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Mars Base

Space College: ISEE-3 Reboot Project Archives - 0 views

  • It has 4 large antennas that span 91 meters and it spins
  • once every 3 seconds
  • Using GNU Radio to Talk to ISEE-3
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • What ISEE-3 Really Looks Like
  • successfully
  • uplink commands to the space craft
  • accomplished through a lot of team work, strong leadership
  • and generous support from the community at large
  • designed a deep-space uplink modulator in a couple of days,
  • products like the Ettus Research USRP, the open source SDR framework GNU Radio have made this exceedingly easy.
  • 12 June 2014
  • telemetry from ISEE-3 indicating that its entire suite of science instruments is powered up and has been powered up since NASA last commanded the spacecraft many years ago
  • getting data back from the magentometer that indicates that science data is coming back
  • Just because an instrument is powered up doesn't mean that it is functioning normally
  • some of the ISEE-3 instruments had begun to fail or become partially functional as early as 1982
  • plans to briefly fire two of the spacecraft's thrusters on 21 June so as to spin it up from 19.16 rpm to the mission specification of 19.75 +/- 0.2 rpm
  • spin-up target is 19.733 rpm
  • This burn would utilize spin-up thrusters A and B
  • This optimal spin rate is required in order to properly fire the axial thrusters during the much longer trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) we need to perform to adjust the spacecraft's course
Mars Base

June 6 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on June 6th, died, and events - 0 views

  • Heart defect detection
  • In 1961, the success of a mass-screening field-test for the detection of heart defects in children was announced by the American Heart Association. A child's tape-recorded heart sounds were amplified and filtered, so distinctive murmers and abnormal sounds could be recognized. The system “permits a relatively few trained cardiologists to rapidly screen large numbers of children” and “finds heart disease with an accuracy of 91 percent,” reported the New York Times the next day. From Apr 1959 to Jul 1960, with equipment housed in a trailer and moved between Chicago schools, 33,026 children were recorded. Of these 506 were indentified for further examination, and 64 of those were followed up, some with corrective surgery. Such ailments as rheumatic disease and inborn defects are best treated in childhood.
Mars Base

Inside The New Dragon Spacecraft | Popular Science - 0 views

  • the previous version of the Dragon capsule was flightworthy enough to deliver supplies, its life support system wasn’t reliable for human passengers
  • Dragon V2, on the other hand, will be able to carry seven astronauts for seven days.
  • When the capsule reaches the ISS, it will dock with the station autonomously. Unlike its predecessor, it won’t need the ISS’s robotic arm to reach out and grab it
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  • To land back on Earth, version one slowed its speed with parachutes before splashing into the ocean
  • This is now a backup technique for the new capsule
  • V2 can use its engines to land propulsively
  • “You’ll be able to land anywhere on Earth with the accuracy of a helicopter,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
  • The Dragon V2’s landing ability will make it quickly reusable
  • According to Ars Technica, NASA pays Russia about $71 million per astronaut for trips to the ISS. Musk thinks he can drop that number to $20 million or less.
Mars Base

Dragon V2: SpaceX's Next Generation Manned Spacecraft | SpaceX - 0 views

  • The vehicle holds seats for 7 passengers, and includes an Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) that provides a comfortable environment for crewmembers
  • Dragon V2’s robust thermal protection system is capable of lunar missions, in addition to flights to and from Earth orbit
Mars Base

