Really Rocket Science

First it was the XPrize. Then it was news that Virgin Galactic is building a commercial spaceport in New Mexico. Now, private space flight has taken yet another step closer to reality with news that the FAA has drafted a report proposing rules and regulations for commercial space flight. We’re not sure if your nail clippers will be permitted, but Darlene Superville reports on some of the new rules for the AP:

More than 120 pages of proposed rules, released by the government Dec. 29, regulate the future of space tourism. This don’t-forget list touches on everything from passenger medical standards to preflight training for the crew.

Before the trip, companies would be required to inform the “space flight participant” — or passenger — of the risks. Passengers also would be required to provide written consent before boarding.

Legislation signed a year ago by President Bush and designed to help the space industry flourish prohibits the Federal Aviation Administration from issuing safety regulations for passengers and crew for eight years, unless specific design features or practices cause a serious or fatal injury.

Physical exams for passengers are recommended, but will not be required, “unless a clear public safety need is identified,” the FAA says in the proposed regulations.

Passengers also would have to be trained on how to respond during emergencies, including loss of cabin pressure, fire and smoke, and how to get out of the vehicle safely.

To release the belt, lift up etc….

Laws governing private sector space endeavors, such as satellite launches, have existed for some time. But there had been no legal jurisdiction for regulating commercial human spaceflight.

Public comment on the proposed rules are allowed through Feb. 27, and final rules are expected to be announced by June 23.

An article in MosNews.COM tells us a ban on alcohol aboard the International Space Station (ISS) could be lifted in 2006 to allow crews nips of liquor after grueling work assignments, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported on Tuesday.

“They fly in orbit for half a year and perform a heavy workload, especially during exhausting space walks when they shed several kilos in weight over a few hours,” said a source in the Russian medical support teams for the manned space program. “Many people think a small ration of alcohol would help restore their strength.”

Moderate alcohol consumption was tolerated on Russia’s Mir space station until it was decommissioned in 2001, Independent Online website reported. But a strict ban has been in place on the ISS since Russia and the United States sent the first joint crew five years ago.

A tentative step was taken before New Year to loosen the measure when gifts sent on a cargo ship to cosmonaut Valery Tokarev and astronaut William MacArthur were thought to include chocolate liqueurs, the source said.

However, while Russian space controllers may favor allowing modest rations of cognac, the preferred drink of orbiting cosmonauts, the US space agency Nasa has previously insisted that missions must be teetotal.

This is a great story from the WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL:

Cooking a tasty brat is not rocket science.

So forgive me, Sheboygan, if I laughed when I first heard your plans for space travel.

Then I remembered that people in your fine city actually surf in Lake Michigan when the waves kick up each winter. That takes at least as much guts as blasting in a tin can past the stratosphere.

And then I remembered that the moon is made out of cheese, a Wisconsin specialty.

So maybe a Sheboygan space odyssey isn’t so far-out after all?

In case you missed it, state Sen. Joe Liebham, R-Sheboygan, has launched legislation at the state Capitol to create the Wisconsin Aerospace Authority. His bill, SB 352, would seek federal money for “Spaceport Sheboygan,” a launch pad in Brat Land for commercial satellites and, eventually, private spaceships carrying tourists.

At a minimum, I have to give Liebham credit for “thinking outside the bun” about Sheboygan’s and Wisconsin’s long-term economic futures. Most politicians don’t think past the next election. Liebham is literally shooting for the stars.

Yet Liebham had to know his proposal would draw snickers. Sure, hundreds of Midwestern high school science students annually meet in Sheboygan to shoot 8-foot-tall rockets over Lake Michigan. But rockets with people on them?

Skeptics might stamp Liebham’s idea as a clever grab for federal money. Remember the $223 million “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska. Remember the $50 million indoor rainforest for Iowa?

This might be another boondoggle. Or maybe, just maybe, Liebham is on to something.

Sheboygan, like Cape Canaveral in Florida, sits on the western edge of a large body of water. Booster rockets could fall into Lake Michigan as innocently as rockets from the space shuttles fall into the Atlantic Ocean.

UW-Madison, with ties to NASA, could help with technical know-how. And Oshkosh’s nearby EAA AirVenture fly-in could help draw visitors.

Sheboygan also lacks a major airport, limiting air traffic. In fact, a good chunk of Lake Michigan airspace is restricted.

