Artists at 73 See in Montclair explore spirituality in abstraction – Montclair Local

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Oracle by Keely McCool.

Abstract works at 73 See Gallery The Body Is Just a Metaphor by Monika Smerdel Earth Works by Keely McCool 73 Pine St. 73seegallery.com Artist talk Wednesday, July 26, 7 p.m. Closing reception Sunday, July 30, 3-6 p.m. Show runs through July 30. Noon-6 p.m. or by appointment. Gallery is closed Mondays.

By GWEN OREL orel@montclairlocal.news

Monika Smerdels paintings are full of color. Keely McCools sculptures are earth-toned and neutral (in fact, many are literally made out of earth). But the work of each artist complements the others, at 73 See Gallery through Sunday, July 30.

Smerdels show is titled The Body Is Just a Metaphor, while McCools is called Earth Works.

Both artists explore spirtuality in their work. Smerdels paintings explore light, said the artist. McCool hopes her work will encourage the viewer to delve inside themselves and connect to the material they see.

Smerdel, born in Poland, moved to the U.S. as a small child just before the fall of Communism. After briefly moving back with her family, she returned to the U.S., and now lives in Cranford.

McCool came to Montclair State University from Oregon to be near Manhattan. She ended up loving Montclair and settling here.

We caught up to both artists to ask them about their inspirations and goals. The interviews were conducted separately, but like their artwork, complement one another.

Local: Tell me how you got started as an artist.

Smerdel: My grandmother had a paint store in Poland, in the family for two generations. I used to go after school and just stare at the pigments. They were so vibrant and chromatic. I still think about it every day. Its what inspired me to become an artist. In Poland back in the day, paint didnt come in gallons. There were crates filled with pigments in them. A painter would walk in and say I need a green color and mix blue and yellow with linseed oil and other bases to create the paint.

McCool: Ever since I was a little kid I was taking my toys apart and resculpting them to something else, and creating different things. When there was show and tell at school I was drawing. I was always doing something creative, since I was little.

Local: Talk to me about the title of your show.

Smerdel: It has a lot to do with my study of the Bhagavad Gita. Ive been exploring spirituality more, and digging in more to my subconscious. The subconscious connects through light, and the title is the way I perceive light into the painting: its shining from underneath or applied on top.

McCool: (laughing) Its a good title because I have three series in this show. Having a general title was more feasible. My new work is called Impetus of Creation. Im interested in how humans create. Im concentrating on the flow of energy from consciousness, the subconscious, the super subconscious, from thought to form. Im referencing the physical world and the metaphysical world. This is my three-dimensional interpretation to try to incorporate this concept into being.

I also have my Basket Series, inspired by Japanese basketry. Its called Basket Series. Thats how minimal I am. The last one is the Organic Series, sculptures that I made with leaves. the foundation is always minimal. I took just leaves and found a way of folding them to incorporate my forms. People rake the leaves and Im here thinking noooooo!

Local: what inspires you?

Smerdel: Energy. Nature. Everything. I can look at something taking a walk and something will hit me. Everything is from within looking out. I can walk down the same street every day and see something different. I collect information for a few months before I start a new series. It could take up to a year before I start digging in. I have a photographic memory and feelings, and want tog e that out onto a canvas. Its very emotional, yet physical and visual state.

McCool: Im inspired by nature. I incorporate what Im inspired by. Most of my work is made out of mud and twigs. Mud becomes the foundation of my form. I add twigs to add texture and dialogue.

When Im just going out for a walk and see things on the ground, because Im so spatially inclined, I can see the forms, the natural materials spinning and forming into different sculptures. If I like it, I grab the material and go.

Also a current issue, and I collect words. Sometimes a word will mold itself into a form later. It might be the word impetus. If I could use just three right now they would be evolution, revolution, and unity consciousness.

Local: How do you want viewer to feel?

Smerdel: I like the viewers to experience whatever they need to experience through it. Everybody looks at things differently. One person might see a dog or a piece of fabric. Bright colors draw them in. People are attracted to color, just like children. Thats how you create energy in a painting, either through texture or color. It is two dimensional, not sculpture, which is three dimensional. [McCool] can go mellower, with three dimensional shapes that draw people to her work and the rawness of it.

McCool: I really want to make the viewer connect with the materials. Having a neutral palette means they connect with it, and have to go inside themselves to find the connection. Its more of an inward connection, an essence connection, soul to soul. I want the viewers to feel all that I feel, with what inspires me. Im trying to share it with everybody else.

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Artists at 73 See in Montclair explore spirituality in abstraction - Montclair Local

A Diva Who Is Not Above Walking 3100 Miles – New York Times

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But her biggest challenge so far is this Queens race, known as the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race, which organizers call the longest certified foot race in the world.

There are six male and four female entrants, and all are runners except Ms. Holder. She says walking is less wearing and fatiguing than running, so she can get by with only a 15-minute nap or two, and continue logging miles until midnight to meet a daily average of about 60 miles required over the races 52 days to complete the 3,100 miles, well beyond the distance from New York to Los Angeles.

Its the tortoise and the hare, man, said Shamus Babcock, who volunteers to help Ms. Holder with snacks and drinks. You have nine hares and one tortoise.

Ms. Holder laughed at this and repeated one of her mantras.

I like to say, I walk, you run, we both get it done, she said, but then allowed that, At night, my competitive side comes out.

I tell everyone, Watch your back because Im gaining on you, she said.

So far in the race, which began on June 18 and is scheduled to finish on Aug. 8, Ms. Holder has walked about 1,900 miles in in 33 days, sleeping only three and a half hours a night.

The race is organized by the followers of the Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy, who died in 2007. His disciples remain devout and continue to practice his teachings of extreme physical feats of endurance and achievement as a path to spiritual enlightenment and transcendence.

Nine of this years 10 entrants are disciples of Mr. Chinmoy. Ms. Holder is not, but she was invited to participate because of her impressive athletic rsum, showing that she had mastered the ability to withstand the mental and physical torture to have a shot at completing the race, said Sahishnu Szczesiul, a race director.

Among the onlookers recently was Ashrita Furman, a disciple of Mr. Chinmoy.

Shes not a disciple, but she has that feeling of self-transcendence, said Mr. Furman, who is not an ultramarathoner but is rather the worlds foremost record-breaker. He holds the record for having the most Guinness World Records, having set more than 600, from pogo stick-jumping to underwater unicycling.

Mr. Babcock, an ultramarathoner himself, said that for Ms. Holder, Its a personal journey, but its still a race.

Shes humble and very nice, but shes as fierce a competitor as anybody out there, said Mr. Babcock, laying a towel on the concrete so that Ms. Holder could lie down for a few minutes to take a short nap.

Her body will not stay down for more than that, he said. If the race is on, shes moving.

