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SABRE-engines to help spur moon-settlement? New breakthru's
...We could be on the horizon of eponential-exploration..
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/The_Biggest_Breakthrough_In_Propulsion_Since_The_Jet_Engine_999.html
Yes, a bit of a thrill looking at them some 40 years later, and all the eveidences are still there unchanged.
Great image B/T Zoomed in for a closer look Wow great resolution
New images of the apollo-11 mission's landing site.
http://www.space.com/12796-photos-apollo-moon-landing-sites-lro.html
MOON DAILY
Proof at last: Moon was created in giant smashup
by Staff Writers
St. Louis MO (SPX) Oct 18, 2012
This artist's conception of a planetary smashup whose debris was spotted by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope three years ago gives an impression of the carnage that would have been wrecked when a similar impact created Earth's Moon. A team at Washington University in St. Louis has uncovered evidence of this impact that scientists have been trying to find for more than 30 years. Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
It's a big claim, but Washington University in St. Louis planetary scientist Frederic Moynier says his group has discovered evidence that the Moon was born in a flaming blaze of glory when a body the size of Mars collided with the early Earth.
The evidence might not seem all that impressive to a nonscientist: a tiny excess of a heavier variant of the element zinc in Moon rocks. But the enrichment probably arose because heavier zinc atoms condensed out of the roiling cloud of vaporized rock created by a catastrophic collision faster than lighter zinc atoms, and the remaining vapor escaped before it could condense.
Scientists have been looking for this kind of sorting by mass, called isotopic fractionation, since the Apollo missions first brought Moon rocks to Earth in the 1970s, and Moynier, PhD, assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts and Sciences - together with PhD student, Randal Paniello, and colleague James Day of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography - are the first to find it.
The Moon rocks, geochemists discovered, while otherwise chemically similar to Earth rocks, were woefully short on volatiles (easily evaporated elements). A giant impact explained this depletion, whereas alternative theories for the Moon's origin did not.
But a creation event that allowed volatiles to slip away should also have produced isotopic fractionation. Scientists looked for fractionation but were unable to find it, leaving the impact theory of origin in limbo - neither proved nor disproved - for more than 30 years.
"The magnitude of the fractionation we measured in lunar rocks is 10 times larger than what we see in terrestrial and martian rocks," Moynier says, "so it's an important difference."
The data, published in the Oct. 18, 2012 issue of Nature, provide the first physical evidence for wholesale vaporization event since the discovery of volatile depletion in Moon rocks, Moynier says.
The Giant Impact Theory
According to the Giant Impact Theory, proposed in its modern form at a conference in 1975, Earth's moon was created in a apocalyptic collision between a planetary body called Theia (in Greek mythology the mother of the moon Selene) and the early Earth.
This collision was so powerful it is hard for mere mortals to imagine, but the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is thought to have been the size of Manhattan, whereas Theia is thought to have been the size of the planet Mars.
The smashup released so much energy it melted and vaporized Theia and much of the proto-Earth's mantle. The Moon then condensed out of the cloud of rock vapor, some of which also re-accreted to the Earth.
This seemingly outlandish idea gained traction because computer simulations showed a giant collision could have created a Earth-Moon system with the right orbital dynamics and because it explained a key characteristic of the Moon rocks.
Once geochemists got Moon rocks into the lab, they quickly realized that the rocks are depleted in what geochemists call "moderately volatile" elements. They are very poor in sodium, potassium, zinc, and lead, says Moynier.
"But if the rocks were depleted in volatiles because they had been vaporized during a giant impact, we should also have seen isotopic fractionation," he says. (Isotopes are variants of an element that have slightly different masses.)
"When a rock is melted and then evaporated, the light isotopes enter the vapor phase faster than the heavy isotopes, so you end up with a vapor enriched in the light isotopes and a solid residue enriched in the heavier isotopes. If you lose the vapor, the residue will be enriched in the heavy isotopes compared to the starting material," explains Moynier.
The trouble was that scientists who looked for isotopic fractionation couldn't find it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary data
Asked how he felt when he saw the first results, Moynier says, "When you find something that is new and that has important ramifications, you want to be sure you haven't gotten anything wrong."
" I half expected results like those previously obtained for moderately volatile elements, so when we got something so different, we reproduced everything from scratch to make sure there were no mistakes because some of the procedures in the lab could conceivably fractionate the isotopes."
He also worried that fractionation could have occurred through localized processes on the moon, such as fire fountaining.
To make sure the effect was global, the team analyzed 20 samples of lunar rocks, including ones from the Apollo 11, Apollo 12, Apollo 15, and Apollo 17 missions - all of which went to different locations on the Moon - and one lunar meteorite.
To obtain the samples, which are stored in Houston at the Johnson Space Center, Moynier had to convince committee that controls access to them of the scientific merit of his project.
"'What we wanted were the basalts," Moynier says, "because they're the ones that came from inside the Moon and would be more representative of the Moon's composition."
