Really Rocket Science

Biology and space flight have been closely intertwined ever since the Soviets first launched Laika into orbit in November of 1957. The unique environment of space presents an incredible laboratory environment for biologists to study biological processes, and literally thousands of experiments have been undertaken in the last 50 years.

Now the Chinese government, following in Mendel’s footsteps, is taking genetic and biological research in space one step further — launching the country’s first seed satellite — specifically designed for seed breeding– this coming September:

Shijian-8 is expected to carry at least 2,000 varieties of plant seeds in nine categories, including grains, cash crops and forage plants, as well as seeds of fungi and molecular biomaterials that have been sequenced.

Sun Laiyan, chief of the China National Space Administration, said the "seed satellite" will enable scientists to try and cultivate high-yield and high-quality plant varieties.

Exposed to special environment such as cosmic radiation and micro-gravity, some seeds will mutate to such an extent that they may produce much higher yield and improved quality, said Sun.

Space experts said 40 per cent of mutated space seeds can be used in space breeding experiments.

Since 1987, nine Chinese satellites and several of China’s six Shenzhou spacecraft have carried seeds for experiments and a number of new species of plant seeds have been bred in space, but never before has the country launched a satellite exclusively for seed breeding.

Space-bred seeds are big business:

Liu Luxiang, director of the Centre for Space Breeding under the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said that between 2001 and 2004, space-bred rice and wheat varieties developed by his centre had been planted in about 566,600 hectares, producing an additional 340,000 tons of grain.

Experiments have shown that the vitamin content of vegetables grown from space seeds is 281.5 per cent of that of ordinary vegetables; and microelements of ferrum, zinc and carotene are also higher than normal.

The planting of space tomatoes and green peppers in Southwest China’s Sichuan Province, which started in 1999, has raised average yield by 10 to 20 per cent, with the fruits bigger and of better quality, according to earlier newspaper reports.

Space tomatoes! But are they organic?

Let’s face it: no matter how cool it may be to have a satellite dish, they make terrible lawn ornaments. Only the most hardy space nut finds the local neighborhood array a thing of beauty– and many homeowners associations have introduced covenants prohibiting the use of large dishes.

But for $900 bucks or so, Clearsat has a DIY solution that will please those who don’t like looking at your dish:

Most Home Owners Associations (HOA’s) have agreed that if the dish is adequately disguised, they will allow it. The ClearSat Umbrella Style Dish Cover will comply with most reasonable HOA’s by covering both the front and back, and when coupled with a set of chairs and table, can actually function as a patio set.

One or two persons can install the umbrella cover in about 15 minutes. It does not require any drilling or modification to the dish whatsoever. Once the fiberglass rods are inserted between the hub and end socket, the cover springs into shape. You simply rest the end sockets on the edge of the dish and zip up the back panels.

The shade provided is not to be overlooked as an added benefit — especially this week, when most of North America is blistering under a scorching heat wave. 

Pop quiz. Where were you 37 years ago today? Where were you 30 years ago today?

In the first case, I’m not sure where I was, but I was probably learning how to sit up. Meanwhile Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were becoming the first humans to walk on the moon.

Seven years later, I was walking, talking, and probably getting underfoot around the house when Viking I became the first spacecraft to land safely on another planet.

Via Respectful Insolence and MetaFilter.

Remember that urban legend about how you can save your life in a plummeting elevator by jumping just before impact? According to the experts, it doesn’t work. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping some people from trying a similar trick to stop global warming today, on World Jump Day.

Apparently the jump was scheduled for 11:39:13 Greenwich Mean Time, so if you’re reading this you’ve already missed it, which is fine because apparently it’s a hoax.

But just for laughs, here’s how it’s supposed to work.

Hans Peter Niesward, from the Department of Gravitationsphysik at the ISA in Munich, says we can stop global warming in one fell swoop — or, more accurately, in one big jump.

The slightly disheveled professor states his case on WorldJumpDay.org, an Internet site created to recruit 600,000,000 people to jump simultaneously on July 20 at 11:39:13 GMT in an effort to shift Earth’s position.

Niesward claims that on this day "Earth occupies one of the most fragile positions in its orbits for the last 100 years." According to the site, the shift in orbit will "stop global warming, extend daytime hours and create a more homogeneous climate."