Amber discovery indicates Lyme disease is older than human race - 0 views

  • Lyme disease is a stealthy, often misdiagnosed disease that was only recognized about 40 years ago
  • new discoveries of ticks fossilized in amber show that the bacteria which cause it may have been lurking around for 15 million years
  • The findings were made
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  • studied 15-20 million-year-old amber
  • that offer the oldest fossil evidence ever found of Borrelia, a type of spirochete-like bacteria that to this day causes Lyme disease
  • In a related study
  • scientists announced the first fossil record of Rickettsial-like cells, a bacteria that can cause various types of spotted fever
  • it's worth considering that these tick-borne diseases may be far more common than has been historically appreciated
  • Those fossils from Myanmar were found in ticks about 100 million years old.
  • plant and animal life forms found preserved in amber
  • are very efficient at maintaining populations of microbes in their tissues, and can infect mammals, birds, reptiles and other animals
  • "In the United States, Europe and Asia, ticks are a more important insect vector of disease than mosquitos
  • A series of four ticks from Dominican amber were analyzed in this study
  • In a separate report, Poinar found cells that resemble Rickettsia bacteria, the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever and related illnesses
  • This is the oldest fossil evidence of ticks associated with such bacteria
  • Evidence suggests that dinosaurs could have been infected with Rickettsial pathogens
Mars Base

Lyme Disease Bacteria Found in 15-Million-Year-Old Amber | Paleontology | Sci-News.com - 0 views

  • In 30 years of studying diseases revealed in the fossil record, the scientist has documented the ancient presence of such diseases as malaria, leishmania, and others.
  • Lyme disease
  • can cause problems with joints, the heart and central nervous system
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  • This is the oldest fossil evidence of ticks associated with such bacteria.
Mars Base

'Signglasses' System Helps Deaf Literacy - 0 views

  • Students at Brigham Young University recently launched the "Signglasses"
  • project in an attempt to develop a better system of sign language for narration through several types of glasses, including Google Glass.
  • Two of professor
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  • who are also deaf, signed up for the project just as the national Science Foundation funded the research
  • The team tested their system during a field trip visit to the Jean Messieu School for the deaf
  • Research from one of the tests revealed that the signer should be displayed in the center of the lens
  • deaf participants could look straight through the signer as they focused on a planetarium show.
  • This was particularly surprising for researchers as they believed that deaf students would prefer to have a video displayed at the top, as Google Glass normally presents itself
  • Researchers hope that with further studies, this tool can also be used for literary guidance
  • One idea is when you're reading a book and come across a word that you don't understand, you point at it, push a button to take a picture
Mars Base

June 7 - Today in Science History - Scientists born on June 7th, died, and events - 0 views

  • Ultrasound article
  • In 1958, a seminal article that launched the widespread use of ultrasound in medical diagnosis was published in The Lancet by Ian Donald, an English physician. After a few years developing the experimental use of ultrasound, Donald had applied it to treat patients in his hospital. In the Lancet article, Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound, he described how he was able to make the life-saving diagnosis of a huge, easily removable, ovarian cyst in a woman who had been diagnosed by others as having inoperable stomach cancer. Donald knew about sonar from his service in WW II, and industrial use of reflected ultrasound waves for flaw detection in materials, and with help from others, he launched its use in medicine
Mars Base

35-year-old ISEE 3 Craft Phones Home | Sky & Telescope - 0 views

  • The team successfully established contact that afternoon — notwithstanding a minor earthquake in the area — at a heart-thumping transmission rate of 512 bits per second.
  • approval from NASA to attempt contact, and that go-ahead came on May 29th
Mars Base

World Largest Heat Shield Attached to NASA's Orion Crew Capsule for Crucial Fall 2014 T... - 0 views

