The researchers fired pellets of randomly oriented multiwalled carbon nanotubes from a light gas gun built by the Rice lab of materials scientist Enrique Barrera with funding from NASA.
Hypervelocity impact tests are used mostly to simulate the impact of different projectiles on shields spacecraft
and satellites Ozden said. We were investigating possible applications for carbon nanotubes in space when we got this result.
The effect was confirmed through molecular simulations. They showed that when multiwalled tubes impact the target the outer tube flattens hitting the inside tubes
and sequentially the transfer of energy between them occurs exclusively within the intracellular space he says.
and light weightuch as in structures to be deployed in space, where every bit of weight adds significantly to the cost of launch.
Collecting sunlight using these tiny colloidal quantum dots depends on two types of semiconductors: n-type which are rich in electrons;
For the average person this means more sophisticated weather satellites remote controllers satellite communication or pollution detectors.
space-consuming batteries could become a thing of the past. It is possible to further miniaturize the electronic devices
or the space that has been used previously for batteries could be used for other purposes. In the case of launch vehicles
and hold sunlight to drive the chemical reactions involved in water splitting. Semiconductors like silicon and gallium arsenide are excellent light absorberss is clear from their widespread use in solar panels.
While the overall efficiency of this cell is still low compared to other types about 9 percent of the energy of sunlight is converted to electricity the rate of improvement of this technology is one of the most rapid seen for a solar technology.
and thus boosting their overall efficiency in converting sunlight into electricity. Many approaches to creating low-cost large-area flexible and lightweight solar cells suffer from serious limitations such as short operating lifetimes
And of course the laser and its mounting take up a great deal of space. With the new design the illumination will be applied directly over the probe tip at the same place on the sample that is being exposed to the microwave signal.
"This is a problem because empty spaces, such as the thoracic cavity, will also appear dark, possibly leading to incorrect identification of tumour margins."
and internal bleeding contains gadolinium a rare-earth metal. Recently biomedical researchers have found ways to increase the effectiveness of certain contrast agents by associating them with nanoparticles.
or aerospace vehicle if you have to replace them every few years because they go dead."
Just as a glass lens can be used to focus sunlight to a certain spot, these plasmonic nanostructures concentrate incoming light into hotspots on their surface,
Or they say the fiber could be a space-saving power source and serve as energy-carrying wires in medical implants.
#Is it a#true#simulacrum of a blocky quantum universe? Ha no. But considering just how strange the field is that probably wouldn't make for a fun game.
He and his printer system are#part of this year's NASA International Space Apps Challenge in Paris proposing to use e waste to make 3-D printers that would print tools to colonize Mars. euronews
#Watch A 3-D Printer Make A Pizza#This summer we heard about a 3-D printer for food developed with NASA funding
#You can see why NASA would be interested in the idea: send up a printer instead of boxes of food
and you save space plus you give the astronauts a home-cooked meal. Also: it's fun to watch.
Kickstarter via IGN Of the space I will be moving in I hope it first allows me to setup my boundries else this thing might have me walk into a wall when visually
if implemented with something like Virtusphere (virtusphere. com) being part of one of those laser-tag/game centers plus it would require a lot less floor space than laser tag
and the cost for compatible games would be way less than the cost for the space.
#Waggling Phallic Scanner 3-D-Maps The Tower Of Pisa In 20 Minutes The Zebedee created by Australia's national space agency is a 3-D scanner
or read more over at the Australian space agency's site. I am sure a great many Popsci readers are thinking this at the same time I'm typing it Attachã this to a drone for remote scouting in 3d!
Playing Devil's advocate since 1978the only constant in the universe is change-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC-475 BCREALLY neat
#The next Space shuttle: Hybrid Engines Make Runway-To-Orbit Missions A Reality A disembodied jet engine attached to a hulking air vent sits in an outdoor test facility at the Culham Science Center in Oxfordshire England.
When the engine screams to life columns of steam billow from the vent giving the impression of an industrial smokestack.
For Bond the engine represents the beginning of the world's first fully reusable spaceship a new kind of craft that promises to do
offer reliable affordable and regular round-trip access to low Earth orbit. Bond and the engineers at Reaction engines the aerospace company he founded with two colleagues in 1989 refer to the future craft as the Skylon.
