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Category: space – Page 983

A Germany-based company, Paravan, is a leader in the electric wheelchair market and related accessories to adapt vehicles for people with disabilities. While they mostly work with vans and trucks, their latest product makes almost any car with enough trunk space extremely practical for someone using a wheelchair.

They installed it in a Tesla Model S to illustrate the functionalities of the product and the range of vehicles it can be installed on.

A robotic arm, called Robot 3000, can automatically lift a wheelchair (up to 25 kg – 55 lbs) from the trunk of a vehicle, then it moves the chair to the driver’s side and extends it all the way to the driver’s door.

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In.
1979, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a novel about an elevator to space. This.
is the story of the people who intend to build it.

SKY LINE is not just a story about trying to build the largest thing ever, it’s a story about our impulse to push limits and chase dreams, even when the results might not be seen until long after we’re gone. What drives a person to devote his life to pursuits that may take generations to achieve?

Continue reading “About Sky Line” | >

Astronaut Tim Peake controlled a robot from the International Space Station (ISS). However, the robot wasn’t in space, but was located on Earth. The experiment was meant to prepare astronauts and technicians for future human-robotic missions to the Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies.

As part of a unique experiment, astronaut Tim Peake successfully maneuvered a robot located on Earth from the ISS. The British astronaut took control from the Earth-based team and steered the robot on a simulated Martian landscape. The experiment took place at Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, dubbed “Mars Yard.”

The experiment, titled “Supervisory Control of Mars Yard Rover” or SUPVIS-M for short, was designed to one day allow humans, more specifically astronauts, sitting on board ISS or other deep space vehicles, to reliably control robots or machines over vast distances. The experiment is part of Europe’s METERON (Multipurpose End-To-end Robotics Operations Network) project. The overall idea is develop and optimize tasks and directional control.

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The moon has three large seas and a number of smaller lakes connected by rivers and rivulets located in its northern hemisphere, and one large lake in the south. NASA researchers previously believed the liquid to be ethane, which is produced when “sunlight breaks methane molecules apart”, said Alice Le Gall, a member of the Cassini radar team who led the study into the makeup of the moon’s liquid reservoirs.

Using radar observations of the heat given off by Ligeia Mare, as well as data from a 2013 experiment that bounced radio signals off of the sea, the team determined the compositions of the liquid sea and the sea bed by separating each of their contributions to the sea’s observed temperature.

This image from Cassini shows Ligeia Mare, the second largest known body of liquid on Titan.

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On April 12th, 1961 Yuri Gagarin launched into space on a Vostok rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, becoming the first person ever to leave the planet.

Here’s the crazy thing: today’s astronauts travel to space on a nearly identical rocket, the Soyuz, which went into operation only five years after Gagarin’s historic flight.

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The longer you gaze at this depiction of the hidden architecture of the universe, the more you can’t help but notice how similar it looks to neurons communicating with each other in the human brain.

3D interactive visualization lets users explore the vast, hidden structure of the universe.

By Amanda Montañez on April 14, 2016.

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Ever since Kepler’s observation in the 17th century that sunlight is one of the reasons that the tails of comets to always face away from the sun, it has been understood that light exerts pressure in the direction it propagates. Radiation pressure is produced by the momentum carried by light, and it plays a crucial role in a variety of systems, from atomic to astronomical scales.

In a recent theoretical paper, a group from the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan showed that density in non-uniform optical fields has an unusual component, which is orthogonal to the propagation direction of and is proportional to the optical spin, which means the degree of circular polarization. They predicted that this spin momentum would produce a transverse spin-dependent optical force, a few orders of magnitude weaker than the usual .

Now, based on the theoretical work, a group from RIKEN, the University of Bristol, and other institutions have used an extremely precise technique to experimentally verify that light does in fact exert the extraordinary perpendicular force, which is determined by the polarization of the light. The research has been published in Nature Physics.

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Every year, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program puts out the call to the general public, hoping to find better or entirely new aerospace architectures, systems, or mission ideas. As part of the Space Technology Mission Directorate, this program has been in operation since 1998, serving as a high-level entry point to entrepreneurs, innovators and researchers who want to contribute to human space exploration.

This year, thirteen concepts were chosen for Phase I of the NIAC program, ranging from reprogrammed microorganisms for Mars, a two-dimensional spacecraft that could de-orbit space debris, an analog rover for extreme environments, a robot that turn asteroids into spacecraft, and a next-generation exoplanet hunter. These proposals were awarded $100,000 each for a nine month period to assess the feasibility of their concept.

Of the thirteen proposals, four came from NASA’s own Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with the remainder coming either from other NASA bodies, private research institutions, universities and aerospace companies from around the country. Taken as a whole, these ideas serve to illustrate of the kinds of missions NASA intends to purse in the coming years, as well as the cutting-edge technology they hope to leverage to make them happen.

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