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Undergrads at Colorado Crash a NASA Satellite Into The Ocean
Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:56:04 -0400
Call it a crash course. A group of undergrads at the University of Colorado at Boulder got to participate in an unusual and awesome classroom activity on Monday, the culmination of a weeks-long process to decommission a NASA science satellite: they crashed a satellite into the atmosphere, sending it to a fiery death.
The Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) spent seven years aloft under the careful guidance of professionals and their undergrad protégés at CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). The satellite gathered key data on polar ice, ice sheets and sea ice dynamics that have informed nearly a decade of climate research, but on Monday -- low on fuel and out of time -- ICESat's number was up.
But it wasn't all explosions in the sky. Decommissioning the satellite was a process that required the undergrads to spend seven days a week calculating positions, plotting re-entry scenarios, and ensuring that whatever debris did survive re-entry landed somewhere where it wouldn't do any damage.
That location happened to be the Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia, and no more than 200 pounds of ICESat's original 2,000-pound mass was expected to survive re-entry. The team of undergrads and LASP professionals used the last of ICESat's fuel to put it on course for a spectacular death, and on Monday the satellite re-entered the atmosphere and largely burned up.
Such an honor is rare, particularly for undergraduate students. The last decommissioning-by-fire of a NASA satellite occurred in 2002 and was conducted by NASA personnel. That just might qualify them for inclusion in our guide to the 30 coolest college classes in the country.
[University of Colorado]
Loud Video: NASA Test Fires Largest-Ever Solid Rocket Motor
Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:01:43 -0400
In Utah today, NASA completed a successful test of the world's largest, most powerful solid rocket motor, the DM-2. For two minutes, the motor, designed to provide up to 3.6 million pounds of thrust, roaringly fired a column of flame, while some 760 instruments monitored its every aspect. Best to turn down your speakers before the countdown in this video hits zero.
Before the motor was fired, the engineers chilled it to 40 degrees below zero, for additional stress testing. It reportedly passed every test. The motor is intended to be used in the heavy-lift rocket segment of the Constellation program that NASA has slated for 2015.
Technological Tracking of Free-Range Felons Could Make Incarceration Obsolete
Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:01:36 -0400
Americans have a prison problem -- namely, we’ve got a whole lot of people in prisons and that’s a huge drain not only on hard money in our public coffers, but on man-hours lost by both the inmates and the people who spend their productive hours keeping an eye on them. But Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic, describes a new prison paradigm that would take the economic – and, for the inmates, psychological – duress out of our penal system: let most of the inmates go free. Then use technology to monitor their every move.
This brave new world of free-range felons is highly reliant on technological solutions, but, advocates argue, it would take tremendous strain off a failed prison system into which decent people who’ve fallen afoul of the law (often related to illegal substances) come out of prison hardened, more violent, and with a slew of new friends from their time spent inside. By keeping pettier criminals out of jail, we keep them working, keep them among positive influences like family (a relationship for which the benefits are often reciprocal), and keep them out of trouble.
How does the system keep them out of trouble? The current parole/probation system is also something of a failure, with overworked officers trying to ensure that too many felons keep their noses clean, day in and day out. Technological solutions like the ExacuTrack from Anderson, Indiana-based BI Incorporated can do that automatically. The combination ankle bracelet and GPS transponder (worn on the waist like a cell phone) keeps real-time tabs on its clientele, making sure they do what they’re supposed to do and stay away from places where the state doesn’t want them.
For instance, a parole officer could detail a rigid routine for a free-range prisoner, ensuring he adheres to his work schedule (we’re using the masculine “he” here – in the majority of cases it’s accurate), reports for community service, and stays the hell away from schools or that watering hole down on 2nd Street where the whole trouble started in the first place. Not only that, but the tracking tech can make sure he stays clear of other felons wearing the device, but also from further crime – who would recruit a partner in crime who has a GPS tracker attached to his belt, anyhow?
BI’s technology is already capable of monitoring the free-range felon’s sweat for traces of alcohol use (what’s up, LiLo!) if necessary, but future versions could also monitor for other substances to ensure state charges stay off the hard stuff or on their meds. And as other wireless technologies progress, so too could the monitoring tech, for instance checking for proximity to the kinds of products the "prisoner" has a habit of stealing.
