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News

Gaps in Egyptian Airport Security Face Scrutiny After Crash

By KAREEM FAHIM and NICOLA CLARKNOV. 7, 2015

SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt The airport is surrounded by a wall topped with barbed
wire. Armed sentries are stationed at its entrance, and passengers pass through two
security screenings before reaching departure gates; before a recent departing
flight, there were no fewer than eight uniformed guards standing around the
checkpoint.
But potential inconsistencies in airport security here and elsewhere inEgypt have
never been hard to detect. As guards at a metal detector here forced a departing
passenger on a recent trip to throw out a pack of safety razors found in his luggage,
an airport cafe worker breezed past the checkpoint without any search or
inspection. At the Cairo airport on Friday, an officer at an X-ray machine sent text
messages while he was scanning luggage. Another guard took a passenger at his
word when he said it was his phone that had caused a metal detector to beep.
Those potential gaps are now under a spotlight, as preliminary evidence from the
crash of a Russian charter jet on Oct. 31 points to the possibility of a bombing, and
several countries have restricted flights to and from Sharm el Sheikh. Theories
about how a bomb might have gotten onto the plane, whose passengers and crew
were almost all Russians, have focused on the possibility that an airport worker
might have been involved.
The Egyptian authorities have repeatedly refused to offer or confirm any theories
about the cause of the disaster. At a news conference on Saturday, they said they
were still considering all possibilities, and that no conclusions could be reached until
the investigation had run its course.
Airport officials have been trying to reassure travelers by letting foreign reporters
tour and film the airport, including its baggage scanning facility. President Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt said in London last week that Egyptian airport
security authorities willingly complied with specific requests the British government
made 10 months ago about improving procedures at Sharm el Sheikh, a resort city
where many Britons vacation. We have cooperated with them, Mr. Sisi said. And
they checked the security actions; they were happy with that.
The security failings at Sharm el Sheikh and other Egyptian airports, some of them
identified as recently as January 2015, were seen as significant enough to prompt
formal recommendations to the Egyptians that they be addressed. One country

even agreed to provide the Sharm el Sheikh airport with additional explosivesdetection equipment to screen checked baggage. But the security problems were
evidently never considered serious enough to warrant banning flights.
We have been working for some considerable time with the Egyptians on Sharm,
said a British official, who acknowledged that London had sent a team of experts in
January to look at the security situation in the resort, and including, as part of that,
at the airport.
While declining to discuss specifics, that official said the Egyptian authorities had
been responsive to the concerns that were raised and addressed them to Britains
satisfaction at the time. We set out a number of measures that we thought would
be helpful and that should be put in place, and the Egyptians worked very closely
with us on those, the official said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/science/space/mars-atmosphere-strippedaway-by-solar-storms-nasa-says.html

Academic Prose
Mars Atmosphere Stripped by Solar Winds, NASA Says
By KENNETH CHANGNOV. 5, 2015
The air on Mars what there is of it is leaking away, about half a pound a second
sputtering into space, scientists announced on Thursday.
The planets early atmosphere is thought to have been as thick as or thicker
than Earths today, and even over the 4.5-billion-year history of the solar system,
that slow leak would not explain how it atrophied to its current wisps.
But new readings from NASAs Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission
Maven, for short show that when Mars is hit by a solar storm, the ferocious
bombardment of particles from the sun strips away the upper atmosphere much
more quickly.
That could help explain the disappearance of the atmosphere. The sun during its
youth was more unsettled, with many more solar storm eruptions, and it shone
brighter in the ultraviolet wavelengths that also help knock atoms out of Mars
atmosphere.
What this tells us is loss through space has been an important process, said Bruce
M. Jakosky, a scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the
University of Colorado and the principal investigator for the Maven mission.
The answer to what happened to the Martian air is key to understanding how Mars
might have once been a warm, habitable planet with lakes andmaybe an
ocean covering the northern hemisphere. When the air disappeared, liquid water
largely disappeared, too.

Dr. Jakosky and other scientists reported their findings from Maven in four scientific
papers published on Thursday in the journal Science. More than 40 additional
papers by the Maven team appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Weve been trying to piece together its upper atmospheric physics from a bunch of
incomplete views from other spacecraft, said Michael W. Liemohn, a professor of
atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the University of Michigan who is not
directly involved with Maven. These are great stories that theyve put together
from the initial data sets.
The Maven spacecraft, which entered orbit around Mars in September last year,
carries a suite of instruments to analyze the solar wind and its effects on the
atmosphere.
Jasper Halekas, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa and a
member of the Maven team, said the energy hitting the Martian atmosphere during
the storm was equivalent to a million tons of TNT an hour. Thats one large nuclear
weapon per hour, if you like, he said.
Such solar storms are not everyday events, but they are also not rare, happening
perhaps a few times a year, Dr. Halekas said. He gave an analogy of a geologist
studying beach erosion, wondering whether more sand is washed away by the
steady, daily effects of waves and tides or by one or two big tsunami. Another set of
observations measured dust in the Martian upper atmosphere, so high and so
evenly distributed that the scientists concluded the grains came from interplanetary
space and not the surface or Mars moons.