Monthly Archives: February 2010

Window to the World

Posted on by
Window to the WorldFloating just below the International Space Station, astronaut Nicholas Patrick put some finishing touches on the newly installed cupola space windows last week. Patrick was a mission specialist onboard the space shuttle Endeavor's recently completed STS-130 mission to the ISS.

View my blog's last three great articles....

ICESat’s Notable Moments in Science

Posted on by
ICESatOver the last decade, NASA has launched a series of satellites to monitor the health of our planet. One such satellite -- the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) -- has provided a sustained, big-picture look at ice thickness at Earth's polar regions.

Now, after seven years in orbit and 15 laser-operation campaigns, ICESat has stopped collecting science data. The last of three lasers on the satellite's Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) ceased emitting light on Oct. 11, 2009. Attempts to restart the lasers have ended, and NASA is pursing options for satellite decommissioning.

"ICESat's loss is disappointing and it comes at a critical time," said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "But we can't lose sight of the fact that ICESat and its team of talented scientists and engineers helped us see the Earth's polar ice caps in a new way. Those observations are feeding a new generation of models to help us figure out where the planet is headed.????"

As the world's first laser-altimeter satellite, ICESat has measured Earth's surface and atmosphere in "unprecedented 3-D detail," said Jay Zwally, ICESat's project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "ICESat has been an outstanding success, despite disappointing limitations in the laser lifetimes. Scientific advances have been made in measuring changes in the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, polar sea ice thickness, vegetation-canopy heights, and the heights of clouds and aerosols."

In the Arctic, for example, scientists used ICESat to map Greenland's dramatic surface elevation, rising to 4,000 meters above sea level. They watched as thin, seasonal sea ice replaced thick, older sea ice as the dominant type in the Arctic Ocean. In Antarctica, scientists achieved a comprehensive inventory of lakes that actively drain or fill under the ice. At both poles, they have tracked glaciers along the coast of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets as they empty into the sea.

Scientists used ICESat data to show changes in elevation over the Greenland ice sheet between 2003 and 2006.Learn more about the satellite's early days and subsequent discoveries in this Flickr image gallery.

Despite the end of ICESat's mission, NASA's observations of Earth's polar regions continue. Operation Ice Bridge began in 2009, becoming the largest airborne survey of Earth's polar ice ever flown. For the next five years, instruments on NASA aircraft will target areas of rapid change to yield an unprecedented 3-D view of Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, ice shelves, and sea ice. The mission will bridge the gap in satellite data until the launch of ICESat-2, planned for 2015.

"Operation Ice Bridge is allowing us to get much higher resolution data over smaller, targeted regions," said Lora Koenig of NASA Goddard, and acting project scientist for the Ice Bridge mission.

Targeted information from aircraft combined with the broad and consistent coverage from satellites contribute to a more complete understanding of Earth's response to climate change, helping scientists make better predictions of what the future might hold.

Related Links

› ICESat's Notable Moments in Science Image Gallery (Flickr)
› ICESat Video Highlights
› Operation Ice Bridge
› Antarctica's Land and Ice Elevation
› NASA Provides New Perspectives on the Earth's Changing Ice Sheets
› NASA Satellite Reveals Dramatic Arctic Ice Thinning
› Map Characterizes Active Lakes Below Antarctic Ice
› NASA Ice Satellite Maps Profound Polar Thinning
› ICESat project Web site
› ICESat on Twitter
View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

Cool Movie: SDO Destroys a Sundog

Posted on by
Last week, on Feb. 11th, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) lifted off from Cape Canaveral on a five-year mission to study the sun. Researchers have called the advanced spacecraft the "crown jewel" of NASA's heliophysics fleet. SDO will beam back IMAX-quality images of solar explosions and peer beneath the stellar surface to see the sun's magnetic dynamo in action.

SDO is designed to amaze—and it got off to a good start.

"The observatory did something amazing before it even left the atmosphere," says SDO project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center.

Moments after launch, SDO's Atlas V rocket flew past a sundog hanging suspended in the blue Florida sky and, with a rippling flurry of shock waves, destroyed it. Click on the image below to launch a video recorded by 13-year-old Anna Herbst at NASA's Banana River viewing site—and don't forget to turn up the volume to hear the reaction of the crowd.

Above: SDO has a close encounter with a sundog. Movie formats: 10 MB Quicktime, 1 MB mpeg-4. Credit: Anna Herbst of Bishop, California.

