Really Rocket Science

I have to confess, one of the things I like most about traveling for business is that it usually means a long period of time during which I’m unreachable. The mobile phone is shut off, and I don’t have internet access so I can’t answer email. I’m free to take a nap or read a book while I’m in the air.

Well, no more. JetBlue is moving to do away with my mile-high refuge by making wi-fi internet available in-flight. 

JetBlue Airways Corp. won a government auction Friday for wireless spectrum that could be used to provide in-flight telephone, Internet, or entertainment services.

The winning bid of $7.02 million was placed through New York-based JetBlue’s entertainment subsidiary, LiveTV LLC, which provides DirecTV service on JetBlue flights.

The licenses will not mean travelers can use their cell phones in the air, but between instant messaging and the avilability of free Skype calls in the U.S. and Canada, who needs to use their movile phone in-flight.

Remember those flying robots we told you about earlier, and how Europe has some of their own. Well, now EU plans on putting those airborne bots to work. 

Fleets of unmanned "drone" aircraft fitted with powerful cameras are to be used to patrol Europe’s borders in a dramatic move to combat people-smuggling, illegal immigration and terrorism.

The Independent on Sunday can today reveal that the tiny planes will fly at more than 2,500 feet over the English Channel and Mediterranean beaches as part of a £1bn programme to equip Europe’s police forces, customs officers and border patrols with hi-tech surveillance and anti-terrorism equipment.

The aircraft, called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are already being used by the Belgian government to catch tankers illegally dumping oil in the North Sea. Several ships’ captains have already been prosecuted.

The European Commission now wants to use similar drones, which can have a 6-metre wing-span and weigh as little as 195kg, to patrol the Mediterranean coasts and the Balkans where illegal immigrants try to enter the EU. The Russian government is also close to flying drones over its borders.

Interesting news, but if you ask me they’ll only really be on to something when the put tentacles on those flying robots.

Looks like the spacewalk we blogged about yesterday went off without a hitch. Almost.

The spacewalk took 6 1/2-hours, longer than expected, but nowhere near the record of eight hours and 56 minutes set in 2001.

"OK. We’re going out," Russian commander Pavel Vinogradov said at 6:48 p.m. EDT Thursday as he and U.S. flight engineer Jeff Williams exited the Russian side of the station in their bulky suits while the outpost soared more than 220 miles above Earth.

Vinogradov attached himself to the end of a boom that can extend to 50 feet and Williams maneuvered him to an area on the station where the Russian commander installed a new vent for a broken oxygen-generation system. At one point, the spacewalkers were bathed in a golden glow from a sunset over the Pacific Ocean. After the sun passed, the temperature got chilly.

"My feet are like ice," Williams joked in Russian when asked if he was cold. A Russian flight controller responded, "We need to put brandy into the system instead of water." 

No word on the brandy, but there was a pretty cool droid on board the ISS.

More interesting uses for Google Maps — the site that brought satellite imagery to your desktop — keep cropping up.

Google has launched its first mashup–a map-based Web site with information about earth-friendly locations in five of the U.S.’s top travel destinations.

The site, at maps.google.com/green, features information on and video tours of spots in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Orlando, Fla., as well as tips for "traveling green" during the summer using Google Maps. 

… Listings include the Las Vegas Natural History Museum and the Go Raw Cafe in Las Vegas, the Tree People park and EcoLimo in Los Angeles, the Skyscraper Museum and Central Park in New York, the Forever Florida nature preserve and Horse World Riding Stables in Orlando and, in San Francisco the Red Victorian Bed and Breakfast and the Exploratorium.

But I think my favorite is a non-official mashup called Placeopedia, which matches WikiPedia articles with their locations. You can add a place, or spend click around to various places, which is a great time-waster or way to take a vacation without leaving your desk.

A couple of fifth grade students are going to see thier first rocket launch, and it’s a happy story of the internet community coming together to help a couple of fifth-graders who may be the next generation of rocket scientists. 

Here’s your chance to help do just that. Two fifth grade students from Indiana, Cameron Wade and Billy Shannon, both 11 years old, have an experiment that will launch onboard a suborbital NASA rocket. It’s part of a partnership between their school and NASA. The problem is, the grant they have doesn’t cover their own travel to Virginia to see the rocket launch!

They still want to go, of course. The trip will cost $3000, and they’re still $1000 from their goal.

And their experiment sounds pretty interesting. 

Their experiment is already in Virginia, waiting to be loaded onto the rocket. The students placed nuts and bolts screwed together in tiny bottles to see whether the vibrations from the rocket will break them apart.

They also sent up plant seeds, which they will plant this summer along with seeds that haven’t been airborne to see whether there is a difference in growth.

“They’re learning how to follow an experiment through,” Ghaffarian said. “They’re learning how to change the variables and see what happens, and it’s cool because … it makes it much more exciting than if you just buy a couple seeds and plant them.”

The nuts and bolts tie in with a unit the class did on robots and cars. The seeds work with lessons on extreme environments. Everyone in Ghaffarian’s third- through fifth-grade multiage class wrote essays that were judged by the school’s office staff on why they should be chosen for the Virginia field trip.

The good news? In less than a day, the money was raised. 

I am incredibly pleased and proud to announce that after just a few hours, BABloggers have donated more than $1000 to help the two fifth-graders and their teacher fly to Virginia to see their rocket launch!

