Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 241

86 years ago, the University of Queensland in Australia began conducting an experiment in which the flow rate of a piece of pitch was measured. For those of you who may not know what pitch is, it's a highly viscous liquid which, for all intents and purposes, appears to be solid. Bitumen is the most commonly used form and at room temperature, this tar pitch flows at a very slow rate sometimes taking up to a decade or more for a single drop to fall.

The University of Queensland is not the only institution studying this phenomenon. Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland has also been conducting their own experiment since 1944. Finally after 69 long years, the first drop of pitch has finally fallen. The drop occurred on July 11, 2013 at 5 PM local time and webcams that were set up last April were on hand to catch this extremely rare occurrence.

While some of you may not understand the excitement, I find in things like this let me break down how many times human eyes have missed seeing this event take place. According to Prof. John Mainstone of the University of Queensland, he has missed several opportunities to witness the drop happening with his own eyes. First in 1979, Mainstone said that he skipped one of his usual Sunday campus visits and coincidentally the drop happened the same day. Then again in 1988, Mainstone left his lab to grab a snack and apparently missed the drop by just five minutes. Finally in 2000, fed up with missing the drop, Mainstone set up a camera but unfortunately a glitch at the moment of the drop prevented any video of the event occurring.

The Northrop Grumman-built X-47B is an unmanned drone, and it has completed its first successful landing on an aircraft carrier at sea. We reported on the X-47B being the first unmanned drone to take off from an aircraft carrier, but landing unmanned? Remarkable.

Considering aircraft carriers are constantly moving with the ocean waves, even an experienced pilot would have trouble landing on one. It's not an easy thing to do, but unmanned, run purely on technology, algorithms and equipment? That's quite an achievement. The X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) is designed to fly mostly on its own, without much hands-on time from shipboard operators.

The precision landing was just that: precise. It is a huge step for multiple reasons, as this has been a procedure set in motion after quite a few years, and nearly a billion US dollars. On Wednesday, the X-47B made a 35-minute flight from the Navail Air Station at Patuxent River, Md., to the aircraft carrier, where it hooked onto the 3 wire with its tailhook and came to a perfect stop from a speed of approximately 145 knots in less than 350 feet.

It looks like adoption rates of solar power are about to get much better, with the cost of photovoltaic solar panels expected to drop to around 36c per watt by 2017, according to new research by cleantech market research firm, GTM Research.

Solar panels are currently backed up by natural gas and other types of power plants on the electricity grid... but with solar panels costing just $0.36 per watt, this would make it a good idea to install many more solar panels to back each other up instead of relying on another, older, Earth- and human-harming way of generating power.

At 36c per watt, 1000W of solar power is only going to cost you $360. With these costs arriving by 2017, we're not far from a far brighter (pun intended) future. Read more on this at the source.

Google's engineering director, Ray Kurzweil, has come out with a crazy prediction - that the human race will soon develop the technology to keep us alive forever. CNBC reports that Kurzweil told the Global Future 2045 World Congress this week that life expectancies "will go into high gear within 10 and 20 years from now."

Kurzweil added that within "probably less than 15 we will be reaching that tipping point where we add more time than has gone by because of scientific progress." This means that Kurzweil thinks within the next 20 years, technology will have reached a point to add more years to our lives than the pace we currently live at through natural ageing. I don't quite think we'll get there, with all of the government regulation and the idea that everything has to be about making money - and everyone not dying surely has to have some serious consequences.

If no one died, how would the economies of the world work exactly? If you could live for 5000 years, you'd live a much different life than you would now, wouldn't you? It really does make you think - what do you think about living forever?

I think mainstream science has been suppressed for a very long time now, and it's about time that we find out, as a human race, what the reality of our existence really is. The first steps in this, are reversing the mainstream points of science. It looks like NASA could do something good here, with their latest field test that could prove that there is a possibility of faster-than-light travel.