But lunar basalts have different chemical compositions, Moynier says, including a wide range of titanium concentrations. Isotopes can also be fractionating during during the solidification of minerals from a melt. "The effect should be very, very tiny," he says, "but to make sure this wasn't what we were seeing, we analyzed both titanium-rich and titanium-poor basalts, which are at the two extremes of the range of chemical composition on the Moon."
The low and high titanium basalts had the same zinc isotopic ratios.
For comparison, they also analyzed 10 Martian meteorits. A few had been found in Antarctica but the others were from the collections at the Field Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and the Vatican.
Mars, like the Earth, is very rich in volatile elements, Moynier says. "Because there is a decent amount of zinc inside the rocks, we only needed a tiny bit to test for fractionation, and so these samples were easier to get."
What it means
Compared to terrestrial or martian rocks, the lunar rocks Moynier and his team analyzed have much lower concentrations of zinc but are enriched in the heavy isotopes of zinc.
Earth and Mars have isotopic compositions like those of chondritic meteorites, which are thought to represent the original composition of the cloud of gas and dust from which the solar system formed.
The simplest explanation for these differences is that conditions during or after the formation of the Moon led to more extensive volatile loss and isotopic fractionation than was experienced by Earth or Mars.
The isotopic homogeneity of the lunar materials, in turn, suggests that isotopic fractionation resulted from a large-scale process rather than one that operated only locally.
Given these lines of evidence, the most likely large-scale event is wholesale melting during the formation of the Moon. The zinc isotopic data therefore supports the theory that a giant impact gave rise to the Earth-Moon system.
"The work also has implications for the origin of the Earth," Moynier points out, "because the origin of the Moon was a big part of the origin of the Earth."
Without the stabilizing influence of the Moon, the Earth would probably be a very different sort of place. Planetary sciences think the Earth would spin more rapidly, days would be shorter, weather more violent, and climate more chaotic and extreme. In fact it might have been such a harsh world, it would have been unfit for the evolution of our favorite species: us
MOON DAILY
Proof at last: Moon was created in giant smashup
by Staff Writers
St. Louis MO (SPX) Oct 18, 2012
This artist's conception of a planetary smashup whose debris was spotted by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope three years ago gives an impression of the carnage that would have been wrecked when a similar impact created Earth's Moon. A team at Washington University in St. Louis has uncovered evidence of this impact that scientists have been trying to find for more than 30 years. Credit: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
It's a big claim, but Washington University in St. Louis planetary scientist Frederic Moynier says his group has discovered evidence that the Moon was born in a flaming blaze of glory when a body the size of Mars collided with the early Earth.
The evidence might not seem all that impressive to a nonscientist: a tiny excess of a heavier variant of the element zinc in Moon rocks. But the enrichment probably arose because heavier zinc atoms condensed out of the roiling cloud of vaporized rock created by a catastrophic collision faster than lighter zinc atoms, and the remaining vapor escaped before it could condense.
Scientists have been looking for this kind of sorting by mass, called isotopic fractionation, since the Apollo missions first brought Moon rocks to Earth in the 1970s, and Moynier, PhD, assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts and Sciences - together with PhD student, Randal Paniello, and colleague James Day of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography - are the first to find it.
The Moon rocks, geochemists discovered, while otherwise chemically similar to Earth rocks, were woefully short on volatiles (easily evaporated elements). A giant impact explained this depletion, whereas alternative theories for the Moon's origin did not.
But a creation event that allowed volatiles to slip away should also have produced isotopic fractionation. Scientists looked for fractionation but were unable to find it, leaving the impact theory of origin in limbo - neither proved nor disproved - for more than 30 years.
"The magnitude of the fractionation we measured in lunar rocks is 10 times larger than what we see in terrestrial and martian rocks," Moynier says, "so it's an important difference."
The data, published in the Oct. 18, 2012 issue of Nature, provide the first physical evidence for wholesale vaporization event since the discovery of volatile depletion in Moon rocks, Moynier says.
The Giant Impact Theory
According to the Giant Impact Theory, proposed in its modern form at a conference in 1975, Earth's moon was created in a apocalyptic collision between a planetary body called Theia (in Greek mythology the mother of the moon Selene) and the early Earth.
This collision was so powerful it is hard for mere mortals to imagine, but the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is thought to have been the size of Manhattan, whereas Theia is thought to have been the size of the planet Mars.
The smashup released so much energy it melted and vaporized Theia and much of the proto-Earth's mantle. The Moon then condensed out of the cloud of rock vapor, some of which also re-accreted to the Earth.
This seemingly outlandish idea gained traction because computer simulations showed a giant collision could have created a Earth-Moon system with the right orbital dynamics and because it explained a key characteristic of the Moon rocks.
Once geochemists got Moon rocks into the lab, they quickly realized that the rocks are depleted in what geochemists call "moderately volatile" elements. They are very poor in sodium, potassium, zinc, and lead, says Moynier.
"But if the rocks were depleted in volatiles because they had been vaporized during a giant impact, we should also have seen isotopic fractionation," he says. (Isotopes are variants of an element that have slightly different masses.)