"I couldn't believe my eyes," says Anna. "The shock waves were so cool." Anna traveled with classmate Amelia Phillips three thousand miles from Bishop, California, to witness the launch. "I'm so glad we came," says Amelia. "I've never seen anything like it!"

Sundogs are formed by plate-shaped ice crystals in high, cold cirrus clouds. As the crystals drift down from the sky like leaves fluttering from trees, aerodynamic forces tend to align their broad faces parallel to the ground. When sunlight hits a patch of well-aligned crystals at just the right distance from the sun, voila!--a sundog.

"When the Atlas V rocket penetrated the cirrus, shock waves rippled through the cloud and destroyed the alignment of the crystals," explains atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley. "This extinguished the sundog."

Videos by other photographers at Banana River show the shock waves particularly well. Here's one from Romeo Durscher of Stanford, California, and another from Barbara Tomlinson of Beachton, Georgia.

In the past, says Cowley, there have been anecdotal reports of atmospheric disturbances destroying sundogs—for instance, "gunfire and meteor shock waves have been invoked to explain their disruption. But this is the first video I know of that shows the effect in action."

Right: Sundogs are formed by the refracting action of plate-shaped ice crystals. Image credit: Les Cowley/Atmospheric Optics [more]

The effect on the crowd was electric.

"When the sundog disappeared, we started screaming and jumping up and down," says Pesnell. "SDO hit a home run: Perfect launch, rippling waves, and a disappearing sundog. You couldn't ask for a better start for a mission."

SDO is now in orbit. "The observatory is doing great as the post-launch checkout continues," he reports. "We'll spend much of the first month moving into our final orbit and then we'll turn on the instruments. The first jaw-dropping images should be available sometime in April."

Believe it or not, Pesnell says, the best is yet to come.

View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

Spirit’s Journey to the Center of Mars

Posted on by
Mars rover Spirit has tenaciously swept, scraped, and squeezed secrets from the forbidding surface of Mars for 6 years. Now at an impasse, up to its belly in sand, it has struggled to tilt its solar panels toward the sun and collect just enough power to survive the perilously cold Martian winter. If Spirit can make it through to spring, the feisty robot will prove it's still in the game—by solving the mysteries of the Martian core.

see captionUnlocking those secrets will require the guile of a veteran explorer. Like a wily old baseball pitcher who uses knuckle balls to keep winning, the aging Spirit still has a few tricks up its sleeve. It will do its next trick without moving a single mechanical muscle.

Right: Spirit's view of its own predicament. The rover is now parked for the winter with its solar panels tilted only 9 degrees toward the sun. [more]

"In this case, it's a good thing Spirit is immobile," says principal investigator Steve Squires. "We can track its radio signal to determine its motion through space."

Mars is rotating around its own axis and orbiting the Sun. With the rover stationary, the radio's only motion will be the motion of Mars. Because the scientists already know the specifics of the red planet's orbit, they'll be able to use Spirit's radio signal to hone in on how the planet spins around its own axis.

"Mars wobbles, or precesses, as it spins," says Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We'll measure that wobble by looking at the timing of the radio signal—how long it takes to go back and forth between Spirit's transmitter and our receivers on Earth."

"Mars completes an entire wobble only once every 170,000 years," he continues. "So we'll be measuring a very tiny motion—looking at minute changes. But these miniscule numbers speak volumes about Mars' core."

First, it will help scientists figure out if the core is solid or liquid. There are clues that it was molten at some time in the ancient past. A molten core is a fluid that moves and conducts electricity, so it sets up a powerful magnetic field. Researchers see remnants of that field today but are unsure how much of the core, if any, is still molten.

"If Mars' core is solid through and through, the nature of the wobble will be subtly different from the wobble if the core is liquid," says Squires.

Spin a hard-boiled egg and then spin a raw egg. You'll see a distinct difference in the way they rotate.

Right: An artist's concept of the Martian core. Credit: NASA/JPL.

see captionSpirit's radio signals will also reveal the precise speed of Mars' wobble. That, in turn, will help the researchers calculate the planet's moment of inertia, or MOI.

The moment of inertia of a spinning object—in this case, a planet—is a number that describes how easy or how hard it is to change the spin. "The MOI affects the speed at which the axis of Mars wobbles, so the wobble speed indirectly tells us the MOI," says Banerdt.

