Now Moon Mars and Asteroids will be mined. Get ready for space travell

An international group of scientists, mining and aerospace engineers, policy makers, and other specialists met in Golden, Colorado to discuss the use of space resources. Space Resources Roundtable II was held at the Colorado School of Mines, and was sponsored by the School of Mines, NASA, and the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Participants discussed lunar, martian, and asteroidal resources, along with economic and legal aspects of using extraterrestrial resources. This report focuses on lunar resources. Manufacture of useful materials on the Moon, Mars, or asteroids requires extensive use of what we know about those places through studies of lunar samples and meteorites from asteroids and Mars. It is applied cosmochemistry.



Matter from:-Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology

People are eventually going to be working and living in space. Construction and operation of lunar solar power stations may make that happen. Or perhaps it will happen to support a thriving space tourism business. Whatever drives it, there will be a need to use the resources available in space. It is too expensive to drag all the needed ingredients up from the Earth. The resources are available on the Moon, Mars, and asteroids. Participants in the Space Resources Roundtable agree that we need to explore extraterrestrial bodies for resources and to learn how to extract those resources from them. Experts in the mineralogy and chemical composition of extraterrestrial materials will play important roles in the search and mining of space resources. Like Earth explorers through the ages, we must live off the land and a new breed of scientist, the applied cosmochemist, will be there to see it happen.

LEONID METEOR SHOWER

LEONID METEOR SHOWER: The Leonid meteor shower peaks this year on Nov. 17th. The shower begins on Tuesday morning around 0900 UT (4 a.m. EST; 1 a.m. PST) with a sprinkling of 20 to 30 meteors per hour over North America.  The best place to be, however, is Asia, where forecasters expect as many as 300 Leonids per hour. The predicted outburst occurs between 2100 - 2200 UT, just before local dawn in that part of the world:
For more update visit:-http://www.spaceweather.com

Disaster management with the help of robots

Modern robotics can help where it is too dangerous for humans to venture. Search and rescue robots (S&R robots) have meanwhile become so sophisticated that they have already carried out their first missions in disasters. And for this reason rescue robots will be given a special place at the RoboCup 2009 – the robotics world championships in Graz.

The rescue robotics programme provided exciting rescue demonstrations in which two complex disaster scenarios formed the setting for the robots’ performances. An accident involving a passenger car loaded with hazardous materials and a fire on the rooftop of Graz Stadthalle were the two challenges that flight and rescue robots faced on their remote controlled missions. Smoke and flames made the sets as realistic as possible, ensuring a high level of thrills.

A remote controlled flight robot can help by reconnoitering the situation and sending information by video signals to the rescue services on the ground. As the robotics world championships, the RoboCup recognised the possible uses of rescue robots a long time ago and promoted their development in the separate category “RoboCup Rescue”. RoboCup 2009, organised by TU Graz, dedicates one particular focus to the lifesaving robots with a rescue robot demonstration, a practical course for first responders and a workshop for the exchange of experiences between rescue services and robotics researchers.

Searching space debris via network

Now, research by a team from the University of Southampton's School of Engineering Sciences, suggests a new technique for identifying key pieces of debris that should be targeted for removal from orbit.




Using network theory as a mathematical tool to identify these key pieces of debris, the Southampton team's approach involves looking for objects that might cause damage based on how many potential links they have to other objects. That is, how connected they are in a network. The greater the number of links, the greater the object's potential for causing damage.



The research was presented at the 59th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Glasgow this week by Dr Hugh Lewis of the University's School of Engineering Sciences. His presentation was based largely on work by Southampton PhD student, Rebecca Newland.



"The space debris environment can be thought of as a network in which the pieces of debris are connected if there is a possibility of them colliding," explains Rebecca Newland. "Once a network has been built it can be analysed to identify objects that are important to the overall structure of the network.



"To destroy a network it would be necessary to identify and remove those key objects, in the same way that targeting highly connected routers for removal could cripple the internet."



Space debris consists of any man-made object that no longer serves a useful purpose in space. Examples include redundant satellites, used rocket bodies and explosion or erosion fragments. Even small pieces have the potential to cause damage if involved in a collision, as many are travelling at speeds of around 10 kilometres per second.



"Previous modelling studies have suggested that even if no new satellites were launched, the number of objects orbiting the Earth will continue to increase as a result of predicted collisions between existing objects," comments Dr Hugh Lewis.



"For this reason, it is important to identify debris objects at risk of collision when making plans to 'clean-up' space.



