Canterbury PhD students at NASA
The Jet Propulsion Lab is where robotic, un-crewed spacecraft are built, and for missions like Mars 2020 and the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. The scholarships cover their flights, accommodation and give a daily allowance - funded by the Government - as a way to prepare NZ students for the growing space sector here.
Photo: Supplied by University of Canterbury
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RNZ News
15 hours ago
- RNZ News
Chatham Islands building materials rusting 22 times faster than inland rural NZ
BRANZ senior scientist Zhengwei Li. Photo: Supplied The headline and topline of this story have been corrected to show the rusting rate is 22 times faster, not 50. Building materials on the Chatham Islands are rusting up to 22 times faster than inland rural NZ, according to research by locals and the Building Research Association. Surrounded by sea and exposed to the elements 800 kilometres out in the South Pacific, the working theory is that salt-laden winds are to blame. Denis Prendeville, a sixth-generation Chatham Islander, had spent 23 years building fences for the Department of Conservation - so he knew well the island's rugged environment . "A hundred years ago, it was forested," he said. "Well, through clearing bush for grazing, the wind has actually finished off a lot of the remaining bush on the Chathams, so it's quite bleak in places." Now, reforestation work was underway, and pests needed to be kept out. "You haven't got anything if you haven't got a fence," Prendeville said. But using all the normal materials, a fence on the coast could rust through in seven years. Prendeville had learned ways around it - using thicker wire, and plastic inserts to keep metal from touching metal, which were the areas which tended to rust first. In the swamps, he usually skipped the bottom two lines of wires, as they tended to rust through in a year. But across the board, things needed replacing more often . "The expense on the Chathams, well you just double it to the New Zealand standards," Prendeville said. Building Research Association (BRANZ) team leader Dr Anna de Raadt said the working theory was that the salt-laden winds could be to blame, with gales picking up the sea spray and throwing it onto fences and roofs, speeding up that rusting process. She said their research has been a collaboration with the community. "Talking to the people living there, it's amazing to hear stories," she said. "One of them really brought it home for me. They were saying, 'Oh we buy a car, bring it over from the mainland to the island, and within three years it's rusted out.'" Scientists set up four racks of metal squares around the island, and left them out in the elements for a year. The metal testing samples. Photo: Supplied De Raadt explained one set was set up at a local school. "And it was really fantastic to see their eyes light up and actually hold the samples and look at them, because they'd see something like a beautiful, shiny metal coupon, and they'd compare it to one looking like a swiss cheese." The results showed corrosion levels were off the charts. An unprotected carbon steel plate, a millimetre thick, was completely gone within a year, despite lasting more than 50 in rural inland areas. BRANZ established more sites, and confirmed the results - the corrosion rates were among the highest defined by international standards. Carbon steel, used in common building products like beams, framing, and nuts and bolts, corroded at a rate more than 22 times faster than inland New Zealand, and more than three times the rate at our harshest coastal sites, like Oteranga Bay in Wellington, and nearly double the highest corrosion rate recorded at marine sites in Europe. "We are testing other materials to see how they will perform on the Chatham Islands environment," de Raadt said. "This then can help inform people's choices about what material to use where." "I guess the main point for us is: the right material in the right place." The current rating system fell short. BRANZ senior scientist Zhengwei Li said materials approved for Zone D - the classification long-held by the Chathams - just didn't hold up. "If you use materials approved for Zone D corrosivity in the Chatham Islands, you will have early material failure." The Chatham Islands Photo: RNZ/ Matthew Theunissen Building company owner Leith Weitzel moved to the Chathams from Wellington just over a decade ago, and said it was definitely an eye-opener. "So up in the eaves of sheds or houses, where you would have some sort of mild steel product or galvanised steel product, if it's not getting rain washing on it, it will start to show corrosion in a few years." It changed the materials they used. "We always opt to use stainless steel externally as much as we can, and we find that's made a huge difference." But even using marine-grade stainless, tea staining - that is, those patchy orange streaks that appeared on metal like water from a tea bag - still occurred. Weitzel said people were often tripped up. "They might buy a flatpack shed or they'll buy a tiny home, something that's of a kit-set nature, and they express that it is quite corrosive and windy and wild over here, and these manufacturers don't supply some of these buildings, these units up to standard, and they find over time that they have used the wrong nails and structural fittings." It was an awareness problem, he said - something the building research association hoped to improve as it took on further tests. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Scoop
a day ago
- Scoop
Jim Lovell To Donald Trump: From America's Best To Its Worst
