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Mars Base

Acidic Europa may eat away at chances for life - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...cidic-europa-chances-life.html

scibyte36 Jupiter Europa

shared by Mars Base on 03 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Europa's interior. The moon is thought to have a metallic core surrounded by a rocky interior, and then a global ocean on top of that surrounded by a shell of water ice
  • ocean underneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa could be too acid to support life
  • Europa, which is roughly the size of Earth's moon, could possess an ocean about 100 miles deep
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Recent findings even suggest its ocean could be loaded with oxygen, enough to support millions of tons worth of marine life like the kinds that exist on Earth
  • However, chemicals found on the surface of Europa might jeopardize any chances of life evolving there
  • compounds in question are oxidants, which are capable of receiving electrons from other compounds
  • usually rare in the solar system because of the abundance of chemicals known as reductants such as hydrogen and carbon
  • oxidants from Europa's surface might react with sulfides and other compounds in this moon's ocean before life could nab it
  • generating sulfuric and other acids
  • . If this has occurred for just about half of Europa's lifetime, not only would such a process rob the ocean of life-supporting oxidants
  • could become relatively corrosive, with a pH of about 2.6, "about the same as your average soft drink
  • ecosystem would need to evolve quickly to meet this crisis, with oxygen metabolisms and acid tolerance developing in only about 50 million years to handle the acidification
  • analogous to microbes found in acid mine drainage on Earth
  • bright red Río Tinto river in Spain
  • dominant microbes found there are acid-loving "acidophiles" that depend on iron and sulfide as sources of metabolic energy.
  • microbes there have figured out ways of fighting their acidic environment
  • If life did that on Europa, Ganymede, and maybe even Mars, that might have been quite advantageous
  • Others have questioned whether or not rock in Europa's seabed might actually neutralize the effects of this acidity
  • not think this is likely
  • one of the interesting possibilities is that they might have use blue phosphates as their bone material instead to evolve large organisms
Mars Base

Big Solar Storm Packed Small Punch | Solar Flare 2012 | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/solar-storm-earth-effects.html

scibyte37 sun

shared by Mars Base on 09 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • triggered weaker-than-expected disruptions
  • Early forecasts showed that the oncoming CME could boost solar radiation in space and trigger geomagnetic storms on Earth, potentially disrupting satellites, power grids and other electronic infrastructure.
  • effects of the solar tempest have been milder than scientists originally predicted
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • due to the orientation of the CME and Earth's magnetic fields
  • "If it's oriented more southward, which is opposite to Earth, then we expect a stronger storm, but it appears that this one was very much north oriented
  • orientation of the magnetic field in the CME is a big determining factor for how strong or weak the event is going to be
  • coronal mass ejection has a cloud of particles, but also embedded in that is a magnetic field structure
  • while it hasn't packed much of a punch so far, this ongoing solar storm is the largest one scientists have seen in more than five years
Mars Base

Four-winged dinosaur's feathers were black with iridescent sheen - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...feathers-black-iridescent.html

scibyte37 dinosaur

shared by Mars Base on 09 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • team of American and Chinese researchers
  • color and detailed feather pattern
  • Microraptor, a pigeon-sized, four-winged dinosaur that lived about 130 million years ago
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • fossilized plumage, which had hues of black and blue like a crow
  • earliest record of iridescent feather color
  • Although its anatomy is very similar to birds, Mircroraptor is considered a non-avian dinosaur
  • placed in the group of dinosaurs called dromaeosaurs that includes Velociraptor
  • color displayed by many modern birds is produced partially by arrays of pigment-bearing organelles called melanosomes
  • t a hundred of which can fit across a human ha
  • melanosome's structure is constant for a given color
  • imaging power of scanning electron microscopes, paleontologists recently started analyzing the shape of melanosomes in well-preserved fossilized feather imprints
  • comparing these patterns to those in living birds, scientists can infer the color of dinosaurs that lived many millions of years ago
  • Iridescence is widespread in modern birds and is frequently used in displays
  • Statistical analysis of the data predicts that Microraptor was completely black with a glossy, weakly iridescent blue sheen.
  • researchers also made predictions about the purpose of the dinosaur's tail
  • Once thought to be a broad, teardrop-shaped surface meant to help with flight
  • researchers think that the tail feather was ornamental and likely evolved for courtship and other social interactions, not for aerodynamics
  • actually much narrower with two elongate feathers
  • findings also contradict previous interpretations that Microraptor was a nocturnal animal because dark glossy plumage is not a trait found in modern nighttime birds.
Mars Base

