An Air Force Reserve C-130 Hercules and 10 reservists from the 910th Airlift Wing began aerial spray missions in Louisiana September 22nd. Starting with southwestern Louisiana, the spray crews from Youngstown Air Reserve Station, Ohio, will then work on other affected areas as required.

Barksdale Air Force Base was chosen as the base of operations for the aircrews and maintenance personnel due to its proximity to the spray area, ability to handle C-130H aircraft, and ability to support the missions without conflicting with other relief efforts.

The spray crews are working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and state public health officials to determine locations to spray. Each aerial spray modified C-130H is capable of spraying about 80,000 acres per day. Spray missions are normally conducted at dusk when the insects are most active.

The reservists are mainly targeting mosquitoes and filth flies, which are capable of transmitting diseases such as West Nile Virus and various types of Encephalitis. The probability that people will contract these diseases, whether in single incidents or widespread outbreaks, increases greatly if they are not controlled.

Said Maj. Karl Haagsma, a research entomologist with the 910th AW, “The product that will be used to combat the disease-spreading insects will be Dibrom, which is an extremely effective material for mosquito control, and at the amounts that are applied, is an extremely safe material as well. Typically we apply Dibrom at a rate of 1/2 to 1 oz. per acre. When properly applied at these application rates, Dibrom is virtually non-toxic to humans, while eliminating a majority of the flying mosquito population.”

Dibrom is an EPA registered insecticide, currently in use for many mosquito control programs throughout the country.

The 910th AW is the only unit in the Department of Defense tasked to maintain a full time, fixed wing aerial spray capability. In 2005, three of its specially equipped C-130s sprayed for 38 days, covering 2.8 million acres of Louisiana and Texas in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Known as an organization with bunch of science and technology geniuses, NASA has always managed to create advanced solutions such as space rockets, lunar modules, etc. in discovering data and facts that mankind has yet to learn. But when a highly sophisticated plan has failed to bring in necessary information and satisfactory outcome, some might doubt the capabilities of low-tech ways to do such thing.

However, Robotics expert Alberto Behar, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California has recently resort to a simpler experiment. Wanting to gather relevant data on whether pools of melted glacial ice were showing up in the ocean, Behar used something as primitive as rubber ducks.

A brigade of rubber ducks might help NASA figure out if water shooting through tunnels in Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier makes it into Baffin Bay. The dispatched probe that makes its way to the glacier’s water tunnels has a positioning sensor and satellite telephone so NASA would be able to track where the water ends up. During the summer, ice melts on glacier’s surfaces, getting into shallow lakes and streams, then falls eventually into water tunnels in the ice, also called moulins.

Seelye Martin, the program manager for NASA’s Earth sciences division said the agency is a little frustrated as of the moment. “The water has to go somewhere but we don’t know where.”

As part of the continuous study on global warming, this test will hopefully determine and understand the changes in the Earth’s water levels. The experiment may not be as highly complicated as those using NASA capsules, but getting significant results is still a possibility.

In the North Sea on September 22, 1914, the German submarine U-9 sank three British cruisers, the Aboukir, the Hogue and the Cressy in just over one hour.

The one-sided battle on September 22, which claimed three British cruisers and the lives of 1,400 sailors, alerted the British to the deadly effectiveness of the submarine, which had been generally unrecognized at that time. In the first few years of World War I, German U-boats took a terrible toll on Allied shipping. By 1917, continued unrestricted U-boat attacks in American vessels traveling to Britain prompted the previously neutral United States to declare war on Germany. The infusion of American ships, troops and arms into World War I, as well as the economic support the United States supplied the Allied powers, would eventually turn the tide of the war against Germany.

Space Shuttle Endeavour rolled out to a Florida launching pad early Friday to serve as a rescue craft for its sister spaceship Atlantis in what is expected to be the last time in history that NASA has two orbiters in launch position.

NASA is preparing to launch seven astronauts aboard Atlantis next month on the final service call to the Hubble Space Telescope, where the spacefliers plan to perform five back-to-back spacewalks to install new cameras, replace aging batteries, gyroscopes and other components, add a docking ring and make tricky repairs to equipment never designed for in-flight maintenance.

NASA mission managers and Atlantis astronauts consider the rescue plan an extremely unlikely scenario and are confident their mission will go as planned. Once Atlantis and its crew return safely to Earth, NASA will move Endeavour from Pad 38B to 39A for its planned November 12 launch to haul fresh supplies and equipment to the space station.