George French, president of the Oklahoma-based company Rocketplane, recently testified at the state Capitol in Madison that Sheboygan is suitable for space launches.

According to French’s Web site, www.rocketplane.com, his company has created “a sub-orbital spacecraft that will launch civilian astronauts more than 330,000 feet above Earth’s atmosphere.”

They even throw in a hearty meal! “Your day begins with a special astronaut breakfast,” the Web pitch begins.

Eggs and hash browns would be the last thing on my mind minutes before blastoff. But the pitch gets better: “As the engines cut off at 175,000 feet and you silently coast upward to peak altitude, you look out the window and are presented with the spectacular view of Earth. You feel the sensation of weightlessness.”

The Web site suggests the flights will start in 2007 – in Oklahoma, not Sheboygan.

Yet a group of Sheboygan business leaders hopes to raise millions in public and private dollars to turn a more than 60-year-old Sheboygan armory into a space tourism complex.

The bottom line, of course, will be money. Just how much will state taxpayers be asked to float on the spacey idea. Even if taxpayers are merely asked to back up borrowed money to get the project off the ground, that might be a tough sell.

Then again, Wisconsin could proudly launch the first brat into space. It would have to be a Sheboygan brat, of course, simmered in beer, chopped onions and butter, cooked on a grill and tucked into a hard roll.

Add that to Rocketplane’s in- flight meal, and I just might sign up. All I’d need is $200,000 and some ketchup.

LG Electronics has announced the launch of the world’s first ‘Time Machine satellite DMB handset, LG-SB130/KB1300. The ‘Time Machine TV Phone’ is equipped with the ‘Time Machine’ function so that users can continue watching TV without pausing even when they receive an incoming phone call or are abruptly interrupted. ‘Time Machine’ technology enables users to record the program while receiving calls and play the recorded program back at a later time. The ‘Time Machine’ function can operate up to 60 minutes.

With the LG-SB130/KB1300, users can watch TV for a maximum of 3 hours as the model is equipped with a low-power consuming TV receiving chip developed by LG. It also supports multi-tasking features including calling or messaging while watching TV and capturing the screen image of a TV program by using the camera button.

The ‘Time Machine TV Phone’ provides the best quality picture as it is a true abstract of LG’s world-class technology in a digital TV format. The model is equipped with a Mobile-XD Engine, a mobile chip which improves the quality of the picture, and a 2.2 inch QVGA(256×320) LCD. Moreover, its swing T style form factor provides convenience for users to watch TV even when using with only one hand. The model also supports 3D sound and has various multimedia features such as auto-focus 3 mega-pixel camera and MP3 with more than 300MB memory capacity. With its TV-Out feature, users can watch pictures and motion-pictures taken by the handset on TV as well.

“The World’s First ‘Time Machine TV Phone’ is a perfect combination of state of the art digital TV and handset technologies. We will maintain the leadership in the DMB market by developing products that fully reflect our customers’ needs,” said Mr. SUNG HA CHO, LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company.

http://www.lg.co.kr/eabout/news/release/read.jsp?cmd=rview&path=0010000060000&news_num=11271&rn=1

See for yourself and vote for you favorites at space.com

Periodically the FCC releases a count of the number of broadcast stations licensed in the United States. Last week’s Broadcast Station Totals as of Sept. 30, 2005 shows a total of 1,034 UHF TV stations and 715 VHF TV stations. The FCC listed a total of 593 Class A TV stations (485 UHF and 108 VHF), a total of 2,117 LPTV stations (1,621 UHF and 496 VHF), and 4,503 TV translators (2,678 UHF and 1,825 VHF).

After adding in AM operations, along with FM full-power, low-power and translator stations, the count reveals a total of 27,079 licensed broadcast stations as of Sept. 30, 2005. It should be noted that DTV stations are not counted as separate licenses, so although a TV station may be transmitting on two channels, it is counted as only one station.

Tracking Santa has never been so high-tech from PhysOrg.com
It’s a Christmas tradition that many parents of inquisitive children have come to appreciate immensely, and an opportunity for the U.S. military to show its softer side to the public. Best of all for taxpayers, though, is that corporate tie-ups and volunteering efforts make tracking down Santa relatively cost-free for the government’s coffers.

[…]

For astronomers, it’s always been a source of frustration that the nearest white-dwarf star is buried in the glow of the brightest star in the nighttime sky. This burned-out stellar remnant is a faint companion of the brilliant blue-white Dog Star, Sirius, located in the winter constellation Canis Major.