Exotic material shows promise as flexible, transparent electrode - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...ble-transparent-electrode.html

scibyte37 electronics

shared by Mars Base on 08 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • An international team of scientists with roots at SLAC and Stanford has shown that ultra-thin sheets of an exotic material remain transparent and highly conductive even after being deeply flexed 1,000 times and folded and creased like a piece of paper.
  • first practical applications: flexible, transparent electrodes for solar cells, sensors and optical communications devices.
  • basic structural unit for bismuth selenide is a five-layer sandwich made up of alternating single-atom sheets of selenium (orange) and bismuth (purple).
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • stacked on top of each other as thicker samples are made
  • selenium-selenium bonds between the units are weak
  • overall material to flex durably without being damaged
  • researchers made and tested samples of a compound in which sheets of bismuth and selenium, each just one atom thick, alternate to form five-layer units. The bonds between the units are weak, allowing the overall material to flex while retaining its durability
  • topological insulator
  • the material conducts electricity only on its surface while its interior remains insulating
  • it is an exceptionally good electrical conductor – as good as gold
  • bismuth selenide is transparent to infrared light, which we know as heat
  • about half the solar energy that hits the Earth comes in the form of  infrared light, few of today’s solar cells are able to collect it
  • transparent electrodes on the surfaces of most cells are either too fragile or not transparent or conducting enough
  • experiments also showed that bismuth selenide does not degrade significantly in humid environments or when exposed to oxygen treatments that are common in manufacturing.
  • bismuth selenide may be useful in communications devices. This material could also improve infrared sensors common in scientific equipment and aerospace systems.”
Mars Base

A Peek Inside the Manta Ray Womb - ScienceNOW - 0 views

news.sciencemag.org/...inside-the-manta-ray-womb.html

scibyte50 MantaRay ultrasound

shared by Mars Base on 06 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • In November 2008, a female manta ray got stuck in a fishing net off the coast of Okinawa, Japan
  • fishermen called up the local aquarium, where scientists were studying how the creatures reproduce
  • The ray was pregnant
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • manta rays give birth to live young, but they don't have an umbilical cord or a placenta to deliver oxygen
  • researchers have figured out how manta ray embryos get oxygen without a mammal's life-support equipment
  • uterus is closed off from the outside seawater, so the embryo has to be getting oxygen somehow, but nobody knew how
  • checked to see if she was pregnant using an ultrasound machine that had been modified to keep water away from the electronics
Mars Base

NASA - NASA's Voyager Hits New Region at Solar System Edge - 0 views

www.nasa.gov/...voyager20111205.html

scibyte51 Voyager1 voyager

shared by Mars Base on 17 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • the wind of charged particles streaming out from our sun has calmed, our solar system's magnetic field has piled up, and higher-energy particles from inside our solar system appear to be leaking out into interstellar space.
  • Voyager 1 is about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun
  • The data do not reveal exactly when Voyager 1 will make it past the edge of the solar atmosphere into interstellar space, but suggest it will be in a few months to a few years.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • During this past year, Voyager's magnetometer also detected a doubling in the intensity of the magnetic field
  • Like cars piling up at a clogged freeway off-ramp, the increased intensity of the magnetic field shows that inward pressure from interstellar space is compacting it.
  • Voyager has detected a 100-fold increase in the intensity of high-energy electrons from elsewhere in the galaxy diffusing into our solar system from outside, which is another indication of the approaching boundary.
Mars Base

Engineers build 50 gigapixel camera - 0 views

phys.org/...2012-06-gigapixel-camera.html

scibyte52 camera

shared by Mars Base on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • resolution is five times better than 20/20 human vision over a 120 degree horizontal field.
  • capture up to 50 gigapixels of data, which is 50,000 megapixels
  • most consumer cameras
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • ranging from 8 to 40 megapixels
  • researchers believe that within five years
  • gigapixel cameras should be available to the general public
  • Traditionally, one way of making better optics has been to add more glass elements, which increases complexity
  • camera was developed by
  • Duke's Pratt School of Engineering
  • University of Arizona
  • University of California
  • Distant Focus Corp
  • The camera is so large now because of the electronic control boards and the need to add components to keep it from overheating
  • prototype camera itself is two-and-half feet square and 20 inches dee
  • only about three percent of the camera is made of the optical elements
  • arrange for some overlap
Mars Base

