European Space Agency's Idea for a Quadcopter on Martian Surface

The European Space Agency is coming up with a large number of projects. I find many of the theories interesting, but being pessimistic; I wonder how far any of these things get in real terms. Once beyond the drawing board or if they get beyond.

It would be wonderful to see the ESA get some meaningful projects together and witness a mission to Mars with the proposed Quadcopter. I read this article in IEEE Spectrum magazine.

This is an article downloaded form IEEE Spectrum - an online magazine about space exploration. 

By Evan Ackerman

Posted 7 Jul 2014 | 16:20 GMT

The most ludicrous way of getting a robot to the surface of Mars is maybe stuffing it inside a giant inflatable bouncy ball and dropping it from a parachute. And that is only slightly more ludicrous than attaching it to a rocket-powered hovercrane (a rocket-powered hovercrane!!!) and thenlowering it to the ground with some sort of ridiculous cable contraption.

NASA has done both of these things. Successfully.

So, the bar is very high for finding ludicrous ways of getting robots to the surface of Mars, and the European Space Agency (ESA) has taken on the challenge with a quadcopter that can safely drop a rover down onto the Martian surface while hovering.

This is a combination of navigation software and hardware (GPS plus inertial systems, followed by vision-based navigation, a laser range finder, and a barometer), and visual hazard avoidance: the quadcopter is actively avoiding perceived obstacles (big pointy rocks and such) to find a nice, clear, flat, happy place to set down its rover cargo, using a 5-meter-long bridle.

You can think of this system as a combination of NASA's Morpheus lander, which has autonomous obstacle avoidance for landing site selection:

And this system from Japan, which is designed to deploy small rovers into (or next to) volcanoes:

Now, no matter what the ESA says in its press release, we don't want you to get the idea that this thing is now ready to fly off to Mars, rover in tow. There's a reason that NASA went with rockets and not rotors. I mean, there are probably lots of reasons, but one of them is that Mars doesn't have much atmosphere: the pressure at "sea level" on Mars (which is the average radius of the planet, Mars not currently being in possession of any seas) is about one-hundredth the atmospheric pressure at sea level on Earth.

And since things like helicopters depend on thrusting air downward to keep themselves up, you're going to need some ludicrously long blades (or a huge number of small ones) to physically move enough atmosphere to remain airborne. The reduced gravity (a little over a third of that on Earth) will help substantially, but it's still not a proven approach. This page from Georgia Techprovides more detail on how bad of an idea this is, and suggests flapping wings as a substitute (although I think it's research from 2001-ish).

What's most relevant here is the software that the team developed to navigate and detect hazards, because it can (presumably) be adapted to other flying platforms, like rocket cranes, or something more exotic, like maybe something based on a balloon. Or an anti-gravity hovership. The ESA has those, right?

Frogs' Genes could help humanity voyage into space

Read this fascinating report in the Independent Newspaper about frogs genes helping humanity voyage in space.





Scientists say burrowing frogs' genes could help humanity voyage into space - Science - News - The Independent

NASA’s Orion Passes Most Complex and Flight-Like Test of Parachute System | French Tribune

Read this exciting new article from the French Tribune. Click on the link below to read about very encouraging tests.

NASA’s Orion Passes Most Complex and Flight-Like Test of Parachute System | French Tribune

Another Look at Orion Spacecraft at NASA

The Orion spacecraft is the new big project under development. The US government had cold feet about expense for some time and probably still does - understandably. The costs of building such a spacecraft must be colossal and the US electorate would want their taxes spent elsewhere. 

However, funding from private enterprise could be the answer as many firms re-invest in such a project to get their own space ideas into the cosmos and onto Mars. Private enterprise is beginning to find advantages in space exploration.

Exploding Star 20,000 Light Years Away.

When this event happened, there was an ice age on planet Earth and humans were battling the elements to survive. Humans did survive and civilisations have come and gone, empire have risen and fallen and the human race has been through many trials and tribulations. They have managed to look into the heavens and build telescopes that can look at the stars. They have discovered that the stars they look at are often in the past. They are witnessing an event that happened 20,000 years ago, yet only now do we realise that such a momentous event took place. It has taken 20,000 years of light speed for this information to reach us. If someone at the other end had a telescope and could look at Earth, they might look at Stone Age men hunting mammoths upon ice plains. They would have no notion we had adapted and evolved. It makes the mind boggle. All our silly little political squabbles seem meaningless when there is that vast eternity waiting for us. 

One day... one day...

NASA's Design for a New Warp Drive Monster - Star Trek Become a Reality.

I was spellbound by this piece from CNN news. I have pasted it here because there is so much info I would like to keep on the blog. This is a mega Wow!

(CNN) -- Thanks to a NASA physicist, the notion of warp speed might just travel out of sci-fi and into the real world.

NASA's Harold White has been working since 2010 to develop a warp drive that will allow spacecraft to travel at speeds faster than light -- 186,000 miles per second.