Now, an international team of astronomers has used the keen eye of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to isolate the light from the white dwarf, called Sirius B. The new results allow them to measure precisely the white dwarf’s mass based on how its intense gravitational field alters the wavelengths of light emitted by the star.
“Studying Sirius B has challenged astronomers for more than 140 years,” said Martin Barstow of the University of Leicester, U.K., who is the leader of the observing team. “Only with Hubble have we at last been able to obtain the observations we need, uncontaminated by the light from Sirius, in order to measure its change in wavelengths.”

“Accurately determining the masses of white dwarfs is fundamentally important to understanding stellar evolution. Our Sun will eventually become a white dwarf. White dwarfs are also the source of Type Ia supernova explosions that are used to measure cosmological distances and the expansion rate of the universe. Measurements based on Type Ia supernovae are fundamental to understanding ‘dark energy,’ a dominant repulsive force stretching the universe apart. Also, the method used to determine the white dwarf’s mass relies on one of the key predictions of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity; that light loses energy when it attempts to escape the gravity of a compact star.”
Sirius B has a diameter of 12,000 kilometres, less than the size of Earth, but is much denser. Its powerful gravitational field is 350,000 times greater than Earth’s, meaning that a 68 kilogram person would weigh 25 million kilograms standing on its surface. Light from the surface of the hot white dwarf has to climb out of this gravitational field and is stretched to longer, redder wavelengths of light in the process. This effect, predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity in 1916, is called gravitational redshift, and is most easily seen in dense, massive, and hence compact objects whose intense gravitational fields warp space near their surfaces.

Based on the Hubble measurements of the redshift, made with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, the team found that Sirius B has a mass that is 98 percent that of our own Sun. Sirius itself has a mass of two times that of the Sun and a diameter of 2.4 million kilometres.

White dwarfs are the leftover remnants of stars similar to our Sun. They have exhausted their nuclear fuel sources and have collapsed down to a very small size. Despite being the brightest white dwarf known, Sirius B is about 10,000 times fainter than Sirius itself, making it difficult to study with telescopes on the Earth’s surface because its light is swamped in the glare of its brighter companion. Astronomers have long relied on a fundamental theoretical relationship between the mass of a white dwarf and its diameter. The theory predicts that the more massive a white dwarf, the smaller its diameter. The precise measurement of Sirius B’s gravitational redshift allows an important observational test of this key relationship.

The Hubble observations have also refined the measurement of Sirius B’s surface temperature to be 25,000 degrees C. Sirius itself has a surface temperature of 10,000 degrees C.

At 8.6 light-years away, Sirius is one of the nearest known stars to Earth. Stargazers have watched Sirius since antiquity. Its diminutive companion, however, was not discovered until 1862, when it was first glimpsed by astronomers examining Sirius through one of the most powerful telescopes of that time.

Source:ESA/Hubble Information Centre
Date: 2005-12-14
URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051214083340.htm

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A new resident of the Math Sciences Building is supporting the sophisticated data-storage needs of researchers at Purdue University and helping to establish the institution among the nation’s supercomputing elite.

“Robbie the Robot,” named for the mechanical star of the 1950s sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet,” is a cutting-edge, automated storage and retrieval system that will enable vast amounts of data to be seamlessly archived and quickly located for researchers’ use.

The $1 million robot system has the capacity to store up to 1 petabyte of data.

“To put this in context, one petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes,” says Dwight McKay, director of systems engineering with Information Technology at Purdue (ITaP). “The U.S. Library of Congress contains approximately 10 terabytes of data, and our capacity is about 100 times that amount.

“That is substantial considering all the Internet content in existence is estimated to be 8 petabytes. This system brings Purdue up to the kind of data storage that other large, high-performance computing centers have.”

This initiative is part of ITaP’s ongoing efforts to upgrade high-performance computing capabilities.

“We’ve been actively expanding our resources to attract researchers to Purdue, and this robot system is one of the tools to help us become competitive at the national level of supercomputing,” McKay says.

This is especially needed to support the new Cyber Center for supercomputing that was announced last summer as part of Discovery Park, the university’s multidisciplinary research center.