Astrophysicists spy ultra-distant galaxy amidst cosmic 'dark ages' - 0 views

phys.org/...tra-distant-galaxy-cosmic.html

scibyte64 galaxy

shared by Mars Base on 20 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • combined power of NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes as well as a cosmic magnification effect, a team
  • has spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever detected.
  • Light from the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories shone forth when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • This galaxy is the most distant object we have ever observed with high confidence
  • Future work involving this galaxy—as well as others like it that we hope to find—will allow us to study the universe's earliest objects and how the Dark Ages ended
  • traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years
  • the universe was just 3.6 percent
  • Objects at these extreme distances are mostly beyond the detection sensitivity of today's largest telescopes
  • astronomers rely on "gravitational lensing
  • predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago
  • gravity of foreground objects warps and magnifies the light from background objects
  • brightening the remote object some 15 times and bringing it into view.
  • small and compact, containing only about 1 percent of the Milky Way's mass
  • leading cosmological theories, the first galaxies should indeed have started out tiny
  • then progressively merged
  • omers plan to study the rise of the first stars and galaxies and the epoch of reionization with the successor to both Spitzer and Hubble—NASA's James Webb Telescope, slated for launch in 2018
  • newly described distant galaxy will likely be a prime target.
  • first galaxies likely played the dominant role in the epoch of reionization
  • event that signaled the demise of the universe's Dark Ages
  • About 400,000 years after the Big Bang, neutral hydrogen gas formed from cooling particles
  • these earliest galaxies is thought to have caused the neutral hydrogen strewn throughout the universe to ionize, or lose an electron
  • during the epoch of reionization, the lights came on in the universe
Mars Base

Nighttime smartphone use zaps workers' energy - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...140122170624.htm

scibyte117

shared by Mars Base on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In a pair of studies surveying a broad spectrum of U.S. workers
  • found that people who monitored their smart phones for business purposes after 9 p.m. were more tired and were less engaged the following day on the job.
  • More than half of U.S. adults own a smartphone
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Many consider the devices to be among the most important tools ever invented when it comes to increasing productivity of knowledge-based work
  • the National Sleep Foundation says only 40 percent of Americans get enough sleep on most nights
  • a commonly cited reason is smartphone usage for work.
  • the first study, the researchers had 82 upper-level managers complete multiple surveys every day for two weeks.
  • The second study surveyed 161 employees daily in a variety of occupations -- from nursing to manufacturing and from accounting to dentistry
  • both studies
  • showed that nighttime smartphone usage for business purposes cut into sleep and sapped workers' energy the next day in the office
  • The second study also compared smartphone usage to other electronic devices and found that smartphones had a larger negative effect than watching television and using laptop and tablet computers
  • In addition to keeping people mentally engaged at night, smartphones emit "blue light"
  • the most disruptive of all colors of light. Blue light is known to hinder melatonin, a chemical in the body that promotes sleep
  • nighttime use of smartphones appears to have both psychological and physiological effects on people's ability to sleep and on sleep's essential recovery functions
  • "There may be times in which putting off work until the next day would have disastrous consequences and using your smartphone is well worth the negative effects on less important tasks the next day,"
  • "But on many other nights, more sleep may be your best bet."
  • Johnson, MSU assistant professor of management
Mars Base

