The Meridiani Journal: When one thinks about Mars, probably the last thing that comes to mind is a tropical paradise. Mars is just the opposite – cold, dry and barren. But as the saying goes, “the devil is in the details.” It turns … Continue reading →
HobbySpace Blog: In 1952, Arthur C. Clarke in Popular Science asked a good question: What Will We Do With The Moon? Popular Science April (1952) - Dreams of Space - Books and Ephemera. R.A. Smith provided illustrations like this one:
collectSPACE.com: Today In Space History: On Tuesday, space shuttle Endeavour opened on display at the California Science Center (CSC), following a ceremony held underneath the retired NASA orbiter for invited guests and schoolchildren. The commemoration, which was emceed by Bill Nye, "The Science Guy," marked the culmination of Endeavour's long journey 'home' and the start of its new mission to inspire a new generation of scientists, engineers and explorers.
Space Fellowship: Like a Hollywood starlet constantly retouching her makeup, the giant asteroid Vesta is constantly stirring its outermost layer to present a young face. Data from NASA's Dawn mission show that a form of weathering that occurs on the moon and other airless bodies we've visited in the inner solar system does not alter Vesta's outermost layer in the same way. Carbon-rich asteroids have also been splattering dark material on Vesta's surface over a long span of the body's history. The results are desc [...]
This image from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft shows a close up of part of the rim around the crater Canuleia on the giant asteroid Vesta. Canuleia, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter, is the large crater at the bottom-left of this image. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/PSI/Brown From a ULCA press release: Like a Hollywood starlet constantly [...]Home Become a Member Carnival of Space Contact Us Forum Guide to Space Privacy Policy Telescope Guide Subscribe Universe Today Remove this ad Vesta Looks Forever Young by Nancy Atkinson on October 31, 2012 Want to stay on top of all the space news Follow universetoday on Twitter This image from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft shows a close up of part of the rim around the crater Canuleia on the giant asteroid Vesta . Canuleia , about 6 miles 10 kilometers in diameter , is the large crater at the bottom-left of this image . Image credit : NASA JPL-Caltech UCLA MPS DLR PSI Brown From a ULCA press : release Like a Hollywood starlet constantly retouching her makeup , the giant asteroid Vesta is constantly stirring its outermost layer to present a young face . Data from NASA’s Dawn mission show that a
Smithsonian Instiution Smithsonian Journeys Smithsonian Store Smithsonian Channel goSmithsonian Visitors Guide Smithsonian magazine AirSpaceMag.com Subscribe Home History of Flight Flight Today Military Aviation Space Exploration Need to Know How Things Work Photos Videos Blogs The Daily Planet Letters To Earth The Once and Future Moon The View from 30,000 Feet On Air October 31, 2012 Fly-Powered Planes and Other Oddities Reddit Digg Stumble Email More Model airplane powered by . flies . Photograph by Eric Long . NASM As we celebrate all things weird and wonderful on Halloween , let’s take a look at some of the stranger objects donated to the Smithsonian over the years . The photograph above shows two model airplanes designed and built by Frank Ehling in the 1970s . Take a closer look the
The Progress 49 cargo craft ship went from zero to 28,000 km/h in about 8 minutes — as it usually does — but it then caught up and docked to the International Space Station in super-fast time, in less than six hours. This is the second Progress to take advantage of the abbreviated four-orbit rendezvous [...]
skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home October 30, 2012 David LeBlanc talks about Molten Salt Reactors Email This BlogThis Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Tweet At the 18 minute , talks about current University consortium starting to work towards 25 MWE prototype and a major engineering firm . Oil sands' 200 Billion carbon taxes over 35 years , 65279 mandated to be spent on . cleantech At about 17 minutes , talks about the opportunity to use molten salt reactors for oilsands and then bridge over to pure nuclear energy powered . civilization If you liked this article , please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon Thanks Posted by brian wang at 10 30 2012 Labels : economic impact fission molten salt physics science thorium uranium David LeBlanc talks about Molten Salt
skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home October 30, 2012 Tri-alpha Energy Nuclear Fusion 100MW Project emerging from Stealth Mode Email This BlogThis Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Tweet Tri-alpha Energy stealth nuclear fusion project that has over 140 million in funding including funding from Goldman Sachs has a 79 page presentation . Tri-Alpha structures in . 12C H T Talk Polywell Tri-alpha Energy has a patent Controlled fusion in a field reversed configuration and direct energy . conversion The 11B p,α αα reaction When 675 keV protons strike 11B , a resonance in 12C is formed at 16.6 MeV having a width of 300 . keV This resonance decays by emitting a primary α−particle , leading to the first excited state of 8Be which is 3 MeV above the ground state . This state decays into two
skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home October 30, 2012 Emerging Nuclear Fission and Fusion Innovations Talk by Mark Halper Email This BlogThis Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Tweet Introduction for 4 minutes then fast neutron reactors Terrawave , China , and others , Full size reactor should be commercial 2030 General Atomics 6.5 minutes 2 page datasheet 8 page executive summary China at about 8 minutes QPower Pebble bed in South America . 30 . MW Nuclear fusion General Fusion , Lawrenceville Plasma Physics and others about 15:00 minutes starts Tri-alpha Energy has raised over 140 million . If you liked this article , please give it a quick review on ycombinator or StumbleUpon Thanks Posted by brian wang at 10 30 2012 Labels : china dense plasma focus energy fission focus fusion
Subscribe Today Renew Give a Gift Archives Customer Service Facebook Twitter Newsletter SEARCH Health Medicine Mind Brain Technology Space Human Origins Living World Environment Physics Math Video Photos Podcast RSS Time lapse : Close to the Heavens A wind is rising Looking up to Saturn Just in case you’ve forgotten how brain-destroyingly big Saturn : is Click to encronosenate . This shot of the ringed wonder was taken by the Cassini spacecraft when it was well over 2 million kilometers from the planet . The spacecraft was south of the rings , looking up toward the north . The Sun is shining down on the rings from this perspective , so they look darker than you might expect , and the use of a near-infrared filter accentuates storms in the southern hemisphere . cloudtops So why does this
skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home October 29, 2012 Google Reveals the Nexus 10 and it is the strongest tablet competitor to the Apple iPad Email This BlogThis Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Tweet Google Play Nexus 10 is the newest tablet from . Google With the world’s highest resolution tablet display , all new multi-user features , immersive HD content and the best Google app . It will be available for purchase on Tuesday , Nov . 13th for 399 for a 16GB WiFi version and 499 for a 32 GB . version 2560-by-1600 high-resolution display Chrome is now better than ever on Nexus 10. Advanced MIMO WiFi and accelerated page loading give you web browsing speeds up to 4x faster than normal . WiFi CPU : Dual-core A15 GPU : Mali T604 1.33 pounds 5 MP main camera 1.9 MP front camera nine hours
, , skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home October 29, 2012 Incremental Solar Electric Propulsion Improvement Enables Electric Propulsion Human Missions to the Moon , Asteroids , and Mars Email This BlogThis Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Tweet NASA FISO presentation This Way To Deep Space Electric Propulsion Human Missions to the Moon , Asteroids , and Mars 27 pages New solar array technologies e.g . ROSA , FAST , Ultraflex could provide the power for a high-‐power SEP stage with specific powers of 130-‐220 W kg Space Solar array technology has been doubling every four . years There are other potentials for more radical improvement in space capabilities , but this incremental scaling up and improvement of what has already flown in . space The Japanese Ikaros satellite , a solar
skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home October 29, 2012 Oak Ridge National Lab Debuts the 20 petaflop Titan supercomputer Email This BlogThis Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Tweet The U.S . Department of Energy's DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new era of scientific supercomputing today with , Titan a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second—or 20 petaflops—by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming . Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system , Jaguar , while overcoming power and space limitations inherent in the previous generation of high-performance computers . Oak Ridge National Laboratory is home to Titan , the world’s most powerful
skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home October 29, 2012 Samsung's third quarter smartphone shipments double Apple's Email This BlogThis Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Tweet Samsung shipped more than twice as many smartphones as Apple . Inc in the third quarter , as the South Korean company dramatically expanded its lead over its U.S . rival , according to ABI . Research Worldwide handset shipments decreased 1.9 YoY to 387.3 million units in Q3 2012, according to new data from market intelligence firm ABI Research . Worldwide smartphone shipments increased 32.8 YoY to 155.5 million over the same period . Samsung retained the lead position in both handset and smartphone shipments . Underscoring its accomplishment , Samsung shipped more than double the smartphones of second place Apple .
skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home October 28, 2012 Ultracompact on-chip silicon optical logic gates Email This BlogThis Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Tweet Arxiv All-optical integrated circuits for computing and information processing have been pursued for decades as a potential strategy to overcome the speed limitations intrinsic to electronics . However feasible on-chip integrated logic units and devices still have been limited by its size , quality , scalability , and reliability . Here we demonstrate all-passive on-chip optical AND and NAND logic gates made from a directional emitting cavity connecting two ultrasmall photonic crystal heterojunction diodes . The measured transmission spectra show more than 10dB contrast of the logic transport with a high phase tolerance ,
Subscribe Today Renew Give a Gift Archives Customer Service Facebook Twitter Newsletter SEARCH Health Medicine Mind Brain Technology Space Human Origins Living World Environment Physics Math Video Photos Podcast RSS Hurricane Sandy intensifies as it grows Splashdown The Dragon returns to the nest As I write this , moments ago , the SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a two week mission to the International Space Station . Splashdown occurred at 19:22 UTC . Yay UPDATE 20:30 UTC SpaceX has a picture of the Dragon floating in the Pacific : Click to ensmaugenate . This ends the first operational mission of the Dragon . It’s the first of twelve contracted by NASA to bring supplies up to and back from the ISS . There was no live coverage of the splashdown ,
skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home October 27, 2012 India aspires to be the next university superpower but only 40 attend secondary school now Email This BlogThis Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Tweet BBC News India has ambitious plans to increase graduate numbers in a way which would give it the size and status of an education . superpower The figures are staggering . India's government speaks of increasing the proportion of young people going to university from 12 at present to 30 by 2025 approaching the levels of many Western . countries It wants to expand its university system to meet the aspirations of a growing middle class , to widen access , and become a knowledge powerhouse It will mean increasing the country's student population from 12 million to over 30 million , and
, Subscribe Today Renew Give a Gift Archives Customer Service Facebook Twitter Newsletter SEARCH Health Medicine Mind Brain Technology Space Human Origins Living World Environment Physics Math Video Photos Podcast RSS Flatly wrong global warming denial NuSTAR catches a black hole’s hot belch Oh , snap Another X-class flare from the Sun Yesterday , an active region on the sun basically , a collection of magnetically active sunspots popped off a series of flares that were actually fairly energetic . NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory caught the action in this video Neat These shots were in the ultraviolet , where flares are easier to spot . Sunspots are where the Sun’s complex magnetic field pokes through the surface . The field lines store ridiculous amounts of energy did you see my BAFact
I just found out that Devin Jacobson, a member of the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA), has been maintaining a blog entitled “JSEA Activities” (a name almost as unique as the one on this blog :).
Many of the posts are about Devin’s thoughts about space and the future and many of them are about activities at [...]
Las Cruces, New Mexico - October 17, 2012 - The National Space Society (NSS) and the New Mexico Museum of Space History (NMMSH) announced a new partnership on Wednesday for the establishment of a permanent home for historic records chronicling the development of the space activist community and the U.S. space industry.
This alliance is the [...]
There is a new space elevator-themed short out now called Payload. It’s nice to see the Space Elevator getting more publicity this way, but this short film is a real downer - it makes The Hunger Games look like It’s a Wonderful Life in comparison…
And, maybe it’s just me, but the opening shot of an ascending Space Elevator reminded me a [...]
Yes, Brewster Rockit fans, your intrepid hero has now commented on the Space Elevator.
The joke is old (see here and here and elsewhere too, I’m sure), but he has the basic facts of a Space Elevator correct and the artwork is pretty good
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I’m very pleased to announce that Yi-Jeng Huang, a resident of the Canada, has agreed to join ISEC as our new eNewsletter editor.
Yi-Jeng brings a lot of experience in creating and editing newsletters to the table as well as a passion for the Space Elevator. He attended the recent Space Elevator conference and volunteered his [...]