"When a rock is melted and then evaporated, the light isotopes enter the vapor phase faster than the heavy isotopes, so you end up with a vapor enriched in the light isotopes and a solid residue enriched in the heavier isotopes. If you lose the vapor, the residue will be enriched in the heavy isotopes compared to the starting material," explains Moynier.
The trouble was that scientists who looked for isotopic fractionation couldn't find it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary data
Asked how he felt when he saw the first results, Moynier says, "When you find something that is new and that has important ramifications, you want to be sure you haven't gotten anything wrong."
" I half expected results like those previously obtained for moderately volatile elements, so when we got something so different, we reproduced everything from scratch to make sure there were no mistakes because some of the procedures in the lab could conceivably fractionate the isotopes."
He also worried that fractionation could have occurred through localized processes on the moon, such as fire fountaining.
To make sure the effect was global, the team analyzed 20 samples of lunar rocks, including ones from the Apollo 11, Apollo 12, Apollo 15, and Apollo 17 missions - all of which went to different locations on the Moon - and one lunar meteorite.
To obtain the samples, which are stored in Houston at the Johnson Space Center, Moynier had to convince committee that controls access to them of the scientific merit of his project.
"'What we wanted were the basalts," Moynier says, "because they're the ones that came from inside the Moon and would be more representative of the Moon's composition."
But lunar basalts have different chemical compositions, Moynier says, including a wide range of titanium concentrations. Isotopes can also be fractionating during during the solidification of minerals from a melt. "The effect should be very, very tiny," he says, "but to make sure this wasn't what we were seeing, we analyzed both titanium-rich and titanium-poor basalts, which are at the two extremes of the range of chemical composition on the Moon."
The low and high titanium basalts had the same zinc isotopic ratios.
For comparison, they also analyzed 10 Martian meteorits. A few had been found in Antarctica but the others were from the collections at the Field Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and the Vatican.
Mars, like the Earth, is very rich in volatile elements, Moynier says. "Because there is a decent amount of zinc inside the rocks, we only needed a tiny bit to test for fractionation, and so these samples were easier to get."
What it means
Compared to terrestrial or martian rocks, the lunar rocks Moynier and his team analyzed have much lower concentrations of zinc but are enriched in the heavy isotopes of zinc.
Earth and Mars have isotopic compositions like those of chondritic meteorites, which are thought to represent the original composition of the cloud of gas and dust from which the solar system formed.
The simplest explanation for these differences is that conditions during or after the formation of the Moon led to more extensive volatile loss and isotopic fractionation than was experienced by Earth or Mars.
The isotopic homogeneity of the lunar materials, in turn, suggests that isotopic fractionation resulted from a large-scale process rather than one that operated only locally.
Given these lines of evidence, the most likely large-scale event is wholesale melting during the formation of the Moon. The zinc isotopic data therefore supports the theory that a giant impact gave rise to the Earth-Moon system.
"The work also has implications for the origin of the Earth," Moynier points out, "because the origin of the Moon was a big part of the origin of the Earth."
Without the stabilizing influence of the Moon, the Earth would probably be a very different sort of place. Planetary sciences think the Earth would spin more rapidly, days would be shorter, weather more violent, and climate more chaotic and extreme. In fact it might have been such a harsh world, it would have been unfit for the evolution of our favorite species: us
...We just might live to see a return to the moon and a moon-base...but I don't expect anything to shake-out in the nearterm....China is the most likely to accomplish anything in the near-future.
lol. the dark side??
NASA proposes a "Gateway" spacecraft located in stable Lagrange-orbit as a stepping stone to Mar's trips and futher moon-surface explorations.
...Now they got to get funding, and that unlikely to happen anytime soon...
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/NASA_sees_gateway_for_space_missions_999.html
i love this one!!!
http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/afron-winners/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+F
These $10 Robots Will Change Robotics Education
BY NATHAN HURSTEMAIL AUTHOR09.29.126:00 PM
And the future of robotics education in Africa is ... Chupa Chups?
When the African Robotics Network announced their $10 robot design challenge this summer, co-founder Ken Goldberg was careful not to share too many expectations, lest he influence contestants' designs. But he never imagined one of the winning entries would prominently feature a pair of Spanish lollipops.
The challenge, hosted by AFRON co-founders Goldberg and Ayorkor Korsah, emphasized inexpensive designs to help bring robotics education to African classrooms. Goldberg announced AFRON's 10 winners in three categories today at Maker Faire, including the lollipop-laden Suckerbot and traditional (roaming) category first prize winner Kilobot, a Harvard-spawned three-legged, vibrating, swarming robot.
"The ingenuity that has come from all over the world to address this problem is just astounding," Goldberg said in an interview with Wired Design. "And we're very excited about the next step, which is that once they're awarded, some of them will become available products."
The contest had a few simple restrictions, including the loose $10 target; entrants from around the world had to build a prototype, offer instructions on a website, and make the whole plan open-source, software included. The winners were little, an inch or two in size and up, never more than a foot long. They were sourced from cardboard, old cell phones, and circuit boards. They performed simple tasks: navigating, following lines, even communicating with each other.