Driverless Taxis in European Cities from 2014 - 0 views

www.scienceworldreport.com/...-european-cities-from-2014.htm

scibyte117

shared by Mars Base on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Driverless taxis will be carrying passengers during demonstration projects in five European cities as of February 2014.
  • cybercars, by the EU-funded CityMobil2 project, is one of a number of research initiatives that are testing out specially designed self-driving road vehicles as the technology required to navigate them becomes cheaper and more reliable.
  • Cybercars have traditionally sensed the world through expensive gyroscopes, microwaves and laser beams
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • cheap cameras and fast image-recognition algorithms has led to a new technique known as visual odometry
  • a computer analyses images to determine the position and orientation of the vehicle.
  • researchers have better access to the technology required for automated vehicles
  • e V-Charge project, a consortium of companies and universities which is working on fully automated low-speed driving in cities using only cameras and other low-cost sensors mounted on standard cars
  • . The consortium is working to produce detailed maps and a perception system that allows a vehicle to recognize its location and identify nearby pedestrians and vehicles, all using only stereoscopic or fisheye cameras.
  • team has taken this a step further, pioneering a guidance system that works economically by using a single camera.
  • car manufacturers are already making automated piloting features of their own – radar-based cruise control, anti-braking systems (ABS) and lane-control assistance
  • cables and hydraulic pressure valves which previously linked the controls of the vehicle to its working parts are gradually being replaced with electronic circuits
  • While companies such as Google see autonomous cars in a couple of decades
  • CityMobil2 project
  • thinks that they could be hitting the road sooner than that
  • The challenge lies in their environment
  • believes that, in addition to teaching cars to respond autonomously to traffic conditions, traffic should be adapted to automated cars
  • In their current state of development, cybercars could already drive safely in pedestrian areas and designated lanes
  • , investors are at present deterred by their high initial investment and perceived risks.
  • why they are being implemented in small stages
  • The first CityMobil project shuttled passengers across the car park of London Heathrow airport in a fleet of driverless pods
  • CityMobil2, now brings specially designed automated vehicles to designated roads inside the city centre
  • The project plans to procure two sets of automated vehicles which will tour five cities in a series of demonstration projects each lasting six to eight months
  • CityMobil2 is bringing together experts from ministries in each member state to agree on technical requirements by the time the project concludes in 2016 that could feed into a future European directive on the issue
Mars Base

China's Historic Moon Robot Duo Awaken from 1st Long Frigid Night and Resume Science Op... - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-and-resume-science-operations

scibyte115 ChineseSpaceProgram

shared by Mars Base on 14 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Yutu woke up
  • Saturday, Jan. 11, at 5:09 a.m. Beijing local time
  • Chang’e-3 lander was awoken on Sunday, Jan. 12, at 8:21 a.m. Beijing local time, according to a BACC statement
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • They went to sleep to conserve energy since there is no sunlight to generate power with the solar arrays during the lunar night.
  • During the nocturnal hiatus they were kept alive by a radioisotopic heat source that kept their delicate computer and electronics subsystems warmed inside a box below the deck
  • It was maintained at a temperature of about minus 40 degrees Celsius to prevent debilitating damage
  • lunar night time environment when temperatures plunged to below minus 180 degrees Celsius, or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit
  • Just prior to hibernating, the lander snapped the first image of the Earth taken from the Moon’s surface in some four decades
  • Yutu has already resumed roving
  • The Chang’e-3 lander should survive at least a year.
Mars Base

Yutu rover Suffers Significant Setback at Start of 2nd Lunar Night - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...ck-at-start-of-2nd-lunar-night

scibyte117 ChineseSpaceProgram

shared by Mars Base on 29 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The six wheeled Yutu rover, which means ‘Jade Rabbit’, has “experienced a mechanical control abnormality” in a new report by China’s official government newspaper, The People’s Daily. Remove this ad
  • ‘Jade Rabbit’ was traversing southwards from the landing site as the incident occurred just days ago – about six weeks into its planned 3 month moon roving expedition
  • very few details have emerged or been released by the Chinese government about Yutu’s condition or fate
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The abnormality occurred due to the “complicated lunar surface environment,” said the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence
  • took place just prior to the beginning of the 2nd lunar night and
  • ‘dormancy’ for both ‘Jade Rabbit’ and the Chang’e-3
  • Based on unofficial accounts, it appears that one of the solar panels did not fold back properly over Yutu’s mast after it was lowered to the required horizontal position into a warmed box to shield and protect it from the extremely frigid lunar night time temperatures
  • could potentially spell doom for the mast mounted instruments and electronic systems, including the color and navigation cameras and the high gain antenna, if true
  • each Lunar night also lasts approximately 14 Earth days
  • there is no communication possible during sleep mode, no one will know until the resumption of daylight some two weeks from now – around Feb. 8 to 9.
Mars Base

