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Earth Passed Over For Invasion
April 5, 2006 | Issue 42•14
BETA QUADRANT, ZGYXA—Nearly 200,000 hostile aliens from the planet Zgyxa skipped invading Earth Monday, saying it "does not seem worth the effort." "A planet scan indicates that its resources will be tapped by 2015, its most intelligent life form cannot fly, and it possesses no significant deposits of Tangium," said Supreme Commander Kasha Ak-Bej, the nine-foot serpentine leader of the invasion. "Not to mention that their fleshy exoskeleton would make earthlings unfit slaves for mining Zgyxa's molten core." Representatives from the Council of Earth expressed their disappointment.
National Science Foundation (NSF) News... http://www.nsf.gov/news/
Do your neutrinos quiver?
Do your micro pills deliver?
Does your centrifuge mimic Katrina levees?
Do your genes have viral playmates?
Device Only Atoms Across May Allow Infinitesimal But Powerful Computers
NSF Press Release 06-053, April 3, 2006
Single-molecule diode may change Moore's "law" of microchip memory.
Single-molecule diodes are gatekeepers for electrons in a circuit.
View video... http://websrvr80il.audiovideoweb.com/il80web20024/nsf/text/diode.mov
Using the power of modern computing combined with innovative theoretical tools, an international team of researchers has determined how a one-way electrical valve, or diode, made of only a single molecule does its job.
Diodes are critical components within computer, audio equipment and countless other electronic devices. If designers can swap existing diodes with the single-molecule one, the products could be shrunk to incredibly small sizes.
The technology may allow computer designers to sustain "Moore's Law"--a prediction made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965--which suggested technological advances will allow a doubling every 18 months in the number of transistors that can fit on a computer chip. But the "law" has been nearing the end of its useful life as ever-shrinking silicon chips approach their physical limits.
Created by a research team at the University of Chicago, the single-molecule diode is merely a few tens of atoms in size and 1,000 times smaller than its conventional counterparts. Recently, theorists from the University of South Florida and the Russian Academy of Sciences have explained the principles that make the device work.
The researchers showed electron energy levels in a molecule are efficient channels for transferring electrons from one electrode to another. Because the molecule in the diode is asymmetrical, the electronic response is also asymmetrical when voltage is applied. The asymmetry contributes to a phenomenon called molecular rectification: the channels conduct electrons in one direction, but limit flow in the opposite direction when the voltage polarity reverses. That property makes the molecular diode a potential gatekeeper for circuits and a candidate to one day replace silicon in computer chips.
Researchers from all three institutions reported their findings in the March 10 issue of Physical Review Letters. The work was supported by several National Science Foundation grants.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=106836&org=NSF&from=news
Supercomputer Maps One Million Atoms of a Complete Virus in First Simulation of a Life Form
National Science Foundation, Press Release 06-049
March 23, 2006
Virtual virus takes 100 days on supercomputer, 35 years on a desktop.
Researchers completed the first all-atom simulation of satellite tobacco mosaic virus.
For the first time, researchers have visualized the changing atomic structure of a virus by calculating how each of the virus' one million atoms interacted with each other every femtosecond--or one-millionth-of-a-billionth of a second. A better understanding of viral structures and mechanisms may one day allow researchers to design improved strategies to combat viral infections in plants, animals and even humans.
Led by Klaus Schulten at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the team tapped the high-performance power of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) processors to accomplish the task. Still, it took about 100 days to generate just 50 nanoseconds of virus activity. Schulten says it would have taken the average desktop computer 35 years to come up with the results.
The simulation revealed key physical properties of satellite tobacco mosaic virus, a very simple, plant-infecting virus. Ultimately, scientists will generate longer simulations from bigger biological entities, but to do so, they need the next generation of supercomputers, the so-called "petascale high-performance computing systems." The National Science Foundation (NSF) is currently devising a national strategy for petascale computing to give scientists and engineers the resources needed to tackle their most computationally intensive research problems.
NSF supported the work through funding to the NCSA and through a graduate research fellowship to study first-author Peter Freddolino. The National Institutes of Health also provided support for the study, which was published in the March issue of Structure.
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=106791&org=olpa&from=news
Chip ramps up neuron-to-computer communication
Tom Simonite, 18:40 27 March 2006
NewScientist.com news service
A specialised microchip that could communicate with thousands of individual brain cells has been developed by European scientists.
The device will help researchers examine the workings of interconnected brain cells, and might one day enable them to develop computers that use live neurons for memory.
The computer chip is capable of receiving signals from more than 16,000 mammalian brain cells, and sending messages back to several hundred cells. Previous neuron-computer interfaces have either connected to far fewer individual neurons, or to groups of neurons clumped together.
A team from Italy and Germany worked with the mobile chip maker Infineon to squeeze 16,384 transistors and hundreds of capacitors onto an experimental microchip just 1mm squared. When surrounded by neurons the transistors receive signals from the cells, while the capacitors send signals to them.
Each transistor on the chip picks up the miniscule change in electric charge prompted when a neuron fires. The change occurs due to the transfer of charged sodium ions, which move in and out of the cells through special pores. Conversely, applying a charge to each capacitor alters the movement of sodium ions, causing a neuron to react.
The researchers began experimenting with snail brain cells before moving on to rat neurons. "It is harder using mammal neurons, because they are smaller and more complex," Stefano Vassanellia molecular biologist with the University of Padua in Italy told New Scientist.
The researchers took a twin-track approach to developing the system, he says: "We improved the chip, and also the biology." The team had to tinker with the neurons themselves to increase the strength of the connection between cells and the chip.
Pore connection
Firstly, the researchers genetically modified the neurons to add more pores. Secondly, they added proteins to the chip that glue neurons together in the brain, and which also attract the sodium pores. Applying this neural glue meant that the extra sodium channels collected around the transistor and capacitor connections. This improved its chance of translating the movement of ions into electrical signals on the chip.
Having boosted the electrical connection between the cells and chip, the researchers hope to be able to extend the chips influence further. "It should be possible to make the signals from the chip cause a neuron to alter its membrane and take up a new gene, or something that switches one off," says Vassanelli. "Now the chip has been developed, we plan to use it to try and switch genes on and off."
A compound that would turn off a gene, or the DNA for a new one, could be added to the dish containing the wired-up neurons. Using the chip, it would be possible to control exactly which neurons took them up, and which did not.
Having this level of control over many thousands of connected neurons would provide new insights and make new applications possible, Vassanelli says. "It would definitely improve our ability to experiment and understand the workings of neurons, and this development could also provide a whole new way to store computer memory, using live neurons," he says.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8902-chip-ramps-up-neurontocomputer-communication.html
Artificial Intelligence: Working backwards from HAL
Nick Hampshire, ZDNet UK
March 27, 2006, 15:40 BST
Part 1: In the first part of a three-part special report looking at the past, present and future of AI, we examine the origins of machine intelligence and neural networks.
The phrase 'artificial intelligence' was first coined by John McCarthy at a conference at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1956, but the concept of artificial, or machine, intelligence is in fact as old as the computer. The computer was, after all, initially developed during the Second World War to break codes that were too hard for humans and required high speed 'machine intelligence'.
It was one of the most celebrated of the Second World War code breakers, Alan Turing, a man who many would describe as the inventor of the first modern computer, who proposed in 1950 what has become known as the Turing Test. This simply said that we could consider a machine to be intelligent if its responses in some sort of conversation were indistinguishable from those of a human. It is this proposal that is seen by many not only as the definitive test of machine intelligence but also the point at which today's quest to develop artificial intelligence was born.
Three Laws of Robotics
In the early days of computing there had already been a great deal of optimism that machines could be created that would behave intelligently. In 1942 Isaac Asimov put forward his three laws of robotics in the short story Runaround, which was later republished as part of the short story collection, I, Robot. Not long after the book was published, one of the fathers of computing, John von Neumann said, "You insist that there is something that a machine can not do. If you tell me precisely what it is that a machine can not do, then I can always make a machine that can do just that."
This optimism was fuelled over the next few decades by the constantly increasing power and speed of computer hardware and by the success in applying computers to an ever-wider range of human endeavours. Many believed that as the computational power of machines increased they would soon be able to equal the intellectual power of a human being.
It is now over fifty years since the birth of artificial intelligence research, computing power is both fast and cheap, and yet today intelligent machines seem to as far in the future as they were half a century ago. According to those early researchers we should now be surrounded by intelligent machines, is this the case or are we still waiting?
A long road to intelligence
Work on machine intelligence started with chess, and Maniac 1, the first chess program to beat a human player, was demonstrated in 1956 by Stanislaw Ulam at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. This was an early success in the quest for machine intelligence that started a long sequence of work on chess-playing computers by many researchers around the world.
In 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT developed the first computer program capable of engaging in a conversation with a human — Eliza. This clever program was able to hold a seemingly intelligent conversation with a human, and many felt that given enough computer power and a large enough vocabulary these algorithms would make it possible for a machine to meet Turing's test for intelligence.
Shakey, the first robot capable of locomotion, perception and problem solving was built at Stanford Research Institute, California, in 1969. This was followed in 1979 by the Stanford Cart, a computer controlled autonomous robot designed by Hans Moravec of Stanford university that was capable of successfully navigating around a room filled with furniture without bumping into any.
The success of these and other similar experiments in artificial intelligence gave researchers during the 1960s and 1970s the confidence that given enough computing power, and sufficient research funds, they would quite soon be able to develop an algorithm for intelligence. This was the era in which there was also much speculation about the impact of intelligent computers, computers like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Fifth Generation project
In response to this high level of optimism Japan's Ministry of Information and Trade decided to push for a great leap forward, and announced in 1982 a project to develop massively parallel computers that would they believed make machine intelligence possible. This became known as the Fifth Generation project.
American government and business quickly responded by setting up the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), and pumping money for AI research into the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This competitive atmosphere meant that over the next decade large amounts of money were poured into AI research in both the US and Japan.
