Mar 26

NASA Spacecraft Finds Hundreds of Asteroids Each Day

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili

NASA_Wise_Asteroid_Infrared.jpg

NASA’s newest space telescope, the $230 million Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), has been busy discovering hundreds of asteroids every single day–all of which were in our solar system undetected all this time, Space.com reports.
NASA designed WISE to find “dark” objects, like asteroids, brown dwarf stars, and vast dust clouds, the report said, though it’s been busy finding darker asteroids that visible light telescopes have missed in passed surveys.
“Our instrument is finding hundreds of asteroids every day that were never detected before,” said Ned Wright, principal investigator for WISE and a physicist at the University of California in Los Angeles, in the article. “WISE is very good at this kind of work.”
NASA launched WISE in December 2009, and will operate through October, at which point its supply of frozen coolant will run out. (Image credit: NASA/WISE)
No Comments | Tags:
Mar 25

NASA Upgrades Mars Rovers Brain

Posted in: NASA, science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
NASA_Mars_Rover_12_Miles.jpg
If it’s too expensive to fly humans to Mars, maybe we can train robots to make human-like decisions.
So goes the thinking at NASA, which has upgraded its Mars Rover Opportunity’s control software, so that the rover can let it make its own decisions about which rocks to focus on.
NASA’s new AEGIS (Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science) system lets the rover check out images taken with its wide-angle navigation camera, search for rocks that “meet specific criteria,” and then flick on its narrower-angle panoramic camera to snap photos of the rock.
So far, Opportunity has chosen a football-sized layered rock from a nearby impact crater, following NASA’s criteria of “large and dark.” Currently, the rover is en route to Endeavor, a large crater about 13.7 miles across. It has drive over 12 miles during the past six years. (Image credit: NASA)

No Comments | Tags:
Mar 24

Seismic Laptops Help Detect Earthquakes

Posted in: laptop, science, Space Tech, Today's Chili
Stanford_Earthquake_Program.jpg
If you’ve got a laptop with a built-in accelerometer, you, too, could help detect earthquakes.
It turns out an ordinary laptop is all people need to join the 1,000-volunteer Quake-Catcher Network, which transmits data about earthquakes to researchers at UC Riverside and Stanford University, LiveScience reports.
The accelerometers in today’s laptops power down the hard disk in the event of a fall or sharp jolt. Elizabeth Cochran, a UC Riverside geoscientist, came up with the idea of tapping into the accelerometers to record earthquakes, the report said.
No Comments | Tags: ,
Mar 24

CERN to Power Up Collider to 7 TeV March 30

Posted in: science, Space Tech, Today's Chili
LHC_CERN_2.jpg
Things are heating up at the Large Hadron Collider, and not in a bad way this time.
CERN says that they plan to collide particles at the highest energy level so far beginning on March 30th, by circulating twin beams in the 16.8-mile tunnel at 7 tera-electron volts, or twice the current (already record-breaking) 3.5 TeV, Reuters reports.
At that rate, “it may take hours or even days to get collisions,” according to Rolf Heuer, CERN’s director-general, in the article.
Scientists hope that the multiple particle collisions will each create mini-Big Bangs, which should generate plenty of rich data for scientists to mine in the years ahead, according to the report.
No Comments
Mar 23

Lunar Rover Found on Moon After 37 Years

Posted in: gaming, NASA, science, space, Today's Chili

NASA_Moon_Rover_Garriott.jpg

Seek ye, the rover of kings: Scientists have spotted Lunokhod 2, a Russian space vehicle that landed on the moon in 1973 and stopped working that same year, after a 37-year period where no one knew where the thing was, NPR reports.
What makes Lunokhod 2 even more interesting is that it belongs to Richard Garriott, of Ultima and Origin Systems fame. Garriott purchased the rover at a 1993 Sotheby’s auction for $68,500, making him the world’s only private owner of an object on a celestial body aside from Earth.
Garriott said in the report that he’s thrilled to finally have photos of his “private flag sitting on the moon.”
“My rover has traveled over 40 kilometers. It has tilled the soil or turned the soil with its wheels and it has surveyed land as far as the eye can see — or as far as its cameras can see,” he said.
In 2008, Richard Garriott became the latest of a series of space tourists to visit the International Space Station.
No Comments | Tags:
Mar 23

SpaceShipTwo Takes Maiden Flight

Posted in: science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
SpaceShipTwo_Flight.jpg
We have liftoff: Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo “rocket plane” has taken its maiden flight from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, MSNBC reports.
The SpaceShipTwo, pictured above attached to the WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane, flew for almost three hours at altitudes up to 50,000 feet, though it still remained within the Earth’s atmosphere. The report said we still have several months before SpaceShipTwo hits outer space for the first time. Right now, the company is testing SpaceShipTwo’s aerodynamics.
Virgin Galactic is planning to begin taking passengers as early as 2011 or 2012. The Richard Branson-backed project first unveiled SpaceShipTwo late last year.
No Comments
Mar 19

