10 Years of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data gathered together: Magnificent Mars is a short but intense video highlighting the last decades worth of images brought back from the red planet. It’s next project may be selecting a landing area for the first manned flight.
When LIGO detected the gravity wave signature of two black holes merging, it inspired the Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes Project to create this simulation of the event as it would have appeared to human eyes, and post it online. The Astronomy Picture Of the Day site maintained by the folks at NASA then picked it up, which is where I stumbled across it. For those wondering, LIGO stands for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, a technology dreamed up by Einstein and an operation run by Cal Tech and MIT. The video is slowed way down so you can make out details, the part of the event simulated took about a third of a second to happen. I particularly liked the gravitational lensing effect, nice attention to detail.
When I hear Planetary Defense I think Doctor Who and U.N.I.T. or several other sci-fi franchises. But this is NASA in real life, protecting the planet from another Extinction-Level Event in the form of a big hulking rock slamming into Earth at trans-orbital velocities. You can follow them on Twitter if you want to keep track of what might be headed our way, and learn about the next step, the Asteroid Redirect Mission.
One of the most exciting fields of engineering is the application of existing principles in totally new ways to solve long standing human-centric problems, and there have been recent breakthroughs on two such problems that will extend help to millions of people.
The GyroGlove is just what it sounds like: a glove with one or more small but intense Gyroscopes attached to it that will help steady the hands of victims of Parkinson’s and other degenerative neural disorders. Being able to shave without slicing your own throat/femoral artery or being able to eat soup without splattering half of the bowl across the table is a given for most folks, but for those who suffer from the trembling such a condition induces it makes all the difference in regaining a life with dignity and control.
For the visually impaired, electronic communication has meant a telephone so you could talk to people, or a (tiny motors driving very tiny vertical rods mechanism slaved to your internet connection) single line of Braille that you would have to read and remember until the next line was built up on the interface, and maybe the next, until you finally held the entire sentence in your mind. The advances in speech-to-text have been tremendous in the last decade, and that has helped, but there is finally a cost effective potential solution for a Braille Tablet. Using microfluidics rather than motors, a whole new class of Braille electronic outputs become available that make it possible to offer a complete screen worth of text rather than a single line, and for a fraction of the previously available outputs price.
These are powerful advances to my mind, offering new help to a lot of people that never had these options before. Even though each solution will only benefit some percentage of their target populations, I can’t help but grin at the thought that we continue to push back the barriers that keep us all from advancing.
Japan’s first planetary orbiter Akatsuki is now sending back images of Venus from close up, and the folks at the Planetary Society have posted a nicely detailed Akatsuki Mission Status Report on their web site which includes those pictures. Besides telling us about the satellites current status, they also give some information about its mission as the Venus Climate Orbiter and the three cameras that are its primary data gathering instruments. There was also some background on the JAXA planetary orbiter history, of which this mission is the first success, and a translation of their press conference announcing the achievement. While I would personally rather move to Mars, the knowledge we can gain from studying the weather dynamics on Venus will be very useful in better understanding our own.
It is October 13th, which means it is Ada Lovelace Day, the woman who invented computer programming in the early 1800s. There are quite a few postings on Twitter celebrating the women of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), along with radio and TV programs like this one from the BBC.