Ms. Holder, who is married with two grown children, began walking after her parents died from complications related to diabetes. She said she walked to honor them and to raise health and fitness awareness.

At age 50 she decided she would try to enter 50 marathons in 50 weeks, she said, and has completed two, or sometimes three, marathons per week.

The Walking Diva said she would have to repeat some of her outfits because luggage limitations required that she bring only 30 of them to the Queens race. To prepare, Ms. Holder said she spent months walking 30 miles a day in her neighborhood, but nothing really prepares you for it.

She has continued, through heat waves and harrowing humidity, through rainstorms and various injuries, including mental stress. Bouts with dehydration, a stomach virus and numerous blisters have slowed but not stopped her. She noted that she had completed marathons on sprained ankles and with broken ribs.

On a recent day she walked past handball courts and Bengali teenagers playing cricket on the asphalt playground, and past a driver who parked his yellow cab to do some walking on the racecourse.

She said hello to some passers-by, but mostly maintained a calm concentration and a steady gait. Unlike many runners, Ms. Holder shuns headphones, opting instead for meditation and prayer while walking.

The main thing is just believing in myself and accomplishing what I set out to do, she said, adding that she is also inspired by her past failures.

Of roughly 540 distance races, she has failed to finish only five times, she said. She said she took the printed documentation of those disappointing results and framed them to display at home.

Everyone knows that when Yolanda sets out to do something, she accomplishes it, she said about her own toughness. If I dont finish this race, something went wrong.

A version of this article appears in print on July 21, 2017, on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: A Racewalkers Stats From Start to Finish: 3,100 Miles, 52 Days, 30 Outfits.

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A Diva Who Is Not Above Walking 3100 Miles - New York Times

Tour the International Space Station With Google Street View – Newsweek

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A gravity-free Google Street View has landedon the International Space Station (ISS).

Related: Google grant seeks to curb gun violence in 10 U.S. cities

The search engine on Thursday announced that anyone can now see inside the ISS using its popular map tool, Street View. Launched in 2007, the technology feature in Google Maps and Google Earth provides 360-degree views from different positionspreviously limited to streets aroundthe world. For the first time ever, Google has extended the feature into outer space.

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Earth is seen behind the International Space Station from Space Shuttle Discovery as the two spacecraft begin their relative separation in this NASA handout photo taken on September 8, 2009. Google Street View on Thursday landed on the ISS. NASA/Handout/Reuters

Users can poke through 15 parts of the ISS. Tiny dots within the images allow users to launch notes that explain specific functions. In the Pirs, Docking Compartment 1, for example, clicking on the description for the Orlan Spacesuitexplains that the accessory is designed to protect an Extravehicular Activity crewmember from the vacuum of space, ionizing radiation, solar energy and micrometeoroids.

The ISS is a large spacecraft and science lab that orbits around the Earth. It houses astronauts from around the world and acts as a base for space exploration, with possible future missions to the moon, Mars and asteroids. The station is made of many parts, also called modules,the first of which was launched by a Russian rocket in 1998. The first crew arrived on November 2, 2000, and NASA and its international partners finished the stationin 2011.

As Google users now can see, the space station is as big inside as a house with five bedrooms. It has two bathrooms, a gymnasium and a big bay window. Six people are able to live there. It weighs almost a million pounds and is big enough to cover a football field that includes the end zones.

Thomas Pesquet, an astronaut at the European Space Agency, spent six months aboard the ISS as a flight engineer and captured Street View imagery to share what it looks like from the inside, and what its like to look down on Earth from outer space. Looking at Earth from above made me think about my own world a little differently, and I hope that the ISS on Street View changes your view of the world too, he wrote Thursday in a blog post.

Modules called nodes connect parts of the station to each other. The ISShas science labs from the United States, Russia, Japan and Europe, where astronauts learn about living and working in space. From Earth, the ISS often can be seen with the naked eye. The ISS is one of the first steps in NASAs plan to send humans deeper into space than ever before.

Googles milestone comes 48 years after the first manned mission landed on the moon.

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Tour the International Space Station With Google Street View - Newsweek

When and where to see the space station over Bundy – Bundaberg News Mail

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WANT to spot the International Space Station over Bundy?

With no clouds forecast for the next few days comes the chance to see the International Space Station fly over in the early evenings.

Bundy stargazers should be able to get a good view of the Space Station on the following days:

From 6.04pm for six minutes, max height 69 degrees, appears 10 degrees above SW.

From 6pm for one minute, max height 17 degrees, appears 17 degrees above NNW.

From 5.25am for one minute, max height 15 degrees, appears 10 degrees above NNE.

From 6.08am for two minutes, max height 54 degrees, appears 11 degrees above NNW.

From 5.16am for six minutes, max height 54 degrees, appears 11 degrees above NNW.

From 4.27am for one minute, max height 19 degrees, appears 10 degrees above W.

From 5.11am for three minutes, max height 39 degrees, appears 39 degrees above SW.

It will likely appear as a bright light moving quickly across the sky, as the space station flies at approximately 29,000 kmh.

The International Space Station is a large spacecraft that orbits around Earth and astronauts live on it.

The space station is also a science lab and many countries have worked together to build it.

They also work together to use it.

The space station is made of many pieces.

The pieces were put together in space by astronauts.

NASA uses the station to learn about living and working in space.

These lessons help NASA explore space.

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When and where to see the space station over Bundy - Bundaberg News Mail

Inertia steers Int-Ball drone through International Space Station – Electronics Weekly

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Instead, thrust comes from an internal fan and steering is through three reaction wheels the latter classic satellite technology.

Inside is one of two exquisitely-engineered (see this and this video) self-contained 3d inertial orientation control modules both aimed at general-purpose use in space-craft, drones and even as self-propelled rolling cube ground robots.

The 100mm cube weighs 1.34 kg including a wireless communicator and a battery and includes six MEMS inertial sensors and three brushless DC motors driving three orthogonal rotating wheels as reaction masses (see image).

The sensors are mounted on the modules vertexes to improve attitude estimation accuracy, Hall sensors in the motors also feed-back rotational speed and each wheel has an electromagnetic brake. The brakes can generate 2.1Nm of torque, reducing wheel speed from 6000rpm to zero within 100ms, including demagnetization time.

Also in the module is a wireless tranceiver for telemetry and commands, and the lithium polymer battery.

A smaller inertial unit has 31mm reaction wheels and squeezes these, a guidance control computer and 6-axes of inertial sensing inside a 50g mass budget. Exploration of microgravity asteroids is a potential use for this one, said JAXA.

A video describing both of the inertial steering modules can be viewed here

Int-Ball, short for JEM Internal Ball Camera, was delivered to the Kibo Japanese Experiment Module by a Dragon spacecraft in early June.

Many of its parts were 3d-printed.