“Researchers are coming to Purdue and bringing their very large data sets with them,” says Mike Marsh, senior engineer in the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. “With this system, we have the ability to capture that data in our library and have it automatically available to them, and that’s a big advantage.”

The robot also will enable more researchers to move toward mining data collected from multiple, sophisticated simulations. Some of the current research that will benefit includes climatology modeling and structural biology.

“These researchers have large computations and simulations, as well as large data sets,” McKay says. “This is the tool they need to be effective in doing this kind of science.”

McKay and his team monitor researchers’ use of and needs for the system, which is in the testing phase and set to be operational in the spring. Through a user group, ITaP is able to gather feedback and adjust to the needs of researchers.

“We’re a partnership with researchers,” McKay says. “We are familiar with their labs so we see how we can help and what kinds of resources they need.”

The tape robot device is part of a hierarchical storage-management system that consists of a server computer attached to the robotic tape mechanism, all within a 6-by-20-foot space. It uses extremely fast, fiber-channel technology. The software on the server conveys to users that their data is online and available when they request it.

Behind the scenes and within about 10 seconds, the robotic arm – which resembles those used in automobile manufacturing – moves along a hallway of shelves storing data tapes to select and then load the requested data into the computer for researchers to access. Data that isn’t being requested can be moved onto tapes for storage until it’s needed. The entire process is lightning fast and carefully controlled by sophisticated sensors, Marsh says.

“Robbie” represents the third generation of such robots on campus.

“We’ve had similar, but much smaller, systems in the past,” McKay says. “In this generation, we’ve added a significant piece of hardware with very large storage capability for archiving data and supporting data-intensive science.”

The previous tape-storage robot – in use at Purdue since 1996 – could hold up to 60 terabytes of data on about 960 tapes with 15 tape drives that could each transfer 11 megabytes of data per second.

“Robbie” represents a quantum leap ahead, McKay says.

The new robot – an ADIC model using LTO-2 tape drives – has 5,400 tape slots and 36 drives that can each transfer 40 megabytes of data per second.

This type of system can be found at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Social Security Administration, national research labs and very large insurance companies – not many universities

“These systems are expensive, physically large and require high-level staff to operate,” Marsh says. “This robot is putting Purdue ahead of the curve.”

The system can easily be doubled in size to two petabytes with additional tape drives. It also can accommodate 11 different models of tape drives from four different manufacturers, and many of the parts are engineered to be “hot-swappable” and redundant, which makes the system more flexible and able to stay online during maintenance.

“We can replace failed power supplies or tape drives while the library continues to run, which keeps the system available to researchers at all times,” Marsh says.

The system operates 24 hours a day, providing continuous backup and automatic downloading to researchers. The old robot system will be online for about a year while its data is migrated to the new system.

Marsh says the new system also provides more efficiency in meeting government requirements for storage of sensitive data.

“It’s critical that data be backed up in a separate location in case of natural disaster,” he says. “With this system, it will be possible to locate another robot system elsewhere, like Indianapolis, and duplicate critical data in that remote location.”

While “Robbie” is putting Purdue in the upper echelon of supercomputing, tape-storage needs will continue to become more sophisticated.

“One exabyte is 1,000 petabytes, and it’s estimated that a 5-exabyte library would be able to store all the words ever uttered by every person who has ever lived since the origin of our species,” Marsh says. “We should have libraries capable of storing an exabyte of data within the next several years.”

Writer: Amy Page Christiansen, (765) 463-2644, [email protected]

Sources: Mike Marsh, (765) 496-8240, [email protected]

Dwight McKay, (765) 494-4481, [email protected]

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; [email protected]

NASA readies for 3D view of the sun

By Stefanie Olsen

Link

Story last modified Tue Dec 13 04:00:00 PST 2005

Studies of solar magnetic storms, the solar system’s most violent explosions, will soon come in “stereo.”

Two nearly identical robotic spacecraft known as Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories (or STEREO) are in development and testing by NASA to capture high-definition 3D images of the sun and solar wind–the first-ever stereoscopic measurements of the sun’s explosions.

NASA expects to launch the two-year mission this spring after it completes testing of the crafts at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland this winter.

The $520 million project is the next frontier for scientists observing the sun and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), powerful solar eruptions that can disrupt the protective magnetic field surrounding Earth, as well as the general environment in space. Related to solar flares (scientists still don’t know which come first), CMEs can pack a punch equivalent to a billion megaton nuclear bombs.