This quickly led to a flood of new ideas, expert systems quickly became knowledge-based systems with the development of logic based on Bayesian probabilities that offered new ways to classify, store and use human knowledge. Early work on perceptrons developed into 'neural networks' that held the promise of being able to model biological neural structures that could not only function as pattern classifiers but could also learn. Search strategies were improved. The concept of intelligent agents was developed, and new learning strategies such as genetic algorithms were devised. There were also considerable advances in areas such as machine vision, natural language processing, and voice recognition.
The AI bubble bursts
The ultimate goal of all this research effort and expenditure, the creation of an intelligent machine eluded the researchers, and by the early 1990s it was starting to become clear that the hoped for great leap forward in AI was not going to happen as quickly as people had thought 10 years earlier. Government and corporate enthusiasm disappeared, funds started to dry up, DARPA withdrew most of its support, and research projects were shelved. This was the AI equivalent in the early 1990s of the dot-com bubble a decade later.
Researchers' failure to develop a general-purpose intelligent system was largely blamed on the fact that they had put most of their faith into the concept that the key to intelligence lay in symbolic reasoning. This is a mathematical approach in which ideas and concepts are represented by symbols such as words, or sentences, can be processed according to the rules of logic.
This was of course the long-standing idea amongst AI researchers that there is a fundamental set of algorithms that if supplied with enough information will eventually produce an intelligent system. Once discovered, such general algorithms, computer scientists had believed, would then be applicable to all areas of AI research, from natural-language processing to machine vision.
Loss of funding
This lack of success in finding such general algorithms, coupled with the loss of a very large proportion of the research funding for AI, led most of the researchers who remained to concentrate on niche areas where success, and therefore a return on research investment, was most likely. Research into AI largely disappeared to be replaced by a number of more-focussed disciplines that shared one thing in common: the need for a certain amount of machine intelligence or learning capability.
Many of the early projects continued. The development of game-playing programs reached a high point in 1997 with the defeat by a computer system from IBM called Deep Blue of chess grand master Gary Kasparov. Eliza was developed and refined, and in 1995 Richard Wallace developed Alice, a program that is now the world's most successful chatbot. Indeed such AI programs have reached a level of sophistication that allows them to be routinely used in interactive Web sites and automated telephone services by many companies, including Coca Cola and Burger King. Meanwhile mobile robots directly descended from Shakey have successfully explored the surface of Mars.
http://insight.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/emergingtech/0,39020439,39259512,00.htm
Ancient skull found in Ethiopia
Last Updated: Monday, 27 March 2006, 15:42 GMT 16:42 UK
BBC News
Fossil hunters in Ethiopia have unearthed an ancient skull which they say could be a "missing link" between Homo erectus and modern people.
The cranium was found in two pieces and is believed by its discoverers to be between 500,000 and 250,000 years old.
The project's director, Dr Sileshi Semaw, said the fossilised specimen came from "a very significant time" in human evolutionary history.
It was found at Gawis in Ethiopia's north-eastern Afar region.
Stone tools and fossilised animals including two types of pigs, zebras, elephants, antelopes, cats, and rodents were also found at the site.
The skull appeared "to be intermediate between the earlier Homo erectus and the later Homo sapiens ," Sileshi Semaw, an Ethiopian research scientist at the Stone Age Institute at Indiana University, US, told a news conference in Addis Ababa.
'Wealth of information'
The palaeoanthropologist said most fossil hominids were found in pieces, but the near-complete skull provided a wealth of information.
"[It] opens a window into an intriguing and important period in the development of modern humans," he explained.
Little is known about the period during which African Homo erectus supposedly evolved into our own species Homo sapiens .
The fossil record from Africa for this period was sparse and most of the specimens poorly dated, project archaeologists said.
The face and cranium of the fossil are recognisably different from those of modern humans, but the specimen bears unmistakable anatomical evidence that it belongs to the modern human ancestral line, Dr Semaw said.
Scientists conducting surveys in the Gawis River drainage basin found the skull in a small gully.
Over the last 50 years, Ethiopia has been a key site for archaeologists hunting for fossil human ancestors.
Gawis is situated near Hadar, where palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson found the 3.2-million-year-old remains of "Lucy", the partial skeleton of a hominid belonging to the species Australopithecus afarensis , in 1974.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4849320.stm
Fire caused SpaceX rocket failure
BBC News
Last Updated: Monday, 27 March 2006, 10:52 GMT 11:52 UK
A fire fed by a fuel leak caused the failure of a commercial rocket seconds into its maiden launch, the company that built it has confirmed.
SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket was lost during lift-off from an island in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
It was carrying a US Air Force Academy research satellite onboard.
The vision of Elon Musk, co-founder of the electronic payment system PayPal, the Falcon was designed to cut the cost of current satellite launches.
The unexplained fuel leak occurred 25 seconds into the launch near the top of the main engine on the rocket's first stage, SpaceX's founder said.
"Falcon was executing perfectly on all fronts until fire impaired the first-stage pneumatic system," Mr Musk explained.
The fire cut a helium pneumatic system, and when pneumatic pressure fell, a safety function within the valves forced them to close, shutting down the main engine 29 seconds into the flight, he added.
The company said it would investigate all possible causes for the leak.
Looking ahead
"I cannot predict exactly when the next flight will take place, as that depends on the findings of this investigation, and ensuring that our next customer is comfortable that all reasonable steps have been taken to ensure reliability," Mr Musk said.
"However, I would hope that the next launch occurs in less than six months."
He noted that other rocket developers had also had failures before succeeding.
"Having experienced firsthand how hard it is to reach orbit, I have a lot of respect for those that persevered to produce the vehicles that are mainstays of space launch today," he said.
Falcon 1 is a 21m-long (70-foot-long), two-stage rocket powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene. Its first stage is designed to parachute into the ocean to be recovered and used again. It is intended to be the first in a family of low-cost rockets.
SpaceX had originally planned to launch last November, but the mission was delayed by concerns ranging from problems with the rocket to limitations on the supply of liquid oxygen at the remote Kwajalein Atoll site.
The rocket was carrying FalconSat-2, part of an Air Force Academy satellite programme intended to measure plasma that can interfere with communications in space.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4848782.stm
Our Bodies, Our Technologies
Ray Kurzweil's Cambridge Forum Lecture (Abridged)
by Ray Kurzweil
In the 2020s, we'll see nanobots, blood-cell-sized devices that can go inside the body and brain to perform therapeutic functions. But what happens when we have billions of nanobots inside the capillaries of our brains, non-invasively, widely distributed, expanding human intelligence, or providing full-immersion virtual reality?
It turns out that information technology is increasingly encompassing everything of value. It's not just computers, it's not just electronic gadgets. It now includes the field of biology. We're beginning to understand how life processes, disease, aging, are manifested as information processes and gaining the tools to actually manipulate those processes. It's true of all of our creations of intellectual and cultural endeavors, our music, movies are all facilitated by information technology, and are distributed, and represented as information.
Evolutionary processes work through indirection. Evolution creates a capability, and then it uses that capability to evolve the next stage. That's why the next stage goes more quickly, and that's why the fruits of an evolutionary process grow exponentially.
The first paradigm shift in biological evolution, the evolution of cells, and in particular DNA (actually, RNA came first)—the evolution of essentially a computer system or an information processing backbone that would allow evolution to record the results of its experiments—took billions of years. Once DNA and RNA were in place, the next stage, the Cambrian explosion, when all the body plans of the animals were evolved, went a hundred times faster. Then those body plans were used by evolution to concentrate on higher cognitive functions. Biological evolution kept accelerating in this manner. Homo sapiens, our species, evolved in only a few hundred thousand years, the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
Then again working through indirection, biological evolution used one of its creations, the first technology-creating species to usher in the next stage of evolution, which was technology. The enabling factors for technology were a higher cognitive function with an opposable appendage, so we could manipulate and change the environment to reflect our models of what could be. The first stages of technology evolution—fire, the wheel, stone tools—only took a few tens of thousands of years.
Technological evolution also accelerated. Half a millennium ago the printing press took a century to be adopted, half a century ago the first computers were designed pen on paper. Now computers are designed in only a few weeks' time by computer designers sitting at computers, using advanced computer assisted design software. When I was at MIT [in the mid-1960s] a computer that took about the size of this room cost millions of dollars yet was less powerful than the computer in your cell phone today.
One of the profound implications is that we are understanding our biology as information processes. We have 23,000 little software programs inside us called genes. These evolved in a different era. One of those programs, called the fat insulin receptor gene, says, basically, hold onto every calorie because the next hunting season might not work out so well. We'd like to change that program now. We have a new technology that has just emerged in the last couple years called RNA interference, in which we put fragments of RNA inside the cell, as a drug, to inhibit selected genes. It can actually turn genes off by blocking the messenger RNA expressing that gene. When the fat insulin receptor was turned off in mice, the mice ate ravenously and remained slim. They didn't get diabetes, didn't get heart disease, lived 20% longer: they got the benefit of caloric restriction without the restriction.
Every major disease, and every major aging process has different genes that are used in the expression of these disease and aging processes. Being able to actually select when we turn them off is one powerful methodology. We also have the ability to turn enzymes off. Torcetrapib, a drug that's now in FDA Phase 3 trials, turns off a key enzyme that destroys the good cholesterol, HDL, in the blood. If you inhibit that enzyme, HDL levels soar and atherosclerosis slows down or stops.
There are thousands of these developments in the pipeline. The new paradigm of rational drug design involves actually understanding the information processes underlying biology, the exact sequence of steps that leads up to a process like atherosclerosis, which causes heart attacks, or cancer, or insulin resistance, and providing very precise tools to intervene. Our ability to do this is also growing at an escalating rate.
Another exponential process is miniaturization. We're showing the feasibility of actually constructing things at the molecular level that can perform useful functions. One of the biggest applications of this, again, will be in biology, where we will be able to go inside the human body and go beyond the limitations of biology.
Rob Freitas has designed a nanorobotic red blood cell, which is a relatively simple device, it just stores oxygen and lets it out. A conservative analysis of these robotic respirocytes shows that if you were to replace ten percent of your red blood cells with these robotic versions you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath, or sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours. It will be interesting to see what we do with these in our Olympic contests. Presumably we'll ban them, but then we'll have the specter of high school students routinely outperforming the Olympic athletes.
