Posts Tagged ‘headlines’
Space Boat: A Nautical Mission to an Alien Sea
In May, the TiME project received a $3-million development contract from NASA. If the space agency green-lights the mission, the capsule will lift off in 2016. By 2023, TiME will be about 800 million miles away in Titan’s north-polar region, home to its biggest lakes and seas. The capsule will take photographs, collect meteorological data, measure depth, and analyze samples. TiME will have no means of propulsion once it is on Titan, so it will float, carried by breezes across the sea’s surface. Then, by the mid-2020s, it will enter a decade-long winter of darkness as the moon’s orbit takes it to the dark side of Saturn, away from the sun and communication. It won’t have a line of sight to Earth to beam back more data until 2035.
Methane clouds drift in Titan’s smoggy orange skies, sometimes releasing hydrocarbon raindrops, which replenish the seas and sculpt the landscape the way water does on Earth. But Titan’s seas probably don’t contain life. “Life as we know it requires liquid water, and Titan’s surface is far too cold for this,” says Ralph Lorenz, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who is working on TiME. “Its seas can tell us about how molecules organize and evolve, and how life may arise more generally.” TiME’s principal investigator, planetary geologist Ellen Stofan, wonders about the waves: “Are there hazes, sea spray? Is the liquid clear or cloudy? Is there scum floating on the surface? With Titan’s seas, there are endless questions.”
brightcove.createExperiences();
Splash Landing on Titan's Sea
DROP IN
After a seven-year journey, including gravitational slingshots around Earth and Jupiter, the Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) passes through Titan’s thick nitrogen and methane atmosphere, protected by its heat shield.
DRIFT DOWN
At an altitude of about 100 miles, TiME deploys its parachute. During the remainder of its roughly two-hour descent, the probe’s camera snaps pictures while a thermometer and barometer record meteorological data.
FLOAT AROUND
After landing in the ethane and methane sea Ligeia Mare, TiME’s mass spectrometer collects a sample to analyze its chemical composition, while its sonar measures the sea’s depth. Without its own means of propulsion, the capsule will bob along in the gentle wind and currents. It might even experience alien rains or wash up on an extraterrestrial beach.
Cosmic Contenders
Next year, NASA will give full funding to one of three missions: a Mars probe to study how the planet formed, a “comet hopper” that will repeatedly land on a near-Earth comet, or a capsule to float on a sea on Titan, one of Saturn’s 53 known moons.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Geophysical Monitoring Station would study Mars’s interior structure and composition to better understand its geological history.
The Comet Hopper, conceived at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, would land several times on a comet, studying how the icy body evolves as it warms up while approaching the sun.
Building, Launching, and Landing a Rover (All Before Going to College)
The first time we launched, the parachute didn’t deploy. The robot fell 2,000 feet and shattered. It wasn’t too big a deal cutting new parts to make another, but we needed to figure out a better release system for the parachute. So I climbed onto my roof and threw the rover off a few times with different parachute designs. When we launched the newer system, the parachute worked great, but the sensors that were supposed to release the parachute after the rover had landed malfunctioned and released 100 feet before touchdown. The rover almost landed in a lake!
I designed and programmed the microcontroller in the robot. The hard part was determining what state the robot was in: inside the rocket, in the air, or on the ground. I set up a system of accelerometers and barometers to detect launch, apogee and landing with accelerations and altitudes. The robot can avoid collisions, navigate, and find an outlet to charge itself.
The whole process took longer than expected because of school and college applications and graduation. But after two years, we entered the competition. We were the first to have a working rover.
Youk and classmates at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, competed in the Federation of Galaxy Explorers’ Battle of the Rockets in April.
Spy vs. Spy: Casinos Can’t See The Cameras Hidden Up Gamblers’ Sleeves
After a few hands, the cutter left the floor and entered a bathroom stall, where he most likely passed the camera to a confederate in an adjoining stall. The runner carried the camera to a gaming analyst in a nearby hotel room, where the analyst transferred the video to a computer, watching it in slow motion to determine the order of the cards. Not quite half an hour had passed since the cut. Baccarat play averages less than six cards a minute, so there were still at least 160 cards left to play through. Back at the table, other members of the gang were delaying the action, glancing at their cellphones and waiting for the analyst to send them the card order.
The gang had just walked away from Macau, the largest gambling city on Earth, with millions. They took $100,000 from the Bicycle casino in Los Angeles only weeks after the Las Vegas run. The Cutters’ scam did not require marking or switching cards, so casinos’ card scans and tracking software was irrelevant. Security consultants say that the gang numbers about 70. (With so many players, facial analytic software is easy to beat.)
Click here to launch a gallery of ways casinos catch cheats, and ways cheats beat the system.
At the Cosmopolitan, about 25 black-domed surveillance cameras hang from the ceiling above the high-stakes baccarat tables. Camera feeds, card scans, information about individual betting chips, and even biometrics about players are fed to a security suite at most new casinos, where software analyzes the data to determine betting outcomes in real time. a Cosmopolitan security official hovered a few feet behind the players, too, tracking wins, losses and betting patterns to identify cheats like the Cutters. Jeff Voyles, a hotel management instructor at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, says that a new casino will spend at least $10 million on its surveillance.
