Hasta La Gadget!

The Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama is getting its science-fiction groove on by using selective laser melting, also known as SLM, to create the metal parts needed for heavy-lift rockets. What makes this cooler is that SLM is basically 3D printing, something that saves millions in construction costs. According to NASA, this is the future of manufacturing.

The two primary benefits that come with using selective laser melting is safety and cost-effectiveness. The method is being used to create the parts needed for the U.S.’s upcoming flagship rocket. A variety of the created parts will be hot-fire and structurally tested using a J-2X, a Space Launch System upper-stage engine.

Says the Marshall Center’s advanced manufacturing team lead Ken Cooper, “Basically, this machine takes metal powder and uses a high-energy laser to melt it in a designed pattern. The laser will layer the melted dust to fuse whatever part we need from the ground up, creating intricate designs. The process produces parts with complex geometries and precise mechanical properties from a three-dimensional computer-aided design.”

Another benefit is the speed at which parts can be created, with the Engine Office’s integration hardware lead stating that manufacturing time with this method goes from months to weeks or days, depending on the part. In addition, the lack of welds means that the parts are stronger than their traditional counterparts. If all goes according to plan, selective laser melting will be used to manufacture various parts of the Space Launch System’s first test flight slated for 2017.

[via NASA]

NASA using selective laser melting to build rockets is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
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NASA scientists are having a lot of fun with Messenger, the spacecraft now orbiting Mercury. Not only they are documenting the planet at a resolution of 200 meters per pixel, but they are spotting all kinds of fun stuff. A few weeks ago it was the Sesame Street’s cookie monster. Today it’s a smiley crater. More »

NASA (and the ESA) have long been working on a multi-planet internet that can link up spaceships, probes and rovers, but they’ve at last brought the experimentation from the broad scale to smaller dimensions. Lego bricks, to be exact. International Space Station expedition lead Sunita Williams recently steered a Lego Mindstorms robot at an ESA facility in Darmstadt while she orbited overhead, proving that future space explorers could directly control a vehicle on a planetary surface while staying out of harm’s way. As in the past, the key to the latest dry run was a Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) system; the focus was more on reliably getting packets through to the brick-based vehicle than on pure speed. As tame as that Earth-bound test drive might sound relative to an in-the-field use on a less familiar world, it demonstrates that the DTN approach can work when it really counts. We just wouldn’t hold our breath for any Martian RC car races.

Filed under: Robots, Science, Internet, Alt

ESA, NASA test interplanetary internet by remote controlling a Lego robot from the ISS originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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