A robotic white blood cell is also being designed. A little more complicated, it downloads software from the Internet to combat specific pathogens. If it sounds very futuristic to download information to a device inside your body to perform a health function, I'll point out that we're already doing that. There are about a dozen neural implants either FDA-approved or approved for human testing. One implant that is FDA-approved for actual clinical use replaces the biological neurons destroyed by Parkinson's disease. The neurons in the vicinity of this implant then receive signals from the computer that's inside the patient's brain. This hybrid of biological and non-biological intelligence works perfectly well. The latest version of this device allows the patient to download new software to the neural implant in his brain from outside his body.
These are devices that today require surgery to be implanted, but when we get to the 2020s, we will ultimately have the "killer app" of nanotechnology, nanobots, which are blood cell-sized devices that can go inside the body and brain to perform therapeutic functions, as well as advance the capabilities of our bodies and brains.
If that sounds futuristic, I'll point out that we already have blood cell-size devices that are nano-engineered, working to perform therapeutic functions in animals. For example, one scientist cured type I diabetes in rats with this type of nanoengineered device. And some of these are now approaching human trials. The 2020s really will be the "golden era" of nanotechnology.
It is a mainstream view now among informed observers that by the 2020s we will have sufficient computer processing to emulate the human brain. The current controversy, or I would say, the more interesting question is, will we have the software or methods of human intelligence? To achieve the methods, the algorithms of human intelligence, there is underway a grand project to reverse-engineer the brain. And there, not surprisingly, we are also making exponential progress. If you follow the trends in reverse brain engineering it's a reasonable conclusion that we will have reverse-engineered the several hundred regions of the brain by the 2020s.
By early in the next decade, computers won't look like today's notebooks and PDAs, they will disappear, integrated into our clothing and environment. Images will be written to our retinas for our eyeglasses and contact lenses, we'll have full-immersion virtual reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities; we can see early harbingers of this already. We'll have effective language translation.
If we go out to 2029, there will be many turns of the screw in terms of this exponential progression of information technology. There will be about thirty doublings in the next 25 years. That's a factor of a billion in capacity and price performance over today's technology, which is already quite formidable.
By 2029, we will have completed reverse engineering of the brain, we will understand how human intelligence works, and that will give us new insight into ourselves. Non-biological intelligence will combine the suppleness and subtlety of our pattern-recognition capabilities with ways computers have already demonstrated their superiority. Every time you use Google you can see the power of non-biological intelligence. Machines can remember things very accurately. They can share their knowledge instantly. We can share our knowledge, too, but at the slow bandwidth of language.
This will not be an alien invasion of intelligent machines coming from over the horizon to compete with us, it's emerging from within our civilization, it's extending the power of our civilization. Even today we routinely do intellectual feats that would be impossible without our technology. In fact our whole economic infrastructure couldn't manage without the intelligent software that's underlying it.
The most interesting application of computerized nanobots will be to interact with our biological neurons. We've already shown the feasibility of using electronics and biological neurons to interact non-invasively. We could have billions of nanobots inside the capillaries of our brains, non-invasively, widely distributed, expanding human intelligence, or providing full immersion virtual reality encompassing all of the senses from within the nervous system. Right now we have a hundred trillion connections. Although there's a certain amount of plasticity, biological intelligence is essentially fixed. Non-biological intelligence is growing exponentially; the crossover point will be in the 2020s. When we get to the 2030s and 2040s, it will be the non-biological portion of our civilization that will be predominant. But it will still be an expression of human civilization.
Every time we have technological gains we make gains in life expectancy. Sanitation was a big one, antibiotics was another. We're now in the beginning phases of this biotechnology revolution. We're exploring, understanding and graining the tools to reprogram the information processes underlying biology; and that will result in another big gain in life expectancy. So, if you watch your health today, the old-fashioned way, you can actually live to see the remarkable 21st century.
Originally transcribed from the Cambridge Forum Lecture on May 4, 2005, and reprinted in Science & Theology News. Reprinted on KurzweilAI.net March 16, 2006.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0649.html
Cosmic 'DNA': Double Helix Spotted in Space
By Bjorn Carey, SPACE.com Staff Writer
posted: 15 March 2006, 01:00 pm ET
Magnetic forces at the center of the galaxy have twisted a nebula into the shape of DNA, a new study reveals.
The double helix shape is commonly seen inside living organisms, but this is the first time it has been observed in the cosmos.
"Nobody has ever seen anything like that before in the cosmic realm," said the study's lead author Mark Morris of UCLA. "Most nebulae are either spiral galaxies full of stars or formless amorphous conglomerations of dust and gas—space weather. What we see indicates a high degree of order."
These observations, made with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, are detailed in the March 16 issue of the journal Nature.
Disk-driven shape
The DNA nebula is about 80 light-years long. It's about 300 light-years from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The nebula is nearly perpendicular to the black hole, moving out of the galaxy at a quick clip—about 620 miles per second (1,000 kilometers per second).
Magnetic field lines at the galactic center are about 1,000 times stronger than on Earth. They run perpendicular to the black hole, but parallel through the nebula. Scientists think that twisting of these lines is what causes the double helix shape.
While the black hole might be the first culprit to come to mind, it's more likely that the magnetic field lines are anchored to a giant gas disk that orbits the black hole several light-years away, researchers say.
It's like having two strands of rope connected to a fixed point, Morris said. As you spin the strands, they braid around each other in a double helix fashion. In this case the gas and dust of the nebula makes up the strands.
"It's as if there's a bar across the middle [of the black hole], or a dumbbell shape, where the strands are anchored, and as it spins around, it twists the strands together," Morris told SPACE.com.
This process takes a long time, though, since the disk completes one orbit around the black hole roughly every 10,000 years. But that's an important number. "Once every 10,000 years is exactly what we need to explain the twisting of the magnetic field lines that we see in the double helix nebula," Morris said.
The recipe
The recipe for a DNA nebula is strict but simple. It requires a strong magnetic field, a rotating body, and a nebulous cloud of material positioned just right.
Massive central black holes are the best sources for both the strong magnetic field and rotating body, and since most large galaxies have them, Morris expects DNA-like nebula may be common through out the universe.
"I absolutely expect to see [this configuration] in gas-rich galaxies with all these elements in place," Morris said.
However, these nebulas are tough to spot, and current technology limits scientists' observations to our galaxy.
http://space.com/scienceastronomy/060315_dna_nebula.html
Earth rocks could have taken life to Titan
NewScientist.com news service
Maggie McKee, Houston, 18:08 17 March 2006
Boulders blasted away from the Earth's surface after a major impact could have travelled all the way to the outer solar system, new calculations reveal. The work suggests that terrestrial microbes on the rocks could in theory have landed on Saturn's giant moon, Titan. But whether they could have survived once there remains unclear.
The fact that meteorites from the Moon and Mars have landed on Earth confirms that impacts on solar system bodies can launch rocky debris to other planets. And previous studies have suggested that any life on the rocks could have survived the launch blast and the radiation and chill of the journey through space, assuming it lasted less than a few million years.
Such hardiness raises the possibility that life on Earth itself was seeded from space – a concept called panspermia. But now, researchers led by Brett Gladman of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, have analysed the reverse situation – that life on Earth seeded other bodies in the solar system. Gladman presented the results on Thursday at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, US.
He says only boulders at least 3 metres across could punch out through the Earth's atmosphere and escape the planet's gravity, and that only extremely powerful impacts could achieve this. The cause of such impacts would be comets or asteroids between 10 and 50 kilometres wide, Gladman told New Scientist: "The kind of thing that killed the dinosaurs."
Brick wall
The team ran computer models of such giant impacts, estimating that each would send about 600 million boulders into space to orbit the Sun. Some of those launched at relatively high speeds – faster than 6 kilometres per second – got as far as Jupiter and Saturn in about a million years.
In the simulations, about 100 of the boulders from each impact reached Jupiter's moon Europa. But along the way, Jupiter's gravity boosted their speed to an average of 25 km/s, with some moving as fast as 40 km/s. Impacting Europa's icy crust at such speeds would be like "hitting a brick wall," says Gladman. "This must be rather frustrating if you're a bacterium that survived launch from Earth."
But he found a different situation on Saturn's moon Titan, which boasts a thick atmosphere. About 30 boulders from each Earth impact reached Titan, and they slammed into the atmosphere at just 11 km/s – slower than most meteors hit Earth's atmosphere. "Those reaching Titan can aerobrake and drop their fragments onto the surface," says Gladman.
Home from home?
"That kind of entry should be no problem" for life to survive, says Allan Treiman of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, who notes that researchers recently found bacteria that appear to have survived the break up of the shuttle Columbia when it re-entered Earth's atmosphere in 2003. And Earthly lichen has also survived when exposed to the harsh environment of space.
"I thought the Titan result was really surprising – how many would get there and how slowly they'd land," Treiman told New Scientist. "The thing I don't know about is if there are any bugs on Earth that would be happy living on Titan." Titan's surface temperature is a very cold -179°C and its chemistry is very different from Earth's.
Gladman agrees that life may be unlikely to survive once on Titan. But he says major impacts may have happened "tens of times" throughout Earth's history and that these could have sent Earth rocks to other solar system bodies. "I just set out to answer this question: is it possible to get something there?" he says. "The answer is yes."
http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn8867-earth-rocks-could-have-taken-life-to-titan.html
A Nearby Twin of the Sun
Universe Today, Fri, 24 Mar 2006
When astronomers start searching for evidence of live orbiting other stars, they'll start with familiar terrain: other stars like our Sun. Astronomers from the Australian National University have identified a nearby candidate that's a virtual twin of our Sun in age, size, temperature and chemistry; although, it doesn't have the same mass. The star, HD98618, is located 126 light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major (the Big Dipper), and is bright enough to see with binoculars.
ANU astronomers have discovered a nearby solar twin which may shed light on the search for planets that are similar to Earth and that may even support life.