"It's a mix of people who really ... want to make this happen," said Goldberg. "No one here did this just to say 'here's something, a thought experiment'."
Designs were judged by a 6-member jury of robotics industry professionals, and compiled by Goldberg and Korsah, who are professors at the University of California in Berkeley and Ashesi University College in Ghana, respectively.
Suckerbot, designed by Thomas Tilley, a computer scientist living in Thailand, started with a hacked PlayStation controller, and wound up winning first prize in the tethered robot category. In this case, the tether is the controller's USB cable, and Tilley attached the rumble motors to a pair of wheels. Suckerbot's list of parts comes to $8.96, but the real genius is the Chupa Chups. Tilley needed a way for the robot to sense if it ran into something, so he stuck a lollipop in each joystick. Whenever the Suckerbot bumps something, the weight of the sucker tips the joystick forward, and a signal is sent to the processor.
Many of the robots were created specifically for the challenge. Kilobot, however, was years in the making. Created by a Harvard robotics team, including Michael Rubenstein, Radhika Nagpal, and Christian Ahler, it was meant to be a multi-unit swarming robot. Having to build 1024 pieces made the project well suited for the event.
"If you're going to build a lot of robots, you need to have them be cheap and easy to make and easy to use," said Rubenstein. "So all of those things also aided in the AFRON challenge."
"I think there is a great need for — not only in Africa, but even in the U.S. — low-cost robots that you could use for education," Rubenstein went on. "There are people who try to make that now, but they're only in the hundreds of dollars for an educational robot."
Just lately, been having browser-related issues...with lots of things. (On AOL)...for some stuff I'd switched to Chrome, and no issues there. (Other than my unfamilurity with it.)
...The AOL's difficultys were on youtube and FB, ihub has been pretty stable for me lately.
i sent a message to admin. maybe they can/will fix it.
Same troubles here GRRRR...
nice post.
are you having problems with ihub? i can't get in and out of different boards. i have to close my browser sometimes just to get out of a post! no wonder no one is posting much anymore. or maybe it's just me.
Did you ever see this effect? A type of "magnetic-braking", I saw on youtube vid...dropping a strong magnet into a nonemagnetic copper tube, the are some others that "super-cooled" a copper tube in liquid-nitrogen, and the slowing of the magnet is more pronounced...
Room-temp tube and magnet,
Yes, one of the great pioneers. R.I.P.
http://www-spc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/papers/Lunar/ thanks goes out to Kissmekid for the imput
Private companies developing hardware for specific missions has always been done...Driven by govenment money.
In exploration, government funding is essential too. As far as the moon exploration, the surface has barely been scratched. A permanant base of operations located on the moon would benefit further exploration of more distant goals.
Consider a manned mission to mars or even the asteroids, with additional fuel available to the mission, once the gravity-well has been ascended. With additional fuel, Delta V could be increased...shortening the trip.
Another idea would be to have multiple-missions, co-operating beyond just the scope of their own mission. A mars mission could carry a few supplies needed on the moon-base, leaving those behind as it recieves "moon-fuels". On the return-trip, the mars explorers could possibly "discard" the fuel-tanks it used to de-accelerate in moon-orbit to be collected and reused for more fuel storage.
Not enough "conservation" of resources has been done in the past. Mission planners need to ponder what can be done with "expended" items that have been brought out of the gravity-well, and how they could be "parked" in accessable orbits/Lagrange points. (Even when it requires slightly more to get it there.)
Totally agree.
The current Pres is sending NASA in another direction entirely.
"Claimed goals" are to have manned missions to asteroids by 2025.
....Precursor to possible "mining" of asteroids.
I'm all in favor of multiple endevors done together, I personally feel the moon programs were discarded prematurely.
sort of a contrast between government and private development don't you think? or government versus corporate.
Imagine how far landing vehicles and the capsules would have come if we had kept going.
Pondering things today, one of them being the recent passing of the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong.
Even though moon landings are magitude's different than aircraft flight...consider how far the airplane/aircraft have come in 43 years...
nice! a new link to add to my bookmarks too! ty for that one
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/helium-detected.html NASA input here
http://moonandback.com/?p=25748 helium found!!!!!!!!
What exactly he has there is not clear. That the object doesn't continue across the face of the moon, could be the light of a star/planet just behind the moon (And near the edge) getting "bent" due to the mass of the moon's "gravitational-lens".
...As the moon progresses in it's orbit...that would be obscured and would have only momentarily been in view, perhaps giving the impression the the object had decended or "landed".
Very interesting, none the less, Thanks for posting it!
this utube vid is a backyard shot of the moon. i had to play it full-screen to see what the guy was trying to show. really does look like something there. thought you would like it.
Nice find I will have to view these a little later ,I will get back ASAP
In spite of recent and on-going failures in the Russian space program, it appears they will still commit to craft capable of reaching the moon.
