Vertical plasma transport in the ionosphere over Irkutsk during St. Patrick’s Day geomagnetic storm: Observations and modeling

The St. Patrick’s Day storm being the strongest geomagnetic storm of Solar Cycle 24 caused strong changes in ionospheric and thermospheric dynamics. The paper presents a study of vertical plasma transport in the ionosphere during the St. Patrick’s Day storm with using both observations and modeling. The observations give the ionospheric peak height obtained with the chirp vertical sounding ionosonde and the neutral wind velocities obtained with the Fabry-Perot interferometer. The ionospheric peak height is an indicator of the total vertical plasma transport, while meridional wind and electromagnetic drift are the two main drivers of the vertical plasma transport. The Global Self-consistent Model of the Thermosphere, Ionosphere, and Protonosphere used in this study gives the total set of ionospheric and thermospheric parameters including F2-layer peak height, neutral wind velocities, electric field, and neutral composition. The model/data comparison allows us to obtain two main results. The first one is an estimation of the model prediction possibilities under storm conditions. The second result is an indirect assessment of the neutral wind and electric field contribution into the changes in the ionospheric peak height in the case of the St. Patrick’s Day geomagnetic storm.     

Non-cultural methods of human microflora evaluation for the benefit of crew medical control in confined habitat

Current control of human microflora is a great problem not only for the space medicine but also for practical health care. Due to many reasons its realization by classical bacteriological method is difficult in practical application or cannot be done.To evaluate non-cultural methods of microbial control of crews in a confined habitat we evaluated two different methods.The first method is based on digital treatment of microbial visual images, appearing after gram staining of microbial material from natural sample. This way the rate between gram-positive and gram-negative microbe could be gained as well as differentiation of rods and cocci could be attained, which is necessary for primary evaluation of human microbial cenosis in remote confined habitats.The other non-culture method of human microflora evaluation is gas chromatomass spectrometry (gcms) analysis of swabs gathered from different body sites. Gc-ms testing of swabs allows one to validate quantitative and special microflora based on specific lipid markers analysis.