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Inertia steers Int-Ball drone through International Space Station - Electronics Weekly

Our Spaceflight Heritage: 48 years since Apollo 11 landed on the Moon – SpaceFlight Insider

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Collin Skocik

July 20th, 2017

A photograph of Armstrong near the Apollo 11 LM, taken by Aldrin on the lunar surface; most of the time, Armstrong had the camera. Photo Credit: NASA

On July 20, 196948 years ago todaythe world was changed forever when two human beings walked on the Moon. 38-year-old Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the flimsy, spidery Lunar Module Eagleonto the soft and pliant dust of the Moons Sea of Tranquillity (Mare Tranquillitatis) and spoke the immortal words: Thats one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.

Apollo 11 launch. Photo Credit: NASA

It was the culmination of a decade of feverish work and the dedication of 500,000 people across the nation,which paved the way for six more crewed lunar missions.

It began in 1957 when the Soviet Union began the Space Race by launching the first satellite, Sputnik. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was reorganized into a civilian agency known as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). After several failures, NASA succeeded in launching Americas first satellite, Explorer I.

Nonetheless, it was the crewed space race that attracted the most attention. After vetting the highest qualified test pilots in all the armed services, NASA selected seven top pilots as its Mercury Astronautsthe Mercury Seven.

However, the Soviet Union led the way again, launching Yuri Gagarin into space on April 12, 1961. On May 5, Alan Shepard was launched on a fifteen-minute suborbital flight in his tiny Freedom 7 Mercury capsule propelled by a Redstone rocket. That fifteen minutes of space experience was enough to bolster the confidence of young President John F. Kennedy to stand before Congress and ask for the funding to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade.

Nine more astronauts were selected for the two-man Gemini Program and the upcoming three-man Apollo flights. Five more Mercury missions expanded Americas ability to live, work, and navigate in space.

The ten Gemini flights perfected the skills that would be needed for a successful Moon landingextravehicular activity, rendezvous and docking, measurement of the radioactivity of the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding the Earth, endurance during long missions, integration of spacecraft systems, communications, and many other things.

However, tragedy struck on Jan. 27, 1967, when a fire broke out inside the Apollo One spacecraft during a routine plugs-out test. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were killed.

The Apollo Program was shut down for over a year while the spacecraft was disassembled, with each and every piece examined and analyzed. The problem was found and corrected, as were numerous other problems with the Apollo spacecraft.

Finally, on Oct. 11, 1968, the Apollo Program took flight. Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walt Cunningham were launched aboard Apollo 7 by a Saturn 1B rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Stationthe last crewed mission launched from Cape Canaveral. It was a twelve-day orbital flight to test the Apollo Command and Service Module (CSM) in space.

Then, on Dec. 21, NASA launched perhaps the most daring and audacious space mission in history: Apollo 8. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders launched on a Saturn Vthe first crewed launch of that massive rocketand, even though the Lunar Module (LM) was not yet ready for flight, set off on a journey all the way to the Moon. Their Christmas Eve broadcast in lunar orbit transmitted the first television images of the lunar surface to the people of Earth.

Apollo 11 LM Eagle in lunar orbit. Photo Credit: NASA

On March 3, 1969, Apollo 9 launched from Kennedy Space Center to test the Lunar Module in Earth orbit. Dave Scott piloted the CSM Gumdrop while Jim McDivitt and Rusty Schweickart put the Lunar Module Spider through its paces.

On May 18, Tom Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan flew Apollo 10 to the Moon to test the Lunar Module Snoopy in lunar orbit and to do a full run-through of the first lunar landing.

Finally, on July 16, Apollo 11 launched on the long-awaited first mission to land humans on the Moon and return them safely to the Earth.

Neil Armstrong was a civilian pilot who had flown the Air Forces X-15 to 207,500 feet (63,250 meters), and, on March 16, 1966, had finally beaten the Russians in space by carrying out the first rendezvous and docking in space, docking the Gemini VIII spacecraft with an Agena target vehicleand then saved Gemini VIII when it went into a disastrous spin.

Command Module Pilot (CMP) was Michael Collins, a 38-year-old Air Force pilot and test pilot, and the first astronaut to perform two spacewalks.

Lunar Module Pilot (LMP) was Edwin Buzz Aldrin, a 38-year-old Air Force pilot and Korean War veteran, and the only astronaut at the time to have a Ph.D. Foreseeing the importance of spaceflight in the near future, he had written his doctoral thesis on orbital rendezvous, and had used his skills to dock Gemini XII with an Agena target vehicle when the rendezvous computer failed.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin moved from the Command Module Columbia into the Lunar Module Eagle, leaving Collins alone to orbit the Moon in the Apollo CSM. After undocking, Armstrong rotated the Eagle so that Collins could verify that the landing legs were extended and locked into position.

The Apollo 11 plaque on the Moon. (Click to enlarge) Photo Credit: NASA

CAPCOM Charlie Duke, in Mission Control, Houston, talked Armstrong down during powered descent, but Eagle overshot the landing site due to expelled air in the docking mechanism. Seeing that the computer was bringing Eagle into a hazardous, rocky area, Armstrong took manual control and flew Eagle across the lunar surface until he spotted a flat area.

At 4:18 p.m. EDT (20:18 UTC), Armstrong set Eagle down in the Sea of Tranquillity, informing Duke: Houston Tranquillity Base Here. The Eagle has landed.

Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface at 10:56 EDT (02:56 UTC on July 21). Aldrin followed half an hour later, and the world watched a grainy black-and-white broadcastwith such poor resolution (due to the slow-scan television transmission being incompatible with commercial TV) that Armstrong and Aldrin looked like ghosts as they movedas the two astronauts collected soil and rock samples, set up the experiments of the Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Package (EASEP), and famously planted the American flag.

It was an inspiring mission for the entire world. The plaque on the Eagle, which still sits undisturbed on the lunar surface, reads:

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We come in peace for all mankind.

It is an eternal testament to one of humankinds proudest moments, and the one national program ever mounted in the cause of peace and scientific exploration.

Apollo 11, as well as the six Apollo missions that followed, serve as a beacon for the world to follow. Today the future of our space program has never been more uncertain, so full of possibilities and so empty of promise. From here we may go nowhere, or we may conquer the stars. Only timeand the will of the American peoplewill tell.