Roscosmos announced a Ten-million ruble investment for developing a carrier able to transport manned spacecraft to the moon.
http://www.moondaily.com/reports/Roscosmos_Announces_Tender_for_Moon_Rocket_Design_999.html
NASA'S Goddard team to demonstrate new minaturized Spectrometer-on-a-chip. No longer a device the size of a dishwasher, micro-scale LightPipes eliminate the need for multiple-mirrors and bulky precision-optics and moving parts that add up to higher failure rates.
More,
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/NASA_Goddard_Team_to_Demonstrate_Miniaturized_Spectrometer_on_a_Chip_999.html
A RESOLVE to Mine the Moon
by brian shiro
I will be on the beautiful Big Island of Hawaii next week working with the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES). As I’ve described in previous posts, PISCES is an international research and education consortium headquartered at the University of Hawaii at Hilo that aims to develop, test, and validate technologies for use on the Moon, Mars and beyond. When humans return to the Moon and journey to Mars, they will have to live off the land. It’s just too costly to bring everything we need with us. That includes rocket fuel for the return trip, water, oxygen, and other consumables. Thus, it is critical that we learn how to utilize in situ resources if we are to establish permanent presences on other worlds.
As a geophysicist by profession, my interest lies with applying my terrestrial geophysical exploration knowledge to other planetary bodies. To this end, I carried out experiments at FMARS in 2009 and MDRS in 2010 to study the human factors elements associated with astronaut-conducted geophysical surveys to prospect for subsurface resources like water. I presented my findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference and Lunar Science Forum, the results of which became my UND master’s thesis. Now, I am embarking on a Ph.D. at the University of Hawaii to take this work to another level in analog environments such as Hawaii.
The main system being tested at PISCES this year is the Regolith and Environment Science and Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE) experiment. This consists of a lunar rover and drill provided by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to support a NASA payload that turns regolith (dirt) into rocket fuel, water, and air. A system developed from the RESOLVE prototype may travel to the Moon in the next few years to prove that water seen from orbit is accessible and that useful products can be made from it. It could be the key that finally makes the solar system accessible to humans in a safe, cost-efficient manner.
This is the third field season for the PISCES program. I had previously tried to get involved with the 2008 and 2010 field campaigns and am happy that things worked out this time for me to join the effort. My main job will be supporting whatever the NASA and CSA engineers need me to do. I’ll be learning from them and finding ways my talents can fit into the larger picture of planetary resource prospecting. In turn, I’ll mold my upcoming doctoral work to extend and further enable the goals of initiatives like RESOLVE to support exploration of the solar system. For example, I think I could bring a lot to bear on the question of knowing where to look for resources, although the objective of this week’s field work is to test how to dig and process the materials. These are questions the new company Planetary Resources is addressing in the context of asteroid mining too.
Some media outlets have already picked up this exciting story. For example The Hawaii Tribune Herald recently ran a story about how Hawaii Governor Abercrombie signed a bill into law paving the way for the creation of a lunar research park on Hawaii Island. It discussed the benefits not only to planetary prospectors but also to local residents. After all, in space you have no other option but to be “green” and use all available resources. Technologies developed for space have direct application here on Earth to lesson our environmental footprint. MSNBC and Popular Mechanics had really nice articles about the experiment in the larger context of space mining too. NASA has invited reporters out to the field site on Thursday, July 19, and I’ll be helping with the PISCES outreach day at the Imiloa Astronomy Center on Saturday, July 21.
I’ll post again in about a week to describe more specifically how the field testing went. Meanwhile, you can read up on the experiment on NASA’s website and follow the NASA In Situ Resource Utilization Facebook page.
electric moon awesome// gotta give that an AAA plus
Team from University of Alabama wins national competition.
The group was tasked with creating an autonomus robot excavator, capable of obtaining a minimum of 10 kilograms of simulated lunar-material within a 10 minute timespan.
In addition to cash awards, will be recieving assistance from NASA to help in preparation for next years challenges.
http://www.moondaily.com/reports/UA_Lunar_Mining_Team_Wins_National_Contest_999.html
Electric moon?
Although not having a magnetic-field like the earth, electrical-energys from moon's surface inpinge on the solar-wind thousands of kilometers away.
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Electric_Moon_Jolts_the_Solar_Wind_999.html
new robot
http://news.yahoo.com/pollution-hunting-robot-fish-sea-050157142--sector.html
Pollution-hunting robot fish take to the sea
Reuters – 6 hrs ago
The SHOAL robotic fish, a state-of-the-art …
LONDON (Reuters) - Robot "fish" developed by European scientists to improve pollution monitoring moved from the lab to the sea in a test at the northern Spanish port of Gijon on Tuesday.
The developers hope the new technology, which reduces the time it takes to detect a pollutant from weeks to seconds, will sell to port authorities, water companies, aquariums and anyone with an interest in monitoring water quality.
It could also have spin-offs for cleaning up oil spills, underwater security, diver monitoring or search and rescue at sea, they said.
