CWL

The Mercury Rises For Bepicolombo

The engineering model of the BepiColombo Mercury Transfer Module has completed a 12-day Sun-simulation test inside the Large Space Simulator at ESA’s test centre in the Netherlands, where it received a taste of the extreme solar heating it will experience when it enters orbit around the Solar System’s innermost planet in 2022.

The image was taken during a dry run on 20 February, during which the facility’s motion system replicated the different orientations of the simulated solar beam and the positions of the test table.

The real test, in vacuum, began on 26 February and continued non-stop for 12 days. During this time the module was subjected to ten times the solar heating experienced by satellites circling Earth.

Some of the 121 hexagonal mirror segments that direct the simulated solar radiation onto the spacecraft are visible towards the top of the image. The aperture through which the ‘sunlight’ travels from the nineteen 25 kW lamps can be seen just to the left of the mirror segments.

The Mercury Transfer Module will carry the mission’s two scientific satellites – Japan’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter and Europe’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter – into orbit around Mercury. The spacecraft will use electric propulsion to reach its destination.

Open-Sourcing Outer Space: 3-D Printing Meets Rocket Science

From 3D printed moonbases to architectural wonders more to down to Earth, as we saw what awesome mixture 3D printing and architecture could bring, I was left wondering about what other technologies we could be remixing 3D printers with. Partially answering my curiosity, Wired highlights an exciting new world of Rocket science.. now 3D print compatible? Apparently so! Read on:

Sure, a 3-D printed car is cool, but it doesn’t go to space. And there’s probably a good reason for that, but now a competition is aiming to launch the newest manufacturing fad into the final frontier by challenging people to design 3-D printed rocket engines.

As in many other fields, 3-D printing is the latest DIY obsession in space, with people looking to print everything from moon bases to astronaut meals. The 3D Rocket Engine Design Challenge asks competitors to envision an engine capable of sending a small payload, like a 10-kg nanosat, into orbit. Designers will work in an online environment called Sunglass and can collaborate with others around the world. The plan is to print the projects in a stainless steel 3-D printer, and the top three designs will share $10,000 in prizes. The competition will officially open at SXSW on Mar. 9.

The sponsors behind the 3-D rocket engine challenge, Sunglass and a company called DIYRockets, hope to spur innovative ideas for space travel and bring down manufacturing costs. Whether the contest will actually produce something or is just another buzzword-filled presentation at SXSW remains to be seen.

Bringing 3-D printing to rocketry isn’t entirely new. NASA has some 3-D printers working to reduce the cost of new parts for its upcoming giant heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System. Using laser beams, their engineers fuse fine layers of metal powder to create a fully functioning part. A small company called Rocket Moonlighting has built and fired petite engines made from a 3-D printer. Hobbyists are also harnessing 3-D printers to make traditional toy rockets with firecracker engines, some of which look like they sprung from the imagination of a pulp sci-fi writer.

Of course, this is rocket science. Designers for the 3-D rocket engine challenge will need to have a good understanding of fluid dynamics, heat flow, engineering, and physics to make sure their finished models don’t explode in a tiny, adorable fireball. Because of this, the competition hopes to call on a wide variety of people and, using Sunglass, allow them to work on different designs together.

For Full Details Head On Over To Full Article

Neil deGrasse Tyson- Why Would-be Engineers End Up As English Majors

scanzen:

Third Soyuz flight from Europe’s Spaceport

A Soyuz launcher lifted off on 12 October from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana to carry into orbit the third and fourth satellites of Europe’s Galileo global navigation satellite system. Watch this new time-lapse movie of the launcher’s transfer to the launch pad and liftoff.

Animgif: scanzen

jtotheizzoe:

Goldie Blox: An engineering toy set for girls that breaks up the “boys’ club”!

Debbie Sterling, a Stanford engineer, developed Goldie Blox as an engineering toy that lets young girls develop spatial reasoning and creative construction principles without pandering to them or pummeling them with princessey pink paraphernalia. It’s a non-newsflash that academic science is biased against women, but to fight that we’ve got to engage girls early, so that they are comfortable and confident in simply making science a part of their identity. I see hordes of confident, intelligent young women among my blog followers, and I’d like to see those numbers grow. 

This is exactly the toy I would want my daughters to play with, if I had any.

(I suppose I could get it for my dogs, but they would probably just eat it.)

Anyway, this looks awesome. I am not a young girl, as you may have gathered by now, but not gonna lie … I want to play with Goldie Blox.

astronautfashions:

jump-suit:

Neil Armstrong makes paper airplanes with UC’s aero engineering club, 1974.

I’m posting this here, too because pants.

ugh neil :[

Space History Photo: Project Fire

In this historical photo from the U.S. space agency, technicians ready materials to be subjected to high temperatures that will simulate the effects of re-entry heating as part of the Project Fire study. This photo was taken on Aug. 17, 1962, in the 9 X 6 Foot Thermal Structures Tunnel.

Map shows NYC’s energy consumption, building-by-building

“This statistical model uses ‘zipcode-level energy consumption data to estimate the average annual energy use for every tax lot—at practically building level—through all five boroughs of the city.’ Included are estimateans for space heating, space cooling, water heating, and base electric applications such as lighting. ‘This map will enable NYC building owners to see whether their own building consumes more or less than what an average building with similar function and size would,’ said Professor Modi. ‘This is the first time anyone has provided an estimate like this for New York City and the first time anyone has offered information to the public in the form of an interactive map.’”