HD98618 is only the second star found so far that is almost identical to the Sun in age, size, temperature and chemistry, according to the researchers Dr Jorge Meléndez, Ms Katie Dodds-Eden and Mr José Robles, from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
“This solar twin doesn’t only have the same mass as the Sun, it was also formed with the same ‘chemical recipe’. So this star was equipped in the same way as the Sun to form Earth-like planets,” Mr Robles said.
“Hopefully, as new planet finding techniques are developed and refined, astronomers will find whether HD98618 hosts terrestrial planets, which may even contain life.”
HD98618 lies a mere 126 light-years away in the northern constellation of Ursa Major (the ‘Big Dipper’). It is bright enough to see in binoculars, but only in the Northern Hemisphere.
The researchers believe that HD98618 is about four billion years-old, about 10 per cent younger than our own Sun. Its chemical properties are almost identical to the Sun and to the other closest Sun twin, a star known as 18 Scorpii, which was discovered a decade ago.
“It means that hypothetical terrestrial planets around this solar twin may have had enough time to develop some kind of complex life, assuming the time-scale for complex life formation is similar to Earth’s,” Dr Meléndez said.
The team says that focused observations of the two stars by planet-hunter teams could reveal or rule out within a few years giant planets, such as our own Jupiter, around HD98618. “18 Scorpii and HD98618 offer hope to find solar systems similar to our own in the Universe,” Dr Meléndez said.
The discovery also has implications for research in other areas. Solar twins are ideal for the absolute calibration of astronomical measuring instruments. They can provide data useful in modelling the solar phenomena that may affect climate change, and will help settle the argument about the uniqueness or otherwise of our Sun and Solar System.
“We had a number of candidates with similar properties to the Sun, but while we held out hope for each star that it would turn out to be really special, it was not at all certain to happen. HD 98618 was one of the last of our candidates to be analysed, so it was quite a surprise when we discovered how it stood out from the other candidates, together with 18 Scorpii. It was very exciting - I had to blink twice to be sure I wasn’t imagining it,” Ms Dodds-Eden said.
The researchers made the discovery using the largest telescope in the world, the 10m Keck I telescope on the summit of Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano.
Their paper detailing the discovery will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Related images are available from the ANU Media Office.
http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/nearby_twin_sun.html?2432006
For Robots, Fuel Cells That Double as Muscles
By KENNETH CHANG, March 21, 2006
NewYorkTimes.com
An android walks into a bar... http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=/news/news_single.html?id%3D5402
Ray H. Baughman, a professor of chemistry at the University of Texas at Dallas, has not built an android. He has not built a brain or an eye or a robotic equivalent of some other complex body part. Instead, he has built something that will also be crucial for future androids: artificial muscles.
Today's crude humanoid robots already use gears, pulleys and pistons to mimic the actions of muscles. But they are electrically powered, requiring that they be plugged in and tethered by an extension cord or powered by batteries, which drain quickly.
Dr. Baughman's advance, reported in the current issue of the journal Science, is that his new muscle fibers double as fuel cells. Just like real muscles, they power themselves instead of relying on external electrical power. Chemical energy also delivers a greater bang.
"The most advanced battery can only store only about one-thirtieth of the energy that is stored chemically in fuels such as methanol," Dr. Baughman said.
He and his colleagues have made two types of artificial muscles. One is a nickel-titanium alloy coated with platinum, which causes the fuel — currently methanol, but hydrogen or alcohol could work, too — to react with oxygen, producing heat. The metal shrinks; the muscle flexes. The artificial muscle can apply 100 times as much force as real muscle.
Dr. Baughman said the technology was simple enough that it could find commercial applications in as few as three years.
The second artificial muscle, currently less powerful, is made of a sheet of nanotubes, tiny but superstrong cylindrical molecules of carbon. The reaction of fuel and oxygen releases electrical charges that repel each other and cause the nanotube sheet to expand.
To put such artificial muscles into robots will require solving other problems, like how to control the amount of fuel going to the muscles. "The analogy of a circulatory system is really what's needed," Dr. Baughman said.
But for the future, he said, it is not entirely far-fetched for an android to walk into a bar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/science/21find.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin
Delving into the meaning of artificial life
Consortium's report aims to define, classify synthetic biology's many branches
EETimes.com, Chappell Brown, (03/20/2006 9:00 AM EST)
Peterborough, N.H. -- The ability to engineer artificial biological components, and one day perhaps artificial organisms, puts a new spin on the ongoing debate about artificial life, which has been linked mainly to silicon circuits. It has been argued that when VLSI systems reach a high enough level of complexity, they will essentially be alive in the same sense that biological systems are alive.
A study that is being conducted by a consortium of companies delves into the issue of artificial life in detail, since it is fundamental to defining and classifying different branches of synthetic biology. Loosely defined as the engineering of systems using mechanisms and principles from molecular biology, synthetic biology could have a wide impact on the field of engineering and on society as a whole, according to a report of the study.
The report was written principally by Hubert Bernauer of ATG:Biosynthetics (Feiburg, Germany) for consortium leader Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação (Baltimore).
The first phase of the study was completed last October. The next phase, which is seeking to identify new research efforts and startups in the field, will be completed this June. Using research papers as a measure of activity in the field, it says that the United States leads such endeavors with 68 percent of all papers written in the world. The European Union comes in second at 24 percent, and Israel and Japan are next with 3 percent each. Most of the work in the United States was performed in California, with Massachusetts coming in second.
Because it's such a new field, the report's authors had to come up with a working definition of exactly what activities should be included in the term "synthetic biology." In doing so, the report may have an impact on the field simply through its attempts to define it.
According to the report, "Synthetic biology is the engineering of biological components and systems that do not exist in nature and the re-engineering of existing biological elements; it is determined on the intentional design of artificial biological systems, rather than on the understanding of natural biology."
MIT's BioBrick project (see www.eetimes.com, article ID: 21800320)--a catalog of standard DNA sequences that code for specific cell functions--is emblematic of the new field. DNA is a digital code that natural systems use to assemble themselves. A recent technical capability that has propelled synthetic biology is the ability to synthesize a strand of DNA reliably from any predetermined digital sequence. Companies providing that service have sprung up, allowing anyone in biomedical research or bioengineering to work with artificial DNA.
Elements for life
Such current computer-related fields as genetic algorithms, autonomous agents, neural networks and artificial intelligence mimic aspects of living systems. But just how close are they to actual living organisms? The gap is not just a matter of complexity, the authors argue; it also critically depends on the relationship between information and the physical system that represents it.
Biologists have identified three critical principles that must be present in any living system: They must be self-creating, self-organizing and self-sustaining. The self-sustaining capability includes the ability to replicate components, process information and steadily consume energy from the environment. While electronic systems are highly adept at information processing, they are not self-replicating except at the software level, and they consume only one type of strictly defined electrical energy. In contrast, biological systems have excelled at self-replication, and their strategies for consuming energy from the environment are extremely varied.
The report is pessimistic about the possibility that silicon-based systems can ever be able to duplicate the versatile repertoire of information processing and physical replication required by living systems. This is mainly due to the nature of the materials upon which artificial and biological life are based: silicon for the former and carbon for the latter. Carbon has a high degree of flexibility in forming novel configurations with itself and with other common elements such as hydrogen, allowing complex information-processing systems to be represented in a corresponding materials system. In contrast, artificial-life systems realized in electronic systems do not have a corresponding molecular configuration associated with them. While software programs that realize all the basic elements of living systems can be run on silicon circuits--and they might become highly complex programs in the future--the artificial systems will never be closely integrated with corresponding silicon molecular systems.
Synthetic biology will be able to remedy that problem by creating artificial-life systems employing the same flexible molecular strategy of living systems. Several avenues of attack are being developed to do that.
In a top-down approach, researchers are trying to find the evolutionary principles that create various components of living systems, and apply them to nanostructures to create new lines of artificial organisms.
Another method uses a bottom-up, building-block tactic. Specific cell functions are identified, standardized and then coded in DNA sequences. As in inorganic engineered systems, more complex functions are built out of simpler building blocks. The hope is that at some point, self-sustaining systems will result from this classic engineering route.
The authors expect this approach to create a new biological paradigm. Instead of "molecular biology," the new field would be called "modular biology."
In a third procedure, the regulation approach, researchers are trying to identify the signaling systems with which cells modify their growth and behavior. By making those systems program-mable, it might be possible to repurpose biological systems for engineering objectives.
In another branch of synthetic biology, researchers are using the combinatorial properties of DNA and RNA to run test tube experiments to build nanostructures. These molecules can be combined with nanoclusters or other artificially created structures to build systems for specific applications in medicine and biological research. This area is known as "in vitro" synthetic biology.
Complex computer-based simulations of biological systems are also classed under the synthetic biology umbrella, although the object with those systems is to provide a kind of CAD system for modeling and predicting the behavior of natural or engineered biology. These are called "in silico" systems, in which computer models will be an integral part of the evolution of engineered biological systems.
The vision within silico computer systems is similar to that of the EDA industry, where standard fabrication processes make it possible for someone with circuit design expertise to try out a concept on a computer, simulate and specify how it should be laid out--with the confidence that an actual working silicon IC can be produced from the design. In the world of synthetic biology, that kind of capability would greatly speed up the entire field, allowing researchers and engineers to rapidly field artificial-life systems based on past experience and experiments.
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=0LN1BRV4FEJPSQSNDBECKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=18150...
Need some space? Try this for a holiday
By Stephen Cauchi, March 19, 2006
The Age.com
Need a holiday? How does a couple of weeks in space sound?
Commercial suborbital spaceflight will begin in 2008 if Virgin Galactic's New Mexico spaceport plans are realised, but tourism company Space Adventures may yet beat it in the race to get paying passengers into space.
Space Adventures is planning two spaceports for suborbital launches, one of which will be in Singapore if it gets the go-ahead.
Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson says: "Singapore, with its superior geographical and economic infrastructure, is primed to be the hub of a new revolutionary form of travel.
Countries around the world are only just realising the enormous commercial possibilities of space tourism. The market potential for suborbital spaceflights alone is estimated at $US1 billion annually."