This photograph of the Lunar Module at Tranquillity Base was taken by Neil Armstrong during the Apollo 11 mission, from the rim of Little West Crater on the lunar surface. Armstrongs shadow and the shadow of the camera are visible in the foreground. When he took this picture, Armstrong was clearly standing above the level of the Lunar Modules footpads. Darkened tracks lead leftward to the deployment area of the Early Apollo Surface Experiments Package (EASEP) and rightward to the TV camera. This is the furthest distance from the Lunar Module traveled by either astronaut while on the Moon. Photo & Caption Credit: NASA

Buzz Aldrin salutes U.S. flag on the Moon. Photo Credit: NASA

Video courtesy of NASA Johnson

Tagged: Apollo 11 Lead Stories Moon NASA

Collin R. Skocik has been captivated by space flight since the maiden flight of space shuttle Columbia in April of 1981. He frequently attends events hosted by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, and has met many astronauts in his experiences at Kennedy Space Center. He is a prolific author of science fiction as well as science and space-related articles. In addition to the Voyage Into the Unknown series, he has also written the short story collection The Future Lives!, the science fiction novel Dreams of the Stars, and the disaster novel The Sunburst Fire. His first print sale was Asteroid Eternia in Encounters magazine. When he is not writing, he provides closed-captioning for the hearing impaired. He lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida.

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Our Spaceflight Heritage: 48 years since Apollo 11 landed on the Moon - SpaceFlight Insider

Spaceflight Beeps Inspire Cosmic ‘Quindar’ Music: A Q&A with the Composers – Space.com

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Cover for new record from art historian James Merle Thomas and Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen.

At times, the inexplicable emotions that run though the minds of music creators carries with it the weight of traversing space.

Using technological elements that bring people together over great distances, thus "minimizing" the space and time between them, art historian James Merle Thomas and Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen have created a musical experience that taps into the history of spaceflight. They dubbed the project "Quindar."

Quindar-Tones are the communication "beeps" between CapCom and spacecraft during NASA's Apollo and other space missions. The purpose of the beeps is to "trigger the ground station transmitters when there is an outgoing transmission from Earth," according to NASA Apollo Lunar Surface Journal contributor Markus Mehring. [Exoplanet Symphony: Listen to TRAPPIST-1 Worlds' Orbital Music]

These tones served as an inspiration for the duo's new record, "Hip Mobility," and they were infused with other NASA audio archives to create the songs, including "Twin-Pole Sunshade for Rusty Schweikart" and "Honeysuckle This Is Houston," which hark back to the Apollo program.

Space.com talked with James Merle Thomas and Mikael Jorgensen of Quindar in an email interview about the record's inspiration and its technical details.

Space.com: In a very novel approach to composing music, you've interwoven space, time and technology into an ethereal experience. How did your interest in spaceflight history and communications technology act as a muse for the record?

James Merle Thomas: Quindar evolved organically out of our shared enthusiasm for histories of art, technology and music, and is directly related to my doctoral research I'm trained as a historian and curator of modern and contemporary art, and am specifically interested in understanding how our notion of what "modern" looks like is related to the technology and politics of the Cold War period. In 2011, while on a Guggenheim fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum, I was researching how NASA designed for space. My research was focused on how the agency's understanding of its own design shifted during the late 1960s/early 1970s, as the Apollo Applications Programs (including Skylab) drew to a close, and as the program reoriented from symbolic exploration to include a narrative about living and working in space, about scientific research in a laboratory setting, etc.

One fascinating aspect of this transitional period is the rich collaboration (and sometimes tensions) between engineers, who were planning for precision and efficiency, and, on the other hand, architects, artists and industrial designers (e.g., Raymond Loewy, who designed the interior of Skylab), who were invested in questions of visual identity, orientation [and] personal space, and who were genuinely interested in matters of aesthetic design and the possibility for personal improvisation.

Mikael Jorgensen: Early on in our collaboration, James suggested that we listen to some of the NASA archival audio materials he'd been gathering as potential source material for the music we were creating. It all made sense in that moment to ingest and remix not only the sounds of the space program but to utilize these recordings to provide narratives to our songs the way lyrics and singing function. Since we were trying to push our own creative sensibilities and sonic possibilities, incorporating this as a fundamental part of our working methodology we didn't see or feel the need to use our own voices. This vast archive of sound would help us figure out what we wanted to say.

The big, heroic, epic stories of spaceflight have been told. There's the endless preparation, calculation, trials, training and tests leading to the blastoff, being in orbit, and then, re-entry. This larger context is the backdrop for what we've been curious about exploring. What is it like to be aggravated in space? Is weightlessness as wonderful as it sounds? (It turns out to be very uncomfortable at times.) In the moments between endless experiments and tasks, is there time to deeply ponder how insane it is to be so unimaginably far away from our planet before a radio crackles and asks for a status report? [Fun in Zero-G: Weightless Photos from Earth and Space]

Quindar tones are 250ms sine waves at 2.525kHz and 2.475kHz which are generated by an analog synthesizer which is housed in a module that would plug into the control panels in mission control. A corresponding Quindar device in the spacecraft would receive a Quindar tone at one frequency and respond with the other. The more we learned about what Quindar tones were and how they functioned, this beautiful metaphor emerged. I like to think of it as a screenplay:

INT. MISSION CONTROL. NIGHT. A vast array of control panels, switches, lights, dials, meters, are busy indicating life-support levels, fuel supplies are attended by men in suits. Large screens in the front of the room display world maps indicating the current position of the spacecraft as it hurtles through space, hundreds of miles above the Earth. The ambient audio of the chatter in the busy room fades out as we zoom in on a single Quindar module in a control panel bank:

Cut to spacecraft:

MISSION CONTROL QUINDAR MODULE: [BEEP] (An indicator lamp lights when the device transmits) Subtitle: Hey, are you there?

SPACECRAFT QUINDAR MODULE: (Lamp lights, confirming receipt of the [BEEP]) Subtitle: I'm here! [BEEP] (Lamp lights when the device transmits) Subtitle: Are you still there?

MISSION CONTROL QUINDAR MODULE: (Lamp lights, confirming receipt of the [BEEP]) Subtitle: I'm here! [BEEP] (An indicator lamp lights when the device transmits) Subtitle: Are you still there?

Cut to Mission Control:

This conversation continues in the background ensuring a consistent communication channel between the astronauts and mission control.

Fade to black.

So this idea that a musical conversation is being transmitted and received by a pair of synthesizers one of which is in space spoke very deeply to us.

Space.com: You're bringing to light a little-known, but really important, component of communications with Quindar. Can you explain how it was applied when composing the record?

Jorgensen: James was pretty quick to take the Quindar tones into the music software Ableton Live, assign them musical values and generate musical textures and chords using the original recordings.

Thomas: I was struck by how a Quindar tone is a focused sonic element, and how, when you slow down the intro/outro tones, their subtle difference becomes more perceptible. For anyone even casually familiar with John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer and a larger artistic tradition of using found sounds in composition, it's a pretty short path to re-imagining an array of Quindar tones as a kind of musical instrument.

Space.com: When you were thinking about what the title of the record should be, how did you decide that "Hip Mobility" was the way to go?