Romulan Cloak of Invisibility Inches Closer to Reality

Posted in: science, Today's Chili
Romulan_Bird-of-Prey_Paramount.jpg
For the first time, scientists have rendered an object invisible in three dimensions, BBC News reports.
We’re talking about an extremely small object here, about the size of a thousandth of a millimeter. Scaling this technology to work on something the size of a Volkswagen Jetta–never mind a Romulan Bird-of-Prey–will take time.
But here’s how it works: before, researchers could hide an object from light traveling in one direction, but not any other, so the object would still be visible when you shifted your viewpoint ever so slightly. This time, researchers “transformed space,” essentially, by designing a photonic metamaterial that influenced the behavior of light rays, according to the report.
For now, the professor who led the project said that fabrication techniques limit the size of the rods used in the experiment. But the result could still have implications for lens development, plus advances in light storage and optical circuitry, according to the report. There’s way more than we can possibly go into here, so check out the link for more details. (Image credit: Paramount Pictures)
No Comments
Mar 18

Scientists Discover Jupiter-Like Alien World

Posted in: science, space, Space Tech, Today's Chili
ESO_CoRoT_9b.jpg
It’s not quite Earth-like. But scientists have discovered a “normal” exoplanet, dubbed CoRoT-9b, that resembles other planets in our Solar System.
The planet appears to be orbiting its star about as close as our own Mercury, and yet is the approximate size of Jupiter, Space.com reports. Still, it’s a lot further away than other “hot Jupiter” exoplanets, and likely has a much more temperate climate, the report said.
CoRoT-9b is likely made of hydrogen and helium, just like Jupiter and Saturn. The planet is named after the French space agency CNES’s CoRoT satellite, which first picked up the light signature of the planet passing in front of its star.
To date, astronomers have discovered over 430 exoplanets, or extrasolar planets, orbiting other stars–with the expectation that there are many, many more out there. (Image credit: ESO/L. Calcada)
No Comments | Tags:
Mar 15

Hubble 3D Review: A Gift From NASA to Us [Movies]

Posted in: Movies, NASA, science, space, Today's Chili, top

Hubble 3D is a pretty simple movie. It’s also one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen in my life.

Hubble 3D was shot over several years by three different NASA flight crews, documenting both the launch and subsequent repairs of the Hubble Space Telescope. The repair footage is interesting, especially to a space geek, but it’s not anything you haven’t seen before. (Albeit not on a six-story IMAX screen and in 3D.) But it serves as a framework for two rendered space sequences that are stunning—they brought tears to my eyes more than once.

These sections are rendered from Hubble data that was wedded to spectral analysis and other techniques that allowed artists to create an extremely high fidelity 3D model of astronomical objects like nebulae and galaxies. Director Toni Myers manages to keep the narrative structure fairly simple and let the footage and rendered fly-throughs of Hubble photography speak for itself.

Because these sequences are “real”—or at least as real as we can make them without having another Hubble trillions of light years away from Earth showing us the back sides of same objects—there is a tremendous gravitas. I dare anyone to watch the sequence of Orion’s “star nursery” as it calves solar systems and not feel a tremendous affinity for our own.

We’ve become used to Hubble’s imagery over the last couple of decades, sort of, you know, getting over being able to see into the end (or beginning) of the universe. Hubble 3D reminded me how precious our space program is and how just straight-up ass-kicking the astronauts and engineers who work at NASA really are. Hubble 3D feels like a gift from all of them to us.

For more on the IMAX rigs behind Hubble 3D, see the camera here and some behind-the-scenes astronaut rehearsal here. [Hubble3D]

No Comments
Mar 13

Scientists discover method for rapid charging Li-ion batteries

Posted in: charging, research, science, Today's Chili, university

Huzzah! Yet another discovery for us to add to our ever-expanding list of “awesome things that’ll never actually happen!” Ibrahim Abou Hamad and colleagues from Mississippi State University have reportedly devised a method of charging batteries that could hasten the process rather significantly, and better still, it could provide “an increase in battery power densities” as well. The only problem? Lithium-ion batteries have been disappointing tech users for years, and so long as Energizer and Duracell are calling the shots, we kind of doubt a lot will be done to improve the longevity of ’em. Skepticism aside, the new method involves some fancy black magic surrounding molecular dynamics simulations, and researchers have found a way to boost charging time by “simulating the intercalation of lithium ions into the battery’s graphite anode.” We know we just went way over your heads on a Friday afternoon, but if techobabble’s your thing, all you can handle is right there in the Source link.

Scientists discover method for rapid charging Li-ion batteries originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 03:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourcePhysorg  | Email this | Comments

No Comments | Tags: ,