Hell on Earth: NASA’s Toxic Venus Test Chamber

Side Note: Looks like NASA engineers are working to build a formidable opponent for the understanding of Venus, global warming and green house gases all in one. Venus, a planet that was once like ours, but burned to a near crisp thanks in part to these effects caused by the gases. In this article, Wired examines a new technology being built to study spacecraft that would be able to handle conditions of the violent Venusian temperatures.

In a bare concrete room at NASA Glenn Research Center, pieces of a 12-ton toxic oven patiently wait to be assembled.

When engineers finish bolting the compact car-sized device together in May, it will scorch anything put in it at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, crush it under pressures nearly 100 times that of Earth’s and choke it with carbon dioxide, sulfuric acid and a cocktail of other noxious fumes.

The hellish conditions should emulate the surface of Venus (above), a planet baked of its water and suffocated by greenhouse gases. “Venus used to be like Earth. There’s a lot of lessons for us to learn from it,” said NASA Glenn engineer Rodger Dyson, leader of the Extreme Environment Test Chamber.

The problem with Venusian spacecraft is that they melt in an hour — two if they’re lucky. To know if next-generation landers or rovers could survive, engineers need a test chamber large enough to swallow their hardy robots. NASA’s chamber will be the first one of its kind.

“There’s no data to predict how long materials will survive on the surface,” Dyson said. “We don’t even know what physics and chemistry and mineralogy are occurring there.”

scinerds:

World’s Smallest Steam Engine Is Size of Fog Droplet

Engineers have made a tiny engine a few micrometers wide, or roughly the size of a water droplet found in fog.

The device is both confined and powered by a “trap” of laser light, and it sputters a bit. The fact that it works at all, however, may push the boundary of what’s possible in engineering microscopic machines.

“The machine is so small that its motion is hindered by microscopic processes which are of no consequence in the macroworld,” said physicist Clemens Bechinger of the University of Stuttgart in a press release. A study about the microscopic Stirling engine was published Dec. 11 in Nature Physics.

An Engineering professor who combines mechanical know-how with creativity, Dennis Hong is the U.S. star in humanoid robots.  Very cool and in-depth article on Professor Dennis Hong,  the man who is revolutionizing humanoid robotics.  This guy and his team work extremely hard!  They know that #knowledgeispower so learn from um and take #swagnotes.

Poll Finds Public Support for Climate Hacking

Support among the public for scientists deliberately altering the Earth’s climate on a vast scale to counteract global warming is at 72 percent, according to a recent survey that appeared in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

3,105 individuals from the United States, Canada and the UK responded to the internet survey, which was weighted to be representative of the wider population, making it the first large-scale international survey of public perception to the field.

It focused on geoengineering techniques to reflect the Sun’s energy away from the Earth’s surface before it can be absorbed. Such techniques range in scope and complexity, but could involve the injection of tiny particles into the stratosphere, whitening clouds using sea water spray, using pale-coloured roofing and paving materials at ground level, or even blocking the sun’s light with an enormous mirror in space.

The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released in 2007, said that geoengineering options remained largely unproven, and reliable cost estimates had not yet been published. Other opponents to the techniques have expressed concern about the ethics of disrupting an immensely complex system that we don’t yet fully understand.

The team behind the survey said in the paper’s abstract: “Measured familiarity was higher than expected, with eight percent and 45 percent of the population correctly defining the terms geoengineering and climate engineering respectively. There was strong support for allowing the study of solar radiation management. Support decreased and uncertainty rose as subjects were asked about their support for using solar radiation management immediately, or to stop a climate emergency.”

The idea of a Space Elevator is one that dates back to the first rocket scientists.  It’s a reasonably simple idea, you set off a huge cable into orbit at the same rate as the spin of the Earth.  You can then send things up the cable, just like an elevator.  This would allow masses to be sent up to space without the huge burst of energy a rocket uses.  The reason it cannot be done at the moment is that the cable would need to be both extremely light and strong to endure the tension forces.  One of the most promising ideas is to use nanotechnology, to use super elastic carbon nanotubes. 1 gram of these can stretch 18 miles! [more] 

Revolutionary Eyeglasses You Tune Yourself, No Optician Needed | GOOD

Here’s how the glasses work. They have two lenses with a silicon gel in between. You pump in more or less silicon while looking at a reading chart until the letters are crisp and clear, then you have the right prescription. That’s it. Silver—who is an atomic physicist by trade—told the Guardian, “Glasses like these are perfect for use in the third world. We can send them to schools where teachers can direct pupils to set their spectacles to suit each one’s vision. It is as simple as that.”

skepttv:

Exoskeletal Arm Support From Equipois to be Released in June

Gravity can be a pain, literally. Any of you who work in a factory, lab, operating room, or any other setting that requires repetitive tasks with outstretched arms will, I’m sure, agree. Working with extended arms for hours on end can be tiring, especially if you are holding equipment or tools that are necessary to get the job done. Are there any solutions to this problem (other than a gym membership and some upper body work)? Why yes, there soon will be – an innovative exoskeletal arm support, the X-Ar™ from Equipois Inc. will be available sometime in early June and hopes to banish overexertion and fatigue for good. The revolutionary support system is based on the same technology that is used to stabilize camera equipment (the same inventor is responsible for both technologies). The product renders your arm weightless, without hindering range of motion or precision. The system is completely mechanical (consumes no power), so it can be used in a variety of settings and easily transported from one place to another. The future is here people; first it’s an exoskeletal arm support, and the next thing you know, in addition to choosing our outfits for the day, every morning we will be choosing which of our robotic limbs to plug into our arm socket.

Read more on Singularity Hub.