And according to Phil, here’s why it wouldn’t work.

First, there’s the problem with mass. 600 million people sounds like a lot, but the Earth is big. Really, really big. Let’s say each person weighs 100 kilograms to make it easy (that’s 220 pounds, so we’re already being generous). 600 million people times 100 kg = 60 billion kilograms. That’s a lot of meat! But the Earth masses 6 x 1024 kg, or 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. In other words, the Earth weighs (well, masses) 100 trillion times the total mass of all those people!

…The second problem is one of placement. Even if 600 million people could move the Earth, they’re located all over the world. The Earth being a ball, that means that people in, say, northern Spain will be perfectly canceled out by people in New Zealand. You’d need to get all 600 million people in one place on Earth to do this. Not only that, you’d have to find the right place so that when the Earth moved, it went in the right direction. Global warming won’t be stopped if you accidentally move the Earth closer to the Sun. That also means timing the jump perfectly, since the Earth rotates.

…Finally, there is another basic reason this won’t work, even if everyone on the Earth weighed 100 trillion times as much. The problem is that we’re a closed system. If we get everyone to jump up, they’ll fall back down. So even if we were able to push the Earth in one direction by jumping, when we come back down we’ll move the Earth back to where it was!

Are there more reasons it wouldn’t work? Anyway, it sounds like fun, and if my timing hadn’t been off I might have joined in. The physics of it all are a bit beyond me, and I’m willing to bet that’s true of most people. So, if I’d jumped how many people would have been jumping with me?

Remember those flying robots I mentioned earlier, and how I said they Europe has them already? Well, I didn’t know how right I actually was. Turns out Britain is shelling out big bucks to get a fleet of flying robots off the ground.

The British government plans to spend 16 million pounds–about $28 million–on the development of robot aircraft that could be used for police and fire surveillance.

The government said that development of unstaffed craft could "revolutionize" police and fire surveillance, as well as powerline and pipeline inspections–all of which currently rely on human-flown aircraft.

The investment will support a $57.9 million project called Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation and Assessment, or Astraea.

No word on whether these flying robots — unmanned aerial vehicles — will be outfitted with tentacles or not.

It turns out that private spacecraft launch I blogged last week wasn’t exclusively a private entrepreneurial affair. NASA was along for the ride in Bigelow’s balloon, in the form of an experimental micro-lab the agency calls a GeneBox.

The space agency sent up a so-called GeneBox, a micro-lab, with Bigelow Aerospace’s Genesis I last week, piggybaggying a ride on the commercial spaceflight test.

The Genebox is about the size of a shoebox and is attached to the internal structure of Bigelow’s 14-foot inflatable spacecraft, which the company launched from Russia as a demonstration of an affordable human space complex it hopes to launch by 2015. NASA’s GeneBox contains a miniature laboratory of sensors and optical systems that can detect proteins and specific genetic activity. In two weeks, the Bigelow ground control station in Las Vegas, Nev., will activate the GeneBox, and once its tests are complete, data from GeneBox will be relayed to the ground for analysis.

According to NASA, GeneBox will analyze how the near weightlessness of space affects genes in microscopic cells and other small life forms. "During this mission, we are verifying this new, small spacecraft’s systems and our procedures," John Hines, the GeneBox project manager at NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, said in a statement.

A while back I posted about the RIAA lawsuit against XM Radio, claiming $150,000 in damages for each song that XM’s Inno device downloads from its satellite service. Well, now it looks like XM is stepping up and asking a federal judge to toss the case out of court.

XM Satellite Radio asked a U.S. federal judge Monday to throw out a copyright lawsuit by the recording industry over the company’s new iPod-like device that can store up to 50 hours of music.

XM Satellite said the 1992 Home Recording Audio act protects it from being sued over its $400 (U.S.) handheld "Inno" device. The law bans some copyright claims against equipment makers and consumers who make digital music recordings for private use.

… XM Satellite has compared its new device to a high-tech videocassette recorder, which consumers can legally use to record programs for their personal use. It also noted that songs stored on the device from its broadcasts can’t be copied and can only be played for as long as a customer subscribes to its service.