The Singapore spaceport, to be near Changi Airport, is budgeted at $US115 million. Besides suborbital flights, it would offer other space-related activities, including zero-gravity parabolic flights, G-force training in a centrifuge, and simulated spacewalks in a neutral-buoyancy tank.
Lim Neo Chian, chief executive of the Singapore Tourism Board, says the board has been talking with Space Adventures for three years. "With the proposed Spaceport Singapore, we now stand at the threshold of an unprecedented opportunity to launch into space practically from our own backyard."
Interest in suborbital spaceflight soared after three successful flights in 2004 by the experimental SpaceshipOne craft, developed by Scaled Composites. These were the first flights by a privately owned manned spacecraft.
Besides Virgin Galactic (which plans to use SpaceshipTwo, an upgraded version of SpaceshipOne) and Space Adventures, companies hoping to get into the suborbital business include Rocketplane, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, Sprague Astronautics, Starchaser Industries, Challenge and Space Technology, PlanetSpace and Interorbital Systems.
How many will actually make it to the commercial stage remains unclear. Only Virgin Galactic has a flight-proved prototype.
Space Adventures' Singapore port has not yet got the go-ahead (it is planning another in Dubai).
The Singapore Tourism Board says it is "optimistic" about Singapore Spaceport becoming a reality, but this is "pending the finalisation of funds that are expected in the near future".
"I would certainly have significant confidence in Space Adventures and Virgin Galactic," says Kirby Ikin, president of the Australian Space Industry Chamber of Commerce. "Also, Rocketplane seem to be making significant steps forward with their project and are interested in services from Australia."
Space Adventures' planned suborbital spacecraft, the C-21, will be hauled - like SpaceshipOne - to a height of about 15 kilometres by a carrier aircraft. Upon release, it will fire its engines and ascend in a vertical climb to a height of 100 kilometres (considered the height at which space begins), and then "hang" for several minutes at this altitude, allowing passengers to experience weightlessness and the vista of Earth against the blackness of space. (SpaceshipOne's solo flight time from release to landing was about 25 minutes.)
Because a suborbital craft goes straight up and straight down, it needs about 30 times less energy than an orbital craft.
Mr Ikin says Space Adventures is still the only company with a proved space tourism background, having arranged for three businessmen to spend time on the International Space Station.
A confident Mr Anderson says: "We will enable operations of the world's first commercial suborbital flights."
Mr Ikin, who says regulatory issues could be an obstacle to suborbital flight, sees northern Australia as ideal for a spaceport, and he doesn't rule out Space Adventures (or another operator, such as Rocketplane) putting its spaceport in, say, Cairns rather than Singapore. He says Australian federal governments have not been overly enthusiastic but state governments are keen. "But no one would put up any money, whereas the Singapore Government . . . has put $10 or $20 million on the table . . ."
Despite Virgin Galactic's talk of 2008 flights, Mr Ikin does not expect commercial suborbital flights for three-to-five years.
It is believed 100 people have paid Virgin $US20,000 deposits for tickets that will cost 10 times that. Two Australians, scientific equipment maker Alan Finkel and Wilson Da Silva, editor of Cosmos magazine have confirmed they are on the list.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/need-some-space-try-this-for-a-holiday/2006/03/18/11425825752...
Wanna take a ride, little boy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic
Click & buckle up...
Race to blast tourists into space is on
By ALICIA CHANG -- Associated Press
If floating weightless and peering down on a shimmering-blue Earth sounds appealing, and you have a fat wallet, you might consider being a space tourist.
Two years after the first privately financed space flight jump-started a sleepy industry, more than a dozen companies are developing rocket planes to ferry rich people out of the atmosphere.
Several private companies will begin building their prototype vehicles this summer with plans to test fly them as early as next year. If all goes well, the first tourist could hitch a galactic joy ride late next year or 2008 - pending approval by federal regulators.
Unlike the Cold War space race between the United States and Soviet Union that sent satellites into orbit and astronauts to the moon, this competition is bankrolled by entrepreneurs whose competition could one day make a blast into space cheap enough for the average Joe.
"This time, it's personal. This space race is about getting 'us' into space," said space historian Andrew Chaikin.
For now, commercial space travel remains an exclusive club.
Over the past few years, three tourists have paid a reported $20 million US each to ride aboard a Russian rocket to the orbiting international space station.
A fourth would-be tourist - Lance Bass from the former boy band 'N Sync - did astronaut training, but failed to come up with money for the trip.
The three who made it spent about a week weightless and described the experience as "paradise" and "wondrous." The most thrilling part for millionaire U.S. scientist Gregory Olsen, who blasted off last year, was viewing the swirling Earth from the dark of space.
Prospective prices for the next round of personal space flights aren't so astronomical - a seat aboard one of the yet-to-be-built commercial spaceships will fetch between $100,000 to $250,000. Space entrepreneurs expect the price tag to drop once the market matures.
Tourists will get what they pay for.
Instead of spending days in deep space, the commercial spaceships under development will only reach suborbital space, a region about 100 kilometres up that is generally considered the beginning of the rest of the universe. Since the private spaceships lack the speed to go into orbit around Earth, the flights will essentially be up and down experiences - lasting about two hours with up to five minutes of weightlessness.
It's more of a ride than those offered by several companies that use Boeing 727s to produce a half-minute of weightlessness through a series of manoeuvres about 7,600 metres up. Those flights, which generally sell for about $3,000, never reach space.
"It's like an upside-down bungee jump," said John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. "There'll be a few moments to view the Earth and then you come right back down."
Here is a rundown of several companies that will start building their private spaceships this summer:
-The biggest name is Virgin Galactic, a space tourism firm founded by British billionaire tycoon Richard Branson. Branson has partnered with Burt Rutan, whose SpaceShipOne in 2004 became the first private manned craft to reach space, to build a fleet of suborbital commercial spaceships called SpaceShipTwo.
SpaceShipTwo is about the size of a corporate Gulfstream jet that can hold six tourists and two crew members. Like SpaceShipOne, it will be powered by a hybrid rocket motor and use a "feathering" technique to glide back to Earth.
The design of SpaceShipTwo is complete and construction is slated for this summer with test flights scheduled for late next year. The project's $100-million first phase is financed by Branson's Virgin Group, said Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn.
Virgin Galactic plans to fly the first passengers for $200,000 apiece by late 2008 or early 2009, with the first leaving from California's Mojave Desert and later flights from a proposed spaceport in New Mexico. The maiden flight would carry Branson and Rutan, among others, Whitehorn said.
"This is a project not without risk," Whitehorn said recently. "It's our goal to be the first ones to do it safely."
-Oklahoma-based Rocketplane Kistler is one of Virgin Galactic's biggest competitors. Rocketplane Kistler, whose main investor is American businessman George French, hopes to start test flights next January and fly commercially by next summer. French owns several businesses including a space education company in Wisconsin.
The company is building a souped-up, 12.8-metre-long suborbital Lear jet that can seat three passengers and a pilot. Unlike SpaceShipTwo, which would piggyback atop a mothership to a certain height, the Rocketplane XP would take off and land like an airplane using turbojets and rockets.
"It's the beginning of a whole new era of commercial space travel. Someone's got to do it and we want to be the first," said vice president John Herrington, a former NASA astronaut who will perform the suborbital test flights.
-Space Adventures, a Virginia-based space travel agency best known for brokering three tourists to the international space station, is the latest entrant.
Last month, Space Adventures announced a partnership with members of the Ansari family - the major funders of the $10-million X Prize won by SpaceShipOne - to develop Russian-designed suborbital rockets that would launch from a proposed spaceport in the United Arab Emirates by 2008.
Space tourism companies hope wary investors will provide financial backing once they can establish a safety record and prove there is sufficient demand.
"It's changed from being a giggle factor to being heralded as a new business," said Geoff Sheerin, president and chief executive of Canada-based PlanetSpace. Sheerin also founded Canadian Arrow, a private rocket company that unsuccessfully competed for the X Prize in 2004.
-PlanetSpace, backed by American businessman Chirinjeev Kathuria, is building a 16.4-metre-long, three-seat suborbital rocket that would launch from somewhere in the Great Lakes region and re-enter Earth by splashing into the water. It hopes to fly 2,000 passengers in the first five years, beginning in 2008.
Some market studies have shown the public has an attitude of "If you build it, we will come." Futron, a Bethesda, Md.-based aerospace consulting firm, estimated that revenues in the infant space tourism industry could exceed $1 billion a year by 2021 with the greatest demand in suborbital flights in which passengers spend mere minutes in space.
Before tourists can lift off, several federal hurdles must be cleared. Federal regulations that will govern human space travel and spell out safety and training requirements are expected to be wrapped up this summer.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta last month told a gathering of space entrepreneurs that the government would move swiftly to grant space travel licences to companies that can prove they can operate safely.
That's good news for people like Chaikin, the space historian.
"I've been hoping and dreaming all my life to go into space. Now I actually have a shot of doing it."
http://travel.canoe.ca/Travel/News/2006/03/20/1497040-ap.html
As Al the Hippy Dippy Weatherman used to say, "The weather forecast for tonight is dark... followed by scattered light by morning!"
Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness
February 27, 2006 | Issue 42•09
NEW YORK—Millions of eyewitnesses watched in stunned horror Tuesday as light emptied from the sky, plunging the U.S. and neighboring countries into darkness. As the hours progressed, conditions only worsened.
Satellite view at 4:50 p.m. EST shows the sun disappearing from the sky.
At approximately 4:20 p.m. EST, the sun began to lower from its position in the sky in a westward trajectory, eventually disappearing below the horizon. Reports of this global emergency continued to file in from across the continent until 5:46 p.m. PST, when the entire North American mainland was officially declared dark.
As the phenomenon hit New York, millions of motorists were forced to use their headlights to navigate through the blackness. Highways flooded with commuters who had left work to hurry home to their families. Traffic was bottlenecked for more than two hours in many major metropolitan areas.
Across the country, buses and trains are operating on limited schedules and will cease operation shortly after 12 a.m. EST, leaving hundreds of thousands of commuters in outlying areas effectively stranded in their homes.
Despite the high potential for danger and decreased visibility, scientists say they are unable to do anything to restore light to the continent at this time.