"Objects need to be ranked according to the risk they pose so that they may be chosen for removal, and this is what our research aims to do."

The research was undertaken by Dr Hugh Lewis, Rebecca Newland, Dr Graham Swinerd and Arrun Saunders at the University of Southampton.

new research over life evolution on earth

Humans might not be walking on Earth today if not for the ancient fusing of two microscopic, single-celled organisms called prokaryotes, NASA-funded research has found. By comparing proteins present in more than 3000 different prokaryotes - a type of single-celled organism without a nucleus - molecular biologist James A. Lake from the University of California at Los Angeles' Center for Astrobiology showed that two major classes of relatively simple microbes fused together more than 2.5 billion years ago.
Lake's research reveals a new pathway for the evolution of life on Earth. These insights are published in the Aug. 20 online edition of the journal Nature.
This endosymbiosis, or merging of two cells, enabled the evolution of a highly stable and successful organism with the capacity to use energy from sunlight via photosynthesis.
Further evolution led to photosynthetic organisms producing oxygen as a byproduct. The resulting oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere profoundly affected the evolution of life, leading to more complex organisms that consumed oxygen, which were the ancestors of modern oxygen-breathing creatures including humans.
"Higher life would not have happened without this event," Lake said. "These are very important organisms. At the time these two early prokaryotes were evolving, there was no oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. Humans could not live. No oxygen-breathing organisms could live."
The genetic machinery and structural organization of these two organisms merged to produce a new class of prokaryotes, called double membrane prokaryotes. As they evolved, members of this double membrane class, called cyanobacteria, became the primary oxygen-producers on the planet, generating enough oxygen to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere and set the stage for the evolution of more complex organisms such as animals and plants.
"This work is a major advance in our understanding of how a group of organisms came to be that learned to harness the sun and then effected the greatest environmental change Earth has ever seen, in this case with beneficial results," said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., which co-funded the study with the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va.
Founded in 1998, the NASA Astrobiology Institute is a partnership between NASA, 14 U.S. teams and six international consortia. The institute's goals are to promote, conduct, and lead interdisciplinary astrobiology research; train a new generation of astrobiology researchers; and share the excitement of astrobiology with learners of all ages.
The institute is part of NASA's Astrobiology Program in Washington. The program supports research into the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere.

 Article from-www.spacedaily.com

Robot with a skin will help cure autism

Research is being going on to construct a  robot with artificial skin which is being developed as part of a project involving researchers at the University of Hertfordshire so that it can be used in their work investigating how robots can help children with autism to learn about social interaction.

Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn and her team at the University’s School of Computer Science are part of a European consortium, which is working on the three-year Roboskin project to develop a robot with skin and embedded tactile sensors.



The researchers will work on Kaspar (http://kaspar.feis.herts.ac.uk/), a child-sized humanoid robot developed by the Adaptive Systems research group at the University. The robot is currently being used by Dr. Ben Robins and his colleagues to encourage social interaction skills in children with autism. They will cover Kaspar with robotic skin and Dr Daniel Polani will develop new sensor technologies which can provide tactile feedback from areas of the robot’s body. The goal is to make the robot able to respond to different styles of how the children play with Kaspar in order to help the children to develop ‘socially appropriate’ playful interaction when interacting with the robot and other people.



“Children with autism have problems with touch, often with either touching or being touched,” said Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn. “The idea is to put skin on the robot as touch is a very important part of social development and communication and the tactile sensors will allow the robot to detect different types of touch and it can then encourage or discourage different approaches.”



Roboskin is being co-ordinated by Professor Giorgio Cannata of Università di Genova (Italy). Other partners in the consortium are: Università di Genova, Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne, Italian Institute of Technology, University of Wales at Newport and Università di Cagliari.





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Adapted from materials provided by University of Hertfordshire, via AlphaGalileo.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090430065818.htm

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Gear system will assemble by itself

A technique created by Engineers at Columbia University to utilize


thermal expansion characteristics of dissimilar materials to create


mechanical devices could prove very useful in building small-scale


machines. A thin metal film is deposited on to a special polymer. When


the temperature is reduced, wrinkles form in the composite material


based on the structure's design due to the differing thermal expansion


characteristics of the materials. These wrinkles can be made to produce


formations such as gear teeth and other mechanical components. After


the required pattern is obtained, a hardening process is used to fix


the device's shape permanently. The application for micro and


nano-scale machines is more efficient because of its simplicity and


low production cost.