Monthly Archives: September 2011

Do You Want to Hear Me Now?

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Are phones in smartphones relevant? According to a survey by social communications platform, CloudTalk, speaking on the phone is not even in the top three favorite activities in which people engage on their smart phones. Texting, emailing, and social networking come first. Meanwhile, researchers in

What's Your Preference, Glass or Plastic?

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"Glass Is Life." A promotional and educational Web site developed by glass packaging giant Owens-Illinois features videos, social networking forums, and case studies to illustrate the versatility of glass. Glass, states the promo, is a safe and inert packaging material, a fact further highlighted by

Building Plant Security from the Ground Up

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Security standards for industrial controllers, devices, and networks are still a work in progress. Initial efforts involved device and process certification requirements developed by security companies such as Wurldtech/Achilles. Today, the ISA99 industrial cyber security committee is driving an ind

Lost and Found: Hemi Willys Six-Cylinder?

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During a recent trip to Milwaukee, I had the opportunity to hang out with Tony Stevens, Brooks Stevens's grandson, for part of a day, and came across this most unusual remnant of the Brooks Stevens collection.

According to Tony, it's a Willys six-cylinder with a casting number of 905101, but

GRAIL Launch Milestones

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NASA's GRAIL spacecraft are set to launch to the moon aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket on Sept. 8, 2011, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. There are two instantaneous (one-second) launch windows at 5:37:06 a.m. and 6:16:12 a.m. PDT (8:37:06 a.m. and 9:16:12 a.m. EDT). The launch period extends through Oct. 19. The launch times occur approximately four minutes earlier each day.
GRAIL's primary science objectives are to determine the structure of the lunar interior, from crust to core, and to advance understanding of the thermal evolution of the moon.
The lunar orbiters are nestled inside the top of a United Launch Alliance Delta II 7920H-10C rocket, the most powerful Delta rocket in NASA's inventory.
On launch day, Sept. 8, NASA TV commentary coverage of the countdown will begin at 3 a.m. PDT (6 a.m. EDT). The coverage will be webcast at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv .
Live countdown coverage on NASA's launch blog also begins at 3 a.m. PDT (6 a.m. EDT) at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/launch/grail_blog.html . Coverage features real-time updates of countdown milestones, as well as streaming video clips highlighting launch preparations and liftoff. To access these features, and for more information on GRAIL, visit http://www.nasa.gov/grail and http://grail.nasa.gov .
The launch will also be online, with a live chat available, on Ustream TV, at http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2 . To follow the GRAIL launch on Twitter, visit http://twitter.com/NASAJPL and http://twitter.com/NASA .
Here is a timeline of expected launch milestones:
Launch
At liftoff, the rocket's first-stage engine and six of its nine strap-on solid rocket motors will ignite, and the rocket will be airborne, carrying GRAIL up and over the Atlantic Ocean.
First six solid rocket motors are jettisoned
GRAIL's Delta II is carrying nine strap-on graphite-epoxy motors. The first six will be ignited at the time of liftoff. The remaining three will be ignited shortly after the first six strap-on motors burn out.
Fairing separates
After the Delta's first stage completes its tour of duty, its second stage, which will provide 9,645 pounds of kick for GRAIL, will begin the first of two scheduled burns.
Shortly after ignition of the rocket's second stage, the Delta's 30-foot-long (8.88-meter-long) nose cone, or fairing, will separate and be jettisoned as planned, providing the GRAIL twins with their first taste of exo-atmospheric existence.
Parking at 17,500 miles per hour
The Delta's second stage will temporarily stop firing, as planned, and the rocket and GRAIL will begin a planned coast phase, also known as a "parking orbit" at about 90 miles (nearly 167 kilometers up).
GRAIL heading from Earth to the moon
The Delta's second stage will begin a second burn. This approximately four-and-a-half-minute-long burn will place GRAIL on its desired trajectory to the moon.
Spacecraft begin to separate from second stage
The GRAIL-A spacecraft begins its separation process from the Delta's second stage. The GRAIL-B spacecraft separates about 8 minutes later. At this point, the moon is three-and-a-half months away.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/news/grail20110907.html

NASA Announces Media Telecon About Opportunity Rover

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NASA will host a media teleconference on Thursday, Sept. 1, at 12:30 p.m. PDT (3:30 p.m. EDT) to discuss progress of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. Opportunity reached the Martian Endeavour crater earlier this month after years of driving.
The teleconference participants are:
-- Dave Lavery, program executive, Mars Exploration Rovers, NASA Headquarters, Washington
-- Steve Squyres, principal investigator, Mars Exploration Rovers, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
-- Ray Arvidson, deputy principal investigator, Mars Exploration Rovers, Washington University in St. Louis.
-- John Callas, project manager, Mars Exploration Rovers, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, completed their three-month prime missions on Mars in April 2004. They continued to work for years in bonus mission extensions. Spirit finished communicating in 2010, after six years of operation.
Opportunity, still very active, reached the rim of Endeavour crater on Aug. 9. The arrival gives the rover access to geology different from any it explored during its first 90 months on Mars.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20110830.html