  • technicians at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida have attached the world’s largest heat shield to a pathfinding version of NASA’s Orion crew capsule
  • test flight later this Fall on a crucial mission dubbed Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1)
  • One of the primary goals of NASA’s eagerly anticipated Orion EFT-1 uncrewed test flight is to test the efficacy of the heat shield in protecting the vehicle – and future human astronauts
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  • A trio of parachutes will then unfurl to slow it down for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean
  • Orion is NASA’s next generation human rated vehicle now under development to replace the now retired space shuttle
  • “The Orion heat shield is the largest of its kind ever built. Its wider than the Apollo and Mars Science Lab heat shields,” Todd Sullivan
  • heat shield senior manager
  • The heat shield measures 16.5 feet in diameter
  • It is constructed from a single seamless piece of Avcoat ablator
  • The ablative material will wear away as it heats up during the capsules atmospheric re-entry thereby preventing the 4000 degree F heat from being transferred to the rest of the capsule
  • The Delta IV Heavy is the only rocket with sufficient thrust to launch the Orion EFT-1 capsule and its attached upper stage to its intended orbit of 3600 miles altitude above Earth
  • 15 times higher than the International Space Station (ISS) and farther than any human spacecraft has journeyed in 40 years
  • At the conclusion of the two-orbit, four- hour EFT-1 flight, the detached Orion capsule plunges back and re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere at 20,000 MPH (32,000 kilometers per hour).
  • “That’s about 80% of the reentry speed experienced by the Apollo capsule after returning from the Apollo moon landing missions,” Scott Wilson, NASA’s Orion Manager of Production Operations
  • The big reason to get to those high speeds during EFT-1 is to be able to test out the thermal protection system
  • Numerous sensors and instrumentation have been specially installed on the EFT-1 heat shield and the back shell tiles to collect measurements of things like temperatures, pressures and stresses during the extreme conditions of atmospheric reentry
  • data gathered during the
  • flight will aid in confirming. or refuting, design decisions and computer models as the program moves forward to the first flight
  • in late 2017 on the EM-1 mission and more human crewed missions thereafter
Mars Base

ISEE-3 Reboot Project Update: BULLSEYE! and More - Space College - 0 views

  • spacecraft has two transponders,
  • transponder A and Transponder B
  • Transponder B is normally the engineering telemetry transponder and transponder A is the ranging transponder
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  • The final state of the spacecraft before was to have both of the transponders transmitters active and that is what people around the world have been tracking.
  • the spacecraft is set up with a lot of redundancy so you can use either transponder A or B to send telemetry or range
  • We tried several times to command the spacecraft's B transponder at 2041.9479 MHz into the mode where it normally sends engineering telemetry
  • did not work
  • Then we tried the same process on transponder A
  • modulation from the output of the telemetry system
  • The initial command was just to turn engineering telemetry on at 512 bits/second. This was successful.
  • successfully commanded the spacecraft into engineering telemetry mode.
  • initial verification
  • later
  • through the A transponder's receiver we commanded through the B transponder's command decoder to output engineering telemetry through transponder B's transmitter
  • verified so far the following systems on the spacecraft
  • 1. Transponder A receiver
  • 2. Transponder A's Command Decoder and Data Handling Unit
  • 3. Transponder B's Command Decoder and Data Handling Unit
  • tried to command the spacecraft into 64 bits/second mode, which was a mode that is much more complicated to set up and we did not get working successfully during the limited time that the spacecraft is visible from Arecibo
  • need to do this so that the smaller dishes at Morehead State and Bochum will have a positive signal margin so that we can record several hours of data
  • neither of the ISEE-3/ICE receivers had met their specification in testing
  • for -120 dbm sensitivity
  • receiver A was tested at about -114 dbm, and Receiver B at -111 dbm
  • after our end to end systems test we had an earthquake
  • how observations could be affected by vibrations in the dome structure as it translates during an observation and then that happened
  • later processed our first day's data dump from the spacecraft and we received 49 full frames of data at a bit rate of 512 bits/second
  • there were no errors on the downlink
  • milestones related to commanding and receiving data
  • 1. Successful commanding multiple times of ISEE-3/ICE
  • 2. Received engineering telemetry from both data multiplexing units on the spacecraft
  • 3. Successful demodulation on the ground of the received data, through the output of bits
  • 4. Verification of good data at 512 bits/sec, including frame synchronization, correct number of bits/frame, and with no errors, showing a very strong 30+ db link margin through Arecibo
  • If we can maneuver the spacecraft by June 17th we get the very small delta V number
  • this starts to climb rapidly as the spacecraft gets closer to the moon
  • cannot at this time rule out a lunar impact.
Mars Base

Google Glass adaptation opens the universe to deaf students - 0 views

  • the only two deaf students to ever take Professor Jones’ computer science class
  • signed up just as the National Science Foundation funded Jones’ signglasses research
  • “Having a group of students who are fluent in sign language here at the university has been huge,
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Professor Mike Jones
  • Jones
  • Jones will publish the full results of their research in June at Interaction Design and Children
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