It sounds intrusive, but when citizens are convicted of felonies they do give up some rights. And given that the alternative is to sit in a prison cells, many would likely leap at the option to remain on the outside as a productive, yet partially restricted, member of society. Of course, we’ll always need places to put those citizens that are true menaces to society, but given that American has more than 2 million people wasting away behind bars right now in the U.S. – a population the size of Houston, as Wood points out – the idea of letting our less dangerous criminals walk among us doesn’t seem so bad.
[The Atlantic]
Archive Gallery: First Looks at Favorite Architecture and Structures
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:00:28 -0400
In Demonstration, Laser-Powered UAV Charged From the Ground Stays Aloft For Hours
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:58:12 -0400
An unmanned aerial surveillance drone is only as good as its power source, and as such many technologies are being considered that could drastically extend the duration of drone missions – for instance, DARPA’s Vulture program has helped develop a giant solar plane that, theoretically, could fly for five years straight. But Seattle-based LaserMotive thinks laser power is the answer, and to prove it they recently kept a tiny 22-gram helicopter aloft for hours by beaming power to it via a laser.
LaserMotive knows a thing or two about turning laser power into mechanical energy; last year the firm beamed energy to a robot that climbed nearly 3,000 feet up a cable suspended form a helicopter, a feat impressive enough to win $900,000 from NASA. Now LaserMotive is demonstrating that similar ground-based lasers could beam energy to either fixed-wing or hovering rotary-wing UAVs high in the sky, keeping batteries topped up with juice so that they never have to land, with flight durations limited only by the durability of the aircraft’s motors.
Take the tiny laser-powered helicopter. LaserMotive kept the aircraft aloft for six hours at last week’s AUVSI Unmanned Systems Conference in Denver using a 7-centimeter beam of near-infrared laser that automatically tracked the helicopter as it moved up and down. The helicopter eventually failed, but only when the motor gave out. The laser never stopped beaming energy.
Better motor tech could lead to unmanned systems that fly missions that last days or weeks, powered by ground based energy beams that keep them running indefinitely. Portable UAV systems could allow troops operating at forward operating bases to send small surveillance platforms skyward to hover overhead, giving them an eye in the sky over their temporary quarters. Troops on the move could feasibly keep drones aloft above their convoys, powered from lasers mounted on the vehicles.
Of course, we could also just use lasers to blast UAVs out of the sky.
[New Scientist]
Tiny, Five-Nanometer Silicon Oxide Switches Could Create Single Chips With Terabyte Storage
Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:12:07 -0400
Even with great strides being made regularly in the realms of nanotech and materials science, Moore’s Law – the notion that the number of transistors that can be placed on a given integrated circuit doubles every 18-24 months – has for several years been bearing down on engineers who have shrunk conventional chip technology about as far as material limitations will let them. But a graduate student at Rice University has demonstrated that a well-known insulator – silicon oxide – may just be the minuscule digital switches of the very near future.
Researchers at a Rice University lab demonstrated last year that current could repeatedly break and reconnect tiny, 10-nanometer graphite strips to create reliable, very small memory bits. At the time they didn’t understand why the graphite did this so well; now, grad student Jun Yao has figured it out, and it has little to do with graphite.
Using silicon oxide, an insulator, as the meat in a tiny semiconductor sandwich, Yao showed that the electrodes will strip oxygen from the silicon oxide leaving behind a small chain of nano-sized silicon crystals. That crystal chain can then be connected or broken repeatedly by varying the electrical charge passed through it, creating a tiny switch that is always either on or off. And by tiny, we mean very tiny; Yao’s silicon oxide switch is just five nanometers (that’s five billionths of a meter) wide.
The graphite switches that seemed impressive last year were double that size, and conventional electronics can’t even come close to switches that small. Flash memory, in theory, will bottom out at 20 nanometers. Other conventional pathways might someday hit 10 nanometers, but it will be expensive to get there. Silicon oxide is already used in chip manufacturing and would be relatively easy to integrate into existing chip manufacturing tech.
Moreover, unlike flash memory silicon-oxide chips wouldn’t need to hold a charge and it’s perfectly suited to be arrayed in 3-D structures that can further help cram more switches onto a given switch, meaning chips get more memory for every nanometer of real estate. An Austin tech company is already testing a 1,000 memory element chip in collaboration with Yao and his colleagues at Rice. If the technology doesn’t hit any serious obstacles, single chips with memory comparable to today’s high-capacity disk drives could be a reality in just five years.