Jorgensen: It's pretty easy to get wrapped up in the seriousness and weight of these unfathomably difficult missions. There were countless problems to solve and challenges to predict with only slide rulers, pencils and brain power. That being said and fully appreciated, we've identified moments that seem unintentionally funny to us. "Hip Mobility" was the title of an excerpt from an industrial film that was depicting the flexibility of a prototype spacesuit and it was just exactly what you'd expect: A man wearing long underwear, in a preposterous aluminum exoskeletal framework, bending and stretching to illustrate the range of motion that this particular spacesuit would provide an astronaut in space. Out of context, "Hip Mobility" sounds like a name for the coolest dance moves or a description of moving into, or out of (not sure which) an up and coming neighborhood. [Evolution of the pacesuit in Pictures (Space Tech Gallery)]

I'd just like to say that we're in no way making fun of these men and women who worked diligently and seriously on these projects, but that we're empathizing with them and hopefully acknowledging some of the ridiculous things that we find ourselves doing in service of some larger goal. It's important to be serious, but not to take yourself too seriously.

Art historian James Merle Thomas and Wilco keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen collaborate to create the 'Quindar' record.

Space.com: Converting phenomena throughout the cosmos, that's usually inaudible by humans, into music has drawn a lot of interested folks to our site. Looking forward, is there another bit of technology, space history or a phenomenon that has been stirring the creative juices?

Jorgensen: There is currently such a wealth of tools and software that exist to make almost any idea a reality. We've been lucky to work with Jeremy Roth, who does stage design and lighting for Wilco, and tap into his expertise when it comes to our live show presentation. We've been using software called Resolume Arena which allows us to cue up video and present it in real time, but also to display multiple channels at once, superimpose video and more. It's been extremely gratifying to build our live show with our synthesizers and laptops and have them communicate with the video software to put this live show together that is at once interactive and responsive to each other.

"Hip Mobility" is available on Amazon. Learn more about Quindar through their website.

Follow Steve Spaleta @stevespaleta. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Spaceflight Beeps Inspire Cosmic 'Quindar' Music: A Q&A with the Composers - Space.com

Propulsive landings nixed from SpaceX’s Dragon spaceship – Spaceflight Now

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Artists concept of SpaceXs Red Dragon spacecraft. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceXs upgraded Dragon capsules will not return astronauts to Earth for powered landings as originally envisioned, company boss Elon Musk said Wednesday, a design change that raises questions about the space transport firms plans to send commercial landers to the surface of Mars.

Musk cited safety concerns for eliminating plans for propulsive Dragon landings in remarks at the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in Washington. He also said the original Dragon landing concept, in which four landing legs would extend from the base of the capsules heat shield as throttleable SuperDraco thrusters slowed the crafts speed for touchdown, was not as useful as he initially thought for SpaceXs plans to send humans to Mars.

That was a tough decision, Musk said in response to a question on the matter. He added that the human-rated Dragon, which SpaceX is developing with mostly NASA funding, is technically still capable of propulsive landings.

Although youd have to land it on some pretty soft landing pad because weve deleted the little legs that pop out of the heat shield, Musk said.

SpaceX unveiled the design of the next-generation spacecraft in May 2014, when Musk predicted the capsule should be ready to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station by the end of 2016. Musk said Wednesday that the spaceship is now scheduled to launch crews by mid-2018, and he described the crew capsule effort as SpaceXs primary focus.

NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.6 billion contract later in 2014 to finish development of the upgraded Dragon spacecraft called Crew Dragon or Dragon 2 and fly up to six crew rotation missions to the space station. Boeing won a similar contract worth $4.2 billion for its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft.

Both programs have been delayed and will miss NASAs goal of having the vehicles certified for piloted missions by the end of 2017, ending U.S. reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to carry astronauts to the space station and return them to Earth.

Boeing says the CST-100 Starliners first orbital test flight with a two-person crew in August 2018.

SpaceX officials said in 2015 that the Crew Dragons first few missions would end with parachute-assisted splashdowns at sea, similar to the way the current Dragon cargo capsules come back to Earth. The crew-capable version is heavier, requiring four main chutes instead of the three flying on station resupply flights.

But engineers continued to plan for propulsive landings once NASA certified the powered descent approach. The Crew Dragon will already have the SuperDraco thrusters needed for a powered descent. The same rocket packs act as the capsules escape booster to whisk astronauts away from a failing launcher.

That is how a 21st century spaceship should land, Musk said in 2014, describing the crew capsules ability to land anywhere on Earth with the accuracy of a helicopter.

SpaceX now favors another type of recovery.

The reason we decided not to pursue (powered landings) heavily is it would have taken a tremendous amount of effort to qualify that for safety, particularly for crew transport, Musk said. And then there was a time when I thought that the Dragon approach to landing on Mars, where youve got a base heat shield and side-mounted thrusters, would be the right way to land on Mars, but now Im pretty confident that is not the right way, and that theres a far better approach.

Musk did not elaborate on the new concept for landing on Mars.

Thats what the next generation of SpaceX rockets and spacecraft is going to do, so just the difficulty of safely qualifying Dragon for propulsive landings, and the fact, from a technology evolution standpoint, it was no longer in line with what we were confident was the optimal way to land on Mars, Musk said. Thats why were not pursuing it.

It could be something that we bring back later, but it doesnt seem like the right way to apply resources right now.

The redesign of the next-generation Dragons landing system will affect SpaceXs plans to send the first in a series of robotic Dragon spacecraft to Mars in 2020. Musk did not address the status of the first so-called Red Dragon mission Wednesday, but the concept involved dispatching a Dragon capsule similar to the ship built for crews to the red planet on top of a huge Falcon Heavy booster.

The Red Dragon would have descended to a powered touchdown on landing legs in a sequence similar to the one envisioned for Crew Dragons on Earth.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceXs president and chief operating officer, said in February that the first Red Dragon flight was delayed to mid-2020 from 2018, pushing its arrival at Mars back to early 2021. Launch opportunities to Mars come approximately every 26 months when the planets are favorably aligned.

The Red Dragons would have delivered cargo and experiments to the Martian surface and tested supersonic retro-propulsion in the planets rarefied atmosphere for the first time. NASA engineers say a rocket-braking mechanism like the Dragons SuperDraco thrusters is needed to safely land heavy supply ships and crew vehicles on Mars.

The space agency signed up to support the privately-developed Red Dragon project to gather data on supersonic retro-propulsion officials said NASA would be unable to obtain until at least the late 2020s with a government-managed mission. NASA said it would spend more than $30 million on the effort by providing advisors, navigation, communications and tracking services, and technical analysis.

Musk wrote in a tweet that SpaceX has not abandoned supersonic retro-propulsion at Mars.

Plan is to do powered landings on Mars for sure, but with a vastly bigger ship, he tweeted Wednesday after his remarks in Washington.

Musk said his team at SpaceX is refining how the company could send people to Mars, eventually to settle there. He revealed a Mars transportation architecture in a speech at the 67th International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, last year, but the outline has since changed.