"Vast gravitational forces have rotated the planet Earth on an axis drawn through its north and south poles," said Dr. Elena Bilkins of the National Weather Service. "The Earth is in actuality spinning uncontrollably through space."
Bilkins urged citizens to remain calm, explaining that the Earth's rotation is "utterly beyond human control."
"The only thing a sensible person can do is wait it out," she said.
Commerce has been brought to a virtual standstill, with citizens electing either to remain home with loved ones or gather in dimly lit restaurants and bars.
"I looked out the window and saw it getting dark when I was still at the office working," said Albert Serpa, 27, a lawyer from Tulsa, OK, who had taken shelter with others at Red's Bar and Grill. "That's when I knew I had to leave right away."
Ronald Jarrett, a professor of economics at George Washington University who left his office after darkness blanketed the D.C. metro area, summed up the fears of an entire nation, saying, "Look, it's dark outside. I want to go home," and ended the phone interview abruptly.
Businesses have shut their doors, banks are closed across the nation, all major stock exchanges have suspended trading, and manufacturing in many sectors has ceased.
Some television stations have halted broadcasting altogether, for reasons not immediately understood.
Law-enforcement agencies nationwide were quick to address the crisis.
Houston-area victims flee their workplaces ahead of the growing wave of darkness.
Said NYPD spokesman Jake Moretti: "Low-light conditions create an environment that's almost tailor-made for crime. It's probably safe to say we'll make more arrests in the next few hours than we have all day."
Darkness victims describe hunger pangs, lassitude, and a slow but steady loss of energy, forcing many to lie down. As many as two-thirds of those believed afflicted have fallen into a state of total unconsciousness.
Many parents report that their younger children have been troubled, even terrified, by the deep darkness. To help allay such fears, some parents are using an artificial light source in the hallway or bedroom.
As of 2 a.m. EST, the continent was still dark, the streets empty and silent. However, some Americans remained hopeful, vowing to soldier on despite the crisis.
"I don't plan on doing anything any different," said Chicago-area hospice worker Janet Cosgrove, 51. "I'm going to get up in the morning and go to work."
Cutbacks to space program will hinder exploration
Poughkeepsie Journal, By DAN SHAPLEY
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Ah, Solarquest, that late-'80s Monopoly knock-off played on a scale that defies even a Trump-sized ambition. It was one of my favorite board games. My neighbors and I spent hours moon-hopping through the solar system, buying up extraterrestrial real estate.
The game came to mind a few days ago with the news that spacecraft Cassini may have spotted geysers of water spewing from one of Saturn's moons, Enceladus. If Solarquest was reprinted today, you can bet the value of that icy moon 800 million miles from Earth would rise.
"We realize that this is a radical conclusion — that we may have evidence for liquid water within a body so small and so cold," Carolyn Porco, Cassini's imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in a news release. "However, if we are right, we have significantly broadened the diversity of solar system environments where we might possibly have conditions suitable for living organisms."
Life on other planets, or moons. It sounds as tantalizing and unbelievable as the childhood dreams I had lying in the backyard staring up at the stars in Salt Point.
The idea gains legitimacy with the growing evidence the substance so critical to life on our planet, water, may be found in places like Mars and Jupiter's moon Europa. Add in the theory that the building blocks for life on Earth may have arrived from comets, and one can imagine the same cosmic reactions triggering life on Earth.
Bacteria's sustainability
The idea gains from ongoing discoveries here on Earth about the versatility of bacterial life. It can thrive at our icy poles. It thrives in acids that would sizzle skin. It lives in the absence of sunlight on a diet of methane and the extreme heat from the Earth's fiery bowels at the bottom of the sea. Some forms of bacteria may even survive miles deep in the Earth's crust.
After all, extraterrestrial life is less likely to resemble little green men than it is minute, green algae.
Still, even bacteria inhabiting another world would have to re-order our view of ourselves. It took long enough for intelligent life to get over Copernicus' big bang — that the Earth revolves around the sun — and not vice versa. We might not be humble enough to believe we share the universe with other life, but that doesn't mean we don't.
It's a shame, then, NASA's astrobiology budget will be cut in half next year, and other research budgets similarly slashed. The space program's focus will be on sending humans back to the moon, instead of new explorations of other watery worlds or research into "extremophile" life here at home.
No question, it takes enormous sums of money for this kind of research and NASA's budget will remain close to $16.8 billion. But the government is also the only thing around with pockets big enough to pay for research on this scale.
As for Solarquest, even 10 years after it went out of print it is apparently still popular enough to inspire its own lengthy Wikipedia entry on the Web. Asking prices on E-bay Friday ranged from $4.99 to $9.99.
Now there's a bargain.
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060319/COLUMNISTS07/603190361
Probe yields Earth defence clues
By Paul Rincon
BBC News science reporter, in Houston , Texas
Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft is providing an unprecedented insight into one of the many asteroids that cross into Earth's neighbourhood.
Data from the mission shows Itokawa is a relatively young body formed out of debris from the collision of two larger objects.
Scientists presented their results at a major science US conference held in Houston, Texas.
The mission could also provide clues to preventing asteroid strikes on Earth.
"If you're going to mitigate against an object on an Earth-threatening trajectory, you're going to first want to know its composition and secondly its structure," said Dr Don Yeomans, the scientist in charge of monitoring Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) at the US space agency (Nasa).
"We'd have the technology to deal with them, but you have to know the enemy," he told the BBC News website.
Best defence
Because there are many more small NEOs like Itokawa than large ones, this asteroid was a good target, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientist added.
There is considerable debate among scientists about the best way to deal with an asteroid headed for our planet. Proposed methods include firing nuclear weapons at an incoming object to blow it up, and detonating a nuclear bomb just close enough to deflect its course - a so-called stand-off explosion.
Itokawa's age is probably in the order of several million years; so it is relatively young
Jun'ichiro Kawaguchi, Hayabusa mission manager
Knowing an asteroid's mineral make-up and whether it is fairly solid or more porous would help scientists determine which would work best.
A so-called "rubble pile" asteroid with a porous structure might absorb enough energy from a stand-off explosion to continue unimpeded, it is claimed.
"For this particular type of asteroid - an S-type object - we know its composition well. And this one seems to be a rubble pile," Dr Yeomans explained.
'Potato' mystery
Itokawa's "rubble pile" structure (it is estimated to be 40% porous) holds the key to how it was created.
Scientists think two large objects may have hit each other, shattering into debris. Some portion of this primordial material then merged to form a smaller body - Itokawa.
Its characteristic potato-like shape may even suggest Itokawa is a so-called "contact binary" - an object created when two smaller chunks of debris strike each other very slowly and stick. How this happens is still a puzzle.
The low number of craters on the asteroid provides a clue to its age, say Hayabusa scientists. Heavily cratered objects are considered to be ancient due to the heavy bombardment that is believed to have taken place in the early Solar System.
"Itokawa's age is probably in the order of several million years; so it is relatively young," Hayabusa mission manager Jun'ichiro Kawaguchi told the BBC News website.
But not everyone in the audience here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference was convinced the craters identified by Hayabusa's scientists really are craters.
Long return
Asteroids previously visited by spacecraft, such as 433 Eros and 253 Mathilde, are covered in impact depressions.
And, according to Don Yeomans, there could be other reasons why the surface is so smooth.
"I think it suggests that somehow the materials have been seismically shaken when objects have hit Itokawa. The whole asteroid shakes and the loose regolith or soil rolls into what were once craters and areas where the gravity is highest," he explained.
Itokawa is covered in a loose, gravel-like regolith which reaches depths of 2m in some areas.
Like other S-type asteroids, the composition of Itokawa resembles the most common type of meteorite found on Earth - the chondrites.
Hayabusa reached near-Earth asteroid (25143) Itokawa late last year. It was designed to collect the first dust and rock samples from an asteroid and return them to Earth; but the mission has been plagued by problems.
Two reaction wheels, which maintain the spacecraft's orientation, failed on approach to the asteroid. Then, a robot designed to hop about on the surface of Itokawa drifted into space after being released from its mothership.
The two scheduled landing attempts to collect samples were also failures, though scientists think a container may have passively collected some soil.
Controllers re-established communications with the spacecraft this month after a fuel thruster leak in December prevented the craft from pointing its antenna towards Earth. They hope to send it on the three-year journey back to Earth in 2007.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4823526.stm
Published: 2006/03/19 20:59:55 GMT
© BBC MMVI
Robot Dance (Video) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2949093547034908878
Won't be long before they're break-dancing in the street!
BigDog: The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth
Click BigDog & watch him dance...
BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog's legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.
BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others.
So far, BigDog has trotted at 3.3 mph, climbed a 35 degree slope and carried a 120 lb load.
BigDog is being developed by Boston Dynamics with help from Foster Miller, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Harvard University Concord Field Station.Development is funded by the DARPA Defense Sciences Office.
http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog
'Riddles Remain'...
you aint kiddin'. Love it when people declare they have found the origins, edges of the universe, beginning of time, trillionth of a second expansion. I accept that there is a whole bunch of stuff we just can't explain. Kinda like how the stock market works.
You're just not drinking enough of the right stuff, burp! A coupla 6-pax and this guy (gal?) will see dark matter all over the place.
A new breed of scientists leads a cosmic revolution in thinking how the universe came to be.
By Ron Cowen
Mark Subbarao, University of Chicago, Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Get a taste of what awaits you in print from this compelling excerpt.
Imagine a universe with no stars, no galaxies, and no light: just a black brew of primordial gases immersed in a sea of invisible matter. Beginning a few hundred thousand years after the blinding flash of the big bang, the universe plunged into a darkness that lasted almost a half billion years. Then something happened that changed it all, something that led to the creation not just of stars and galaxies, but also of planets, people, begonias, and lizards. What could that something have been?
New clues to this puzzle—one of the most fundamental in cosmology—are pouring in from many directions. Theorists using supercomputer simulations have retraced the steps that produced the first stars and galaxies. Astronomers peering through giant new telescopes have journeyed back in time in search of the first galaxies. Researchers studying images from the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the breathtaking diversity of the galaxies that surround us today—from giant pinwheels blazing with the blue light of newborn stars, to misshapen footballs glowing with the ruddy hue of stars born billions of years ago, to tattered galaxies trailing long streamers of stars torn out by collisions with intruder galaxies.
