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Arizona Daily Wildcat
The independent student voice of the University of Arizona since 1899 tuesday, march , dailywildcat.com
tucson, arizona
HiWISH releases Mars images
NITRO CIRCUS
By Michelle A. Monroe ARIZONA DAILY WILDCAT
Gordon Bates/Arizona Daily Wildcat
Bryan Korth, a chemistry and bio-chemistry doctoral student, filled a 160-liter container near the Henry Koffler building with liquid nitrogen at -321 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday. Ventilation of nitrogen gas from the container results in a cloud of condensed water vapor.
ASUA executive candidates debate By Jazmine Woodberry ARIZONA DAILY WILDCAT The candidates for the top offices of the Associated Students of the University of Arizona voiced their platforms and answered questions at the debates on Monday night. For a crowd of several dozen, the two candidates for administrative vice president and the two current ASUA members running in uncontested races for the executive vice president and presidential spots faced rounds of questioning from a representative student panel. The two unopposed spots went through a similar debate system to the ASUA senatorial debates on Thursday, though with five minutes for platforms and a question from each of the nine panelists chosen to represent the student body. The real debate came between the two candidates running for the administrative vice president spot, Sen. Hillary Davidson and pre-business sophomore Brett Ponton. Davidson presented her platform, which deal with direct student involvement through town hall
meetings, outreach program to bond students and faculty on campus and a peer mentoring program implemented during orientation. Ponton’s platforms dealt more with community building, focusing
Alan Walsh/Arizona Daily Wildcat
ASUA administrative vice presidential candidate Brett Ponton makes his opening statements during the debates held last night in the Student Union Memorial Center’s Ventana room.
on cultural and arts preservation and student interaction with athletes with learning disabilities in the Tucson community, which would connect those on campus with the diversity of people off campus. Both Ponton and Davidson were asked a series of questions from the panel and had the chance to ask a question in rebuttal to the other candidate. Davidson thought the debate went well and served its purpose, especially for the administrative vice presidential race. “I think the debates were very informative just to kind of see the direction for ASUA next year,”she said. Ponton left immediately after the debate and was unavailable for comment. Sen. Katherine Weingartner, executive vice presidential candidate, noted there was room for improvement in ASUA but wanted to work on both the governmental body’s image and the information students have about it. “I want people to know what we do, because it’s tremendous,”saidWeingartner during her time at the podium. Emily Fritze , the current executive
vice president and the uncontested candidate for president, noted that even for positions with one candidate in the running, the debates were beneficial. “I think that for the unopposed positions, it was a great way to see if they are qualified for the position,” Fritze said. “Especially since there was a diverse panel of students, I think that it was a good set up to see what candidates stood for.” Audience members were unable to ask questions of the candidates, as the debates ran over time, said Justine Piscitello, elections commissioner for ASUA. These debates were the last public forum for candidates to speak with voters. General elections will be held from 8 a.m. today through 8 p.m. Wednesday.
General elections begin today at 8 a.m. and conclude Wednesday at 8 p.m. with a general election results show in the Kiva room of the Student Union Memorial Center Wednesday at 8:30 p.m.
There have been more than 1,000 picture suggestions for the UA’s HiWISH Mars imaging program. HiRISE, High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, is a camera orbiting Mars that was launched into space in August 2005 and began taking images in the fall of 2006, according to Guy McArthur, senior applications systems analyst and developer for the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and a software developer for HiRISE. A life-size model of the spacecraft can be found at the UA HiRISE center at 1541 E. University Blvd. HiRISE is known as the “people’s camera,”according to Alfred McEwen, professor of planetary sciences and principal investigator of HiRISE. “We actually had the idea of the public input images when we first submitted our proposal. We didn’t get started with it as soon as we wanted, and we finally got time to do that,” McEwen said. The HiRISE scientists wanted the public not to only see their work, but also to be a part of it. “Other missions had done similar stuff, but our camera is the most powerful that we’ve ever sent to another planet,” said Ari Spinoza, media liaison for HiRISE and senior information technology support analyst for the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “This opens up science to everybody.” Most of the work is done locally in Tucson, but the mission has international arms as well. “We have a science team comprised of individuals at other institutions across the U.S. and in Switzerland, and they can participate,” McEwen said.“People here locally do all the detail and image programming and send the command files to the spacecraft.” HiWISH is a program that allows the public to suggest imaging sites on Mars using the HiRISE camera. People have suggested 1,056 sites for imaging since the program began on Jan. 20. “We were ready to go several months beforehand, but our spacecraft was in safe mode, so we didn’t want to have targets coming in and wait around for it,”Spinoza said. The HiWISH team has imaged about 18 of those suggested targets. MARS, page 3
Arizona.edu upgrades Web site format By Jazmine Woodberry ARIZONA DAILY WILDCAT After a failed launch a few months ago, the UA relaunched the new version of its homepage Monday morning. “It wasn’t like March 8 had anything magic about it,” said Kate Maguire Jensen, assistant vice president of marketing.“We ended up just having to make a decision based on readiness.” The new site loads quickly and incorporates features from the old site, including an updated search feature and the original and more complete phonebook. The site went through final changes in early February before a date for the final launch was determined. The UA’s new homepage still has sections for future and current students, parents and faculty, but there is also a
new business and industry section for corporate connections to find out more about the UA. These sections cater their news toward their respective audiences and are one of the biggest changes on the new Web site. Along with these secitons, changes to the search engine, the Web engine and the programming to go along with those were the biggest changes to the site between launch dates, said Derek Masseth, senior director of infrastructure services for University Information Technology Services. Masseth works on the incident command council charged with fixing issues with the new site.
Visit www.arizona.edu to see the changes to the UA’s homepage.
He noted that the new site had “dramatically better results” but that there will still be modifications made if necessary in the coming weeks. “We have a lot of expert folks sitting together in a room watching this thing like a hawk for the next few days just to be sure,” he said. “But we went live because today was the right day, because all of our ducks were in a row, and we made all the changes we thought we needed to make.” The new site is aligned with the update to the UAccess student system, which is slated to replace Student Link incrementally through fall 2010. The site’s launch met originally projected costs . Its design, by Archetype 5, an outside constractor, cost $116,000, with $30,000 more spent on additional hardware for
new servers and smaller additional software needs. Other features include news updates changed daily and larger stories updated monthly, which are important
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“so people know what kind of opportunities our students have here,” according to Jensen.
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