China's Yutu Moon Rover Unable to Properly Maneuver Solar Panels - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...properly-maneuver-solar-panels

scibyte122 scibyte123 ChineseSpaceProgram-Yutu

shared by Mars Base on 04 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The serious technical malfunction
  • of China’s Yutu moon rover
  • has been identified as an inability to properly maneuver the life giving solar panels
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • “Yutu suffered a control circuit malfunction in its driving unit,” according to a newly published report on March 1 by the state owned Xinhua news agency.
  • prevented Yutu from entering the second dormancy as planned
  • A functioning control circuit is required to lower the rovers mast
  • They must be folded down into a warmed electronics box to shield them from the damaging effects of the Moon’s nightfall when temperatures plunge dramatically to below minus 180 Celsius, or minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • The panel driving unit also helps maneuver the panels into position to efficiently point to the sun to maximize the electrical output
  • Chinese space engineers engaged in troubleshooting to try and identify and rectify the technical problems in a race against time to find a solution before the start of Lunar Night 3.
  • The 140 kilogram rover was unable to move during Lunar Day 3 due to the mechanical glitches.
  • “Yutu only carried out fixed point observations during its third lunar day
  • it did complete some limited scientific observations. And fortunately the ground penetrating radar, panoramic and infrared imaging equipment all functioned normally.
  • Yutu and the companion Chang’e-3 lander have again gone into sleep mode during Lunar Night 3 on Feb. 22 and Feb 23 respectively, local Beijing time.
  • the issue with the control circuit malfunction in its driving unit remains unresolved and a still threatens the outlook for Yutu’s future exploration.
  • Yutu is now nearing its planned 3 month long life expectancy
Mars Base

Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers : Nature News & Comment - 0 views

www.nature.com/...n-120-gibberish-papers-1.14763

scibyte122

shared by Mars Base on 28 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.
  • Over the past two years
  • catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer
  • more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE),
  • One of the named authors replied t
  • said that he first learned of the article when conference organizers notified his university in December 2013;
  • he does not know why he was a listed co-author on the paper.
  • Among the works
  • a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China.
  • The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’,
  • in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”.
  • a way to automatically detect manuscripts composed by a piece of software called SCIgen, which randomly combines strings of words to produce fake computer-science papers
  • SCIgen was invented in 2005 by researchers
  • to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers — and, as they put it, “to maximize amusement”
  • A related program generates random physics manuscript titles on the satirical website arXiv vs. snarXiv.
  • SCIgen is free to download and use, and it is unclear how many people have done so, or for what purposes
  • SCIgen’s output has occasionally popped up at conferences, when researchers have submitted nonsense papers and then revealed the trick.
  • Most of the conferences took place in China, and most of the fake papers have authors with Chinese affiliations.
  • The papers are quite easy to spot,” says Labbé, who has built a website where users can test whether papers have been created using SCIgen.
  • involves searching for characteristic vocabulary generated by SCIgen
  • In April 2010, he used SCIgen to generate 102 fake papers by a fictional author called Ike Antkare
  • showed how easy it was to add these fake papers to the Google Scholar database
  • There is a long history of journalists and researchers getting spoof papers accepted in conferences or by journals to reveal weaknesses in academic quality controls
Mars Base

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

blogs.smithsonianmag.com/...cal-gears-ever-found-in-nature

scibyte102 BiologicalGear ViewerFeedback

shared by Mars Base on 16 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • 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
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • 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

Chinese rover & lander beam back Portraits with China's Flag shining on Moon's Surface - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-flag-shining-on-moons-surface