Less than a century ago astronomers knew only about our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which they believed held about 100 million stars. Then observers discovered that some of the fuzzy blobs in the sky weren't in our own galaxy, but were galaxies in their own right—collections of stars, gas, and dust bound together by gravity. Today we know that the Milky Way contains more than 100 billion stars and that there are some 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each harboring an enormous number of stars.
Our view of the universe is changing completely, says cosmologist Carlos Frenk of the University of Durham in England, and it's largely because of our new understanding of galaxy formation: "It's no exaggeration to say that we're going through a period of change analogous to the Copernican revolution."
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0302/feature1/index.html
Just consider me a minor heckler to be ignored. Carry on! Love this board. Oh, and... grub.
If only those colorful photos were actually representative of the visible part of the spectrum as we would see it with our own eyeballs. We have been totally lied to by the covers of our Sci-Fi novels, dude! I was disillusioned the first time I figured that out. F'in knowledge! Please Lord, remove part of my learning. (Actually, I think Mr. Jim Beam is on the case, never mind.)
Shoulda know better than try to pull anything over those burpzilla eyes.
That was my point
Star Nursery
Photograph by G. Fritz Benedict, Andrew Howell, Inger Jorgensen, David Chapell (University of Texas), Jeffery Kenney (Yale University), and Beverly J. Smith (CASA, University of Colorado), and NASA
A merry-go-round of young stars flashes around the center of galaxy NGC 4314. This spectacular close-up from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the basic structural elements of a galaxy. At the center glows a dense cluster of old stars, their mature status indicated by temperatures in the yellow and white part of the spectrum. Even deeper into the center probably lurks an invisible black hole, common to most galaxies. A black hole is matter so densely compacted that even light can't escape.
New stars usually appear in the spiral arms of a galaxy. But in this case the young, ultra-hot stars (blue and purple) have formed in a ring, created when clouds of gas collapse into superdense cores. Ten times hotter and one million times brighter than our sun, these new stars will eventually cool down and resemble the older stars near the center. Clouds of dust and gas fog the edges of the image. Even farther out lies the unseen weave of dark matter, whose gravitational force keeps the galaxy's hundreds of billions of stars bound together. http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0302/feature1/zoom4.html
It's a model not a photo. Can't see dark matter, remember? :)
When Galaxies Collide
Photograph by NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (USCS/LO), M.Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA
The violent meeting of two galaxies dislodges a tail of stars and gas in a view from the Hubble Space Telescope. The tail is more than 280,000 light-years long, or almost three times the length of the Milky Way. Galaxy collisions play out over hundreds of millions of years. In this one the spiral galaxy UGC 10214, dubbed the Tadpole, broke apart when it was sideswiped by a smaller star system, visible as the blue compact galaxy in the upper left region of the Tadpole. Stars themselves don't crash head-on. It's the gravitational fields of the dark matter and visible matter that get mangled together, throwing stars out of their orbits. Dozens of distant galaxies glint in the background, many of them also in the process of colliding. http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0302/feature1/zoom3.html
Nice photo of the dark matter, lol.
The Dark Truth
Photograph by John Dubinski, University of Toronto
No one can see it, or feel it, or even know what it is. But without the mysterious substance called dark matter, galaxies would fly apart. A computer simulation by John Dubinski, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto, pictures dark matter as an enormous web of filament stretching through space, shown in white above. According to calculations by Dubinski and other astrophysicists, the visible universe—stars and galaxies—is a mere sliver of what is out there. Dark matter is believed to account for at least 90 percent of all matter. The best guess is that dark matter is a large particle with no electrical charge; its only signature is its gravitational pull. Experts predict that within the next ten years experiments will finally isolate dark matter particles and unmask the universe's biggest mystery.
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0302/feature1/zoom2.html
Proof of Big Bang Seen by Space Probe, Scientists Say
Davide Castelvecchi for National Geographic News
March 17, 2006
New NASA space-probe observations of the oldest light in the cosmos are the most direct evidence yet that the universe expanded extremely quickly immediately after the big bang, physicists say.
Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, led the team overseeing NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). He and colleagues announced the new results Thursday in a teleconference.
Previous experiments—including WMAP results released in 2003—had provided strong evidence for the rapid-expansion theory, called inflation, that was first proposed by physicist Alan Guth in 1980.
In the trillion-trillionth of a second after the big bang, the universe expanded from the size of a gumball to something approaching its current size, according to the inflation theory. The universe then settled into a more leisurely pace of expansion over the past 13.7 billion years or so.
Smoking Gun
WMAP now has the most convincing evidence yet for inflation: a reading of the light released just after the big bang. This cosmic afterglow, known as microwave background, is made of the same type of radiation that carries signals to a TV antenna.
The afterglow is as valuable to a cosmologist as the earliest fossils are to a paleontologist. It is the oldest radiation ever detected, still traveling almost 14 billion years after it was emitted.
The microwaves bathe the entire universe in a perpetual buzz, reaching Earth from all directions. The buzz is virtually uniform, but not quite.
Tiny variations at different points in space allow scientists to draw maps of the early universe, as the WMAP team has done with unprecedented detail.
These cosmic baby pictures show us a time when the universe was a smooth, fiery broth, when stars and galaxies had yet to form under the pull of gravity (photo: another view of the early universe). http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0302/feature1/zoom1.html
Finer Points
The team said cosmologists will now be able to delve into the finer details of how inflation happened.
"I think we now have crossed a threshold," said team member David Spergel of Princeton University in New Jersey. "We can now start to say something quite interesting about the physics of inflation."
Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at California's Stanford University and one of the founders of inflation theory, agrees.
"Theorists sometimes believe we are so smart—[that] nobody can be compared to us," he said in a telephone interview from Moscow. "But these experimentalists [such as the WMAP team], they can sometimes do things that look like science fiction to us."
WMAP has also for the first time mapped the big bang afterglow's polarization. "That's our big step forward," Spergel said.
Polarization is when light—which normally radiates out randomly from its source—encounters something, such as a mirror or fog, that causes it to assume a particular orientation.
The patterns of polarization in the newborn universe—shown as white bars on this map—provide clues that dramatically improve scientists' ability to determine the dates of key events, the team said.
Riddles Remain
The probe's high-definition data also reaffirm some long-standing riddles.
Certain features in the microwave "sky" look to some experts like statistical anomalies, and WMAP's new data make them even more conspicuous.
Some of the anomalies seem to "very oddly line up with the geometry of the solar system," said Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
For example, some groups of anomalies seem to be pointing in one direction. But this idea runs counter to the accepted principle that the cosmos has no preferred orientation (whereas Earth, for example, is governed by its magnetic field, which gives rise to the directions of the compass).
Joao Magueijo of Imperial College London said, "We expect everything to be more or less the same in every direction."
Still others believe that the statistical anomalies are in the eye of the beholder.
"Are those features telling you something physical and important, or are those features just random? That, I think, remains an open question that will be a subject of debate," Spergel said.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0317_060317_big_bang.html
Stardust -- article, pictures, video links
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/03/14/stardust.results/index.html
Newfound Ice World Alters Perceptions of Planetary Systems
By Bjorn Carey, SPACE.com Staff Writer
posted: 13 March 2006 04:48 pm ET
Astronomers announced today the discovery of a frigid extrasolar planet several times larger than Earth orbiting a small red dwarf star roughly 9,000 light years away.
The finding alters astronomers' perceptions of planetary system formation and the distribution of planets in the galaxy, suggesting that large rock-ice worlds might outnumber gas giants like Jupiter.
The newfound planet is about 13 times more massive than Earth and likely has an icy and rocky but barren terrestrial surface, and it is one of the coldest planets ever discovered outside of our solar system.
It orbits 250 million miles away from a red dwarf star, which is about half the size of our Sun and much cooler. The orbital distance is about the same as our solar system's asteroid belt is from the Sun.
Rocky and cold
The planet is similar in rocky structure to Earth and it is described a "super-Earth."
But being so far away from a red dwarf means that its surface temperature is an inhospitable -330 degrees Fahrenheit (-201 Celsius), about the same as Uranus. That's too cold for liquid water or life as we know it.
Further analysis of the system revealed the absence of Jupiter-like gas giants, and scientists suspect the system literally ran out of gas and failed to form any. This may have starved the newfound planet of the raw materials it needed to turn into a gas giant itself.
"This icy super-Earth dominates the region around its star that in our solar system is populated by the gas-giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn. We've never seen a system like this before, because we've never had the means to find them," said study author Andrew Gould of The Ohio State University and leader of the MicroFUN planet-searching team.
'Pretty common'
Planet formation theory predicts that small, cold planets should form easier than larger ones around big stars. A previous study suggests that about two-thirds of all star systems in the galaxy are red dwarf stars, so solar systems filled with super-Earths might be three times more common than those with giant Jupiters.
"These icy super-earths are pretty common," Gould said. "Roughly 35 percent of all stars have them."
While this is one of the coldest exoplanets ever discovered, it is not the smallest. Earlier this year astronomers announced the discovery of an exoplanet just 5.5 times Earth's mass. The previous record holder weighed in at 7.5 Earth masses.
"Our discovery suggests that different types of solar systems form around different types of stars," said Scott Gaudi of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "Sun-like stars form Jupiters, while red dwarf stars form super-Earths. Larger A-type stars may even form brown dwarfs in their disks."
Brown dwarfs are dim, failed stars that straddle the mass range between gas planets and real stars.
Discovery details
Astronomers discovered this latest planet, catalogued as OGLE-2005-BLG-169lb, with a technique called microlensing, an effect where the gravity of a foreground star makes a more distant star appear brighter. If the foreground star is orbited by a planet, the planet's gravity can periodically warp the brightness of the background star by tiny amounts.
This shift is a telltale indicator of a planet, but is so brief that scientists must monitor the star closely and make multiple observations to confirm the planet's existence. In this case, the scientists were concerned that the warp wasn't caused by a planet, so they wrote a special computer program to speed up their models and confirm the existence of the Neptune-sized object.