The fish, which are 1.5 meters (5 feet) long and currently cost 20,000 pounds ($31,600) each, are designed to swim like real fish and are fitted with sensors to pick up pollutants leaking from ships or undersea pipelines.
They swim independently, co-ordinate with each other, and transmit their readings back to a shore station up to a kilometer away.
"Chemical sensors fitted to the fish permit real-time, in-situ analysis, rather than the current method of sample collection and dispatch to a shore based laboratory," said Luke Speller, a scientist at British consultancy BMT Group who led the project.
The fish can avoid obstacles, communicate with each other, map where they are and know how to return to base when their eight-hour battery life is running low, their makers say.
After the tests this week, the team will look at modifications needed to move the fish into commercial production, which they expect to reduce the cost of each unit.
The development project was part-funded by the EU and drew on expertise from the University of Essex and the University of Strathclyde in Britain, Ireland's Tyndall National Institute and Thales Safare, a unit of Europe's largest defense electronics group, Thales, which was responsible for the communication technology.
($1 = 0.6326 British pounds)
(Reporting by Chris Wickham; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Mars rover, "Opportunity"...still working. (Since April 2004)
I think the engineers that designed and assembled those rovers should make a sampler/mobile water-collector for the polar-ice regions. In a lifespan of 8yrs, alot of water could be stockpiled.
Non-Manned robotic-missions may go to the moon to prepare moonbase habitat and tools, made from lunar materials.
An established, yet still maturing technology...is 3-Dimensional Printing. (It's been around about 30 years)
It is referred to as "Additive" manufactoring, where items (And even large buildings) can be "Deposited" in place, layer by layer. Materials used on earth based labs are often "Sintered" in place utilizing a high-output industrial-Laser, and have little (Or none) binding agents or polymers required.
The 3D printing is something that will be adopted rather rapidly now that the devices are becoming relatively inexpensive enough that ordinary household will some be able to have one.
TED-talks, 3D printing vid. Gets interesting (At 2:30 sec) as a titanium part is layered and fused...
Yep. That's why the internet is a double-edged sword...you can find answers to almost anything,...but are they correct answers, or skewed-data?
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/04/it-science-or-it-fraud
Is it Science or is It Fraud?
—By Kevin Drum| Wed Apr. 18, 2012 9:26 AM PDT
A couple of weeks ago I published a chart showing that conservative trust in science has plummeted over the past few decades, while liberal and independent attitudes have remained fairly steady (liberals with high trust levels and indies with low trust levels). However, several commenters pointed out that this result was derived from GSS survey data, and the actual question was about institutions:
I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them?
So conservatives were becoming less confident in the people who run the scientific community, which is not quite the same as becoming less confident in science as a discipline. This is fair up to a point, though I suspect that most people answering the question don't generally make distinctions quite that fine. What's more, in the aftermath of the 70s liberals had plenty of reason to lose confidence in some aspects of the scientific community too — this was a period in which corporate sponsorship of science was a growing flashpoint — but that didn't cause them to change their general level of trust. The Reagan-era decline was solely a conservative phenomenon.
All that said, though, the New York Times reported a couple of days ago that over the past decade or so there might well be reason for all of us to be a little more skeptical of scientific results than we have been. A couple of years ago, Dr. Ferric Fang, editor in chief of Infection and Immunity, discovered that one of his authors had doctored several papers:
Dr. Fang became curious how far the rot extended. To find out, he teamed up with a fellow editor at the journal, Dr. Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. And before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.
....Last month, in a pair of editorials in Infection and Immunity, the two editors issued a plea for fundamental reforms. They also presented their concerns at the March 27 meeting of the National Academies of Sciences committee on science, technology and the law. Members of the committee agreed with their assessment. “I think this is really coming to a head,” said Dr. Roberta B. Ness, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health. And Dr. David Korn of Harvard Medical School agreed that “there are problems all through the system.”
....Critics like Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall argue that science has changed in some worrying ways in recent decades — especially biomedical research, which consumes a larger and larger share of government science spending.
It's not clear how far this extends outside the biomedical community, and it's also not clear if this is genuinely new behavior, or if bad papers are simply more likely to get caught than in the past. Either way, though, the research community in general had better listen to Fang. Declining public trust in science may be primarily a conservative phenomenon right now, motivated by hostility toward evolution and climate science, but independents have had low trust levels ever since the 70s, and there are plenty of liberals who could probably be tipped into the anti-science camp pretty easily too. Time to clean house, folks.
Yep, debate continues.
Humans have been here for a speck of time, global climate-change has occured in the past and will in the future.
http://news.yahoo.com/former-astronauts-employees-nasa-stay-away-global-warming-171203899.html
Former Astronauts & Employees to NASA: Stay Away from Global Warming
By Wynne Parry | LiveScience.com – 43 mins ago
Print
A group of former NASA employees, including astronauts, has called on the agency to stop making "unproven and unsubstantiated remarks" regarding global climate change — specifically that human activities are driving global warming.