The vehicle would have a fuselage reminiscent of the Concorde and take off like a conventional airliner accelerate to Mach 5. 2
and blast out of the atmosphere like a rocket. On the return trip Skylon would touch down on the same runway it launched from.
Bond's Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket engine (Sabre) part chemical rocket part jet engine will make Skylon possible.
Sabre has the unique ability to use oxygen in the air rather than from external liquid-oxygen tanks like those on the space shuttle Strapped to a spacecraft engines of this breed would eliminate the need for expendable boosters
which make launching people and things into space slow and expensive. The Skylon could be ready to head back to space within two days of landing says Mark Hempsell future-programs director at Reaction engines.
By comparison the space shuttle which required an external fuel tank and two rocket boosters took about two months to turn around (due to damage incurred during launch and splashdown) and cost $100 million.
Citing Skylon's simplicity Hempsell estimates a mission could cost as little as $10 million. That price would even undercut the $50 million sum that private spaceflight company Spacex plans to charge to launch cargo on its two-stage Falcon 9 rocket.
The engine produces incredible heat as it pushes toward space and heat is a problem.
Hot air is difficult to compress and poor compression in the combustion chamber yields a weak and inefficient engine.
The Skylon concept has impressed also the European space agency (ESA) which audited Reaction engines'designs last year and found no technical impediments to building the craft.
The quest for a single-stage-to-orbit spaceship or SSTO has bedeviled aerospace engineers for decades. Bond's own exploration of the topic began in the early 1980s
when he was a young engineer working with Rolls-royce as part of a team tasked with developing a reusable spacecraft for British aerospace.
That's when he came up with the idea of a hybrid engine. But the team struggled to figure out how to cool the engine at supersonic speeds without adding crippling amounts of weight.
NASA and Lockheed martin meanwhile had their own plans for a fully reusable spacecraft the Venturestar intended as an affordable replacement for the partially reusable space shuttle.
The Venturestar demonstrator called X-33 (which graced the cover of this magazine in 1996) was a squat triangular rocket that would take off vertically
and glide back to Earth just as the shuttle did. Eliminating the expendable rockets needed to boost the shuttle into space could theoretically reduce the cost of launches from $10000 per pound to $1000 per pound.
But by 2001 after sinking more than $1 billion into the project the agency pulled the plug citing repeated technical setbacks and ballooning costs.
because we felt it was better to focus our efforts on other less costly ways to get payloads to orbit says Dan Dumbacher NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development who spent two years working on the X-33.
Expendable rockets make sense for missions beyond low-Earth orbit. They can haul more cargo and more fuel than single-stage craft.
Rockets also offer reliability on average only one out of 20 launches fail in part because they suffer no wear and tear from repeated use.
Finally rockets come with fewer R&d costs as much of the technology has existed since the 1960s. But for routine missions to the ISS or to park a small observational satellite in orbit affordability becomes a critical consideration.
Spacex CEO Elon musk told an audience at the National Press Club in 2011 that private spaceflights would need to follow a model closer to that of airlines.
If planes were not reusable very few people would fly he said. Spacex plans to make rocket stages reusable
but there are drawbacks to that too: While it is possible to recover rocket stages designing bits
and pieces to survive reentry in good working order adds a level of complexity and cost.
For rocket scientists nothing matters more than weight. Each pound you put into orbit requires about 10 pounds
or so of fuel to get it there says NASA's Dumbacher. The challenge with the SSTO has always been to get the craft as light as possible
and generate as much thrust as possible. Bond estimates that Skylon would weigh about 358 tons at takeoff
and hold enough hydrogen fuel to carry itself and about 16.5 tons of payload about the same capacity as most operational rockets into orbit.
If and when the engine passes flight tests one of Reaction engines'plans is to license the technology to a potential partner in the aerospace industry.
I will see a single stage space plane take off to space and land back on earth.
or space tourism the space industry will explode with so many companies getting into this. There are already a number of them out there.
Truthfully Skylon or SSTO is the only way to make space common. Imagine a fleet of these vehicles whisking payloads to LEO on a daily basis
We could finally start to build a true space presence...moon base lunar orbital base a lunar tether space manufacturing space recreation and ultimately deep space travel.
Setting up shop on Phobos and Deimos Mars Titan Europa...Later on sky cities wafting through the Venusian atmosphere (oxygen is a lifting gas on that planet so technically a simple Nitrogen/Oxygen atmosphere
(which is what we breathe) would be sufficient to provide bouyancy in the atmosphere. An enclosed city will eventually happen.
It all starts with regular SSTO flights. Very awesome breakthrough on heat exchange. This single breakthrough will ripple through a host of applications.
So basically a Ram Air (Oxygen) induction that is super cooled used to ignite/burn rocket/hydrogen fuel.
I am guessing that due to the need for Ram Air at mach 5. 2 that this thing has to stop engine burn at orbit (due to lack of oxygen)
Basically it's a rocket engine that can utilize oxygen out of the air only while it is in air.
The banana shape of the engines is to keep the rocket engines thrusting through the center of gravity
otherwise the air/spacecraft will pitch. So the nozzle angle is purely a function of where the engines are relative to the center of gravity.
No one will fly astronauts/cosmonauts up to the ISS on an unmanned vehicle. Other than that good article.
and why it is hybrid. 2. How does the spacecraft accelerate from zero to Mach 5?
In space? 4. If LOX is an oxidiser for at least part of the flight where is the tank?
you can write me at CARTYWILLIAN3@GMAIL. COM. BILLHIMLYNXWIKIPEDIA answers all of your questions. google SABRE (rocket engine)@ wcarty...
The shuttle program kept us from actual space exploration for 20 years. No lunar missions No Mars missions or asteroid missions except by robots. oh yea...
what does it matter that we have a shiny new toy primarily for the commercial interests who will be building 1 star hotels in near Earth orbit that cost $10000 a day
so you can get bruised up floating around and vomit at a spectacular view of Earth.
We dont need a new suborbital launch system for spy satellites or a taxi service to the ISS.
The Space program should be about exploration beyond Earth. I want craft that can support bases on the Moon flag planting ceremonies on Mars Europa and Titan.
I want to see vehicles that can mine asteroids. Its 2013 and we still havent even dug up that Monolith on the Moon.@
@Oniraptor...NASA and Spacex are doing what you are requesting just a few years down the road.
A cheap launch system is needed desperately for support of deep space missions and other needs. And yes the Space shuttle was a huge drain on resources
but was unfortunately necessary for the completion of the ISS as we were too deep into them both to cancel the programs.
Science that can be done only on the ISS hopefully will pay off and make it all worth the high cost.
SSTO-single stage to orbit. I'm sorry but this configuration is too absurd to even comment On it keeps popping up on the net for reasons that
so light for its size it will not get as hot as other re-entry vehicles like the space shuttle (1100k vs 2000k).
me that this could be the perfect example for international cooperation in space (it already is as ESA is already looking more aggressively into it).
It is time for NASA to quit the Senate Launch System and focusing on the future of space transportationâ#Replace those two flags in the picture with the NASA/ESA emblems representing a true international space endeavor.
I say the engine need to be able to work in both air and vacuumto save liquid oxygen weight.@
@lreyna...NASA involvement would probably be welcome however this craft and NASA's deep space capsule have two entirely different missions cheers.
There was NO discussion or mention on the limit and size of carry on bags...Another fake research program to cover for the real space program.
The one that cooperates with the reptilians. could be just a rumor. Skylon is a very neat piece of engineering.
It still won't get the cost down far enough for power satellites to make economic sense.
And this you might want to look at just for the eye candy of a second generation Skylon using laser heated hydrogen to get into orbit. http://nextbigfuture. com/2013/09/propulsion-lasers-for-large-scale. html One error in this article
#In Japan, Eight People With Two Laptops Launch A Telescope Into Orbit A new low-cost highly automated rocket from Japan's space agency launched Saturday with just eight crew members and two laptops on-site.
The Japan aerospace exploration agency sent the first of its new generation of launch vehicles into orbit carrying a telescope that will observe the atmospheres of Venus Mars and Jupiter.
The telescope's measurements will provide astronomers with clues to events early in the solar system's history according to the agency's description of the project.
A large control room could be integrated into a single laptop PC the rocket's project manager Yasuhiro Morita said in a statement in 2011.'
'We are trying to make rocket launches much simpler and ordinary events.''The new rocket called Epsilon has artificial intelligence to perform its own safety checks.
Its computer system reduces the number of people needed at a launch site from the 150 that were standard at Japan's previous space launches.
Japan's space program JAXA developed both its Epsilon Launch vehicle and the small satellite carrying the planet-viewing telescope
so that it could launch more missions more frequently. We are trying to make rocket launches much simpler and ordinary events Morita said.
The agency retired Epsilon's predecessor a rocket called M-5 seven years ago because of its high costs the BBC reported.
It took $37 million to develop the Epsilon half of what it cost to develop the M-5. The mission was supposed originally to launch in August
but blastoff was delayed first and then cancelled apparently because of computer glitches. JAXA reported Saturday's launch went fine
and that the satellite now in orbit is in good health. Japan aerospace exploration agency BBC Why do photos of Japan always seem so clean and tidy?
Eat you heart out N. Korea. ROFL5 years from now they'll use 2 smart phones. 150 to just 8!!!
HAHAHAA! Man that is awesome. Automation will kill the average tech job and even a control engineers job too!
Bill Joy-Chief Scientist and Cofounder-Sun Micro Systems sums it up best in this Wired article.
The data was collected over several decades by NASA and researchers from the UK and Germany.
but it does highlights that we still don't know everything about the surface of our own planet.
Satellite Signals A wireless device developed by researchers at Duke university that converts microwaves into electricity could eventually harvest Wi-fi or satellite signals for power according to its creators.
or satellites to improve efficiency and make lost energy usable. â##It s possible to use this design for a lot of different frequencies
#Planet Without A Star Found â##We have seen never before an object free-floating in space that that looks like this.
It has all the characteristics of young planets found around other stars but it is drifting out there all aloneâ#stated team leader Michael Liu who is with the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. â
##I had wondered often if such solitary objects exist and now we know they do. â#The planet is about 80 light-years from Earth
which is quite close and is part of a star group named after Beta pictoris that also came together about 12 million years ago.
There is a planet in orbit around Beta pictoris itself but PSO J318. 5-22 has a lower mass
and likely had a different formation scenario the researchers said. Astronomers uncovered the planet which is six times the mass of Jupiter
while looking for brown dwarfs or â##failed stars. â#PSO J318. 5-22â#s ultrared color stood apart from the other objects in the survey astronomers said.
The telescope was identified in the Pan-STARRS 1 wide-field survey telescope in Maui. Follow-up observations were performed with several other Hawaii-based telescopes including the NASA Infrared telescope Facility the Gemini North Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
The discovery will soon be detailed in Astrophysical Letters but for now you can read the prepublished verison on Arxiv.
Source: Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii This article was republished with permission from Universe Today o
#U k. Supermarket Lets You 3-D Scan And Print Yourself In store Add this one to your grocery list.
A supermarket chain in the U k. is offering a new service that lets customers scan objects
and then get figurines of them 3-D-printed in ceramic. The 3-D service debuts tomorrow in the chain Asda's York store.#
A Bright Flash From The Sun At 8: 30 p m. Eastern time yesterday a solar flare peaked on the surface of the sun emitting an intense burst of radiation.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured the M9. 4-class event at a wavelength of 131 Angstroms
M-class flares can cause some space weather effects On earth like disrupting radio signals. Anything more intense than an M9. 9 flare becomes an X-class the highest category.
The sun is currently undergoing a solar maximum a peak of activity that occurs about every 11 years making solar flares like this more likely.
#NASA A
#How Technology Will Make Everyone A Great Photographer At the end of May the Chicago Sun-Times laid off all its staff photographers.
The paper would instead use newswires freelancers and reporters armed with iphones. It was not the first time traditional media turned to untrained photojournalists consider the Instagram photos NBC published after the Boston Marathon bombing
#As one might expect the Sun-Times decision has met with criticism. It s been called â##shortsightedâ
#and â##idiotic. â#There s even a Tumblr of head-to-head comparisons between the Sun-Times
And in theory it will give the Sun-Times even more reach by leveraging the cameras already in place at news events.#
And the newer 20.3-megapixel Galaxy NX has an interchangeable lens mount. The Sony QX100 the newest offering in the lot is the most extreme example.
The Sun-Times to benefit from that type of machine vision the software will need to process larger image batches from multiple sources.
In time those pieces may come together proving that the Sun-Times decision wasn t foolish it was just a bit before its time.#
#One In Five Sun-Like Stars Have Earthlike Planets Back in February a team at Harvard announced they had found a possible Earthlike planet just 13 lightyears away.
The#study detailed the prevalence of these planets orbiting red dwarf stars and found#that about 15 percent have Earth-size planets within habitable zones.
However if you're stargazing from your backyard with only your eyes to guide you you wouldn't be able to see these cooler smaller stars.#
#Red dwarfs#are one-third the size and one-thousandth as bright as the sun. But in this week's PNAS Online Early Edition a team of researchers from#University of California at#Berkeley released a study that looks at how common Earth-size planets
are around stars that are more like our sun. The study found that for stars that more closely resemble our sun about 22 percent
or about one in five stars have these Earth-size planets within the habitable zone. The habitable zone includes orbits where planets receive the same amount of stellar energy from a star as the Earth receives from the sun. Earth-size planets include those that are between one and two times the size of Earth.
Perhaps the most exciting prospect of the study is the finding that#the closest potential Earthlike planet is only 12 lightyears away.
Using data from Kepler lead author Erik Petigura and his team analyzed 42000 G -and K-type stars visible to the naked eye from Earth.
These stars'surface temperatures range from just a bit hotter than the sun's 5778 Kelvin to as cool as 4100 Kelvin all of which are hotter than the M-class red dwarfs studied previously.
I do think that this work is a new chapter but it's not a new book Petigura tells Popular Science.
Indeed earlier this year Petigura published another paper that investigated the prevalence of planets as small as Earth but only those within the orbit of Mercury much closer to the star than Earth's orbit.
With the study published this week Petigura and his team are pushing that out to periods that are more similar to Earthlike periods
which house planets that have lukewarm temperatures similar to Earth. Out of those 42000 stars the team found 603 planets 10 of which fit the bill for orbit
and size#similar to Earth's. But if left it at that there would be a significant number#of planets unaccounted for.
So using custom-built software called TERRA Petigura corrected for the challenges associated with finding all of the planets orbiting stars in the Kepler field
and reached a total of 8000 Earthlike planets. I have been working a lot of late nights coming home after dark.
And around this of year the constellation Cygnus is high overhead and I've been looking up at these stars quite a bit Petigura says.
I was remembering questions I had when I was a little kid looking up and wondering how many of those stars have planets that are in some way like the Earth.
And learning more about planets with similar positioning and properties to Earth could of course aid in scientists'search for life and even future habitable sites.
I'm not saying we found Earth 2. 0 Petigura says. But it's an important stepping stone to answering that question.
I feel so fortunate to be alive in a time when we're even able to start answering this question e
#Preventing Superbugs By Deactivating Antibiotics With A Flash Of Light Bacterial resistance is becoming one of the most serious problems in the medical world
and it's largely a problem of our own making. We've become so good at making
and distributing antibiotics to kill bacteria that as the antibiotics build up in the environment the bacteria are becoming immune.
or at all and get a job after graduation. â#Doing scientific research in Antarctica is incredibly important and expensive According to a March 2012 article in the NSF-funded Antarctic Sun
while others are attacking more abstract ones like determining the weather on distant exoplanets. The common thread between them is brilliance of course but also impact.
Viruses are the most abundant entities on the planet and among the most mysterious. Mya Breitbart a microbial ecologist at the University of South Florida has figured out how to quickly decipher what they are and
Her contributions have been pivotal in unmasking the enormous diversity of viruses on the planet says Curtis Suttle a marine virologist at the University of British columbia.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011