DARPA's Cyber Insider Threat Program Is the Agency's Great Hope for Ending Leaks
Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:27:20 -0400
The recent WikiLeaks exposure was a huge black eye for the U.S. Department of Defense, supposedly one of the more secure state organizations we have working for us. Its impact clearly wasn’t lost on the Pentagon, whose blue sky research arm has launched a new project designed to ferret out malicious behavior on DoD networks. Named CINDER – Cyber INsiDER Threat – the project is designed not to sniff out people, but adversarial actions as they happen.
To quote DARPA’s request for industry solicitations: “The goal of CINDER will be to greatly increase the accuracy, rate and speed with which insider threats are detected and impede the ability of adversaries to operate undetected within government and military interest networks.”
The philosophy driving CINDER is the idea that singular actions by an insider with malicious intent aren’t noticeable as malicious – say, the downloading of a sensitive document from a DoD server or the searching for information on a particular topic. But the larger adversary mission should be noticeable when compared to normal mission activities. By monitoring strings of actions rather than isolated events, CINDER is expected to pinpoint system users who may be up to something malicious.
CINDER assumes that insiders are operating within the Pentagon’s most sensitive networks, so rather than focus on keeping outside threats out, it will be designed to weed out those already inside. As Danger Room points out, it seems like a recipe for false positives, but DARPA seems to think a properly-designed CINDER will be able to distinguish between normal and malicious mission contexts.
We’ll see. In the meantime, while DARPA works CINDER into serviceable shape, the DoD is expected to roll out a new cyber strategy by year’s end to hopefully curtail the kinds of massive leaks and cyber breaches that have been the embarrassment of the Pentagon lately.
[FedBizOpps via Danger Room]
When Drones Go Rogue In Friendly Skies, How Do We Bring Them Home?
Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:00:20 -0400
An advanced fly-by-wire system capable of landing grossly damaged unmanned aircraft—demonstrated on video saving a plane missing 80 percent of one wing—is key to solving one of unmanned flight’s biggest problems
Word spread last week that a rogue MQ-8B Fire Scout copter drone entered restricted airspace just 40 miles shy of Washington D.C. after losing contact with its operators. The revelation occurred smack in the middle of AVUSI 2010, the world’s largest UAV tradeshow. And it served as a poignant reminder that all the game-changing technology on display here at the Denver Convention Center still has some innovating to do, especially when flight crews lose control of their unmanned craft.
But to lose control of a flying robot over a warzone is one thing; things get much more complicated in crowded domestic skies. One remarkable system, capable of bringing a plane missing most of one wing safely home, aims to make losing control a more palatable proposition.
Speaking generally about the issue of bringing UAVs into compliance with FAA rules, Lockheed Martin’s Bob Ruszkowski, a Skunk Works systems engineer, said, “I think we need to rise to the challenge rather than ask for forgiveness.” Then he posed a rhetorical question to underscore his point: “How many of those UAVs [in the convention center] do you see with a collision beacon? Or nav lights?”
Very few, in fact, but there were signs of such advancements.
The most dramatic evidence of technology that might clear the way for UAVs entering national air space was on display at the Rockwell Collins booth. Suspended from the rafters was a sub-scale model F/A-18 missing the better part of its right wing, which had been ditched as the plane ripped above Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground as part of a DARPA-sponsored technology demonstration this summer. But the model didn’t crash.
It’s sounds improbable, until you see the video:
The plane is up and away, there goes the wing, and then… nothing that your gut grasp of Newton’s laws would lead you to expect: The craft shudders briefly, stabilizes, and then comes in for an astonishing, albeit a bit rough, landing. “We’re not defying physics,” insists Dave Vos, Rockwell Collins’ senior director of control technologies and UAVs. “As long as it’s physically possible to put the airplane in some configuration, attitude, velocity and orientation to recover some degree of control, we can do it.”
The technology, called Damage Tolerance Control, consists of a palm-sized box stuffed with sensors and advanced algorithms that taps into a plane’s existing avionics. It exploits the fact that flight control systems are exponentially more capable to counteract in-flight damage than a human pilot. With all due respect to Sully, a craft’s electronics can move its flaps in configurations you could never imagine in the 2 milliseconds available to compensate. Rather than diagnosing the problem, Damage Tolerance Control reacts instantaneously and automatically when it senses a dramatic change in trajectory, adjusting an aileron, say, and cheating the nose to the left to remove drag from the intact wing to keep the craft from whipping into a death spiral. “If you step off your front porch and your leg buckles, you don’t have time to diagnose it,” Vos says. “You catch yourself and worry about your knee later.”
