Is that the Moon? Shoot it!!!!

NASA is now planning a trip to the moon with a probe that will one two punch our neighbor. The mission set to occur in February of 2009. This probe will carry a couple of objects to send into the moons surface and strike the surface twice in order to kick debris off of the surface. Once this occurs NASA will analyze the debris that gets lifted off the surface in order to see if water is on the moon. This impact is set to occur at one of the moons poles.


As far as updates for the blog go, this week has been crazy at work. So starting next week I should return to regular updates. Enjoy yourselves!

"Stay On Target"

The NAVY missile frigate U.S.S. Lake Erie launched an SM-3 missile at a failed satellite on Wednesday night. On its first attempt the satellite was destroyed. The destruction of the satellite likely ruptured the fuel tank as was required, therefore, dispersing the toxic fuel in orbit rather than on the ground where it would harm people. This was a very successful firing and great to watch. Check out the video below for some footage of the firing.

A Party Bag of Topics

Just a bunch of small topics to discuss today.


Tonight there is a total lunar eclipse, be sure to get outside and take a look at it. Happens at 10 pm EST and will be the last lunar eclipse visible in the US until 2010. Go outside and take a look, the moon will turn a cool shade of red due to the red wavelength of light that gets bent in the upper atmosphere of the Earth and projected onto the surface of the moon.

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Space shuttle Atlantis has returned safely to Cape Canaveral today ending its mission to bring a new piece of the ISS into orbit. The shuttle crew completed many tasks and made a successful mission after nearly 2 months of delays due to a faulty fuel sensor. Good to see Atlantis making another successful flight.


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One of the bigger stories of the day was the NAVY preparing to shoot down a failed satellite in orbit. This has been a huge story for the last few days as the NAVY has had to invest millions ($60 million to be exact) in modifications and man hours to prep and launch this missile. The missile will intercept the satellite and break it into many pieces which will easily burn up on re-entry. The whole reason for the shoot down of the satellite was so that the volatile hydrazine fuel won't spread over land if the fuel was to by chance survive re-entry.


Fun day for aerospace in the news!

HD-DVD Throws In The Towel

HD-DVD is giving up the fight for format supremacy. Today Toshiba officially announced their concession to Blu-ray, finally ending the HD format war. This is a big win for SONY, a loss to Toshiba, and a horrid loss to consumers.

Unfortunately for 1million consumers, their HD-DVD players will no longer be receiving updated media. That includes 600,000 people in North America, although Toshiba promises to continue with support of the players that are already in the hands of consumers.

Personally, I'm not sure why people went out and spent so much on an item that was not a definitive winner. $300 plus on an HD-DVD player until recently and $500 on a Blu-ray player. Seems like quite the expense for something you couldn't be sure would survive this war, but to each his own.

Guess it's time to pick up a PS3, oh wait, first they have to give me a reason to do that. I'll wait for generation 2.0 Blu-ray before I even consider it, that and a $300 price drop!

Top Ten Exoplanets

Space.com has compiled a list of the top ten exoplanets, or planets outside of our solar system. The list is cool to take a look at and I'll cap the top ten briefly right here, if you want to see the full descriptions go here at Space.com


Number 10:

51 Pegasus b, or Bellerphon, was the first planet ever discovered outside our own solar system, earning it position number ten.

Number 9:

Epsilon Eridani b, the exoplanet found closet to our own solar system is only about 10.5 light years away. So close that soon telescopes may be able to visually view it.

Number 8:

Planets called planemos, or sometimes described as rogue planets. These objects have no sun and are objects that never quite ignited into a star.

Number 7:

Planets such as SWEEPS-10 which orbit their parent star extremely fast. In SWEEPS-10 case, orbiting only 740,000 miles from it's star, one day is only 10 hours long.

Number 6:

Upsilon Andromeda b, is "tidally locked" to it's star, meaning one side is always facing the star. This is quite possibly the most temperature variant world in existence.

Number 5:

The youngest exoplanet ever discovered. This planet orbits star, Coku Tau 4, and is less than a million years old.

Number 4:

The oldest planet ever discovered, takes position 3. This planet is 12.7 billion years old, and proves that life could have formed very early in the existence of the universe.

Number 3:

HD209458b orbits every 3 and a half days and is losing mass to solar winds at about 10,000 tons per second.

Number 2:

189733b was one of the first planets to have it's atmosphere tested for composition.

Number 1:

The number one slot for exoplanets is taken by Gliese 581 C. This planet discovery was huge, as this was the first planet discovered which exsists in the zone of a system where life can be supported. This proves that life can exsist elsewhere, whether it's microscopic or larger is anyones guess.

