Really Rocket Science

Wanna buy a robot fish? How about a pregnant robot? I don’t think the first one’s for sale, but the last one is gonna cost ya about $20,000. These were two of the robot-related items that landed in my news reader this morning; the former casued me to ask "why would someone build this?", while the latter had me asking "why not?"

Notes from the Technology Underground clued me in to the existance of MITs’ RoboTuna, and pointed me to  Pink Tentacles’ post about a robotic carp recently turned loose in a Japanese aquarium.  While it seems like a pretty cool thing to invent, and maybe it will help scientst learn more about the "phsyics of swimming" as Bill puts it at Notes, I’m kinda left wondering what the point of the whole exercise is, other than invention for inventions sake. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) 

The pregnant robot, found via The Raw Feed (which also links to the robot’s instruction manual), is probably stranger the RoboTuna, but the reasons for building it are easier for me to grasp. 

The full-sized, blond, pale mannequin is in demand because medicine is rapidly abandoning centuries-old training methods that use patients as guinea pigs, turning instead to high-tech simulations. It’s better to make a mistake on a $20,000 robot than a live patient.

… Noelle, from Miami-based Gaumard Scientific Co. Inc., is used in most of Kaiser’s 30 hospitals nationwide, and other hospitals are putting in orders. The Northwest Physicians Insurance Co. is sponsoring similar training programs in 22 hospitals in Oregon and Idaho, rolling out Noelle initially at five of them.

Other companies make lifelike mannequins to train paramedics in emergencies, but Noelle appears to be the only high-tech, pregnant model available.

Not a bad idea. A robot will probably not react to hearing an "Oops" during deliver in the same way an actual person would. I’ll say it again; people build the craziest things, and for reasons I don’t always get but that sometimes end up making sense.

Is science fiction destined to become just science? 

Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason – it’s the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy)….

The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that avoids this nasty side effect by producing gamma rays with much lower energy….

When antimatter meets matter, both annihilate in a flash of energy. This complete conversion to energy is what makes antimatter so powerful. Even the nuclear reactions that power atomic bombs come in a distant second, with only about three percent of their mass converted to energy.

Antimatter rockets have significant advantages over nuclear-powered spacecraft, including improved safety, efficiency and speed:

The Reference Mission spacecraft would take astronauts to Mars in about 180 days. "Our advanced designs, like the gas core and the ablative engine concepts, could take astronauts to Mars in half that time, and perhaps even in as little as 45 days," said Kirby Meyer, an engineer with Positronics Research on the study.

Advanced engines do this by running hot, which increases their efficiency or "specific impulse" (Isp). Isp is the "miles per gallon" of rocketry: the higher the Isp, the faster you can go before you use up your fuel supply. The best chemical rockets, like NASA’s Space Shuttle main engine, max out at around 450 seconds, which means a pound of fuel will produce a pound of thrust for 450 seconds. A nuclear or positron reactor can make over 900 seconds. The ablative engine, which slowly vaporizes itself to produce thrust, could go as high as 5,000 seconds.

Although one of the drawbacks to antimatter rockets is its high cost of development, we wonder if that can’t be mitigated by passing the hat around to the millions of science-fiction fans around the world, who have dreamed of anti-matter-powered rockers for years.

(Via Rawstory.) 

COSMIC— the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate– was successfully launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Friday night. The AP reports:

Six weather satellites successfully reached orbit and were ready to begin their five-year mission to track hurricanes, monitor climate change and study space weather, it was announced Saturday.

"Ground stations have received signals from all six satellites," according to an update on the Web site for the project’s manager, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

The satellites were launched on a rocket booster Friday evening from this Central Coast base. They were placed into orbit about 500 miles above Earth, where they separated to form a chain.

The satellites will take about 2,500 daily measurements by using global positioning receivers to track radio signals passing through the atmosphere, scientists said.

The information gathered will be used to enhance research and improve weather forecasting. Scientists hope the data will help them better track storms and monitor long-term climate change.

The COSMIC web page can be found here. 

