Aerospace

Sprit and Opportunity: The U.S's Robot on Mars!!
 You've Had heard about 'Sprit and Opportunity' the twin
robots that landed on Mars in 2004 by the Delta-2 Rocket.
Sprit and Opportunity helped solve many problems of Mars!


Let's watch some videos!

 See how Sprit and Opportunity's landing on Mars!

Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (Caltech, to you)  says a paradigm shift in planetary exploration is coming - and it involves space robots.

Fink and a team at Caltech, the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Arizona are developing software along with a robotic test bed that can mimic a field geologist or astronaut - the software, they say, will allow a robot to think on its own. 

Today, while thrift-shopping, I found an important component for our satellite building.



Yes, it's a rolling trunk, and I'll admit it's not the most exciting science prop.  But there are four important details that make this an important detail in DIY satellite building.

1) Pragmatics.  I need a place to store the satellite and components when I'm not working on it.

2) Conveyance.  I need something to lug the kit around when I take it over to my friend's workshop, when we eventually get to final assembly.

A new type of rocket propellant made from a mixture of water and nanoscale aluminum powder could be manufactured on the moon or Mars or any place remnant ice may exist, say researchers from NASA, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Purdue and Pennsylvania State University who believe their aluminum-ice, or ALICE, propellant could be used to launch rockets into orbit from Earth as a pit stop for long-distance space missions.  Since it's greener than current propellants it will also be acceptable to those of you concerned about universal global warming(1).

After wrapping up the minutiae of funding, we're finally entering the lab for Project Calliope.  Next week, I get to build a model ionosphere and replicate a spinning satellite to test what sort of music to expect.

In practice, this means rigging up a magnet to replicate ionospheric magnetic fields, putting a strobe for mimicking the Sun as seen by a rapidly spinning satellite, then seeing what sort of data my detectors spit out.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched on June 18th, 2009,  will return more data about the Moon than any previous mission. The Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP), developed by Southwest Research Institute,  uses a novel method to peer into the perpetual darkness of the Moon's so-called permanently shadowed regions - the dark side of the moon.

Everyone is thorough about checklists of items they want to take on long trips - fewer people worry about things they are supposed to leave behind.  But forty years ago, as the Apollo 11 astronauts were completing their checklist to leave the Moon they discovered that they had forgotten something important that wasn't supposed to return to Earth.

Our teeth can withstand an enormous amount of pressure over a period of decades but tooth enamel is only about as strong as glass.

The mystery of teeth may become a solution to future aircraft design concerns, according to a a new study by Prof. Herzl Chai of Tel Aviv University's School of Mechanical Engineering and colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and George Washington University.

The automotive and aviation industries already use sophisticated materials to prevent break-up on impact. For example, airplane bodies are made from composite materials ― layers of glass or carbon fibers — held together by a brittle matrix.

Ptolemy's 20 century-old constellation, Cepheus, seems to have been reserved for long hours of star gazing by astronomers with all levels of experience - especially after it was declared the best yet model for studying the star formation process. Its close, its exciting, its inspiring, and its forming (the last one's most important: a star is forming).

The Cepheus B region, lying in the Cepheus constellation in the Cave Nebula (aka Caldwell 9) near the M52 galaxy, has apparently begun a star-formation process owing to - much to the schock of many astronomers - a radiation nudge (if I may call it so) by a massive star just outside the region's molecular cloud.