Moderate Labor Day Solar Flare Eruption

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At 9:35 PM ET on September 5, 2011, the sun emitted an Earth-directed M5.3 class flare as measured by the GOES satellite. The flare erupted from a region of the sun that appears close to dead center from Earth's perspective, an active region designated number 1283. The flare caused a slight increase of solar energetic protons some 26,000 miles above Earth's surface.
A coronal mass ejection (CME) -- another solar phenomenon that can send solar particles into space -- was associated with this flare. The CME is a relatively slow one, traveling at under 200 miles per second.
Further updates on the event will be provided as they become available.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/News090611-m5.3flare.html

NASA Invites 150 Twitter Followers to Lunar Launch

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NASA has invited 150 followers of the agency's Twitter accounts to a two-day launch Tweetup Sept. 7-8. The Tweetup is expected to culminate in the launch of the twin moon-bound GRAIL spacecraft aboard a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The launch is targeted for 5:37 a.m. PDT (8:37 a.m. EDT) on Sept. 8. The two GRAIL spacecraft will fly in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field in unprecedented detail from crust to core. The mission also will answer longstanding questions about the moon and provide scientists with a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed.
Tweetup participants were selected from more than 800 people who registered online. They will share their Tweetup experiences with their followers through the social networking site Twitter.
Participants represent the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Indonesia, Spain and the United Kingdom. Attendees from the U.S. come from 32 states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.
Beginning at noon PDT (3 p.m. EDT) on Wednesday, Sept. 7, NASA will broadcast a portion of the Tweetup when attendees talk with NASA Administrator Charles Bolden; Jim Adams, deputy director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters in Washington; Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge; Sami Asmar, GRAIL deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; and Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and Frederick P. Rose Director at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium in New York. To watch the broadcast, visit: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-tweetup . The event will also be streamed live, with a moderated chat, at http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2 .
Participants also will tour NASA's Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral, including a close-up visit to the launch pad.
Reporters interested in interviewing Tweetup attendees should contact Stephanie Schierholz at 202-358-1100 or stephanie.schierholz@nasa.gov. Reporters interested in covering the afternoon program Sept. 7 at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex must secure access through Andrea Farmer by 2 p.m. PDT (5 p.m. EDT) Sept. 6 at 321-449-4318 or afarmer@dncinc.com.
Previously, NASA invited groups to attend the launch of the Juno spacecraft on its way to Jupiter and five space shuttle launches: Atlantis' STS-129, STS-132 and STS-135 missions, Discovery's STS-133 mission and Endeavour's STS-134 mission.
To follow participants on Twitter as they experience the prelaunch events and GRAIL's liftoff, follow the #NASATweetup hashtag and the list of attendees at: http://twitter.com/nasatweetup/grail-launch.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/news/grail20110901.html

Forbes magazine discusses my views on animal enhancement

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Alex Knapp of Forbes magazine asks, "Is It Ethical to Make Animals As Smart As People?," and takes my position to task:

Dvorsky and other pro-uplift advocates have argued that we have a moral imperative to make other species as intelligent as we are once we have the means. However, given the above, one thing that should be abundantly clear is that even if we come up with a technique to create chimps, parrots, or dolphins with human-level intelligence, we are almost certainly not going to be take any current, adult animals and uplift them. Changes as profound as those needed to make those species intelligent, from the neurological to the biochemical, are going to have to be made to the embryo, if not even before that in the egg and sperm. So what happens to the animals that are left behind? They’re almost certainly not going to be able to produce offspring with their uplifted counterparts – there’ll be too many changes. Their uplifted counterparts are likely going to be a separate, reproductively-incompatible species.

So the adults will be just as they are, living lives as they did before. Which means procreating as they did before – and that leads to a problem for uplift advocates. Namely, for example, if we uplift chimps, do we let the adults procreate? Well, letting chimps continue in an “un-uplifted” state seems to defeat the purpose of uplifting them to begin with, right? On the other hand, if we sterilize them, we’re dooming a species to extinction for no reason other than we don’t think they’re smart enough. I’d argue that we wouldn’t have the right to to sterilize them and cause them to go extinct, and I can’t think of a good argument on the other side. So now we’re trapped in a bizarre ethical paradox that begs the question of why there’s a moral obligation to uplift in the first place. Given that the alternative is to essentially doom a species to extinction, I think it’s safe to argue that an “uplift imperative” doesn’t exist.

Absent that obligation to uplift other species, then I’d argue other ethical factors outweigh pursuing the project in the first place.

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