The Poll Ends

Our first poll has ended and the results are shown below:

Question: What's the future of home movie viewing look like?

Answers:

DVD's will remain mainstream: 40%
BluRay will take over the market: 20%
Digital streaming is the future: 40%


Check out the new poll that is now available

Your WIng is in My Body... No Your Body is in My Wing

NASA has recently been testing the new Blended Wing Body (BWB) concept. The new concept takes the conventional build for an aircraft and modifies the fuselage into a lifting surface. The new design could prove to be more efficient and will definitely allow for more passenger space/ cargo space on-board.

The current flight tests being preformed by NASA will for one, validate the airworthiness of the design. Secondly, and most importantly, the tests will give valuable feedback on flight performance. As this is a completely new design and a fairly significant departure from current aircraft design, the aircraft must be tested. The feedback from the test flights will help determine how the BWB design will react in situations and how flight controls will work.

The information gathered from the test flights will allow the refinement of flight control software and basic flight controls for maximum in-flight performance. This new design could be the future of large scale passenger travel.

This design could prove to be very valuable to military forces. The BWB would be able to efficiently carry huge amounts of cargo on-board and may replace the conventional heavy lift cargo planes used in the Air Force today.

This would be a cool sight in full scale, coming to an airport near you!

Saturn and Jupiter Have Twins!

It seems that two planets in the same system have been discovered, and they very closely resemble Jupiter and Saturn. Both of the newly discovered planets are about 80% of the size of their Solar System counterparts.

These planets are found orbiting a star that is smaller than our own but a few interesting things arise when looking at these planets. They both match the positions of Jupiter and Saturn. They both match the ratio of distance to the star and size of the star. Another item is that Saturn is about twice the distance to the sun than Jupiter is, and this is repeated with the new planets in the observed system. Many scientists are lead to believe that maybe planetary systems aren't all that uncommon, as shown by the discovered planets and their close ties to our own gas giants.

The system that the planets were found in is located about 5,000 light years away from Earth. At this range you might be wondering how these planets were even seen. The technique used to find the planets is called gravitational lensing. This is a fairly new technique and is becoming a popular way to look at objects. Gravitational lensing occurs when light passing by the object is bend by the gravity of that object. This bend light is measure and used to calculate sizes, and find other information.

Looks like ET may be out there yet!

Sir I Believe Your Eyes May Be Glowing

Scientists working at the University of Washington are developing a method to place micro circuitry that is only a few nanometers thick, on a contact lens. The circuitry is being attached to very small Light Emitting Diodes (LED's) only 1/3 of a millimeter wide.

The plan is to use radio waves and solar radiation to power the circuitry on the lens. Micro solar cells would be one choice for power production. This is really cool stuff, but you might be asking yourself, what would I ever use such a thing for?

Some of the potential uses for this technology is in projecting an image that looks like its on the surface you are focusing on. So say you are looking at the windshield of your car, this would make it look like the image is on the windshield; even though it is on top of your eye.

So mobile internet in your eye could be on its way, yet I can't see myself needing the internet that badly. Other uses for this would be interesting to see, maybe a Heads Up Display for pilots, no matter where your head may be turned, even for airline pilots.

The possiblities for this are truly endless.

Flash Memory... Make Way!

Move over flash memory, you're old technology; or at least thats what a company named Nanochip may have us saying in the next year or so.

Nanochip has developed a new type of memory chip that could blow flash memory devices out of the water. Nanochip's new memory promises to store more information and cost less doing it. These new chips use a similar technology that IBM has been trying to perfect for the last 18 years but they do it in a better, cheaper more efficient way. The chip that will be prototype released next year is to be size comparable to flash devices, but carry 100GB of storage capacity.




The company also says that with further refinement, the chip could eventually store in the terabyte range. This will be an exciting advancement as it could make solid state hard drives extremely small, large storage capacity and fairly cost effective.

Although, what would I do with a 50+ terabyte drive?

Mach 5 Commercial Flights

A company located in the UK, named Reaction Engines, are developing the next generation of engine design to be used for spaceflight and long distance air travel. Reaction Engines has begun development on a new engine that it plans to use in the next 10 years to power an unmanned spacecraft for delivering up to 12 tons of cargo into orbit. The company also plans to move this engine into the commercial flight business to power a Mach 5+ vehicle within the next 25 years.

The idea behind the engine starts with the use of hydrogen as a fuel. You may ask why hydrogen. Well hydrogen packs the most amount of energy per unit, then any other fuel. Hydrogen will be able to power these vehicles up to extremely high velocities.