Harold White and his team at NASA have been working on something called the Alcubierre Drive. This new method could use a solution which would see a craft placed within a space that is moving faster than the speed of light. This means that the craft itself isn't moving at the speed of light, meaning the craft itself doesn't need a propulsion system capable of travelling at that speed. This is where things get a little confusing, so grab your white lab coat and come on a walk with me.

The Alcubierre Drive is based on Einstein's field equations, which suggest that a spacecraft could indeed travel faster than the speed of light. But, instead of the craft itself pushing past the speed of light, it would do so by contracting space from in front of it, and expanding the space behind it - a nice trick. It's this type of science that I love reading about, and I think this is the future of space travel - thinking outside the box, which this kind of is.

"Tea, Earl Grey, Hot" It's the classic line from TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Captain Picard walks up to the Replicator in his living quarters and orders a cup of tea. While some have likened that scene with the consumer level 3D printers of today, we are still unable to replicate food from thin air. NASA is looking to change that.

With 3D printers growing cheaper and more popular by the day, it only makes sense for NASA to investigate the use of RepRap style 3D printers for making a hot slice of pizza, right? Mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor received a $125,000 grant from the agency to build a prototype 3D printer with the aim of automating food creation.

The idea behind the project is to take a RepRap Mendel 3D printer and convert the extrusion head to print a mixture of "nutrients" that will form the basis of the food product you wish to eat. Contractor says the nutrient cartridges will have a lifespan of 30 years, making them stable enough for space travel. The project will begin with a proof of concept test where he will print chocolate and the plan is to ramp up from there.

This morning we are waking up to the news that NASA's Kepler Space Telescope may have just came to an early end of mission due to a faulty piece of orientation hardware. The fault falls within one of the wheels that stabilize and help keep the spacecraft pointed in the right direction.

When Kepler needs to be repositioned or stabilized for image capturing, three wheels are spun up to take advantage of centripetal force. Kepler needs three of its wheels running at all times to ensure a stable orientation. On Wednesday NASA officials announced that one of those three wheels had stopped functioning, which put the telescope into "safe mode."

Unfortunately, unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, Kepler is far away from our reach and was not designed to be serviceable. Plus, with the shuttle program long gone, it's not like we would have a way to get to it anyway. "Kepler's not in a place where I can go up and rescue it, or any other astronaut," said John Grunsfeld, the head of science at NASA, and the man who is famous for repairing the Hubble.

Yesterday, astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) discovered an ammonia leak in a coolant loop that cools the power system attached to one of the large solar arrays on the ISS. NASA officials say that the crew of six is in no danger and that this leak will most likely result in the array being shut down until the leak is fixed.

This same system has had leaks before, in 2007 a leak in the same spot was discovered, but was much smaller then and was such that it did not warrant an immediate repair. It was so small that the system was recharged with just eight pounds of ammonia in 2011 during a visit from the Space Shuttle Endeavor. Last November, an attempt to repair the leak was made during spacewalks made by NASA astronaut Sunita Williams and Japanese space flyer Akihiko Hoshide. The fix was only temporary though and now it has reared its ugly head again.

"It is a serious situation, but between crew and experts on the ground, it appears to have been stabilized. Tomorrow we find out for certain," space station commander Chris Hadfield of Canada wrote Thursday via Twitter, where he posts updates as @Cmdr_Hadfield.

This morning Google and Time released the culmination of a project in which they teamed up with NASA and the US Geological Survey to produce a historical perspective on how Earth has changed over the past 30 years.

The project takes satellite imagery produced by the LandSat program and stitches them together removing clouds and haze to produce animated GIF images of how a region has changed over the past three decades. The Time.com hosted site features a handful of pre-chosen sites such as the Amazon Rainforest, Las Vegas, Dubai, Mendenhall Glacier and the Oil Sands fields in Russia.

The project consists of literally millions of individual images taken by the LandSat satellites that have been orbiting Earth at an altitude of over 400 miles since the 1970's. The project began in 2009 when Google began working with the USGS to make the entire archive of LandSat imagery available to the public.

The video you are about to see was not created in CGI, nor does it use any of Hollywood's video trickery. Scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Lab in San Jose, CA, have figured out a way to precisely move and manipulate individual atoms in very precise ways. So precise, in fact, that they were able to film the world's smallest video using nothing but the building blocks of all matter.

