Maven is the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN spacecraft, and it arrives in Mars orbit in just a few weeks. It’s purpose is to collect data that will allow researchers to figure out how Mars went from a warm wet world just like Earth to the cold, dry globe it is today. This could be very useful knowledge if we want to keep the same thing from happening to our planet. The non-NASA home page for this project is the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Starting this evening the Science Channel is running a 3 part special about an aspect of the new race for space, with topics that include mining the Moon, colonizing Mars, and protecting Earth from low flying rocks like the one that wiped out the Dinosaurs. This isn’t science fiction or wishful thinking; these are engineers and scientists working for companies who have a business plan that they expect is going to make them a lot of money by utilizing resources previously inaccessible.
I contributed to a Kickstarter project called ARKYD who’s goal started with building a flock of orbital cameras to spot incoming meteors and asteroids. They have launched a bunch of them already with more in the pipe, and they are starting to map orbits using the Asteroid Zoo app and site. Step two is to do launches, both manned and robotic, to capture and change the orbits of the ones that come close enough so we can mine them for resources such as metals and volatiles (fuel and food). The ones coming too close and posing a danger to Earth? You just use that same capture and change orbits process to make sure they do us no harm, mining them for whatever they have to offer in the process. I suspect the third special might be about them.
InterScreech 2013 was assembled by Julie Meitz and focused on the surreal side of Linguistics. It was created as a presentation to Interspeech 2013, the world’s largest conference on the science and technology of Spoken Language Processing. Some of their disciplines include speech production, phonetics, speech synthesis, and speaker recognition. Julie has created a number of other interesting videos you should take the time to check out after watching this one.
InterScreech 2013 ! from Julie Meitz on Vimeo.
GParted is a world class rescue and partitioning tool that will allow you to save your old computer operating system, and failing that will allow you to export the files off of your old hard drive and back them up to external media. It may not be as intuitive as a lot of other Linux builds, requiring you to go through a bit of a learning curve before you can use it, but trust me when I say it is well worth the time and effort spent to get there. And since it is a Live Disc application, you never need to install it to a hard drive. Download it, copy it out to any media type your computer knows how to boot from, and run it from there. Myself, I have almost never used it to partition a hard drive, because I so rarely do that. But rescue files off a corrupt disc, external drive, or memory stick? That I do pretty much every day, and this is one of the better tools in my arsenal for that task. Try it out and see if you don’t find it useful as well.
Using the Asteroid Zoo web site, you can contribute to the hunt for asteroids by simply applying your Mark II Eyeball and its Wetware computing processing which evolved over millions of years to spot patterns such as the visual differences caused by things that move. It was refined to help us spot things trying to eat us, things falling on us, and things we could eat, but it also makes us the optimal processing instrument for spotting planets, comets, meteors, and asteroids from sky survey photographic sequences. What makes spotting such objects useful and worth your time? The answer depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. The pessimist will be looking for things trying to fall on us, alerting NASA, the ESA, and others so we can destroy or deflect them before they can impact and damage our world. The optimist will be looking for low flying rocks that we can capture and mine for resources such as metals and volatiles (fuel and food). Whatever your reason, it contributes to humanities knowledge and the protection of the world, so it is a good thing. Thanks to the folks at Planetary Resources for making it possible, and thank you if you contributed to the programs Kickstarter funding.
Just a reminder the second annual The Future Is Here Festival at the Smithsonian takes place this weekend (Friday through Sunday). Some of the speakers include Adam Steltzner, George Takei, Kim Stanley Robinson, David Brin, and The Mythbusters. At the higher ticket levels the event also includes priority seating on Saturday night for the national premiere of X-Men: Days of Future Past at the National Museum of American History, and Patrick Stewart will be taking questions from the audience afterwards.