July 2007 - Posts
NASA / JPL / Lockheed Martin |
The Phoenix Mars Lander is equipped with instruments that could detect the signature of life on Mars - but it also carries signatures, stories and lots more for future generations. The nonprofit Planetary Society is sending along what's billed as the first library for the Red Planet: a silica-glass mini-DVD encoded with scores of stories about space exploration, audio and artwork from some of our planet's best and brightest, plus digitally encoded names submitted by thousands of Earthlings. Perhaps the coolest thing about the DVD is the label addressed to future visitors on Mars: "Attention Astronauts: Take This With You."
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Scaled Composites |
There are reasons why "rocket science" is the quintessential hard thing to do. Last week's fatal explosion at Scaled Composites' desert test site, where the historic SpaceShipOne rocket plane was born, showed just how hard and tragic rocket science can be. Even SpaceShipOne's greatest successes came amid great risk - and that message comes through loud and clear in "Rocketeers," the fruit of more than three years of research, interviews and rocket tours by freelance journalist Michael Belfiore.
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They all knew it would happen someday, but they probably didn't think it would happen so soon: For many of those who count themselves in the vanguard of the "personal spaceflight revolution," the three rocketeers who died Thursday in an explosion at Scaled Composites' rocket test site near Mojave, Calif., represent the first fatalities recorded in the service of that revolution.
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Spaceward Foundation |
The million-dollar Space Elevator Games, scheduled for Oct. 19-21 in Utah, is due to hit new heights this year, in more ways than one. Last year, the total purse was $400,000 - and one of the teams came oh-so-close to winning a prize. This year, NASA's Centennial Challenge program has more than doubled the money being offered ... more teams are getting more serious about chasing those bigger prizes ... the speed and height requirements have been doubled as well ... and a kid-friendly competition has been added to the games.
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Univ. of Alberta |
The results are in from the great "Man vs. Machine" computer poker showdown in Vancouver, with the humans coming out on top by a narrow margin. But the main result of the exercise was mutual respect, on the part of the computer programmers as well as the poker pros.
The final 500-hand playoff went until past 11 p.m. PT Tuesday, and when the takes were totaled up, high-ranked poker players Phil "The Unabomber" Laak and Ali Eslami came out $570 ahead. Those results were combined with a too-close-to-call draw and a win for the University of Alberta's Polaris computer program on Monday, plus a win for the humans earlier Tuesday. That led Rutgers computer scientist Michael Littman, the showdown's arbiter, to declare Laak and Eslami the "clear winners."
For Laak, however, the outcome is more ambiguous.
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NCSU |
CLICK IMAGE FOR VIDEO
North Carolina State
University's Mary
Schweitzer explains why we
will probably never see a
real-life "Jurassic Park."
|
A couple of years ago, paleontologists were stunned to find that the soft tissue of a 70 million-year-old dinosaur was preserved within a fossil from a Tyrannosaurus rex. Such a thing had never been seen before. The discovery opened the door to all sorts of speculation about reconstructing dinosaur DNA, just as it was in the fictional "Jurassic Park" tales.
Today, paleontologists are still stunned - not only to find material that looks like dinosaur cartilage, blood vessels, blood cells and bone cells, but to see the stuff in so many different specimens. "It's very scary, I guess, to find this stuff so widely distributed when nobody has ever seen it before," said North Carolina State University's Mary Schweitzer, a pioneer in the field. Although scientists don't plan to create dino-DNA anytime soon, Schweitzer and her colleagues say the growing number of tissue samples are opening the way to a scientific realm almost as exotic as Jurassic Park.
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Three months ago, the Liftport Group was sinking fast. The company’s founder, Michael Laine, lost his headquarters and was talking about shutting down and ending his dream of building the elements for a space elevator. Laine still isn’t out of the woods, but today he says he’s on the verge of a business deal that could revive the dream, based on Liftport’s work with balloon-borne platforms for communications and surveillance. Could the balloon business keep LiftPort aloft long enough to get to space by 2031?
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NASA |
CLICK IMAGE FOR VIDEO
A 1994 NBC retrospective
looks at the Apollo 11
mission and its legacy.
|
If you look hard enough, the calendar provides several opportunities to celebrate humanity's push to the final frontier. There's Yuri's Night in April, Space Day in May, and World Space Week in October. But many argue that July 20 – the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing – should be the biggest space day of the year, since that marks the first time humans ever set foot on another celestial body. Some have even cast it as a holy day with almost religious undertones. Now there’s a petition calling on the president to declare this day an official Space Exploration Day.
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NASA / JPL / SSI |
This image from the Cassini spacecraft highlights several moons of Saturn,
including the new moon known as S/2007 S4, seen as a speck within the red box.
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The scientists behind the Cassini orbiter have announced the discovery of Saturn's 60th moon, a little thing that showed up in time-lapse photography of the ringed planet. Jupiter still leads this moon race with 63 known satellites - but Saturn could soon pull ahead, at least temporarily.
Of course, astronomers don't focus on the mere numbers, which shift around every time a new batch of observations is made. They say they're more interested in what even the tiniest moons can tell us about the universe's biggest questions.
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Two years’ worth of top scientists and technologists will be getting their medals this month during a White House ceremony. The 27 recipients of the National Medals of Science and Technology include the co-inventors of modern-day microphones and atomic clocks, a Nobel laureate, one scientist who has put in her share of government service and another who is just starting a government job.
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University of Washington physicist (and science-fiction author) John Cramer is moving forward with his experiment in backward causality, thanks in part to tens of thousands of dollars in contributions sent in by his fans. Although Cramer emphasizes that his lab is looking at “nonlocal quantum communication” rather than backward time travel per se, the gadgetry he’s assembling could settle a controversy surrounding a seemingly faster-than-light effect that Albert Einstein thought was downright spooky.
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Donna Coveney / MIT |
After years of work, MIT researcher Dava Newman is showing off the ultralight, ultratight spacesuit she and her colleagues have been developing for future missions to the moon and Mars.
Newman's team is just one of several groups working on future spacesuit concepts - groups that include the companies that currently supply NASA's suits. In the coming months, NASA is due to select one team to provide the suit that astronauts will wear for the next series of giant leaps.
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Summer is prime time for escapist fiction - but as long as you're escaping, why not head for some science, speculation and social commentary as well? Here are a few suggestions for sci-fi escapism in print and on TV:
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Warner Bros. Pictures |
|
CLICK THE IMAGE FOR VIDEO
The climax of the latest "Harry
Potter" movie comes in a 3-D
version, and MSNBC's Alan Boyle
explains how it was done.
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What kind of magic spell does it take to turn one of the biggest blockbusters of the summer, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," from a two-dimensional film into a three-dimensional experience? It's not magic of the Hogwarts kind. And it's not a simple incantation in computer code. "It's about 120 highly technical, specialized people who are the finest 3-D engineers in the world," says Greg Foster, chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment.
Those engineers toiled over their computers for six weeks - first to convert the movie's 20-minute finale into digital 2-D data, then to add the third dimension to that virtual world. The magic trick puts one more twist in the road leading to the films of the future. And speaking of virtual worlds, Imax is branching out into the online realm known as Second Life to promote its latest 3-D blockbuster.
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University of Oregon |
When you think of archaeologists, chances are you summon up an image of a tweedy old guy in a pith helmet, poking around a curse-encrusted tomb ... or maybe you have Indiana Jones in mind, scurrying through the jungle with a golden idol in hand and the natives in hot pursuit.
Well, how about a thirty-something woman in a cowboy hat, digging up everyday artifacts in the Old West? This week on PBS' "Nova ScienceNow," Oregon archaeologist Julie Schablitsky has her turn in the spotlight, with nary a mummy or an idol in sight.
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The Pentagon is offering a $1 million top prize for a new breed of ultralight electric power system that could be carried by gizmo-laden combat troops - and perhaps someday by backpackers, tailgaters and medical workers as well. The Wearable Power Prize Competition, unveiled this week, follows in the footsteps of other contests aimed at pushing the limits of innovation - including the Ansari X Prize for spaceflight, NASA's Centennial Challenges and the Pentagon's own DARPA Grand Challenge.
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DigitalGlobe |
This photograph, taken by DigitalGlobe's Quickbird satellite, appears to show
China's latest nuclear-powered, ballistic-missile submarine at port.
|
A policy analyst was making his regular checks of Google Earth when he came upon a rare prize: a photo of China's latest nuclear-powered, ballistic-missile submarine at port. It's the first publicly available satelllite view clearly showing Beijing's Jin-class submarine, according to experts on the country's naval program.
The find, made by Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project, confirms that China is progressing in its plan to build stealthier nuclear-powered submarines. It also illustrates how commercial satellite imagery adds to the debate over international security.
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NASA / ESA / STScI |
The galaxy NGC 4449 is ablaze with blue and red stars in this Hubble view.
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To mark the Fourth of July, the astronomers behind the Hubble Space Telescope present a fireworks show of cosmic proportions, featuring the starburst galaxy known as NGC 4449. The galaxy's blaze of stellar formation has been going on for billions of years, but it appears to be in the midst of an upswing - perhaps brought on by gravitational interaction with neighboring galaxies 12.5 million light-years away.
Whatever the reason, Hubble was well-positioned to take in the starburst - just one of the cosmic sights worth oohing and ahhing over during the holiday.
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Private-sector space efforts are taking on some giant leaps - as evidenced by last week’s launch of the Genesis 2 inflatable module and the progress made by a half-dozen spaceship companies over the past year. But those giant leaps started out years ago with small steps, and this month some of the guiding lights in the spaceflight industry will be offering a "boot camp" for a new crop of ventures that are just entering into the small-step stage.
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AP |
Two police officers view screens in the Central Communications Command Center
for London's Metropolitan Police, where CCTV footage is recorded for use.
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The rapid advance of the investigation into the latest wave of terror attacks in Britain illustrates how video surveillance has become an increasingly important part of the anti-terror toolkit, even if the process still depends primarily on investigators sifting through piles of videotape.
Experts say the next wave of analytical tools - ranging from license-plate identification to facial recognition to psychological profiling - is well on its way from mere science fiction to reality.
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