"We believe the claims by NASA and (Goddard Institute for Space Studies), that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated," write the 49 signatories in a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden. [Read the Full Letter]
This is the most recent objection by skeptics who challenge the reality of human-caused global warming. For decades, climate scientists have warned that humans are changing the composition of our atmosphere, warming the planet and, as a result, face rising sea levels, more extreme weather and other consequences. The concept is now well established in scientific literature and attempts to address it are the subject of ongoing international talks.
The letter originates from members of the Johnson Space Center Chapter of the NASA Alumni League, according to Walter Cunningham, a former astronaut who flew the Apollo 7 in 1968 and one of the letter's signatories.
In its four paragraphs, the letter deliberately avoids delving into its signatories' reasons for doubting climate-change science, Cunningham told LiveScience. "It's really trying to get NASA to back off from taking political positions on science." [10 Climate Change Myths Busted]
Human-caused global warming is "a very open issue right now," he said.
However, that is not how the scientific establishment sees it. NASA Chief Scientist Waleed Abdalati responded to the letter to say that if the work of
NASA scientists — who may use the agency's space-based observation tools to study climate change — withstands the scrutiny of other scientists through peer review, then it encourages them to share their results with the public.
"If the authors of this letter disagree with specific scientific conclusions made public by NASA scientists, we encourage them to join the debate in the scientific literature or public forums rather than restrict any discourse," Abdalati said in the statement.
For his part, Cunningham said the peer-review process — in which scientists in relevant fields scurtinize research — Abdalati mentions is rigged against those who challenge the standard view of global warming.
In spite of its wide acceptance among climate scientists and the scientific community, global-warming skeptics include some scientists. For instance, William Happer, a physicist from Princeton University who is not involved in the NASA letter, recently penned an editorial to the Wall Street Journal stating that the world has not warmed as the concept of carbon dioxide-driven global warming predicts it would.
Like Happer, Cunningham has a background in physics, he is not a climate scientist. According to his NASA astronaut profile, Cunningham has a master's in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed doctoral work as well. Of the 46 signatories who listed their positions, eight are astronauts and others identify themselves as having worked in a variety of positions, including within NASA's science or engineering directorates.
The letter calls out the leadership of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which is headed by James Hansen, a high-profile climate scientist, who has been an important force propelling the prospect of catastrophic, human-caused climate change into the public eye. Recently, Hansen has increasingly turned to activism, and was arrested at a protest in August. Hansen could not be reached for comment by deadline.
Gavin Schmidt, also a climate scientist at GISS, takes issue with statements by global warming skeptics, such as, "It is clear that the science is NOT settled," as the letter reads.
"Dealing with the future always involves dealing with uncertainty — and this is as true with climate as it is with the economy," Schmidt writes in a post at RealClimate.org. "Science has led to a great deal of well-supported concern that increasing emissions of CO2 (in particular) are posing a substantial risk to human society."
Among those who study climate, issues such as the existence of the greenhouse effect, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases over the past century, their human origin, and warming over the 20th century are no longer subject to fundamental debate, he writes.
The claims in the letter are too vague to be clear, Schmidt told LiveScience in an email, but "If any of signatories are ever in New York, I would be happy to discuss with them the science that gets done at GISS."
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/moon-mars-property/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
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Loophole Could Allow Private Land Claims on Other Worlds
By Adam Mann Email Author April 5, 2012 | 6:30 am | Categories: Space
Who owns the moon? What about Mars?
For now, the answer is no one, but as more private companies, billionaire entrepreneurs and national governments start casting their eyes on space, the question could change from a futuristic problem into a real issue.
Under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which governs international space law, no one nation can claim sovereignty over a body in space. But there could be a loophole.
Full blown colonization and settlement of other planets, moons and even asteroids might actually happen, says space policy consultant Rand Simberg, if a government could provide one thing: property rights.
Parceling out plots of land on celestial bodies might encourage people to invest in these properties, and this would benefit Earth economically, according to Simberg. He proposes the Space Settlement Prize Act and lays out how such a scheme would work in a new paper published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, on Apr. 2.
The international community might never buy into such a plan. The Outer Space Treaty states that space is the “common interest of all mankind” and that exploration or use of it “should be carried on for the benefit of all peoples.” Traditionally, this has been interpreted as prohibiting private property claims on other bodies in the solar system. The U.S., along with dozens of other countries, has ratified the treaty.
Handing out property rights to individuals and private companies would be a major shift from current thinking about outer space.
But Simberg argues that the treaty doesn’t explicitly prevent private companies from claiming territory. Though, if the U.S. government accepted such a claim, that could be taken as a declaration of sovereignty, which might violate the Outer Space Treaty, said space law attorney Michael Listner.
“It’s a very touchy issue,” Listner added. The U.S. could possibly withdraw from the Outer Space Treaty but “to take that stand against the rest of the world, would take a lot of political will and the government would take a hit. It’s sort of a nonstarter.”
Of course, Simberg’s model does have historical analogues.
“It’s similar to the way properties were pioneered in the Old West,” said Listner. “The government opened up land and people went to settle it.”