They'll add the MOI to what they already know about Mars—its size and mass. "Combining these three things with our understanding of how iron and rock behave inside a planet will allow us to set limits on the size and density of the Martian core. And the density will tell us what elements must be mixed with iron to make up the core."

"This research has implications that reverberate through all kinds of basic questions about the formation of the solar system and its planets. I have to tip my hat to Spirit. It keeps coming up with new tricks."

But first the rover has to survive the long, hard winter. Baseball great Rogers Hornsby summed it up: "People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

Make that Martian spring.

View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

NASA Hosts RockOn! 2010 University Rocket Science Workshop in June

Posted on by
U.S. university faculty and students are invited to a weeklong workshop to learn how to build and launch a scientific experiment into space. NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia is hosting the RockOn! 2010 workshop June 19-24 in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia. Registrations for the 2010 workshop are being accepted through March 22.

The hands-on workshop teaches participants to build experiments that fly on sounding rockets. During the week, participants will work together in teams of three to construct and integrate a sounding rocket payload from a kit in four days. On the fifth day of the workshop, June 24, their experiments will fly on a NASA Terrier-Orion sounding rocket expected to reach an altitude of 73 miles.

Each experiment will provide valuable scientific data, analyzed as part of the student led science and engineering research. The program engages faculty and students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills critical to NASA's future engineering, scientific, and technical missions.

Approximately 100 faculty and students participated each year in the 2008 and 2009 workshops. All experiments have been successful, completed on time, launched and recovered.

NASA initiated the National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program in 1989. The Space Grant national network includes more than 850 affiliates from universities, colleges, industry, museums, science centers, and state and local agencies. The goal is to support and enhance science and engineering education, and research and public outreach efforts for NASA's aeronautics and space projects. These affiliates belong to one of 52 consortia in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

For more information about RockOn! and to register online, visit:

http://spacegrant.colorado.edu/rockon

For more information about NASA education programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/education

The Sounding Rockets Program Office at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility will be providing the rocket and launch operations during the workshop. For more information about NASA's sounding rocket program, visit:

http://sites.wff.nasa.gov/code810

View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

Media Day Planned for First NASA Global Hawk Science Campaign

Posted on by
Reporters are invited to a media day in April to observe the first environmental science mission of NASA's Global Hawk unmanned aircraft system at the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

The Global Hawk Pacific 2010 mission, or GloPac, will involve a series of long-duration flights by the autonomously operated aircraft. The flights will travel over the Pacific Ocean south to the equator, west past Hawaii, and north into the Arctic. Ten instruments on the aircraft will collect a wide range of atmospheric data.

The media day is tentatively scheduled for April 13 from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. PST. News media will have the opportunity to view the Global Hawk, tour the aircraft hangar and ground operations center, and talk with mission personnel.

Presentations will be made by principal investigators Paul Newman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., David Fahey of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., and Global Hawk project manager Chris Naftel from Dryden.

To obtain credentials, journalists must submit a request to Beth Hagenauer, Dryden public affairs, by phone at 661-276-7960/3449 or by e-mail to beth.hagenauer@nasa.gov. Requests for foreign nationals and U.S. citizens representing foreign-based media are due March 5. The deadline for U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens representing domestic media is March 31.

All requests must include full name, date of birth, place of birth, media organization, the last six digits of social security number and driver's license number, including issuing state. In addition, foreign nationals must provide their citizenship, visa or passport number, country of issue and expiration date. Foreign nationals with permanent residency also must provide their alien registration number and expiration date.

For more information about the GloPac mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/research/GloPac

View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

Sad day for America: Obama shuts down Hummer

Posted on by

Under Obama, Another One Bites the Dust

From Eric Dondero:

The Obama administration is shutting down yet another iconic American company: Hummer. An overseas acquisition sale fell through, and rather than choosing to save American jobs, mostly in the hardhit Mid-West, and keep the company afloat, the administration has selected a "slow scale down of operations."

Reports Bloomberg via Business Week:

Winding down the brand will take several months, Nick Richards, a GM spokesman, said yesterday. Some of the 3,000 people now employed at Hummer work on other vehicles, so GM doesn’t know how many jobs will be lost, he said.

