Archive for the ‘Nasa’ Category

NASA’s Global Hawk completes unmanned airborne refueling simulation, will do it for real next year (video)

While some bot makers are busying themselves designing AI to simulate humans’ natural and distinct lack of intelligence, it’s nice to see there are still old-fashioned researchers out there keeping the Skynet dream alive. Northrop Grumman’s aeronautics gurus have paired together a Global Hawk unmanned aircraft with a manned Proteus ship way up in the skies — 45,000 feet, to be precise — with the vessels of ingenuity managing to fly in tandem at a distance as short as 40 feet. Unsurprisingly, this is the first time such intimacy has been reached between UAVs (the Proteus had a monitoring crew on board to ensure the insurance bill wasn’t through the roof) in high altitude, and the ultimate goal of having two Global Hawks doing the deed without any human intervention is said to be within reach by next year. That’s when these light and agile air drones will be able to refuel themselves and go on for a mighty 120 hours in the air… plenty of time to complete a well planned extermination down below, if one were so inclined.

Continue reading NASA’s Global Hawk completes unmanned airborne refueling simulation, will do it for real next year (video)

NASA’s Global Hawk completes unmanned airborne refueling simulation, will do it for real next year (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Mar 2011 03:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hayabusa Space Probe May Contain Asteroid Dust, or Just Normal Dust [Space]

See that? It might be a dust particle from an asteroid! Or it might be a flake of dried skin from a man in the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency factory that built the Hayabusa probe. No one knows yet. More »










Hayabusa – Space – Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency – Asteroid – Technology

What Is This? [Image Cache]

At first I thought this image was a tattoo under a powerful microscope. One near some feminine naughty bits. But no, there are no tattoos as weird and wonderful as what this image really is. Not in this planet, anyway.

These are Martian dust devils, running over the soil of the Red Planet. Taken by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, they are responsible of marking its surface with strange, capricious shapes. According to NASA:

This portion of a recent high-resolution picture from the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows twisting dark trails criss-crossing light colored terrain on the martian surface. Newly formed trails like these had presented researchers with a tantalizing martian mystery but are now known to be the work of miniature wind vortices known to occur on the red planet – martian dust devils. Such spinning columns of rising air heated by the warm surface are also common in dry and desert areas on planet Earth.

In Mars, however, they can be up eight kilometers high. But why do they leave those marks? Easy: The wind picks up the red dust, leaving the dark sand beneath on its place. The Universe, my dear armchair cosmonauts, is a wondrous place. [NASA]

Ion propulsion engine could take you to Mars and back in 39 days

Ready for some interplanetary exploration? We’ve had the force shields, currency, and refuel stations all sorted out for a while, and now here come the ion thrusters we’ve been missing to make manned trips to Mars really viable. Currently, a return journey to Mars can take up to two years, with crew members having to wait a full year for the planets to realign, but with ion propulsion — which uses electricity to accelerate ions and produce small but longevous thrust — ships can get there and back within a reasonably tight 39-day window. Ion propulsion rocket engines were first deployed successfully by NASA in the Deep Space 1 probe in 1998, and the latest iteration’s successful Earth-bound testing has led to plans for a flight to the moon and use on the International Space Station as test scenarios for the technology. It’s all still very much in the early stages, of course, but should all that testing, checking, and refinement bear fruit, we might finally have a whole new world to colonize and sell sneakers on.

[Thanks, Davis]

Filed under: Transportation, Science

Ion propulsion engine could take you to Mars and back in 39 days originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NASA Moon Bombing Mission May Have Worked Out After All [Space]

So that anticlimactic moon bombing NASA attempted the other day may have kicked up a little dust after all.

Indeed, Earth and space-based telescopes couldn’t see it at the time, but there was, in fact, a dusty plume that got kicked up by the kamikaze LCROSS probe. Success!

That said, there’s still no word on whether or not water or aliens or cheese were present in the plume. Perhaps it was a combination of all three, and that’s the reason for NASA’s silence thus far (more seriously, NASA says results by “mid-November”).

Next time, just to be sure, I think NASA should shoot something a bit bigger into the Moon for better results. Something like, say, Richard Heene’s ego. [New Scientist]

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