The second idea being implemented here, which I think is way overdue for use, is the use of oxidizer. One of the limiting factors on many spacecraft is the fact that the vehicle has to carry it's own oxidizer with it, adding large amounts of weight to the vehicle. The idea here is to use the atmosphere as the oxidizer, use the air around the vehicle and carry limited amounts of oxidizer for use outside of the atmosphere.

The idea is sound, the implementation is a bit trickier. The killer of high speed engines is once the sound barrier is broken. The inlets of engines will create shock waves on their edges, and these shocks will disrupt flow and possibly choke the airflow into the engine. This will be the biggest hurdle in the development of the engine. Also the design that has been chosen for the engine, a circular inlet, is one of the hardest to predict shock creation on.

Break out the supercomputers, got some shock calculations to do.

Cold Fusion... Take Two

In a move reminiscent of the old Cold Fusion claims in Russia and the US 30 or so years ago, a Canadian company claims to be able to make fusion a viable energy source in the next 4-5 years. If you do look at the science behind their method, it does seem promising, but so have many other methods of creating and harnessing fusion, that have up to now, failed.

The Canadian based company, General Fusion, has come up with a method that seems very promising. Now to try to explain how this is to work.

The company will build a "reactor" or better described as a vessel. Within the vessel will be a liquefied lead-lithium mixture. The liquid metal will be spun quickly in order to form a void in the center where plasma will be allowed to exist. Once the plasma has been formed in the void, many pneumatic rams around the liquid will fire at the same time creating a pressure wave traveling into the center of the metal. As the pressure wave propagates, it will magnify greatly until it reaches the plasma void at the center. Once it reaches that point the wave will quickly compress the plasma and generating a quick burst of fusion. That extremely fast fusion reaction will in turn heat the metal and power a steam turbine. The by-products will be able to be collected and used in the process.

The beauty of this process is that the liquid metal will absorb a majority of the neutrons released in the process and this will virtually eliminate radioactive output seen in other fusion models. Also, none of the by-products are harmful, most being reused in the fusion process.

Truly amazing, assuming it all works as planned. Good luck General Fusion, I'd love to see this work.

AMD Phantom... I mean Phenom

The AMD version of the Intel Core 2 Quad, the Phenom, promises of course the same benefits that it's Intel rival product obviously offers... 4 cores. The Phenom has been promised to be out to consumers as a prototype product about this time. Unfortunately the Phenom continues to suffer delays as the Phenom models have been pushed back to quarter three of this year.

AMD is now lagging way behind Intel which raises the question, will AMD be able to continue to compete with Intel? Personally I have always preferred Intel products, for no more reason than I stick to what I know. I use a Core 2 Quad in my current machine and I must say this delay has to be setting back AMD quite a lot.

Although I am partial to Intel products, I rather not see AMD go under. AMD loosing their market share would mean Intel owning the processor market and possibly slacking on advancing their technology. In the end, the loss of AMD would slow down advancements in computing and a loss for consumers.

I for one would like to see AMD catch back up to Intel. Pick it up AMD!

An Apple A Day

Apple has just released some new products, some amazing, some minor upgrades, and some that are just for show.

Some of the cool new stuff includes a new computer sporting eight processors, don't know who would ever be able to make use of this, well short of use for computational fluid dynamics, but cool none the less.

Many of their products are getting upgrades too.
Two of those being the iPhone, and the iPod Touch:



I currently own an iPod Touch, which to say the least, shows me why Apple owns the mp3 player market. The new features on these items include expanded capability such as weather, mail, and more for the Touch and triangulation for Google maps on the iPhone. Also both products have just had a memory upgrade.

The Touch now has a 32GB model and the iPhone now has a 16 GB model, of course this upgrade will set you back another $100. Personally I have hard enough time filling up my 8GB model, but I can see the use for it.

Another product getting some upgrades is Apple TV which has had a new interface made for it, as well as many new features from wireless connectivity to access to Flickr. This product is intriguing and I have thought about getting myself one.



Last but certainly not least is the new MacBook Air, which has had a lot of hype surrounding it. It truly is one of the smallest laptops ever created; at its thickest, 0.76" which is thinner than the Sony versions thinnest point of 0.8". It sports a Core 2 Duo processor and many other features. Great, but many say it's not worth it. The battery gets you about 2.5 hours which is half of the time given in specs. The solid state hard drive is no faster or better with power usage, and nearly doubles the cost of the machine, all while offering less hard drive space. In the end this turned out to be a niche product, not worth the money it costs.

You Spent How Much On Vacation?!?

Lockheed Martin's Atlas V rocket is being looked at by private business Bigelow Aerospace. Bigelow is looking at the Atlas V to provide cargo and personnel transport to orbit. Bigelow is planning to launch a commercial space station starting in 2011, after successfully launching a few test sections with Russian Spacecraft recently.