The Hummer brand was iconic of Americanist values; Strength, vitality, even patriotism. The vehicle was a favorite of surivalists concerned over increasing Islamic attacks on the United States and incursions on the US border from illegal aliens. Continuing:

Hummer sales began in 1999 with the $140,000 H1, a 7,600- pound SUV (3,400 kilograms) patterned after the all-terrain military vehicle popularized for road use by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, now California’s governor. The 6,600-pound H2 debuted in 2002, followed by the 4,700-pound H3 in 2005.

From CarandDriver.com:

the company first catapulted into the spotlight for the unflinching, survivalist nature of its military vehicles...

Regulations and massive oversight with Approval Process may have finally killed Hummer

There are subtle indications of a direct link to the Obama administration's policies and big bureaucracy at government-owned General Motors. Jared Gall of CarandDriver opines this morning:

We also wouldn’t ignore the fact that the history of the Chinese auto industry suggests that, if a company really wants to build a Hummer, it will just go ahead and build something that looks exactly like a Hummer without going through the convoluted process of buying rights and proper tooling.

From the HummerGuy.net:

news reports were indicating that there were obstacles in the approval process, but offered no official statements from GMnews...

Naturally Hummer fans are distraught. From HummerGuy.net comments:

* Yeah, and that obstacle is our magical Kenyan. But don’t feel singled out, Hummer-lovers, Obama is f**king things up all over this great country.

* F*****g Obama! and F**K GENERAL MOTORS!

* It is sad that so many American workers are going to lose their jobs.

Photo of Hummer HX model premiered in 2008, to attract young customers and first time buyers.

NASA Announces New Rocket Engine Testing Opportunity at Stennis

Posted on by
NASA's Stennis Space Center in Stennis, Miss., unveiled an initiative today to chart the future of the nation's premier rocket engine testing facility.

Stennis Director Gene Goldman announced plans for the center to test Aerojet AJ26 rocket engines for Orbital Sciences Corp. as part of a NASA partnership with the companies.

"We're excited about this program and the opportunity to collaborate with two of the world's leading space technology companies," Goldman said. "This also helps pave the way to the future for Stennis. Testing the AJ26 engine not only supplies a service for the Taurus II program, it also provides Stennis a unique opportunity will help sustain the skills and capabilities we need for future test projects."

The AJ26 testing is part of NASA's new direction for space exploration. Under NASA's proposed fiscal year 2011 budget, NASA will work closer with commercial interests to develop space travel capabilities.

The Aerojet AJ26 is a prime example of that new direction and of the immediate future of Stennis, which completed engine testing for remaining space shuttle flights last July. The AJ26 is the first new engine in years to be tested at Stennis and representative of the commercial work the facility now is pursuing. The center also provides RS-68 rocket engine testing for Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne.

Stennis operators have been modifying their E-1 Test Stand since last April in order to test the AJ26 engines. Work has included construction of a 27-foot-deep flame deflector trench, which was toured by media during the Feb. 24 press conference.

Orbital is working in partnership with NASA under the agency's Commercial Orbital Transportations Services (COTS) joint research and development project. Orbital is under contract with NASA through the Commercial Resupply Services program to provide eight cargo missions to the ISS through 2015. The AJ26 Aerojet engines will power Orbital's Taurus II space launch vehicle for the supply missions.

"Our team is very excited to begin the ground testing of the AJ26 engine here at Stennis, one of the great rocket engine testing facilities in the world," Orbital President and Chief Operating Officer J.R. Thompson added. "We have worked with the NASA's Stennis staff and our Aerojet counterparts to develop and install facility upgrades to accommodate our particular needs, and we are pleased with the results. As currently envisioned, each AJ26 engine that will be used aboard our Taurus II rocket will come through the Stennis facility for prelaunch testing, prior to being integrated with the rocket."

For information about Stennis, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/stennis/

View my blog's last three great articles....

View this site auto transport car shipping car transport

Flow Through Given Oriface

Posted on by

Hi,

We are building a flow test rig in our workshop, we are going to be passing compressed air at 100psi through an oriface. Can anyone tell me what rate of flow in CFM will be required. The oriface is 1" dia.

I am not sure our shop compressor will cope with this.

Many tha

Jeb Bush questions Obama’s patriotism; says his policy views "not American"

Posted on by

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush gave a stunningly frank assessment of the Obama presidency to the libertarian-conservative site NewsMax yesterday.

