‘Significant step’ towards break-even target

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California say they have come closer to realizing “ignition”, at which fusion reactions generate at least as much energy as its lasers put in.

MiniCarb: A Passive, Occultation-Viewing, 6U CubeSat for Observations of CO2, CH4, and H2O

We present the final design, environmental testing, and launch history of MiniCarb, a 6U CubeSat developed through a partnership between NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. MiniCarb’s science payload, developed at Goddard, was an occultation-viewing, passive laser heterodyne radiometer for observing methane, carbon dioxide, and water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere at ~1.6 microns. MiniCarb’s satellite, developed at Livermore, implemented their CubeSat Next Generation Bus plug-and-play architecture to produce a modular platform that could be tailored to a range of science payloads. Following the launch on December 5, 2019, MiniCarb traveled to the International Space Station and was set into orbit on February 1, 2020 via Northrop Grumman’s (NG) Cygnus capsule which deployed MiniCarb with tipoff rotation of about 20 deg/sec (significantly higher than the typical rate of 3 deg/sec from prior CubeSats), from which the attitude control system was unable to recover resulting in a loss of power. In spite of this early failure, MiniCarb had many successes including rigorous environmental testing, successful deployment of its solar panels, and a successful test of the radio and communication through the Iridium network. This prior work and enticing cost (approximately $2M for the satellite and $250K for the payload) makes MiniCarb an ideal candidate for a low-cost and rapid rebuild as a single orbiter or constellation to globally observe key greenhouse gases.

GEOSX: A Multiphysics, Multilevel Simulator Designed for Exascale Computing

Evaluating large basin-scale formations for CO2 sequestration is one of the most important challenges for our industry. The technical complexity and the quantification of risks associated with these operations call for new reservoir engineering and reservoir simulation tools. The impact of multiple coupled physical phenomena, the century timescale, and basin-sized models in these operations force us to completely take apart and revisit the numerical backbone of existing simulation tools. We need a reservoir simulation tool designed for scalability and portability on high-performance computing architectures. To achieve this, we are proposing a new, open-source, multiphysics, and multilevel physics simulation tool called GEOSX. This tool is jointly created by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Stanford University, and Total. It is designed for scalability on multiple CPUs and multiple GPUs and offers a suite of physical solvers that can be extended easily while achieving a balance between performance and portability. GEOSX is initially targeting multiphysics simulations with coupled geomechanics, flow, and transport mechanics but with its open architecture, it allows access to high-performance physical solvers as building blocks of other multiphysics problems and provides users with a suite of tools for numerical optimization across platforms. In this paper, we introduce GEOSX, expose its fundamental architecture principles, and show an example of geological sequestration of CO2 modeling on real data. We demonstrate our ability to simulate fluid and rock poromechanical interactions over long periods and basin-scale dimensions. GEOSX demonstrates its usefulness for such complex and large problems and proves to be scalable and portable across multiple high-performance systems.