A vision for gigantic interplanetary transporters Musk presented last year has been downsized, he said.

Its a little smaller, still big, but I think this ones got a shot at being real on the economic front, Musk said, adding that he might present more details at this years International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.

Musk said SpaceX is making progress on the Crew Dragon vehicle, which has a different aerodynamic shape than the companys cargo craft. Designers are also adding a life support system, seats, cockpit displays and other equipment for human passengers.

Its been way more difficult than cargo, for sure, Musk said. As soon as people enter the picture, its really a giant step up in making sure things go right. For sure, the oversight from NASA is much tougher. I thought it was tough for cargo, but its really intense for crew.

It can be a bit tough on the men and women at SpaceX, but I know where its coming from, he said. Its the right motivation, and there will be some debates going into next year about some of the technical details is this right or that right? But I think we really want to make everything humanly possible to make sure it goes well and triple check everything.

Crews riding Dragon spacecraft will blast off on SpaceXs Falcon 9 rocket from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SpaceX is working on final modifications to the Falcon 9, which it calls the Block 5 configuration, to meet NASA human-rating safety standards.

Musk said there were some small technical bones of contention, but were working through those.

He did not offer details on the disagreements.

Some (of the) the things are really esoteric, really in the weeds of rocket and spacecraft design, he said. But I think its good to have these debates.

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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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Propulsive landings nixed from SpaceX's Dragon spaceship - Spaceflight Now

Brown dwarf discovered with the help of citizen scientists – SpaceFlight Insider

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Ocean McIntyre

July 20th, 2017

This illustration shows the average brown dwarf is much smaller than our Sun and low-mass stars and only slightly larger than the planet Jupiter. Image & Caption Credit: NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center

Sometimes in science, when you search for one thing, you end up finding something completely different. Such is the case with the search for the thus far elusive Planet Nine and the citizen scientists who ended up finding a brown dwarf instead.

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is a NASA-funded project sponsored by Zooniverse, and is the group under whose auspices the discovery was made just weeks after its official launch on February 15, 2017. The launch date, which also happened to coincide with the 87th anniversary of the discovery of Pluto, was a tip of the hat to the methodology that is being used to look for the hypothesized planet along with other dim rogue worlds in the far distant outer reaches of the Solar System and beyond.

The newly discovered brown dwarf WISEA J110125.95+540052.8 appears as a moving dot (indicated by the circle) in this animated flipbook from the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project. Image & Caption Credit: NASA / WISE

The search for Planet Nine, also called Planet X by some, has led to several new discoveries, including this brown dwarf designated WISEA 1101+5400.

We realized we could do a much better job identifying Planet 9 if we opened the search to the public, said Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead researcher for the Backyard Worlds project. Along the way, were hoping to find thousands of interesting brown dwarfs.

WISEA 1101+5400 (full name WISEA J110125.95+540052.8) was found with the critical assistance of four citizen scientists, one of whom is Rosa Castro, a therapist, who is credited with nearly 100 classifications as a part of this project.

Backyard Worlds, along with the majority of the other projects under the umbrella of Zooniverse, relies heavily on citizen scientists to sort through huge volumes of data for things that stand out to them. In this case, the project provides participant individuals with flipbooks animated collections of time-lapsed images of the same part of space to review, noting any visible changes in the position or brightness of the pixels within the series of images.

The flipbooks are a collection of the data that was gathered by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) which was launched into space on December 14, 2009.

Originally designed to observe cold objects, as well as those that emit light in the infrared portion of the spectrum (long wavelengths) such as brown dwarfs, WISE was deactivated in 2011 after depleting its source of frozen hydrogen that was needed to cool the sensors, and then reactivated in 2013 as NEOWISE to search for near-Earth objects, or NEOs, which tend to be cold, dark objects easier to locate in the infrared spectrum.

The data that the WISE and NEOWISE missions gathered of the entire sky provides one of the best chances of locating the enigmatic Planet 9 because it may already have been caught in those images. It takes human eyes to be able to look through the noise filled images and be able to recognize these objects, though.

There are a vast number of images, more images than a small team of researchers alone could process in a lifetime, which is why the Backyard Worlds project was created and opened up to the public. What started out as a small group of individuals has grown significantly in the five months it has been in operation. Currently, there are several hundred (or more) citizen scientists looking through the flipbooks for additional objects.

So, whats the deal with WISEA 1101+5400? WISEA1101+5400 isnt exactly local with a location approximately 34 parsecs (111 light-years) from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. The object is a brown dwarf classified as a spectral T5.5, meaning that its size and mass are too low to sustain fusion as a star and that its temperature runs between 9001,500 K (6301,230 C / 1,1602,240 F).

Artists rendition of a T-class brown dwarf. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Researchers took images of the spectra (light) from the object and found that it was nearly identical to other T dwarfs, containing specific amounts of water, methane, iron hydride, potassium, and molecular hydrogen. If the object were cooler or hotter, the amounts and variety of these molecules in the spectral analysis would be different.

The spectrum of WISEA 1101+5400 in black with another T5.5 brown dwarf in red. Image Credit: Kuchner et al.

In fact, WISEA 1101+5400 is pretty average as far as T dwarfs go. What isnt average is who and how it was discovered. Its unlikely that Rosa Castro, Dan Caselden, or the two other citizen scientists involved with the discovery, had set out to find this cold distant object, but find it they did, and just six days after the start of the project.

Even with WISEA 1101+5400 averageness, the researchers are excited. Kuchner hopes that with enough time and interest, they will be able to locate super small, super-cold brown dwarfs called Y-dwarfs, some of which may be lurking far closer to us than we realize.

Theyre so faint that it takes quite a bit of work to pull them from the images, thats where Kuchners project will help immensely, said Adam Burgasser at the University of California San Diego. Anytime you get a diverse set of people looking at the data, theyll bring unique perspectives that can lead to unexpected discoveries.

Its interesting to note that this isnt the only discovery that Backyard Worlds has made. There are currently 117 additional brown dwarf candidates being vetted all from this citizen science driven project, and Kuchner expects that the Backyard Worlds effort will continue for several years to come allowing more volunteers to get involved.

I am not a professional. Im just an amateur astronomer appreciating the night sky, said Rosa Castro. If I see something odd, Ill admire and enjoy it.

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is a collaboration between NASA, UC Berkeley, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Arizona State University, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and Zooniverse a collaboration of scientists, software developers, and educators who collectively develop and manage citizen science projects on the Internet.

NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, manages the NEOWISE mission for NASAs Planetary Defense Coordination Office within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information, visitBackyard Worlds: Planet 9 and NASAs WISE mission.