scibyte113 ChineseSpaceProgram

shared by Mars Base on 16 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Dec 15
  • Chang’e-3 lunar lander and rover beamed back portraits of one another snapped from the Moon’s surface
  • displayed
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Chinese national flag
  • After rolling all six wheels into the dirt, Yutu
  • drove to a location about nine meters north of the lander, according to CCTV commentators
  • then turned around so that the red Chinese flag emblazoned on the front side would be facing the lander’s high resolution color cameras for the eagerly awaited portraits of one another
  • Yutu is nearly the size of a golf cart. It measures about 1.5 m x 1 m on its sides and stands about 1.5 m (nearly 5 feet) tall
  • Yutu will depart the landing site
  • and begin its own lunar trek that’s expected to last at least 3 months. Remove this ad
  • equipped with eight science instruments including multiple cameras, spectrometers, an optical telescope, ground penetrating radar and other sensors to investigate the lunar surface and composition
  • The radar instrument installed at the bottom of the rover can penetrate 100 meters deep below the surface to study the Moon’s structure and composition in unprecedented detail, according to
  • senior advisor of China’s lunar probe project,
  • A UV camera will study the earth and its interaction with solar wind and a telescope will study celestial objects
  • will also investigate the moon’s natural resources for use by potential future Chinese astronauts
  • Most of the science instruments are working including at least three cameras and the ground penetrating radar
  • the extremely cold lunar night and temperature fluctuations of more than 300 degrees Celsius – a great engineering challenge.
  • The rover will hibernate during the two week long lunar night
  • A radioisotopic heater will provide heat to safeguard the rovers computer and electronics
Mars Base

Large Hadron Collider team announces beginning of restart - 0 views

phys.org/...ron-collider-team-restart.html

scibyte126 LargeHadronCollider

shared by Mars Base on 09 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • scientists working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) facility has reported
  • that the process of restarting the massive experimental mechanism has begun
  • though it won't finish until sometime next year
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • will have to be restarted in pieces to ensure that each is operating properly before the next can be brought online
  • the facility is in the process of an upgrade, which has been in the planning stages for several years and will include upgrades to several pieces and parts of the facility that support the LHC as well as the main accelerator itself
  • The team recognized that the facility had begun to suffer from diminishing returns
  • many parts could be improved due to the development of new technology and improvements on old ways of doing things.
  • the team has successfully restarted the part they call the source—the piece of equipment responsible for stripping electrons off of hydrogen atoms for use in producing protons.
  • Next up the team plans to fire up Linac2, an accelerator whose job it is to give protons their initial push
  • After that a booster will be started that will be used to push the protons even faster
  • For the LHC to be used in its proper context, it must receive protons that are already moving exceedingly fast.
  • Team members have made much of the complete upgrade to the control system
  • that integrates all of the systems and which of course will be central to a successful reboot.
  • In addition to swapping out parts for new and improved technology, technicians will also be replacing worn cables or other minor but necessary components
  • If all goes well, the LHC should be ready and back in business sometime early next year.
Mars Base

Invention Awards 2014: Charge Gadgets With Your Footsteps | Popular Science - 0 views

www.popsci.com/...-charge-gadgets-your-footsteps

scibyte129

shared by Mars Base on 04 May 14 - No Cached
  • of a hiker’s heel releases enough energy to illuminate a light bulb
  • Matt Stanton, an engineer and avid backpacker, created a shoe insole that stores it as electricity
  • Instead of using piezoelectric and other inefficient, bulky methods of generating electricity, the pair shrunk down components similar to those found in hand-cranked flashlights.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The result is a near standard–size removable insole that weighs less than five ounces, including a battery pack, and charges electronics via USB.
  • current version, to be released later this year, requires a lengthy 15-mile walk to charge a smartphone.
  • the company is working toward a design that can charge an iPhone after less than five miles of hiking and withstand about 100 million footsteps of wear and tear. 
  • How It Works
  • 1) A drivetrain converts the energy of heel strikes into rotational energy, spinning magnetic rotors
  • 2) The motion of the rotors induces an electrical current within coils of wire
  • 3) Electricity travels along a wire and into a lithium-ion polymer battery pack on a wearer’s shoelaces.
Mars Base

Guest Post: No turning back, NASA ISEE-3 Spacecraft Returning to Earth after a 36 Year ... - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-earth-after-a-36-year-journey

scibyte132 ISEE-3

shared by Mars Base on 25 May 14 - No Cached
  • 30 years later and documents and magnetic tapes have predictably disappeared.
  • The software and hardware to program, command and transmit to ISEE-3 are long gone
  • An independent team of engineers
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • recovering old imagery on magnetic tape reels from the first lunar orbiter missions),
  • operating outside the ranks and hallways of NASA
  • to accomplish a landmark achievement: to turn on, command and maneuver a NASA spacecraft long ago abandoned
  • Amateur radio operators now have technology sufficient to acquire the signal and through the internet are also a part of the recovery effort
  • without the original hardware transmitter, today’s high-speed electronics are able to emulate in software the hardware from 36 years ago
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