Even so, casinos lose 6 to 8 percent of their revenue every year to some form of cheating, and sophisticated hustlers can take as much as $500,000 in just an hour. As cameras get better, smaller and cheaper, the cheaters are gaining an edge and casinos are struggling to keep up. “We’re really buried in tech and don’t know how to get out,” Voyles says, adding that because security systems don’t generate income, casinos are slow to update.
But that night at the Cosmopolitan, the house won. One of the Cutters slipped up, and security was alerted. Nevada Gaming Board agents were called in and shut down the game and detained the players. Still, they couldn’t find a camera. Bill Zender, a security contractor for high-end casinos, says that the agents didn’t find anything because they couldn’t get a warrant to search the gamblers. Video footage showed no illegal moves or suspicious behavior, and under Nevada law, the agents didn’t have probable cause to perform a full body search. The cutters were released.
In May, some of the Cutters were finally caught. A casino surveillance manager in the Philippines spotted a “spatula like” camera hidden up a baccarat player’s sleeve and he identified four more likely gang members nearby. meanwhile, casinos are considering installing counter-surveillance scanners that detect the low-frequency sound that video cameras emit.
Not four miles from the Cosmopolitan, you can buy such a scanner for $720 from Fox’s Spy Outlet. Manager Andrew Rowles will tell you that it has a range of only a few feet, and it might be picking up a cellphone, not a video camera. Rowles can also sell you a camera to beat the scanner. It’s hidden in a stick of gum and costs just $150.
At The End Of The Earth: The Longest, Deepest Oil Wells In The World
The seven-story oil rig at Sakhalin, nicknamed Yastreb (the Hawk), is the industry’s most powerful, with four 7,500-psi mud pumps, 14,000 barrels of liquidmud storage and six generators. It has two walls to help it withstand the cold and earthquakes, which are frequent. The Yastreb’s drill torque is approximately 91,000 foot-pounds (a pickup truck operates with about 200).
Extended-reach drills travel both outward and down. To control the position and angle of the wellbore, drilling engineers use magnetometers and inclinometers; the information the tools gather is sent back by pressure pulses in the drilling fluid, which the engineers then analyze at the surface. The team - about 800, mostly Russians — pre-maps each expedition using 3D seismic imagery to create visual models of the conditions in the rock and the locations of the oil reservoir. They can reach their target with an accuracy of just a few feet. It’s as if they were standing in the middle of Central Park and drilled down to a specific doorway of the New York Stock Exchange.
On Building A Fleshy Robotic Caterpillar–and Why
Caterpillars have an interesting technique for moving quickly and powerfully: They contract their belly muscles, curl up, and become wheels. They can roll several body lengths within 100 milliseconds. We said, Let’s see if we could do that with a robot. Our GoQBot can inch around like a caterpillar, but it also has a coiled shape-memory-alloy wire running through it that shrinks in length when it’s heated. We warm it up through a tethered control, the wire shortens, the robot curls, and it rolls away quickly. Right now, the wire is our muscle. But the second stage—and we’re working on this now—is developing technology to grow robots out of organic materials. We want to find a way to grow insect muscles inside a robotic device and to fuel the muscles with sugar and fat.
Once you can build and control something that is soft and floppy, you could build robots that are environmentally friendly. Imagine a robot that you could potentially eat or set aside to decompose when you’re done with it.
Barnacles Destroy Boats, But Getting Rid Of Them Destroys The Sea—Until Now
The Problem:
Biofouling, which occurs when barnacles (or any other clinging species) cover a ship’s hull or anchor line. The U.S. Naval Academy estimates that biofouling creates enough hull-drag to increase the Navy’s petroleum bill by about $250 million every year. For millennia, copper has been used to keep marine life at bay; the Greeks and Romans used copper nails for this reason. The Navy uses it too, mixing powdered copper into boat paint. But as the paint wears, copper seeps into the water, where it has been shown to harm salmon and oysters. And as the paint thins, the barnacles return.
The Solution:
Medetomidine, a chemical that activates the octopamine receptors (similar to adrenaline receptors) in barnacle larvae, causing them to flee. Barnacle larvae are free-floating and harden only after they have attached to a surface. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden mixed small Plexiglas capsules filled with medetomidine into boat paint, young barnacles were scared away, and the hulls remained pristine. At high levels, medetomidine can lighten the color of fish scales, making them more vulnerable to predators. But the capsules ensure that the chemical is released slowly, so it lasts longer and minimizes environmental damage.
Building a Rodent-Sized, Wearable Brain-Imaging Device
In the scanner, gamma rays collide with solid particles. This gives off light that is then detected by photo sensors. For a scan to work in conventional PET devices, the rats can’t move, so the animals are anesthetized. But anesthesia affects neurochemistry and skews the test results. We miniaturized the scanner so that an awake rat could wear it.
Commercial PET scanners, even for small animals, are several feet tall and weigh hundreds of pounds. We got ours down to under eight ounces; the outer diameter is a little over three inches. We call it RatCAP, for Rat Conscious Animal PET. We were able to make it so small using two new components: a thinner photo sensor called an avalanche photodiode, and a custom microchip that reads the signal from the sensor. The scanner has a single data line, so the animal can move pretty freely. The device hangs from the ceiling on a long, stretched spring, which takes the scanner’s weight off the rat.
RatCAP is the only tool that allows us to measure what’s going on in the brain while we’re studying behavior, and the rats don’t seem to be bothered. We’ve actually seen a rat in a RatCAP fall asleep.
Paul Vaska is a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory.