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Emergency Spacewalk Likely for 'Serious' ISS Coolant Leak - 0 views

  • while the coolant is vital to the operation of the ISS for the electricity-supplying systems, the crew is not in any danger
  • The ammonia cools the 2B power channel, one of eight power channels that control the all the various power-using systems at the ISS
  • All the systems that use power from the 2B channel, the problem area, are being transferred throughout the day to another channel
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  • The 2B channel will eventually shut down when the coolant is depleted, and the power is being diverted in order to keep everything up and running on the station
  • While Cassidy and Marshburn prepare in space, Astronauts at NASA’s Johnson Space Center are using the Neutral Buoyancy lab – a 12- meter (40 ft.) deep swimming pool with mockups of the space station that simulates the zero-gravity conditions in space – going through the entire expected EVA
Mars Base

NASA - Astronauts Complete Spacewalk to Repair Ammonia Leak, Station Changes Command - 0 views

  • Expedition 35 Flight Engineers
  • completed a spacewalk
  • to inspect and replace a pump controller box on the International Space Station’s far port truss (P6) leaking ammonia coolant
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  • A little more than 2 1/2 hours into the spacewalk
  • removed the 260-pound pump controller box from the P6 truss and replaced it with a spare that had been stowed nearby
  • Spacewalkers practice underwater in the facility and divers provide assistance and dive safety protection during spacewalk simulations
  • The spacewalk is the 168th in support of the assembly and maintenance of the space
  • The device contains the mechanical systems that drive the cooling functions for the port truss.
Mars Base

This Insect Has The Only Mechanical Gears Ever Found in Nature | Surprising Science - 0 views

  • To the best of our knowledge, the mechanical gear
  • evenly-sized teeth cut into two different rotating surfaces to lock them together as they turn
  • was invented sometime around 300 B.C.E. by Greek mechanics who lived in Alexandria
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  • Issus coleoptratus
  • juveniles
  • have an intricate gearing system that locks their back legs together, allowing both appendages to rotate at the exact same instant, causing the tiny creatures jump forward.
  • , is believed to be the first functional gearing system ever discovered in nature
  • The finding,
  • used electron microscopes and high-speed video capture to discover the existence of the gearing and figure out its exact function.
  • To jump, both of the insect’s hind legs must push forward at the exact same time
  • The reason for the gearing, they say, is coordination
  • The researchers’ high-speed videos showed that the creatures
  • cocked their back legs in a jumping position, then pushed forward, with each moving within 30 microseconds
  • jump at speeds as high as 8.7 miles per hour
  • 30 millionths of a second
  • the skeleton is used to solve a complex problem that the brain and nervous system can’t
  • The gears are located at the top of the insects’ hind legs
  • and include 10 to 12 tapered teeth, each about 80 micrometers wide (or 80 millionths of a meter).
  • In all the Issus hoppers studied, the same number of teeth were present on each hind leg, and the gears locked together neatly
  • adults of the same insect species don’t have any gearing—as the juveniles grow up and their skin molts away
  • the adult legs are synchronized by an alternate mechanism (a series of protrusions extend from both hind legs, and push the other leg into action).
  • hypothesize that this could be explained by the fragility of the gearing
  • if one tooth breaks, it limits the effectiveness of the design
  • isn’t such a big problem for the juveniles, who repeatedly molt and grow new gears before adulthood
  • for the mature Issus, replacing the teeth would be impossible
  • There have been gear-like structures previously found on other animals
  • but they’re purely ornamental
Mars Base

Young insect legs have real meshing gears | Zoology | Science News - 0 views

  • Adults are bigger and heavier, Burrows says, so perhaps leg-to-leg friction syncs motions without the need for gear teeth.
Mars Base

Researchers at Harvard University and MIT discover previously unobserved state of matte... - 0 views

  • The discovery
  • goes against what scientists previously understood of photons: that elementary light particles are massless loners that do not interact with each other.
  • Most of the properties of light we know about originate from the fact that photons are massless, and that they do not interact with each other
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  • researchers fired a couple of photons into a cloud of rubidium – a chemical element belonging to the metal group – in a vacuum chamber cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero.
  • When the photons exited the other side of the cloud of atoms
  • were surprised to see the pair emerge as a single molecule.
  • special type of medium in which photons interact with each other
  • so strongly that they begin to act as though they have mass, and they bind together to form molecules
  • Rydberg blockade
  • states that when an atom has energy imparted to it, nearby atoms cannot be excited to the same degree
  • the pair of photons moved through the cloud of atoms, the first photon excited atoms, but had to move forward before the second photon could do the same.
  • the pair of photons pushed and pulled each other through the cloud
  • atomic interaction
  • makes these two photons behave like a molecule
  • team is hoping to use their newly discovered state of matter in the advancement of quantum computing
Mars Base

Supervolcanoes Rocked Early Mars - 0 views

  • Massive "supervolcanoes" erupted across the northern face of Mars some 3.7 billion years ago, planetary scientists suggest
  • he eruptions likely blasted lava, sulfur, and ash across the red planet, altering its atmosphere and surface.
Mars Base

NASA Finds Ingredient for Plastic on Saturn's Moon Titan | Space.com - 0 views

  • a chemical essential for the creation of plastic on Earth has been found in
  • Saturn's largest Titan
  • NASA's Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting Saturn, found that the atmosphere of Titan contains propylene
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  • key ingredient of plastic containers, car bumpers and other everyday items on Earth
  • strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene
  • Scientists used Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer (CIRS) instrument, which measures infrared light given off by Saturn and its moon, made the discovery
  • When Voyager 1 conducted the first close flyby of the moon in 1980, it recognized gasses in the moon's brown atmosphere as hydrocarbons.
  • measurement was very difficult to make because propylene's weak signature is crowded by related chemicals with much stronger signals
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