As I’ve said before, I’m not really a DIY kinda guy. Putting together IKEA furniture and my kid’s toys are about as good as it gets. But I admire people who do roll up their sleeves and make stuff. So, every Friday I’m going to try and find a few cool DIY projects to feature here. 

Speaking of kids’ toys, by the way, I stumbled across a pretty impressive project involving a kid’s toy over at I Make Stuff, where the blogger interviewed a guy who usually makes "robots that kill other robots" but recently did something pretty cool with an Etch-a-Sketch.

I had one of these growing up, but could never make a decent picture with it. Little did I know that all I needed were some pulleys, foot pedals, and a laptop to control it all. But you still have to shake it to wipe out the picture. Check out the video podcast at I Make Stuff, recorded at Seattle Battle Bots IV, as well as  more pictures of the CNC controlled Etch-a-Sketch.

Oh, and if you’d prefer something that’s not only cool but useful as well, DIY Happy has a link to instructions on how to build your own Segway-like scooter. I had a scooter growing up too, but nothing like this. There’s video there as well, and details on the version 2 of the scooter includes an amusing picture of some people engaged in a game of Segway Polo.

The European Space Agency released their first images from the Venus Express mission, including our first view of the south pole.

As reported by the AP’s Melissa Eddy in The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.):

"We can see there is a swirl here that is similar to the one we know from the north pole," said Horst Uwe Keller, who leads the team operating the craft’s wide-angle camera – one of seven instruments aboard the Venus Express.  

Using infrared technology that allows the camera to peer though the clouds, scientists hope to be able to determine how the sulfuric acid that swathes the planet was formed, and pinpoint the cause of the high-speed winds that sends it swirling in massive clouds.

 

The ESA has some really cool images and 3-D videos on their site, too.

Not that I’ll need that service any time soon, but apparently Masten Enterprises are the people to call if you need to send something into space. For a fee, they’ll blast your stuff into the stratosphere. There’s even a video of how it works.

The prices seem pretty reasonable at first glance. 

350 gram CanSat – $99
1 kg Custom Payload – $250
2 kg Custom Payload – $500
5 kg Custom Payload – $1250

If you’re like me you’ll need a translation. 

0.77 lbs – $99
2.20 lbs – $250
4.40 lbs – $500
11.02 lbs – $1250

Then again maybe not. Seems like a lot of money to send something ranging from the size of a soda can to a well-fed cat into space. And how do you get your stuff back once it’s up there? Or do you just send up stuff that you no longer need? And if so, this is better than throwing it away or recycling it how? 

It sounds like a cool idea, but unless someone can explain to me just how useful it is, my advice to anyone who has something they no longer need and want to send into space is pretty simple: hold a garage sale.

Via Make.

Before I had a kid of my own, I used to shake my head at parents who used "tethers," that looked like old fashioned telephone cords, to keep their toddlers from toddling off in public. Three years into parenthood, I haven’t succumbed to the "urge to tether" yet, but I’m a little less judgmental about the whole thing.

I have enough trouble keeping up with my three-year-old now. I’m already wondering how I’m going to keep up with him when he’s a teenager with enough subway fare to go where he wants. The answer is simple than I thought: GPS. If it can help find lost pets, it ought to work with kids too. So, though my little one isn’t big enough for a cell phone yet, I was relieved to read on Mobile Wireless News that Sprint just rolled a GPS-driven kid locator service for parents.

Using the Global Positioning System, the service allows parents to track up to four cell phones over the Internet or on their own wireless device. Parents can periodically ask the service to find the child’s phone, displaying the location on a road map.

Parents can also set alerts, automatically warning the parent if the child isn’t at a certain place, such as school or soccer practice, at a specific time.

The child’s phone also displays a text message, letting the child know they’ve been searched for and found.

Of course, there are other uses, like keeping track of elderly parents (as the article notes) or keeping tabs on a wandering spouse, which leads to charges that Big Brother is in the house.  I guess there’s two sides to every technology, and whether it’s used benevolently or not depends on whose pushing the buttons. But, as a parent, if kids can’t remember to be in the house when the streetlights come on, this seems like a pretty good way to remind them, when yelling down the street isn’t an option.