From NewsMax:

"instead of trying to solve that problem [jobs, economic growth] with common-sense American solutions, [he] is trying to take advantage of it to redefine who we are as a nation."

Bush said he tries to avoid such labels but went on to say: "If he believes that government ought to consume 40 percent of the economy, of the economic output, I don’t know what you’d call that, but it’s not American."

"If he believes that redistributing wealth will create more prosperity for more people, that’s been tried and it’s failed. What he should believe is that the interaction of millions of people freely pursuing their dreams will create more prosperity for more people than any government program. That’s the American way."

Bush went on to call Obama's inner circle of advisors in the White House, "all academics and political hacks."

Arizona Republicans pass bill in House to require Obama birth certificate before re-election

Posted on by

No Birth Certificate: No Ballot Status for AZ

From Conservative American News (via AP report):

Nearly half of the Arizona Legislature wants to force President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate to state officials if he runs for re-election. A state House committee on Tuesday approved the measure sponsored by 40 of the state's 90 legislators. It would require presidential candidates who want to appear on the ballot in Arizona to submit documents proving they meet the requirements to be president.

All 40 of the House co-sponsors are Republicans. The initiator of the bill is Skull Valley Republican Rep. Judy Burges who commented:

"If people have to prove their citizenship to apply for a job or get a passport, they should have to prove it to run for president."

Rep. Burgess is best known for having recently sponsored and helped to pass a bill "stipulating that the State of Arizona claim sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution."

Why You Can’t Depend On The Press For Science Reporting

Posted on by

I admit that the title of this post is a little inflammatory, but it’s frustrating when reporters call for input and then proceed to write unbalanced accounts of pseudoscientific practices. A case in point – my last post described a conversation I had with a reporter about energy medicine. My interviewee was very nice and seemed to “track” with me on what I was saying. I did my level best to be compelling, empathic, and fair – but in the final analysis, not a single word of what I said made it into her article. For fun, I thought you’d like to compare what I said, with the final product.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Disease has always been with us, but modern, Western medicine is only a few hundred years old.

Before germ theory and pharmaceutical research, the human race devised countless strategies to relieve pain, banish illness and prolong life. Southern Marylanders are keeping a few of these ancient disciplines alive, insisting they have much to teach us, even in a scientific age.

The rest of the piece is full of the usual pseudoscientific arguments: anecdotal evidence, mistrust of scientific methods, a call to “open-mindedness,” an emphasis on “natural” as being synonymous with “safe and effective,” and an “everybody’s doing it, even academic medical centers” rationale for adoption. There was no dissenting opinion – just an unquestioning acceptance of energy medicine.

Now to be fair, the reporter told me that she had included a quote from me in her submission, but that the newspaper editors had cut it out of the online version.

Nonetheless, my take home message from the experience is that blogs like Science Based Medicine seem to offer the only guarantee of unedited rational thought on matters of health and medicine. Thank goodness we’re no longer beholden to mainstream media for all our health news and commentary. It is a shame that most consumers get their news from TV and other outlets that don’t seem to maintain a journalistic quality filter.

This is why our work here is so important… because without scientists and healthcare professionals providing a counterpoint to the endless onslaught of superficial and misleading information, our patients won’t stand a chance of discerning the truth. We need more critical thinkers to join the cause, and I hope that more of us will step up to the plate and contribute to outlets like SBM or Better Health. Waiting for reporters to include us in the discourse could take a very long time…


[Slashdot]
[Digg]
[Reddit]
[del.icio.us]
[Facebook]
[Technorati]
[Google]
[StumbleUpon]

Calculating Savings on Genset

Posted on by

Hi, I am about to adjust the timer on a chiller circulation pump which is running continuously. It is using 5.5kW for 9 hours a day when the chiller and AHU's are off. The kWh saving would be 49.5kWh/day. However, the pf is down at .27 so we will be saving more than that in kVA. The site runs per

Hydraulic motor

Posted on by

Would you please give me the answer for the following case : If we change the size of connection tubes between hydraulic pump and hydraulic motor to smaller size,is the motor power will be affected or not?.

Torque Calculation for Roller.

Posted on by

Dear All,

I would like to ask a question that how can we calculate the exact torque for the roller?

1. Can we use the formula T=I²α ?(Mass moment of Inertia and Angular acceleration)

2. We are having Mass for the Rotating body and minimum distance of the body from center line.

Can y