The planet's existence was determined by researchers from the MicroFUN, OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) projects and the MDM Observatory in Arizona. The group has submitted their findings for publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060313_icy_superplanet.html
Can't we add a space elevator to International Space Station??? http://www.shuttlepresskit.com/ISS_OVR/
Can we do it?
A critical and as-yet-realized component of a successful space elevator is a super lightweight, super strong material. This material will be used to create a composite ribbon upon which elevators will ride carrying cargo and people. Traveling to geostationary Earth orbit, at around 36,000 kilometers, the ribbon would be attached to a ground platform at the Equator. The end in space would be attached to a counterbalance mass, probably using the ribbon-deployment equipment, or perhaps even a captured asteroid. Electromagnetic propulsion is a candidate for launch and delivery, technology which has already been jump-started by current high-speed railway efforts. Another possiblity is laser propulsion, which you will read more about in our interviews, below.
No ribbon material exists today that meets the strength-to-weight requirements. However, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) look promising, since in one form they may be as much as 100 times as strong as steel, at 1/6th the weight. The problem with CNTs is that to date, nobody has figured out a way to either create them in the thousands of kilometer lengths necessary, or to use them to create a composite material that also meets the requirements. Several recent discoveries do however appear to indicate that a composite material may be available in the next few years.
There are other hurdles, such as propulsion, terrorist threats, and avoiding space debris, hurricanes, and lightening, which we cover in the interviews below. All of these hurdles appear to be dealt with using existing technologies and extensions of existing technologies, and achievable in the short-term.
In an article titled Audacious & Outrageous: Space Elevators by science writer Steve Price, we learn more about one writer's views and vision of the Space Elevator. "Yes, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard NASA's Millennium-Two Space Elevator. Your first stop will be the Lunar-level platform before we continue on to the New Frontier Space Colony development. The entire ride will take about 5 hours, so sit back and enjoy the trip. As we rise, be sure to watch outside the window as the curvature of the Earth becomes visible and the sky changes from deep blue to black, truly one of the most breathtaking views you will ever see!"
Explained in simple terms by Price "A space elevator is essentially a long cable extending from our planet's surface into space with its center of mass at geostationary Earth orbit (GEO), 35,786 km in altitude. Electromagnetic vehicles traveling along the cable could serve as a mass transportation system for moving people, payloads, and power between Earth and space."
When built as conceived, the space elevator is predicted to greatly reduce the Earth-to-orbit costs of materials, devices, and people. The cost-per-pound to move into space will drop from a current NASA rate of $10,000-$40,000, to a forecasted rate of less than $100 (Ed. some say as little at $10 per lb. in the not-to-distant future). Figure you and your luggage weight 200 pounds - that's $20,000, a bit less than the reported $20M Dennis Tito paid to become the world's first space tourist." Additional and larger elevators, built utilizing the first, would allow large-scale manned and commercial activities in space and reduce lift costs even further." says Los Alamos National Laboratory.
When asked to estimate when the space elevator would be built, Arthur C. Clarke replied "Probably about 50 years after everybody quits laughing!" With the rapid increase in our understanding of nanotubes, coupled with our ability to ramp up their production and separate them, the laughter is rapidly dying down.
To learn more, visit the Institute for Scientific Research, and see their animation. See also The Space Elevator
http://www.nanotech-now.com/products/nanonewsnow/issues/016/016.htm
A voice from the UFO cried,
"To the smartest we'll give a free ride!"
Several men volunteered,
But the ship disappeared,
With a whale and two dolphins inside.
-Anon
That said, Google on space elevator or carbon nanotubes. What a cool idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube
Science instrumentation aboard MRO
The broad goals of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are to search for evidence of water, and characterize the atmosphere and geology of Mars.
Six science instruments are included on the mission along with two "science-facility instruments", which use data from engineering subsystems to collect science data. Three technology experiments are also included to demonstrate new technologies for future missions.
And lots more... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Reconnaissance_Orbiter
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is a multipurpose spacecraft, launched August 12, 2005 to advance knowledge of Mars through detailed observation, to examine potential landing sites for future surface missions, and to provide a high-data-rate communications relay for those missions. MRO closely approached Mars and began orbital insertion on March 10, 2006. It is intended to orbit for four or more years, and to become Mars' fourth active artificial satellite (joining Mars Express, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Global Surveyor), and its sixth active probe (the satellites plus the two Mars Exploration Rovers), in a historic scientific focus on Mars.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will lay the groundwork for NASA's planned surface missions: a lander called Phoenix selected in a competition for a 2007 launch opportunity, and the Mars Science Laboratory, a highly capable rover being developed for a 2009 launch opportunity. The MRO's high-resolution instruments will help planners evaluate possible landing sites for these missions both in terms of science potential for further discoveries and in terms of landing risks. The MRO's communications capabilities will provide a critical transmission relay for the surface missions; MRO will even be able to provide critical navigation data to these probes during their landing. Also it may provide evidence which could help to uncover the reasons behind the failure of past Mars missions such as NASA's Mars Polar Lander, and the British Beagle lander.[1]
Orbital insertion and aerobraking
The start of the orbital insertion occurred as MRO approached Mars for the first time on March 10, 2006, passing above the Martian southern hemisphere at an altitude of about 370–400 km (190 mi). All six of the orbiter’s main engines burned for 27 minutes reducing the speed of the probe (relative to Mars at closest approach) from 2900 m/s (6500 mph) to 1900 m/s (4250 mph).
Orbital insertion has placed the orbiter in a highly elliptical polar orbit. The periapsis, the closest point in the orbit to Mars will be 3709 km (about 329 km from the surface). The apoapsis, farthest away from Mars will be 47,972 km. The orbital period will be approximately 35 hours.
Aerobraking will be conducted soon after orbital insertion to bring the orbiter to a lower, quicker orbit. Aerobraking cuts the fuel needed to reach the desired orbit roughly in half, and consists of three steps:
1. MRO will drop the periapsis of its orbit to aerobraking altitude using its thrusters. Aerobraking altitude will be determined at that time depending on the thickness of the Martian atmosphere (Martian atmospheric density changes over the seasons on Mars). This step will take about five orbits or one Earth week.
2. MRO will remain in aerobraking altitude for 5½ Earth months, or less than 500 orbits. Correct aerobraking altitude will have to be maintained with occasional corrections in periapsis altitude using its thrusters. Through aerobraking the apoapsis of the orbit will be reduced to 450 km (280 mi).
3. To end aerobraking, the MRO will use its thrusters to move its periapsis out of the edge of the Martian atmosphere.
After aerobraking another week or two will be spent to make additional adjustments in the orbit with thrusters. These corrections will likely occur before solar conjunction when Mars will appear to pass behind the Sun from Earth perspective, between October 7 and November 8, 2006. After this, science operations will begin. Final or science operations orbit will be at approximately 255 km (160 statute miles) to 320 km (200 mi) above the Martian surface. After reaching science operational orbit the SHARAD will be deployed.
Orbital insertion timeline
On March 10, 2006, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter successfully completed orbital insertion.
In the next few weeks MRO's controllers will begin the "walk in" phase of aerobraking, where the periapsis is lowered into Mars' atmosphere. [2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Reconnaissance_Orbiter
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/
Mars's Gravity Captures NASA Spacecraft
John Roach, for National Geographic News
March 10, 2006
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0310_060310_mars_orbit.html
NASA probe "dodges bullet" to achieve Mars orbit
Sat Mar 11, 2006 1:37 AM ET
By Dan Whitcomb
PASADENA, California (Reuters) - A $450 million NASA spacecraft dropped smoothly into orbit around Mars on Friday, successfully completing a risky make-or-break maneuver in its two-year mission to search the red planet for life and find landing spots for future astronauts.
Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena erupted in cheers when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which left Earth in August, signaled that it had achieved orbit around a planet that has defeated two-thirds of the probes sent there.
"It's almost like dodging a bullet," said Dan McCleese, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's chief Mars scientist. "It's going to take a few trips around the planet to know for sure, but from what we can see so far it's a near-perfect entry into orbit."
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will spend six months making some 500 trips around Mars, reeling itself in from an elongated 35-hour loop to a nearly circular two-hour orbit, before starting its primary science mission.
The most advanced vessel ever sent to another planet, with instruments that can study an object on the Martian surface the size of a desk, the orbiter will search for signs of life and scout sites where astronauts may land years from now.
It will fly closer to the surface than previous missions and send back 10 times as much data as all previous probes put together, while studying every level of the planet from underground layers to the upper atmosphere.
Mars has proven notoriously difficult for Earth explorers and, after losing two of the last four orbiters they have sent there, NASA scientists said were holding their breath on Friday.
The ship, which had been cruising to Mars at 11,000 mph
(17,600 kph), spun its main thrusters forward and fired them for 27 minutes, effectively slamming on the brakes. About an hour after the burn began, the ship, which lost contact with mission controllers when it went behind Mars, emerged and signaled that it was on course.
'ON PINS AND NEEDLES'
If the spacecraft had failed to achieve orbit it would have flown past Mars and off into space -- a fate that befell a probe Japan sent in 1998. Japanese mission controllers managed to gain control of the Nozomi orbiter and send it back toward Mars, but it was damaged by solar flares and ultimately lost.
"Everybody was on pins and needles," said McCleese, who worked on both of the previous failed orbiter missions at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "This isn't just a mission, this is careers. This is the future of JPL. This has been five years and there is an awful lot of emotion wrapped up in it."
McCleese said that while the orbiter had survived the moment of greatest danger, the spacecraft was still at risk as it circled the planet, particularly from capricious Martian dust storms disrupting the atmosphere.
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter program was expected to cost a total of about $720 million. That includes $450 million for the spacecraft and its instruments, $90 million for the launch and $180 million for mission operations, science processing and support.
On the frozen Saturnian moon Enceladus a water-ice geyser erupts into the sky.
Some theories suggest that such geysers feed Saturn's faint E ring.
Gutter? Kind of makes you feel at home, doesn't it, burp?
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