In an effort to create a truly zero-emissions vehicle, Nevada-based Hunt Aviation is exploring ways to use gravity as a powersource– for an airplane:

In order for the GravityPlane to become airborne, gas bags inside a pair of rigid, zeppelin-like structures are filled with helium from storage tanks inside the vehicle. This causes the aircraft to become lighter-than-air, and it rises from the ground. Compressed-air jets on the sides of the craft add further propulsion, pushing the vehicle skyward and decreasing the craft’s overall weight by releasing the stored air which acts as ballast. Once the craft reaches the altitude where the helium is no longer lighter than the surrounding air– theoretically as high as ten miles up– it is unable to climb any further. Some of the stored compressed air is then expanded into the dirigible areas, decreasing the buoyancy effect of the helium and starting the aircraft’s descent phase.

Hunt Aviation has a video explaining the concept of how the plane works. On one level it’s a simple idea– combining lighter-than-air technology to get the vehicle aloft and then gliding from extreme height to the destination. But the devil, as they say, is in the details, and the video reveals the technical complexity that is often involved in implementing a "simple" idea.

Commenters at this blog were relatively unimpressed by the concept. What do you think? 

The word from the rocket scientists in Japan is good:
 

JSAT Corporation ("JSAT"; Head office: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President and CEO: Kiyoshi Isozaki) is pleased to announce that today it has successfully launched JCSAT-9 communications satellite. JCSAT-9 lifted off at 08:30 a.m. (Japan Standard Time) from a launch platform at 154º West Longitude on the Equator (approximately 2,240km south of Hawaii on sea). After this launch, JCSAT-9 was also successfully separated from its launch vehicle.

Sea Launch, an international consortium of Ukrainian, Norwegian, Russian and U.S. companies, does a great job of describing the launch sequence. And an even better job of broadcasting it (watch the video presentation).

The Planetary Society and Harvard physicist Paul Horowitz pointed a giant telescope at the sky for the first time yesterday, beginning a systematic search for light signals from an alien civilization. Science A-Go-Go reports:

Housed beneath a retractable roof situated high atop a wooded ridge in Harvard, the telescope isn’t what most people would expect when they visualize a powerful optical telescope. But what may look like a mish-mash of metal bars and mirrors to the uninitiated represents a truly ambitious project that would make Planetary Society founders Bruce Murray, Carl Sagan, and Louis Friedman, Executive Director of the Planetary Society, extremely proud….

[T]he powerful 72-inch SETI optical telescope pointed its giant mirror at the sky for the first time on April 11, and began a systematic search for light signals from an alien civilization.

The telescope has some impressive computer muscle behind it, with the developers claiming that it can process the equivalent of all books in print in a second. Its optical detectors are cutting edge as well, with a sensitivity that can detect a billionth-of-a-second flash of light. The formidable technology driving it should allow the new telescope to scan the entire northern hemisphere sky over the course of a year.

The Planetary Society says that the observatory represents the biggest SETI project it has ever sponsored… [D]espite many years of scanning the skies for radio signals, there has been little in the way of any definitive ET activity, hence the Society’s interest in the visible spectrum. "We have been listening for alien signals for decades," said Friedman, "it’s time we started to watch for signals as well."

It is now common among SETI advocates to argue that alien civilizations are just as likely to communicate with light signals as they are with radio waves, and not without good reason, as there are a number of advantages to using light as a form of interstellar communication. Unlike radio waves, a laser-like beam suffers little interference as it travels through space, not to mention the vast amount of data that can be transmitted using such a beam. Additionally, a laser’s unidirectional quality coupled with its brightness – capable of reaching intensities 10 times greater than the sun – make it easier for receivers to both see and track the beam to its source. And aside from the initial outlay, the optical SETI project is simpler, cheaper and will cost far less to maintain than its radio counterparts.

But one of the project’s major strengths is also one of its biggest weaknesses, because unless an extraterrestrial beam is pointed our way it is unlikely that it will be detected. But despite this limitation, the Society are happy that they are now covering yet another possible avenue of communication in their search for alien civilizations.