Sounds familiar. I’m probably giving away my age by saying this, but when I was a kid I spent lots of time listening to the radio, and when a favorite song of mine came on I’d hit the "Record" button on the cassette player, and record songs until I had a tape full of my favorites (though minus the beginning of the song in some cases). XM’s player sounds a lot like that. And, as I noted before, if XM subscribers want to have their favorite songs on other devices they can download them from pay services like Napster or iTunes, thus effectively paying for the songs twice — once as XM subscribers and again to download from a pay service.

Of course XM may be seeking to get the case behind them, since they’re about to launch Oprah’s radio show in August, but also because the competition is catching up with them. The Globe & Mail article notes that XM has balked at notion of having to buy expensive distribution licenses from the recording industry, but that Sirius has agreed to pay for those licenses to cover its own similar players. Meanwhile the buzz in the business world is that Sirius is closing in on XM’s subscriber numbers and that XM CEO Hugh Panero may have to work to get the buzz back in XM’s favor.

WaPo columnist Steve Pearlstein has more on the case of XM v. RIAA, and answered questions this morning in an online chat.

Who was it that said technology for those who do not understand it is indistinguishable from magic?

I can’t recall at the moment, but I was reminded of the quote as I read about the successful test flight of an airship utilizing new "paint-on" antenna technology.

NASA’s Langley Research Center, RTI International, Applied EM, Inc., International Communications Group, Unitech, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and Techsphere Systems International, Inc. today announced the successful June 21 completion of the test flights in Nevada.

Azom provides additional details:

The experiment provided the first opportunity to test and evaluate the electrical, electromagnetic and mechanical properties of the "paint-on" antenna technology during an actual flight.

"The successful airship test flights demonstrate exciting possibilities for ‘paint-on’ antenna technologies," said David Myers, vice president of RTI’s Engineering and Technology Unit. "This new technology can be used to assist with hurricane disaster relief, provide enhanced security of ports and borders, perform science observation missions and improve military communications."

High altitude airships can be used for both defense and homeland security purposes including surveillance of battlefields and domestic borders and ports. The airships are intended to serve as economical station-keeping communications and/or ground-sensing platforms that will augment both ground-based and more expensive satellite systems. The airships will operate well above commercial air traffic and the jet stream and beyond the range of most ground-to-air missiles.

In addition to communications, the "paint-on" antennas are a key enabling technology to achieve the high altitudes necessary for Department of Defense and Homeland Security persistent surveillance missions of the nation’s coastal waters, land borders, urban areas and critical infrastructure.

"RTI also arranged for NASA to demonstrate the potential of a lower-cost alternative to satellite remote sensing by installing a GPS Reflectance Remote Sensing Experiment to conduct soil moisture measurements during the flight," according to Azom.

Although it’s certainly a long way off, one can imagine the technology one day applied to the side of your house — eliminating the need for either a satellite dish or (for some of us) the old bunny ears.

It doesn’t even have to look like aluminum foil, apparently.

Today is Bastille Day, commemorating the flare-up of the French Revolution in 1789. In that sense it’s kind of like our 4th of July, except that where we supply our own fireworks le soliel got supplied them for Bastille Day in 2000. It was called the Bastille Day Shock.

A transient flow system containing several streams and shocks associated with the Bastille Day 2000 solar event was observed by the WIND and ACE spacecraft at 1 AU. Voyager 2 (V2) at 63 AU observed this flow system after it moved through the interplanetary medium and into the distant heliosphere, where the interstellar pickup protons strongly influence the MHD structures and flow dynamics.

Um. Yeah. Just what all that means, I don’t know. But I do know that it looked really cool, thanks to the pictures and videos accompanying this somewhat simpler explanation of what happened when the sun celebrated Bastille Day.

On July 14, 2000, an enormous x-class flare was observed near the center of the solar disk of the Sun (a-b).

An x-class flare is the most intense flare recorded and, like smaller flares, is thought to be the result of reconnection at the base of the solar corona.

The Bastille Day flare may have been produced by a larger, more violent and active version of the reconnection event being shown in this movie (c).

Via Space Pragmatism, here are not one but two interviews with Robert Bigelow, the man responsible for yesterday’s launch of an experimental inflatable spacecraft. There’s also a pretty neat Google Maps site for tracking Genesis in orbit.