Plans to make the first known attempt to “push” a spacecraft in Earth orbit using energy beamed up from the ground will be announced next week at the First International Symposium on Beamed-Energy Propulsion at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Scientists from the University of California at Irvine and Microwave Sciences, Inc., will discuss the Planetary Society’s plans to launch its Cosmos Sail mission next year using a Russian launch vehicle.
October 27th, 2002
Did Newton Get It Wrong? Business 2.0
Evgeny Podkletnov’s antigravity technology may sound far-fetched, but it’s attracting serious interest from the likes of NASA and Boeing. Russian scientist Evgeny Podkletnov is challenging one of the most sacred tenets of physics — the law of gravity. Podkletnov claims that when objects are placed above a high-temperature, superconducting ceramic disk rotating within an electromagnetic field, the objects lose as much as 2 percent of their original weight. He calls the effect “gravity shielding,” and when word of his research reached the public in 1996, a brief media circus ensued. Many in the physics community dismissed his effort as wishful thinking.
October 27th, 2002
NASA and Nuclear Power in Space IEEE Spectrum Magazine
After some grandiose plans and a few small-scale experiments in the 1950s and 1960s, work on nuclear-propelled rockets stalled in the United States and elsewhere. Now, Sean O’Keefe (Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and veteran space expert Robert Zubrin (President of the Mars Society) call for a thoroughly rejuvenated program of nuclear space propulsion. In the November issue of IEEE Spectrum, they argue nuclear power is essential if significant human and robotic missions are to be mounted to Mars and beyond.
October 23rd, 2002
Space station radiation shields ‘disappointing’ New Scientist
Radiation levels on the International Space Station are as high as they were on the antiquated Russian space station Mir, in spite of NASA’s attempts to clad the ISS with better shielding. If NASA can’t protect astronauts, its vision of sending a crew into deep space may come to nothing. Data collected by NASA and a Russian-Austrian collaboration show that astronauts on the ISS are subjected to about 1 millisievert of radiation per day, about the same as someone would get from natural sources on Earth in a whole year. Spending three months in these conditions translates into about one-tenth the long-term cancer risk incurred by regular smokers.
October 21st, 2002
Yielding More Photons In Deep Space
A solar energy technology team led by ENTECH, Inc., has been awarded a $195,000 contract from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop advanced concepts for generating electrical power in space. The team will also develop a roadmap for completing the development of these unique concepts, which are known as solar concentrator arrays. The solar concentrator array concepts use flexible, ultra-light lenses to focus sunlight onto high-efficiency solar cells, achieving unprecedented performance.
October 5th, 2002
Ribbon to the Stars Science News
A space elevator would transform the economics of space travel, making ventures ranging from space spas to exotic scientific exploration more possible. Even a decade ago, an elevator to the heavens seemed like sheer fantasy, akin to the beanstalk Jack climbed in the fairy tale. There was no material strong enough to make the cables. But an advance in one of the tiniest of technologies
October 3rd, 2002
Boeing-Led Team Wins Contract To Advance Nuclear Electric Power For Space Boeing
A team of government, industry and academia, under the leadership of The Boeing Company, has been awarded a NASA contract to meet the challenge of developing nuclear electric power for deep space exploration. Responding to NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe’s call to move forward with a “nuclear propulsion initiative,” Boeing and a team consisting of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Glenn Research Center, Honeywell, Swales Aerospace, Auburn University and Texas A&M will develop power conversion technologies that enable future reactor electric propulsion missions. “Our team’s proposal was designed to meet the challenge NASA has made to further our exploration of the planets and deep space,” said Terry Murphy, division director for Boeing Energy Systems at Boeing’s Rocketdyne Propulsion & Power unit. “This reactor technology would give us a 100-fold increase in power and a 30-fold increase in propulsion efficiency compared to conventional, storable rocket propellants. This means that a mission would take a fraction of the travel time and provide years of scientific discovery.”
September 26th, 2002
Mission to Mars The Guardian
Cockroaches are hardy earthlings and the perfect creatures to explore the surface of Mars. Duncan Steel explains why.
September 24th, 2002
Exploring Our Solar System Will Require A New Breed Of SmartBots
During the next decade, says NASA Ames roboticist Liam Pedersen, “there’s not likely to be a human presence much beyond Earth orbit. So if we wish to explore places like Mars, we’ll have to send robots. No robots, no exploration. Period.” “Transmitting detailed instructions to essentially dumb robots is grossly inefficient and expensive–especially when there’s lots to do,” he adds. For example: Robots scouting Mars, perhaps in advance of human explorers, will reconnoiter vast areas. They’ll sample hundreds of rocks, drill holes in search of frozen water, and take thousands of pictures. “If each of these operations takes several days and a standing army of mission controllers … well, you can see how the cost increases.”
September 20th, 2002
Canadian mission to Mars gets closer National Post
A British Columbia robotics firm is to design a laser-guided landing system for a NASA mission to Mars, under a $400,000 contract with Industry Canada announced yesterday. The contract also involves developing a high-tech drill to collect rock samples for NASA’s Mobile Science Laboratory, on a mission of unprecedented scale to explore and study the Red Planet in 2009.