… I just talked to Pamela Ghaffarian, the teacher, on the phone, and she was thrilled with how wonderful people have been to send her this money. She told me the two students, Cameron Wade and Billy Shannon, are really excited about the trip. I know they’re happy now, but wait until they actually see the launch! Even though it’s a small rocket, it’ll be really dramatic, and they’ll have the time of their lives.

And it might also inspire them to keep aiming high. Here’s to the science blogging community for coming together so quickly to help these students out!

I wrote earlier about the amount of debris in outerspace. Well, there’s one bit of debris that we won’t be adding to what’s already up there. 

Thursday’s 5 1/2-hour spacewalk by the Russian and U.S. occupants of the International Space Station will not include the previously announced attempt to hit a radio transmitting golf ball into Earth orbit, The New York Times reported Wednesday. 

The publicity stunt involved the payment of an undisclosed amount of money to Russia from a Canadian golf company. Russian officials did not explain the reason for the postponement.

In place of the golf shot, the astronauts will replace a malfunctioning camera on the U.S. side of the ISS. 

The spacewalk, sans golf clubs, is on for 6:40pm.

Via Marsblog.  

We’ve written before about scientists using satellites to track climate change and uncover Mayan ruins. Now scientists and activists are using satellites for another purpose– to spot human rights abuses:

Satellite images captured under a pioneering program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) provide powerful evidence that the government of Zimbabwe has destroyed an entire settlement and relocated thousands of residents as part of a campaign against political opponents.

The images, analyzed by the AAAS staff, show two views of the settlement of Porta Farm, located just west of the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. The first, an archived image from June 2002, shows an intact settlement with more than 850 homes and other buildings; an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 people lived in Porta Farm at the time. The second photo, taken by satellite on 6 April this year, shows that the settlement has been leveled.

The pictures were released Wednesday 31 May as central evidence in a report compiled by the international secretariat of Amnesty International in London and Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), based in Harare. The report, “Shattered Lives: The Case of Porta Farm,” views the destruction of the settlement and the forced relocation of its residents as emblematic of a broad campaign by the government of President Robert Mugabe to repress political opposition.

(Via Kottke.) 

Reading about a new satellite in New Scientist, set to launch in 2007, that could help us study the 4^th dimension by analyzing gamma-ray bursts:

Charles Keeton, a physicist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, U.S.,  and colleague Arlie Petters at Duke University in North Carolina, U.S., have calculated how many of these tiny black holes should exist – and how they might be detected – according to an offshoot of string theory.
 
The theory they use, called the Randall-Sundrum braneworld model, proposes that the 3D universe we live in is floating within a larger universe with an extra spatial dimension.
 
They based their calculations on black holes that each contain only the mass of a small asteroid. Assuming these objects make up 1% of the mass of nearby dark matter – whose existence can only be detected through its gravitational effects on normal matter – the team says there could be several thousand black holes in the solar system. And not only that: "The nearest ones would lie well inside Pluto’s orbit," says Keeton.
 

Even NASA is calling this “extreme physics,” which has a nice ring to it. 

We’ve covered this type of  topic before – we like anything having to do with anti-gravity, anti-matter and the “theory of everything.”

Consider this your mid-week 70s flashback. Science Daily reports that the two Voyager spacecraft are still sending back useful data to NASA scientists nearly 30 years after their launch — and they’re providing clues to better understanding both the heliosphere and the direction of our solar system through local space:

 The heliosphere, generated by the Sun, is sort of the cocoon in which the solar system rides. It has been suspected for several years that it is not spherical but more egg shaped. Voyager 1 recently reached one edge and it is estimated it will pass into interstellar space at about 12.4 billion miles from the Sun. It was recently announced that Voyager 2 has reached its more southerly edge, sooner than expected. It is now believed it will reach interstellar space at about 10.5 billion miles. This reveals that the heliosphere is not a sphere after all, but is more of a comet shape.

According to Cal Tech’s Ed Stone, the former director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Voyager chief scientist, the shape of the bubble is determined by what is pressing on the solar system from the outside, meaning the shape and force of interstellar gases. That is one explanation. Another put forth by Walter Cruttenden of the Binary Research Institute is that local gases are fairly uniform and the shape derives from the trajectory of the solar system through local space — possibly in its orbit around a companion star. While this latter explanation is far more speculative, it is not unlikely that local interstellar gases are relatively homogeneous and therefore the shape of the heliosphere may be at least partially due to motion of the solar system.

 

Amazingly, both Voyager spacecraft are expected to remain active for several more decades. Which is more than can be said for many other artifacts of the 70s. 

Saturn’s moon, that is. The first intelligent beings we know of in space (besides us, if we count) may be the ones we make ourselves. If this New York Times article is to be believed, scientists basically want to attach a blimp to a Roomba and send it to one of Saturn’s moons. 

A future space mission to Titan, Saturn’s intriguing moon enveloped in clouds, might deploy a blimp to float around the thick atmosphere and survey the sand dunes and carved valleys below.

… Until recently, interplanetary robotic explorers have largely been marionettes of mission controllers back on Earth. The controllers sent instructions, and the spacecraft diligently executed them.

But as missions go farther and become more ambitious, long-distance puppetry becomes less and less practical. If dumb spacecraft will not work, the answer is to make them smarter. Artificial intelligence will increasingly give spacecraft the ability to think for themselves.

… HAL, the soulful conversationalist at the helm of the spaceship in "2001: A Space Odyssey," is not on the drawing board. The work so far has been more along the lines of Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner, with autonomy to perform certain specific tasks.

Interesting. Just about everybody his brother has hacked a Roomba and/or blogged it. I guess the AI techs at NASA will get their crack at doing the same.