GETTING THE WORD OUT

UPFRONT
ADAM BERRY/GETTY
Satellite lost
JUNKED? Hitomi, a Japanese
astronomy satellite, seems to be
tumbling through space, and may
have broken up. It was due to
come online on 26 March, but
failed to communicate with Earth.
A tweet by the US Joint Space
Operations Center reported five
pieces of debris around the
satellite shortly afterwards.
All may not be lost. The Japan
Aerospace Exploration Agency
heard a brief burst of signal from
the craft, and video taken from
the ground suggests it is falling
through space.
“That indicates the sat was
at that point alive, just unable
to point its antenna at Earth,”
says Jonathan McDowell at the
“If we never hear from
the satellite again,
I would be devastated
but not surprised”
Can we sniff out bombs?
LAST week, terrorists walked into scanned by an array of sensors as
Brussels’ Zaventem airport and
they walk through the tunnel to
detonated bomb-laden luggage get into airports or train stations.
in the check-in area. They also
The Lincoln Laboratory at
bombed a subway station.
the Massachusetts Institute of
As New Scientist went to press,
Technology has a different approach.
35 people had been killed and
A team there has turned to lasers
hundreds wounded.
to “sniff” explosives from a distance.
Can we stop attacks like this?
The lab says it can scan spaces like
Airport security focuses on keeping check-in areas from 100 metres
explosives off planes. Stopping
away by sweeping them with
bombs detonating in crowded
lasers tuned to frequencies that
check-in areas and transit terminals vaporise molecules found in
is a bigger challenge. Security
bombs. This material makes a tiny
checkpoints work, but they cause sound as it vaporises, which is
delays and create queues that can amplified and detected.
also be a target. But there are new
Lasers are also used in a device
ways to scan people as they walk. called G-Scan, developed by Laser
Cameron Ritchie, head of
Detect Systems of Ramat Gan in Israel.
technology at the US-based security This fires a green laser at a target then
firm Morpho, is working on a “tunnel uses Raman spectroscopy to
of truth”. Passengers would be
“fingerprint” the molecules that
scatter light back. It can identify
anything visible, including bottle
contents or surface smears.
Detecting explosive material from
a distance would enable security
services to track down bomb-making
supplies – not just finished weapons.
By scanning for telltale chemicals on
people’s bodies and clothes as they
move around cities, security services
may be able to catch suspects before
they have built their device.
One concern is that such sensitive
detectors may trigger many false
alarms. There is also the question
of whether airport and train security
staff can respond to a positive signal
quickly and effectively enough to
neutralise a threat, says Brian
Jenkins, a security researcher at the
Rand Corporation. “You can’t just yell,
‘hey you with the bomb’.”
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics. He says it might be
possible to talk to Hitomi and
stop it tumbling. “But if you told
me we were never going to hear
from the sat again, I would be
devastated but not surprised,”
he says.
Hitomi’s mission is to
observe the universe in X-rays,
investigating matters such as
the birth of black holes and the
origins of cosmic rays.
Space geckos
IN A few years, the exterior of the
International Space Station could
be crawling with geckos. It’s not
an alien invasion, or the plot of a
low-budget sci-fi movie. The
robotic geckos could follow from
an experiment NASA launched to
the International Space Station
last week aboard an uncrewed
Cygnus spacecraft.
The Gecko Gripper devices use
tiny artificial hairs that replicate
the ones geckos use to climb walls.
They are designed to help
4 | NewScientist | 2 April 2016