When it comes to the things I love, the video above is about as high on the list as it gets. The simple fact that we have the technology to now take an individual atom and place it anywhere in space that we want is simply astounding, when you consider the fact that less than 100 years ago we had no idea that atoms even existed. To get a scale of what is going on here, each dot has been magnified about 100,000,000 times.

The video was made by using a scanning tunneling microscope that weighs as much as a full sized truck and operates at -268 degrees Celsius. The positioning of the atoms was achieved by moving a very tiny needle across the surface of a piece of copper the size of a postage stamp with a height from the surface of just one nanometer.

Everybody's favorite little rover, Curiosity, is back in contact with its handlers on Earth, now that Mars and Earth are in an alignment where communication is possible. Curiosity had previously been sitting mostly idle for the last four weeks while the sun blocked communications between Earth and Mars.

The first step NASA has to complete is to update Curiosity's software. After Curiosity is brought up to speed, its handlers will instruct the rover to continue analysis on Yellowknife Bay. Yellowknife Bay is the location that Curiosity has already found the basic building blocks of life.

Researchers at Cern in Switzerland have some interesting things to play with, and have now proved the merits of a way to test antimatter as a source of the thing we all want to see in our futures: "anti-gravity".

Antimatter particles are the "mirror image" of normal matter, but have an opposite electric charge. Antimatter and its relationship with gravity is still a mystery, but it may just simple "fall up" rather than down. Researchers reporting in Nature Communications have made a few steps toward solving this notion.

Antimatter continues to be one of the biggest question marks in physics, where equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created at the Universe's beginning. But, if the two were to shake hands, they destroy each other in what is called annihilation, turning into pure light. Cern's Alpha experiment is here to help the researchers hopefully solve this.

Our readers seem to have quite an interest in space, and who wouldn't? As part of the commercialization of space and space travel, Virgin Galactic has successfully completed the first test flight of its space plane, which will eventually be used to take ordinary citizens into space.

Don't start packing your bags quite yet, though, as Virgin Galactic didn't even make it into space on this first test flight. The plane behaved as expected and flew for around 10 minutes before returning to the ground. It was shuttled to an altitude of 47,000 feet before being released to fly on its own.

After being released, the plane flew up to 55,000 feet and broke the sound barrier. Virgin Galactic expect to test the plane in space by the end of the year and plan to have real flights for everyone available starting in 2015.

NASA have just launched three Nexus One smartphones into orbit as part of a low-budget, experimental satellite program that uses off-the-shelf components.

The three Android-powered devices are now circling high above the Earth, encased in 4-inch metal cubes, at an altitude of around 150 miles and will burn up on re-entry within the next two weeks. NASA's mission of each PhoneSat is easy, they just have to take photos of the Earth and send back periodic radio messages.

The mission is to see if the smartphones are capable of supplying the "brains" of future satellites, which would make satellites much cheaper in the future. NASA launched the smartphones into orbit on Sunday when Orbital Science Corp.'s Antares rocket lifted off from Virginia. Amateur radio operators had begun notifying NASA that they could pick up radio signals from the satellites within hours of the launch.

This afternoon Mars One officially announced the opening of its search and application process for the first manned mission to the planet Mars. Mars One is looking for two men and two women from different nationalities to man a one-way trip to Mars in 2023.

The trip to Mars is not for the light hearted, or those who are not willing to give up everything they have known. "While it is possible that, within the lifetime of the early settlers on Mars, there will be opportunity to bring one or more back to Earth, it cannot be anticipated nor expected", reads part of the mission briefing on the Mars-One.com website.

While I fully support this endeavor, and am immensely excited about humans leaving the planet Earth and populating another world, I still feel that a colonization mission is nothing more than suicide and will remain so until we develop a form of terraforming that would render the Martian atmosphere more hospitable for human life. I think a more technology appropriate approach would be for an orbital mission where we send explorers on a mission to orbit the planet before returning home.