Bigelow plans to open up the space station to tourists after completing the space station. Someone can buy a trip to the station for 4 weeks. This will only set you back a bank account annihilating $11 million.

Start saving now, maybe you'll have the cash to go when you're 75.

My Telescope is Bigger Than Yours!

The world is ramping up for a veritable telescopic "arms race." In countries around the world, designs are being developed for the next generation of telescopes which will prove to be able to look deeper into the cosmos.

The new generation of of telescopes are going to be built within the next decade at a price in the billions between all the new proposed telescopes. The new equipment is promising to return clearer images than even Hubble was able to do, even though Hubble has no atmospheric interference. The technology for the new telescope is akin to that of HD vs normal definition televisions.

This observatory boom could produce some extraordinary images and discoveries in the near future.

The Future of Corn is.... Plastic?

While there are hundreds of uses for corn, from the basic food to ethanol, there is a new corn product that may change the way we dispose of plastic products. The new innovation in plastics is that they are now able to be produced from corn, which makes the plastic biodegradable. These plastics will not be able to be used on items that last a long time, because you wouldn't want your cell phone to start to degrade on you.

The picture shown above is a printer from HP that uses a plastic that is designed to last the lifetime of the printer before it starts to break down. This could mean a change in the way we dispose of plastics, and what once took 10's of thousands of years to break down, now takes but a few years. This is great news for the environment, and hopefully these plastics will be more readily available very soon.

Looks like were going to need some more corn to be grown, to support the plastics industry this time.

Garmin

In the spirit of the superbowl yesterday, here is the Garmin commercial from the game. Enjoy!



Many other good commercials on, but this was one of the only Tech commercials. Check out the Budweiser commercials for a good laugh.

SpaceShipTwo: Safe?

Virgin and Scaled Composites unveiled their design for the new SpaceShipTwo and its carrier aircraft. The "new" design and I emphasize the word NEW, because well lets just say their design was no departure from SpaceShipOne, so the "unveiling" was nothing special. The new design looks "futuristic" which is what Scaled Composites is known for, but is it worth the money to ride in this?

The price as it stands is $200,000 per person, which is just a tad out of the price range for me, but once again is this a valid price. Well many financial analysts predict that the price will fall to somewhere around $5000 in the first 5 years of service, so truly, why pay $200,000 which is 4000% higher than the expected cost in 5 years? Well if your rich I guess this is affordable.

The thing I find most interesting is that in the same week as all of this PR was released for the new design, Scaled Composites has been fined for failure to properly train their employees in saftey practices. So it costs $200,000 per flight, the vehicle is built by people without proper training... all on top of an aerodynamically unstable vehicle.

The aerodynamics of this vehicle are... at the least, unproven. While the fundamental concept behind it seems fantastic, it appears as though they are moving forward a bit too fast. The test spacecraft SpaceShipOne had a lot of stability problems upon re-entry, to a point where the pilot almost lost control catastrophically. So safe or not?

I think I'll give it a while before I take a flight.

Windows 7 Rumors Shot Down

Rumors have been flying the last few weeks as to when the highly anticipated release of Windows' new OS, Windows 7, was going to happen. Windows 7 was rumored to have been pushed up in production in order to move past Windows Vista, one of the companies most hated products, and as a user of Vista I have to agree that the Vista OS is by far the worst I have ever used... well short of Windows ME.


Windows 7 was reportedly moved up to a release in 2009. Well this turned out to be not so true. Windows has stated that their new OS is not to be expected on shelves until 2011. So buckle down and buy Windows XP while they are still selling them, thats what I plan to do.

I'd also like to pose a question to Microsoft about Vista. Now I realize that they are trying to make their software basically "idiot proof", but as the saying goes "if you try to make something idiot proof, it will only challenge god to make a bigger idiot." Do they really have to eliminate the ability for me to go into my computer and find what I want to find. When I take screen shots in a game and then go to view those, but Vista does not show that folder up to date, then what is the point. I need to go look up the file path every time I want to view the screen shots folder. So in the end I don't go view them very often, they just sit there until I have a need for the pictures and actually take the time to go look up the file path that I always forget, I mean who memorizes a 30000 part file path name?

NAVY Tests SciFi Weapon

The NAVY is now testing their new weapon that has been in development; the railgun. A weapon of science fiction is becoming a reality as the NAVY moves closer to deploying this weapon in 2020. The railgun has a capacity to launch at 32 megajoules of energy. This is a weapon that does not use explosives but rather kinetic energy in order to destroy the target.



The picture above shows the projectile impacting the target, pretty ridiculous if you realize that there is no explosive in the projectile. Quite the damage caused, but such can be expected from something traveling at Mach 5 (3700 mph)