Tagged: brown dwarf NASA Planet 9 The Range WISE WISEA 1101+5400

A native of the Greater Los Angeles area, Ocean McIntyre's writing is focused primarily on science (STEM and STEAM) education and public outreach. McIntyre is a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador as well as holding memberships with The Planetary Society, Los Angeles Astronomical Society, and is a founding member of SafePlaceForSpace.org. McIntyre is currently studying astrophysics and planetary science with additional interests in astrobiology, cosmology and directed energy propulsion technology. With SpaceFlight Insider seeking to expand the amount of science articles it produces, McIntyre was a welcomed addition to our growing team.

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Soyuz liftoff glimpsed by orbiting observer and launch pad cameras … – Spaceflight Now

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The launch of a Russian Soyuz rocket July 14 with more than 70 satellites was captured in multiple views from a sharp-eyed orbiting nanosatellite and cameras positioned around the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Russian state space corporation, Roscosmos, released a video clip containing imagery of last weeks blastoff from several cameras placed around Launch Pad No. 31 at Baikonur, where the Soyuz rocket soared into space at 0636 GMT (2:36 a.m. EDT; 12:36 p.m. Baikonur time) July 14.

The rocket deployed 73 spacecraft into a range of orbits several hundred miles above Earth, including 48 Dove satellites to grow Planets commercial fleet of Earth-imaging CubeSats to nearly 200 members.

One of the Dove satellites already in space about the size of a toaster oven happened to be flying over Kazakhstan at the time of launch. Planets ground controllers pointed the telescopic camera on the spacecraft toward the launch pad at Baikonur.

To create this animation, we pointed a Dove approximately 50 degrees off-nadir towards the pad, capturing one still image per second of the fixed target as the Dove traveled overhead at an approximate speed of seven kilometers per second (or 15,658 mph), a Planet employee wrote in a post on the companys website. Then our imaging team cropped and stitched the stills together. All in all, this short clip covers about two and a half minutes in real-time including liftoff and flight.

The U.S. company operates the worlds largest fleet of commercial satellites, most of which are about the size of a shoebox and built in-house at the companys San Francisco headquarters.

The Soyuz booster launched last week also sent a Russian satellite into orbit to locate forest fires, eight commercial weather satellites for Spire Global, another San Francisco-based company, and spacecraft owned by institutions and operators in Germany, Norway and Japan.

More photos of the July 14 launch are posted below.

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Red Bull Heads to Russia – AVweb

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By Geoff Rapoport | July 20, 2017

The 2017 Red Bull Air Race World Championship heads to the Russian city of Kazan this weekend. Yoshihide Muroya of Japan leads the series after back to back wins at San Diego and Chiba, with 39 points. Second place, Martin Sonka, follows closely, two points behind. The first American, Kirby Chambliss, won the most recent event, held in Budapest, and currently sits in 4th place overall.

This is the first Red Bull Air Race event held in Russia. Kazan, the capital of the Russian Republic of Tatarsatan, is located at the confluence of the Kazanka and Volga Rivers, whose waters will serve as the Red Bull Air Race course. The picturesque old city is a popular tourist destination and frequent host to international sporting events. American Michael Goulian, who sits in 8th overall, told members of the media, he's excited to go: Being an avid hockey player and fan my entire life, Ive always been a fan of the Russian athletes.Visiting this country is a first for me, and I cant wait to see what the week has in store forus.

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NASA Just Released Hundreds of Historic Space and Aviation Videos – Atlas Obscura

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STS-1, the Space Shuttle Columbia, launching on April 12, 1981, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA/Public Domain

Experimental aircraft arent an unusual sight over the Mojave Desert in Southern California. NASA, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics before it, have been pushing the aeronautical envelope at the Edwards Air Force Base since 1946. Now, thanks to a bunch of archival footage just posted to YouTube, you can see some important moments in space and aviation history for yourself.

NASAs Armstrong Flight Research Center will post about 500 video clips in all, The Verge reports, but so far there are only about 300 available. The videos were previously only available through the Dryden Aircraft Movie Collection (Armstrong was called Dryden before 2014), but now you can take in high-speed experimental aircraft from the 1950s, watch vortices created by an L-1011 airliner after it flies through smoke plumes, or see a SR-71 Blackbird refuel in flight.

Some important technologies have been developed and tested at the Armstrong Flight Research Center. Winglets, the upturned wingtips seen on commercial aircraft today, were first tested on a KC-135 Stratotanker at Armstrong in 1979. NASA also developed planes that broke the sound barrier, including the X-15, X-24, and X-43. Check out a few choice and historic selections from the archive below.

The X-43A set the record for fastest aircraft back in 2004 when it reached Mach 9.6, close to 7,000 miles per hour. The plane ran on rocket fuel, was unmanned, and launched from a B-52.

If youre terrified of flying, this might be a good video to skip. In 1984, NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration teamed up to see if they could find a fuel formula that wouldnt catch a whole jetliner on fire in case of a crash. They crashed a Boeing 720 full of fuel and test dummies to see what would happen. The fireball took over an hour to put out (fair to call the experimental fuel a failure), but they also got data that helped them develop planes that are a lot safer for passengers.

The first orbital space shuttle flight launched on April 12, 1981, and landed at Edwards Air Force Base two days later. Known as Columbia, the STS-1 launch was purely an experimental run of the new craft, and carried just two crew members.

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NASA Just Released Hundreds of Historic Space and Aviation Videos - Atlas Obscura

NC island’s mysterious birth appears on NASA satellite images – Charlotte Observer

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Charlotte Observer
NC island's mysterious birth appears on NASA satellite images
Charlotte Observer
NASA has released satellite images that show North Carolina's newly formed Shelly Island was born in November. The photos, acquired by the Operational Land Imager on the Landsat 8 satellite, show the sands that grew into the island first registered in ...

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NC island's mysterious birth appears on NASA satellite images - Charlotte Observer

What’s Next for the ISS? Hell if NASA Knows – WIRED

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NASA seeks information on developing Deep Space Gateway module – SpaceNews

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An illustration of NASA's proposed Deep Space Gateway in orbit around the moon. A NASA request for information seeks ideas from industry on how to develop the gateway's power and propulsion module. Credit: NASA

WASHINGTON NASA is taking the next small step in the development of a proposed Deep Space Gateway in cislunar space by requesting information about one of its core modules.

A request for information (RFI), released by NASA July 17, seeks information from industry regarding their capabilities to build a Power and Propulsion Element (PPE), a module that will produce electrical power and provide chemical and electrical propulsion for the gateway.

As currently envisioned by NASA, the PPE would be the first element of the gateway, launched as a co-manifested payload on the first crewed Space Launch System launch, taking advantage of the additional payload capacity provided by the Block 1B version of the SLS. The PPE would go into what is known as a near rectilinear halo orbit around the moon within 100 days of launch.

