Group items tagged

big big booster coming ... !

even bigger booster also coming: China Aims To Build World's Largest Rocket "Back in March, China revealed it is studying the feasibility of designing the most powerful carrier rocket in history for making a manned moon landing and exploring deep space, according to Liang Xiaohong, vice head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. The rocket is envisaged to have a payload of 130 tonnes, five times larger than that of China's current largest rocket. This rocket, if built, will eclipse the 53 tonne capacity of the planned Falcon 9 Heavy from SpaceX. It will even surpass the largest rocket ever built, the 119-tonne Saturn V."

still only "is studying the feasibility of designing a powerful carrier rocket" - we could easily do the same at no cost almost ... but still ... they might be serious ...

smart!

this is the infrastructure that satellites have to compete with ....

I guess you are right... Is ACT already planning a find-and-cut expedition?

now that we have the boat and thanks to Camilla it is still floating after the deluge ....

Tokyo has a very large population and one of the smallest crime rates in the world, in fact Tokyo is known to be the safest big city in the world (w.r.t. crime). It is hard to believe that the crime rate in L.A. is in the same order of magnitude.

As the researchers desribe, the aquifer found is defined as a basin filled with aged snow (firn) that was saturated with water trapped within its porous structure. More ice cores to study! But in that case the time sequence along the length of the cores - to be extracted- would not be monotonic, as was the case in the dry cores we analysed. That's because there is constant input of surface water percolating through the ice-sheet to reach the depth of the aquifer, and since it flows downward its temperature could affect its partial pressure => its vertical position along the core

For the first time ever, astronomers have discovered a ring system surrounding an asteroid. The finding is a complete surprise to planetary scientists, who are yet unsure exactly how such rings could have formed. The cosmic bling was found around an object named Chariklo, which orbits in a region between Saturn and Uranus.

500000 lego bricks, a tank of compressed air, some mechanical engineering and a lot of time later...

Just getting a particle up to near the speed of light isn't good enough for today's physics. To properly unravel the fundamentals of the universe, particles have to be smashed together with enormous force. And two Stanford researchers have just devised a laser-based method that imparts ten times the power of traditional methods at a fraction of the cost.

Regarding our discussion on resource self-sufficiency of a Mars colony. Would it ever be possible (from a resource perspective that is..) A NASA report on availability of resources. A self-sufficiency trade study described in Boston (1996) identifies the mission duration at which the development of local life support resources becomes advantageous. Within 30 days, without recycling, or with the equivalent leakage, it becomes advantageous to derive oxygen from local resources. The time constants for water and food are about 6 months and 3 years, respectively.

I guess it depends on the number of astronauts that have to be supporte ... 3 years for food looks like a lot

Alvin, the only deep-diving manned submersible used for science has been upgraded, allowing scientists to explore for the 1st time the depth of the oceans down to 6500m bsl.

A group of researchers from Austria have sent twisted beams of light across the rooftops of Vienna. It is the first time that twisted light has been transmitted over a large distance outdoors, and could enable researchers to take advantage of the significant data-carrying capacity of light in both classical and quantum communications. Although the data rate is not very high, it could offer a way to provide unhackable data links via space. Would provide an edge over terrestrial fibre optics?

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

In the space industry, concurrent design is frequently implemented as requirements are frequently not set but developed along the design process. In many cases this is due to the interconnection between (sub)systems. In the industry however, this is hardly done, but it is becoming more relevant as lead times and innovation speed needs to increase. There is a webinar tomorrow 10 december from Agile on this topic regarding the semiconductor industry

missed it ... did anybody attend?

A personal interest of mine that I want to explore a bit more in the future. I just bought a ZigBee electricity monitor and I am wondering whether from the signal of the mains one could detect (reliably) the oven turning on, lights, etc. Probably requires Neural Network training. The idea would be to make a simple device which basically saves you money by telling you how much electricity you are wasting. Then again, its probably already done by Google...

Randomly I found this: http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/consumer-electronics/gadgets/curb-startup-home-electricity-tracking Isn't it a similar kind of stuff Thijs?

haha, yep, that's it... but we can do better than that right! :)

With the aid of short infrared laser pulses, researchers have succeeded for the first time in making a ceramic superconducting at room temperature - albeit for only a few millionths of a microsecond.

Our friends from NASA have come out with a plan to the human exploration of Venus in the time that everyone is speaking about Mars.

Love the concept acronym, which pretty much says it all... Not sure which astronaut would fancy floating around in an atmosphere where clouds are made of sulphuric acid. Besides I don't see the point of a manned mission if one can't reach the surface.. tele-operation would be easy and so much cheaper.

Typically, we send rovers to our planetary neighbors one at a time -- but what if we sent a small team of smaller, less impressive robots instead? That's the idea NASA is exploring at Kennedy Space Center with Swarmies: a quartet of four autonomous robots designed to work together to complete a single mission.