Claiming land on the moon would certainly violate the 1979 Moon Treaty, which specifically bans any nation from asserting sovereignty over any part of the moon and prohibits ownership by private persons. But the major spacefaring nations — including the U.S., Russia, and China — have never ratified this international treaty and it is often considered dead legislation.
An Earth-based analogue to the Moon Treaty is the 1961 Antarctic Treaty, which states that the continent should be open to all nations for scientific and peaceful purposes. But many countries would love to find a way to grab Antarctic land in hopes of extracting rich mineral deposits and other resources.
The main obstacle to enacting a law like the Space Settlement Prize Act is political. Congress is not thinking much about extraterrestrial property rights and is instead currently focused on budget cuts and finding the best course for the U.S. space program.
But Simberg’s paper suggests the time is ripe. It cites Moon Express, Inc. and the Shackleton Energy Company as two corporations with plans to extract lunar resources for further space exploration.
“The sooner we put policy in place and encourage this, the sooner it will happen,” Simberg said.
Others say that the issue is not yet pressing. Most private spaceflight companies are only thinking about sending people and supplies to low-Earth orbit, with flights to the moon or Mars many years off. “These topics are simmering right now, but they haven’t come to a boil,” said Listner.
What about the environmental toll of mining and drilling on the moon? The Moon Treaty states that explorers should try to prevent disrupting the existing lunar environment as much as possible.
But Simberg doesn’t see this as a pressing matter. “There are people who believe that rocks have rights; I’m not one of them,” he said.
Thanks. Either my coffee wasn't kicking-in yet, or its just over-my-pay-grade.
Even though I don't truely understand what is going on, or really, what the dance of electrons is being compared to, the GIF's were interesting. (The last one of the series was animating "Notchy" for some reason.)
Modeling molecules (And Atoms) is full of inconsistancy's, due to an inability to actually observe the actual structure. Inferances are made by observing force-interactions. I don't believe anyone really "Knows" exactly what forces cause what...
From wiki,
"complex post hoc distortions of the shape of the potential well to fit experimental data, but the question remains whether these mathematical manipulations actually correspond to the spatial deformations in real nuclei. Problems with the shell model have led some to propose realistic two-body and three-body nuclear force effects involving nucleon clusters and then build the nucleus on this basis. Two such cluster models are the Close-Packed Spheron Model of Linus Pauling and the 2D Ising Model of MacGregor"
Maybe some bright "Rising-Star" in the world of physics, will discover the reason that most of the suspected "missing-Mass" and surmized "dark-Matter" hasn't been observable...merely because it's at the "heart" of all matter.
And that could lead to other terms of force, "Long-force interactions" and "Short-force interactions"
The "short-force" interaction, being responsible for protons/neutrons to be superimposed (Occupying the same space) in a helium 4 molecule,
While the "Long-force" interactions causing the continued (And accelerating) expansion of the universe.
Food for thought, What a banquet!
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!topic/alt.sci.physics.new-theories/lV1yY2mYUM0
this is a physics article with links to animations that show how molecules share electrons. a little off topic but fascinating. and well done! thought you would enjoy it.
I've never made anything quite like what the "Big-Boys" fly, but some of the solids I've flown had inexplicable catastropic-failures. (Inexplicable at the time) Later I'd found the stored motors were developing cracks in the fuel-grain, leading to severe over-pressures shortly after ignition.
15 to 20 ft flight, then kaboom.
Welcome all. A place to discuss and share resources about utilizing construction materials found "in situ" on the moon. Any and all dicussions related to utilizing resources that abound in the solar-system are welcome, the main premise here should be, that we boost to space what few tools we need to develop those "In Situ" resources and "Bootsrap"the rest .
ZOOMABLE Images of the Whole nearside of the moon-mosaic.
http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc_browse/view/wac_nearside
And the rest of the galleries for LROC,
http://wms.lroc.asu.edu/lroc
Links to late-breaking news, about lunarmining, moon-exploration and space research..at MoonDaily, moontoday and others to come, as I find them.
Some of the sources available might be those that have been launched already (Spacejunk sattilites and such) and are simply a hazard to other orbital endeavors. One way to make use of the "Spacejunk", could involve sending batches of tiny drones in a single launch that could find and attach to the larger items in orbit. These drones would utilise a low impulse ion drive to overtake the junk, attach by grapple or other means. Once attached, could fire a high-impulse rocket, (Solid-fuel, or liquid-fuel with a solid oxidizer.)
Don't be afraid to throw new stuff up here!...ANYthing that gets us out there and mining is accepted here. New drives and propellants. Self-replicating machines. New reactors for energy to drive mining/manufactoring equipment. Fusion advances. Autonomous manufactoring/mining equiptment.....Use your imagination!
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/moon-mars/4264325
Farside picture from NASA,
...More moon photos, various timelines.
Link to pictures of luna rock/soils thin-sectioned under microscope,
http://minerva.union.edu/hollochk/c_petrology/moon_rocks/index.htm
Information of space news and research can be found at Colony Worlds website, ...Courtesy of Admiral Lagrange.
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