The system will be tested in a UAV currently flying missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vos won’t say which one, but according to a spokesperson for General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., it’s not the Predator or Reaper. If the system works as advertised, the improved survivability of mid-air damage would be a boon to the military, which under new budgetary restrictions can’t afford to waste resources.
But on the civilian side, improving the reliability of UAVs with a system that automatically lands the craft if something goes wrong is a significant step toward proving that unmanned planes could one day coexist with manned ones. “Once people start believing it’s possible, it’s going to happen really fast,” says Vos.
Stay tuned this week for an in-depth photo report from AVUSI, the drone trade show
China Executes Mysterious, Secret In-Orbit Satellite Rendezvous
Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:59:56 -0400
Satellites may be docking together in orbit -- are they building Voltron?
Though the world found out about it through a Russian media outlet, China has been conducting complicated space maneuvers with two of its science satellites over the past few months, directing two of its "Shi Jian" (practice) satellites to rendezvous some 370 miles above the Earth, and possibly even touch. But the fact that China has been so hush-hush about the close encounter has some wondering what it plans to use such technology for. It could be used to build a peaceful space station, but also for interfering with other nations' satellites.
Russian space observer Igor Lissov first noticed the rendezvous buried in publicly available U.S. military data on global satellite positions. In turn it was picked up by Russian media -- and only then by Xinhua, China's state media outlet -- which brought it to the attention of the international community. The data show that between June 12 and August 16 of this year, Chinese satellite SJ-12, a science satellite launched in June, made a series of maneuvers to position itself closer to SJ-06F, an older science satellite launched in October of 2008.
The satellites ended up so close together that there's speculation that they may have even touched. SJ-06F experienced an anomaly in its orbit, shifting slightly on August 19 according to the U.S. military data. Natural external forces, like the Earth's atmospheric drag, could have caused the slight shift in the satellite's orbit, though that seems unlikely. It also could've been nudged by SJ-12, which at that point was orbiting very, very close to SJ-06F.
Orbital rendezvous, of course, is extremely complicated and demonstrates a broader technological know-how on the part of the Chinese. Outside of operations like docking with the space station, the U.S. has only undertaken the task a handful of times with two orbiting satellites. With China's first space station module, Tiangong-1 slated for launch next year, the test was likely a test of the nation's ability to dock two spacecraft in orbit.
But the fact that China didn't undertake the procedure transparently has some worried that the test might have been military in nature. Whether or not that's the case, China ain't saying. China and the U.S. have both been known to flex their military-space muscles before -- creating a good deal of dangerous space junk in the process -- so let's hope this kind of behavior doesn't set off a new round of power-posturing akin to the memorable, somewhat irresponsible "watch-me-blow-up-this-satellite" showdown of '07-'08.
[New Scientist, Space Review]
Archive Gallery: 138 Years of Architectural Landmarks
Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:00:34 -0400
PopSci's first looks at the Empire State Building, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more
We've heard it said that Rome wasn't built in a day. And while Popular Science isn't old enough to have witnessed the Colosseum going up, we have covered in our pages some of the 20th century's most important architectural achievements rise from nothing but a dream and a blueprint.
We've combed the archives to gather some of our most important first looks at the buildings and structures that went on to define skylines around the world.
Click to launch the photo gallery
Considering the extent to which suspension bridges, skyscrapers, and towering monuments have become symbols of human progression, it's hard to believe that just a hundred, even fifty years ago, our most beloved landmarks only existed as blueprints dreamed up by earnest young engineers. Mount Rushmore had no faces on it. Commuters in San Francisco still rode ferries across the Bay. So-called towering skyscrapers rose only thirty floors.
In 1927, when New York's 57-story Woolworth Building was still the world's tallest high-rise, we continued to ponder the mechanics of installing elevators for high-rises. "Forty thousand people within four walls!" we exclaimed. "Edison and others warn us against threatening chaos."
At times, the process of planning and construction did involve a lot of chaos. Hundreds of workers died while building the Hoover Dam. Even Mount Rushmore's main sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, didn't live to see his masterpiece completed.
Needless to say, finishing projects was no easy feat, so we combed our archives to see how engineers turned empty lots, untended fields, and undisturbed bedrock into the past century's most iconic man-made structures.
Launch the gallery for PopSci's first looks at the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, and more.