White, who heads NASA's Advanced Propulsion Team, spoke about his conceptual starship at a conference last fall. But interest in his project reached a new level this week when he unveiled images of what the craft might look like.

Created by artist Mark Rademaker, who based them on White's designs, the images show a technologically detailed spacecraft that wouldn't look out of place in a "Star Trek" movie. Rademaker says creating them took more than 1,600 hours.

For now, warp speed is only possible in TV and movies, with both "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" referencing an idea that was completely speculative at the time. White has fittingly named the concept spacecraft IXS Enterprise, for the starship famously piloted by Captain James T. Kirk in the "Star Trek" TV series and movies.

At the SpaceVision 2013 Space Conference last November in Phoenix, White talked about his design, the concepts behind it and the progress that's been made in warp-drive development over the decades. He discussed the the idea of a "space warp," a loophole in the theory of general relativity that would allow for massive distances to be travelled very quickly, reducing travel times from thousands of years to days.

In his speech, White described space warps as faraway galaxies that can bend light around them. They work on the principle of bending space both in front of and behind a spacecraft. This would essentially allow for the empty space behind the craft to expand, both pushing and pulling it forward at the same time. The concept is similar to that of an escalator or moving walkway.

"There's no speed limit on the expansion and contraction of space," White said at the conference. "You can actually find a way to get around what I like to call the 11th commandment: Thou shall not exceed the speed of light."

It's the idea of space warps that inspired physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 to first theorizes a mathematical model of a warp drive that would be able to bend space and time. While studying Alcubierre's equations, White decided to design his own retooled version of the Alcubierre Drive. His recently unveiled design has much less empty space than the first concept model, increasing its efficiency.

The warp drive that White's team has been working on would literally transcend space, shortening the distance between two points and allowing the craft to break the speed of light. This would be a spaceship with no speed limit.

Because travel into space has been extremely limited due to existing means of propulsion, such technology could blow open the possibilities of space exploration. It could allow for the study of the farthest reaches of space, parts that scientists once considered unimaginable.

Although the technology to create the spacecraft or the warp the drive doesn't yet exist, the artistic renderings Rademaker created could potentially be a model of what's to come -- the first spacecraft to break the speed-of-light barrier and journey beyond our solar system.

In his design, White says he drew from Matthew Jeffries' 1965 sketches of the Enterprise from "Star Trek," saying parts of that the ship was mathematically correct. He worked with Rademaker and graphic designer Mike Okuda to update the math and produce what he believes to be a viable spacecraft.

According to NASA, there hasn't been any proof that a warp drive can exist, but the agency is experimenting nonetheless. Although the concept doesn't violate the laws of physics, that doesn't guarantee that it will work.

"We're starting to talk about what the next chapter for human space exploration going to be," White said at SpaceVision.

Exciting New Star Cluster Photos Taken by Nasa Hubble Space Telescope

Clip Taken From Independent Newspaper

Nasa has released a stunning image of a brightly coloured ancient cluster containing more than 100,000 stars captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The image depicts Messier 5, or M5, and includes a quote from 18th century astronomer Charles Messier's catalogue of clusters and other nebulae that begins: "Beautiful Nebula discovered between the Balance [Libra] & the Serpent [Serpens].”

This description suggests Messier believed M5 was a nebula, a cloud of dust, hydrogen and other gases, when developments in observation technology later revealed it was actually a cluster of stars.

Nasa said: “Though it appeared to Messier to be fuzzy and round and without stars, Messier 5 (M5) is now known to be a globular star cluster, 100,000 stars or more.”

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NASA: Space in pictures

The globular star cluster is bound by gravity and packed into a region around 165 light-years in diameter. It was discovered by German astronomer Gottfried Kirch in 1702 and lies some 25,000 light-years away from the Earth.

M5 is one of the oldest globulars and its stars are believed to be almost 13 billion years old, making it one of the oldest globulars to be associated with the Milky Way Galaxy.

“Even close to its dense core at the left, the cluster's aging red and blue giant stars and rejuvenated blue stragglers stand out in yellow and blue hues in the sharp color image”, Nasa added.

The Hubble Telescope was launched from the Kennedy Space Centre on 25 April, 1990 and celebrated its 24th year in orbit on Friday. The telescope's orbit outside of the Earth's atmosphere allows it to take high resolution images within almost no background light.

The Problem with Cryogenics so Far. (Defrosting)

The reason why we cant revive frozen people

Theories that might solve the problem

When you see the magnified ice crystal in this picture, imagine it in a human cell - a minute sack with a membrane wall. The little sharp stalagmite edges would rupture such membranes. Imagine if it is what happens inside every human cell when frozen. The crystals puncture our cell walls and as we defrost our cell structures can't contain water and we turn to mush. That is why we can't defrost frozen people. The links above offer ideas that could provide answers for Tomorrow. Cryogenics can be very useful to us, in the future, if the defrosting can be mastered to bring a human out of cryogenic freezing - intact. Obviously, it is much easier said and imagined in theory.