Category: Science

Direct Hit!

Temple 1

Last night the space probe ‘Deep Impact’ did just that to comet Temple 1. Some fo my friends and I were out looking for it, I didn’t see anything but Kevin and Donovan said they might have seen somthing flash. I had a camera with me but didn’t know exactly where to aim it. I have to admit that I was too busy playing ‘Ticket to Ride‘ to look up the info correctly. Anyway, the probe impacted as planned and hopefuly it will produce some good science as to what a comet is made up of. The photos from the impactor just before touching down at 6 miles a second are pretty cool. Go have a look now.

NASA – Deep Impact

NASA, Deep Impact, comet, space

Arizona Wildfires

FIRE!!!

Pretty cool, depending on the time of day you can see a nice time laps of the fires in Arizona.
This is from the GOES-12 satellite in the visible spectrum, so it will be dark about half the time. Arizona is -7GMT so if you catch it in the morning and evening it should be pretty cool.

NASA/MSFC Interactive GOES Data Selector
Arizona, wildfire, satellite, weather

If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen With Your Eyes…

New Eye

For people that suffer with degeneration of their retnas ( like Macular Degenerationthis or Retinitis Pigmentosa) could be a new lease on sight.

The retina implant developed by IIP combines medicinal and information technology with micro-systems technology.
A blind patient has a unique microchip implanted in their eye, wears special glasses with an integrated camera and carries a microcomputer on a belt around their waist.
Visual information received by the glasses is converted into electrical pulses by the microcomputer and the pulses then used to stimulate the patient’s optic nerve. The implant helps restore limited eyesight to people affected with specific hereditary blindness.

The amazing part of this is that when the device is implanted and activated it will produce randon visual information. The user will then be given a visual reference ( a white ring on a computer screen) and told to adjust the input settings. This is done until the user sees the white ring. The trials are to last about five years and if they are successful it could mean that thousnads of people may re-gain at leat some of their sight.
I wonder that if on future models the settings could be adjusted on the fly for different conditions. Lower contrast in bright light, enhanced night vision, digital zoom. Hum, sounds like something Steve Austin would have…

IIP Tec

eye, blind, bionic, medical, sight

A Nuclear Space Battery To Go To Pluto

Space Battery

Atomic enery is the only way to explore the stars. People whine about how nuclear energy is unsafe, how if one of these probes were to crash land on Earth that all of us would be dead from cancer in a year, or that we can’t go poluting space with all this radiation (yes, I have spoken with someone that actualy said that).
That’s a load of crap. Space has quite enough radiation of it’s own that us adding to it won’t matter ar all. No, we can’t use that radiation to power our spaceships (yet) but we can build what is called an RTG to generate power for the space craft quite safely. The RTG program was started in the days before Apollo and has been used on various missions including the both Viking Mars landers.
Sending a probe to Pluto is a once in a lifetime chance – unless there is a major breakthrough in the area of propulsion – the planet is just too far away.
I hope that in the next few years more spacecraft are fitted with nuclear power systems so the space craft are not hobbled by an amazingly small power budget. With enough power a probe around Jupiter could send back a thousand times more information and use envasive sensing like deep radar and laser altimiter measuring. Heck, I would’nt be all that amazed if near live video could be sent back from the surface of a distant moon.

A Nuclear Space Battery To Go To Pluto
space, nuclear, pluto, New Horizons, exploration

R2, Give Me a Hand With This…

Nanosat bot

As the ISS slowly grows in size the astronauts that crew it are going to have work loads even greater than they have now. Because of budget problems the seven man crew was cut two three men and sometimes only two.
Small semi autonomous devices like this could prove to be a valuable aid in getting tasks done faster and with less stress on the crew while on EVA. So far NASA has concentrated on little robots that are inside the crew space and zip around with little fans. This will be able to be extra ‘eyes’ for the ground controllers so they can get a better view on how things look on the surface of the station or even a docked shuttle. Anything that can keep a manned EVA off the schedule is a good thing, space is a dangerous place!
However, I have seen how a device that is supposed to save you time and make life easier can do just the opposite. My PDA (Viewsonic V36) has cause an untold amount of annoyance and stress when I try to get it to do something that is clearly SHOULD be able to do but can’t. This would be ActiveSync with my XP laptop. But I digress, as long as these are over seen by a ground station and causes no additional work load on the crew, everything should be ok.
The little guys are quite amazing, below is a short list of technology that it will have onboard:

Technology innovations include rechargeable xenon gas propulsion, a rechargeable lithium ion battery, custom avionics based on the PowerPC 740/750 microprocessor, “camera-on-a-chip” imagers with video compression, micro electromechanical system gyroscopes, precise relative GPS navigation, digital radio frequency communications, micro-patch antennas, digital instrumentation networking and compact mechanical packaging.

NASA’s New ‘Nanosatellite’ Systems
(It was also seen on MAKE a little while ago.)

NASA, robotics, ISS, satellite

Storm Chasers

A chance meeting with storm chasers in Aberdeen, SD.

Mad Max is tornado proof?

On the way back to Sioux Falls, I ran into a group of storm chasers filling up on gas and donuts at the local Gas Stop. Among the cool doppler equipped vehicles was a strange MadMax type vehicle appearently equipped for storm chasing. I saw this on the news a few nights ago, and the guy that built and drives it claims it is tornado proof…..yeah, I’d like to see the tests đŸ˜‰
Here are a few pics I snapped as I stood around gawking like a local that just saw a two headed cow being beamed up by aliens.
(Why are we so fascinated by weather!?)