This year marks the 23rd anniversary of the Hubble Telescope taking flight in orbit around the earth. To celebrate the occasion it revisited one of my favorite monuments in the night sky; the Horse Head Nebula (IC 434).

Located within the Orion Nebula (M42), the Horsehead is a massive star forming region which is comprised of dust and gas. The Hubble first imaged the Horse Head about 20 years ago and the resulting visible light image can be seen above. The red or pinkish glow originates from hydrogen gas predominantly behind the nebula, ionized by the nearby bright star Sigma Orionis. The darkness of the Horsehead is caused mostly by thick dust, although the lower part of the Horsehead's neck casts a shadow to the left.

The new image of the great Horse Head can be seen above. It shows the region in infrared light, which is made up of longer wavelengths than visible light and can see through the dusty cloud that usually obscures the nebula's inner regions. The result is a rather amazing, and stunning looking structure, made of delicate folds of gas.

It's been a long and drawn out wait for the Raspberry Pi Model A to be released, but it is finally here and on sale in the US for a mere $25. Surprisingly the Model A is not being launched at Element14 as everyone might think.

Allied Electronics, a Texas based component supplier appears to be the first to market with the new $25 credit card sized Linux computer. The Model A is a dumbed down version of the vastly popular Raspberry Pi model B and differs in just a few missing components such as the LAN interface.

Unfortunately it appears that Allied has already sold out of the Model A's which leads us to wonder, why do these component houses not order several tens of thousands of units. They always blame supply, but Arduino was able to overcome supply shortages faster than Raspberry Pi has seemed to. If you know your product is going to sell in the hundreds of thousands almost overnight, why not scale up production to meet that demand?

NASA has an interesting plan that would see them find an asteroid in space, drag it toward the Moon and send astronauts to study it. NASA are requesting $100 million for the mission, which is coming in the middle of their fight over the 2014 budget continues in Washington.

The idea comes from the Keck Institute for Space Studies at the California Institute of Technology back in 2011. Scientists have said that the plan is capable of being played out within the next decade, and would be a very good move for future endeavours by US engineers to plunder asteroids with robotic mining for water and metals. NASA has requested $100 million, with Keck researchers admitting that the actual operation would cost as much as $2.6 billion and it would take at least six years to grab an asteroid close to Earth.

The researchers have said that there could be as many as 20,000 pieces of space debris within a decent distance from the Earth, but it could take astronauts up to six months to travel to the asteroid in order to pull it back toward the Moon.

For the last 50 years or so, it has been widely accepted that an impact from an asteroid was the direct cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs, but it appears that that theory has now been turned upside down. A recent report that was given at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference suggests that it was not an asteroid that caused the demise of the dinosaurs, but was actually a comet.

This theory is based on the fact that 180km wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico is simply too large to have been caused by a meteor, which is supported by the lack of an abundance of iridium. An element which would have been kicked up in vast quantities if such a large asteroid were the source of the crater.

Dr. Jason Moore, of Dartmouth College said: "You'd need an asteroid of about 5km diameter to contribute that much iridium and osmium. But an asteroid that size would not make a 200km-diameter crater," He theorized that the crater was created by something moving much faster than an asteroid, something with less rock and more ice.

From the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, significant pieces of Saturn V's rocket engines have been recovered. What makes this a big announcement is the fact they've been there for over 40 years, and recovered thanks to a privately-funded expedition by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Bezos explained the site of the discovery three miles below the surface, more than 400 miles from Florida's east cost as "an underwater wonderland, an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo programme." The Amazon founder announced over a year ago that they had located the engine pieces that took man to the moon in 1969.

After three weeks abord a recovery vessel named 'Seabed Worker', Bezos and his team are on their way back to Cape Canaveral with their pieces of the Saturn V rocket engines. Bezos said in a statement on the expedition website: "We're bringing home enough major components to fashion displays of two flown F-1 engines. Many of the original serial numbers are missing or partially missing, which is going to make mission identification difficult. We might see more during restoration. The objects themselves are gorgeous."