Wednesday, 13 August 2025, 1:36 pm Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations Taken aboard Apollo 8 by Bill Anders, this iconic picture shows Earth peeking out from beyond the lunar surface as the first crewed spacecraft circumnavigated the Moon, with astronauts Anders, Frank Borman, and Jim Lovell aboard. Image Credit: NASA The astronaut Jim Lovell died last week. Those of us old enough to recall Apollo 8's circumnavigation of the moon, captained by Lovell over Christmas 1968, will tell you that it was nearly as much of a global event as Neil Armstrong's landing less than two years later. Like most American boys at the time, I followed the Apollo missions closely. 1968 is the same year that '2001, A Space Odyssey' came out, which is considered one of the best films of all time. By grappling with the big questions about humanity's place in the universe, the movie inspired me as a 16-year-old to be a philosopher, though I didn't realise it until ten years later. Apollo 8 was the first time humans left Earth orbit, and it was a huge gamble for NASA. The United States was locked in an ideological struggle with the USSR, and in John F. Kennedy's words, 'landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth' was a national priority. Though Apollo 8 wasn't originally scheduled to orbit the moon, NASA took a chance, and the mission was a tremendous success. Equaling the technical feat, there was a moment of global unity that Lovell, Borman and Anders provided that Christmas Eve. As a billion people from 64 countries – one-quarter of the world's population at the time – watched and listened, the three astronauts took turns reading the first lines from Genesis. This mission was the first time humans had seen the entire Earth from space, and Bill Anders is credited with taking the most famous photo from space, 'Earthrise,' which started the global environmental movement. Irrespective of the Christian creation myth of Genesis, anyone with half a heart cannot now listen to the Christmas message from humankind's first spacefarers as they orbited the moon without it bringing a tear to the eye. Not out of any traditionally religious sentiment, but because it crackles with the highest aspirations of the human race. It's hard to fathom now, but the backdrop of the immensely successful Apollo program was the immense failure the Vietnamese War was becoming, and the generational division it was spawning. The contradiction between America's technological prowess and political/military failure reverberates to this day. Indeed, the unaddressed darkside of American character came to dominate its culture and politics to the point of the present destruction of our democracy. Both Lovell and Armstrong were men of exceptional integrity, humility, courage, and competence. Lovell's leadership was instrumental in bringing the badly disabled Apollo 13 crew home, and Armstrong's cool competence landed the Eagle on the moon with only seconds of fuel left. How did the United States come to be ruled by the worst example of its manhood in Donald Trump and his henchmen like Vance, Hegseth and Homan? The short answer is that the American virtues that produced the space program reached the zenith of their external expression with Apollo, and since the moon landing have been eroded year after year by Americans refusing to turn and face the darkness that produced the atomic bombings and the horrors of Vietnam. The first Gulf War supposedly exorcised the ghosts of Vietnam, but it led, after the wasted Clinton years, to the 'forever wars against terror.' Even Barack Obama doubled down in Afghanistan, and in his professorial purblindness, kissed the bankers asses in 2009 after the financial meltdown, and opened the door to Trump. Today, nothing brands the United States as an authoritarian banana republic more than sending the National Guard into Washington DC to stop a crime wave that's been in decline. As one commentator said, 'No one is really supposed to believe that the deployment of troops to America's most liberal, most racially diverse, and most culturally thriving cities is an actual response to an actual crisis. Rather, the thinness of the pretext is itself a demonstration of power.' Trump cannot 'impose suffering' however. He can't even impose his will without a prostrate citizenry, focused solely on its personal escapes. In 1968, the American people would have revolted en masse to being ruled by an ugly-mouth tyrant. After all, we threw out the much less criminal and despotic Richard Nixon in 1974. Authoritarianism in a nation that has no history of democracy arises from longstanding internal conditions of fear and domination in all its forms. Authoritarianism in a nation that gave birth to modern democracy, and prided itself on the power of the people, arises from relatively recent internal conditions of individualism, apathy, indifference and a collective abrogation of responsibility as citizens. It's pointless to write about 'the core features of fascist regimes,' and refer abstractly to the 'collapse of rhetoric and reality.' Yes, 'the ability to make your lies have the force of fact is a terrifying power,' but in a culture that has long prized 'my perspective,' and 'my truth,' seeking and speaking truth has eroded to the point that few feel there is any such thing as truth anymore. The continuous drumbeat of 'competing narratives' in the national media only adds to the underlying corrosion. Even in a woefully imperfect democracy, which is what America has arguably been since a few decades after its inception, tyranny emanates not from the top down, as pundits and academics would have you believe, but from the bottom up. The evil of nationalism is again sweeping the world. Neil Armstrong didn't even want to plant a ridiculous flag on the moon. Look up at the moon tonight. Now NASA is making a priority of building a Trump-driven nuclear power plant on the lunar surface, motivated by the lunacy of extending nationalistic dominion to our nearest celestial neighbor. The man-made evil that flows through Trump and Putin means to destroy the human spirit as surely as the American spirit has been destroyed by the perennial denial of self-made darkness. How far we've come technologically, and how far we've regressed spiritually and philosophically. Martin LeFevre Apollo 8 genesis reading © Scoop Media
RNZ News
a day ago
- RNZ News
The challenge of reducing 10,000 words into three minutes
The average PhD thesis tends to clock in at about 100,000 words. So, how would you go if you had to condense that to three minutes? That's the premise for the University of Waikato's 'Three Minute Thesis' competition. 10 finalists were selected to perform and this year Matthew Taylor was crowned the winner, he chats to Jesse. Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