The RFI describes the basic capabilities and requirements of the PPE as envisioned by NASA. The module would have a 15-year lifetime and be equipped with a solar electric propulsion system that uses xenon propellant, as well as chemical thrusters that use hydrazine. The module would weigh no more than 7,500 kilograms in order to be a co-manifested SLS payload, including a tank carrying 2,000 kilograms of xenon.

The PPE will produce electrical power, being able to transfer up to 24 kilowatts to other modules later added to the gateway. It will also support communications in several bands, as well as an optical communications demonstration payload.

In the RFI, NASA asks potential respondents their ability to produce the PPE, including a conceptual schedule, rough order of magnitude engineering cost estimate, and recommended contract vehicle for it. NASA expects to have the PPE delivered to the Kennedy Space Center for integration onto the SLS in December 2021, which would support a launch of the Exploration Mission 2 flight now expected for some time in 2022.

NASA hopes that the module can build on early design work for the Asteroid Redirect Mission, whose robotic spacecraft would have also used solar electric propulsion to travel to and from a near Earth asteroid. Identify a conceptual design you would use as a starting point and what changes you believe are warranted to address PPE capability statements, NASA instructs industry in the RFI.

NASA also asks industry to address several other issues in the RFI. These range from the potential use of green propulsion alternatives for the hydrazine thrusters on the spacecraft and the use of a commercial spacecraft bus for the module to discussion of potential cost-sharing approaches for its development.

Through the RFI, we hope to better understand industrys current state-of-the-art and potential future capabilities for deep space power and propulsion, said Michele Gates, director of the PPE effort at NASA Headquarters, in an agency statement. Gates formerly was director of the Asteroid Redirect Mission program.

The agency is moving quickly with the RFI. Released July 17, NASA seeks responses by the end of the day July 28. The agency will conduct a question-and-answer session online about the RFI July 24.

In addition to the RFI, NASA plans to release a broad area announcement in August, under its existing Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) program, related to development of the PPE. That announcement will seek proposals for short-term studies to address technical issues involving the PPE, including its power and propulsion systems as well as other key subsystems.

The RFI and planned NextSTEP studies are NASAs next tentative steps in the development of the Deep Space Gateway concept. NASA describes the gateway as a lunar-orbiting, crew-tended spaceport that would also include a habitation module and docking ports for the Orion crew spacecraft and separate cargo spacecraft. The gateways additional modules would also be delivered to cislunar space as co-manifested payloads on future SLS launches.

Crews would visit the gateway on Orion missions, spending up to several weeks there before returning. The PPE would allow the gateway to change orbits, including moving closer to the moon to support any potential later missions on the lunar surface.

NASA also foresees using the gateway to support the Deep Space Transport, a future spacecraft that would carry crews into deep space in preparation for Mars missions NASA seeks to fly in the 2030s.

The gateway and the transport, though, are currently only concepts and not formal NASA programs. The gateway remains under study, and NASA did not request funding for it as a standalone program as part of its fiscal year 2018 budget request.

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NASA ‘Strikes Gold’ Before Spacecraft Explores Most-Distant Object Ever – Observer

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Pluto backlit by the sun. Image taken by NASAs New Horizons spacecraft on July 15, 2015. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI via Getty Images

NASA issued apress releaseon July 19 reporting that the agencys New Horizons team captured rare data of an elusive solar system object from an occultation, which is when an object hidden by another object passes between it and the observer. This event occurred when scientists were in precisely the right time and place to observe a fleeting shadow froman ancient Kuiper Belt object, which is known as 2014 MU69 and is more than 4 billion miles away from Earth, as it passed in front of a distant star. The data obtained from this occultation provides scientists with vital information about the orbit, environment, shape and size of the object. The New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to explore the object on New Years Day 2019. At over 1 billion miles past Pluto, the object will be the most distant object in space ever studied by a spacecraft. Any information about the object is vital to NASAs New Horizons team because their window of time for planning, two years, is much shorter than the seven years used to plan the spacecraftsflybypast Pluto in 2015.The scheduled flyby past a Kuiper Belt object could provide details about the objects that lie in the outer rings of our solar system.

Space.comreportedthat the photos from New Horizons Pluto flyby revealed Pluto to be a diverse world with a stunning variety of features, including a 620-mile-wide (1,000 km) plain of nitrogen ice and water-ice mountains that rise 2 miles (3.2 km) into the dwarf planets exotic sky.

Scientists in New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina have been coordinating with one another to observe the object and collect data preceding New Horizons visit. Twenty-four mobile telescopes were set up in Argentina to try to catch an occultation of the object. The project was cited as the most challenging and technically complex occultation project in history. Because the object is estimated to be onlyaround 25 miles in diameter, its occultation has lasted only about two seconds. Scientists had to figure out an exact location on Earth where it could be observed using data from the Hubble telescope and from the European Space Agencys GAIA mission.

Occultations revealed a lot about the planets in our solar system before the technology existed to study them more closely. In 1977, an occultation observed when Uranus passed in front of another star revealed that the planet had rings. In 1988, an occultation of Pluto revealed that its atmosphere was composed of nitrogen.

This effort, spanning six months, three spacecraft, 24 portable ground-based telescopes, and NASAs SOFIA airborne observatory was the most challenging stellar occultation in the history of astronomy, but we did it! said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from SwRI (Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado). We spied the shape and size of 2014 MU69 for the first time, a Kuiper Belt scientific treasure we will explore just over17 months from now. Thanks to this success we can now plan the upcoming flyby with much more confidence.

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USDA Announces $4.6 Million for Nanotechnology Research … – National Institute of Food and Agriculture (press release) (blog)

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Media contact: Sally Gifford, 202-720-2047

WASHINGTON, D.C. July 20, 2017 The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) today announced 13 grants totaling $4.6 million for research on the next generation of agricultural technologies and systems to meet the growing demand for food, fuel, and fiber. The grants are funded through NIFA's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), authorized by the 2014 Farm Bill. Nanotechnology is being rapidly implemented in medicine, electronics, energy, and biotechnology, and it has huge potential to enhance the agricultural sector, said NIFA Director Sonny Ramaswamy. NIFA research investments can help spur nanotechnology-based improvements to ensure global nutritional security and prosperity in rural communities. The Agriculture and Food Research Initiative is Americas flagship competitive grants program for foundational and translational research, education, and extension projects in the food and agricultural sciences. These grants are awarded under the AFRI Foundational: Agriculture Systems and Technology program. Funded projects support nanotechnology-based solutions that improve food production, nutrition, sustainable agriculture, and food safety. Fiscal year 2016 grants being announced include: Nanotechnology for Agricultural and Food Systems

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Paras Prasad receives honorary doctorate in Brazil – UB News Center

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BUFFALO, N.Y. University at Buffalo researcher Paras Prasad, an internationally recognized expert in optics and photonics, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) in Brazil.

Prasad, PhD, who serves as the executive director of UBs Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics (ILPB), received the award on July 6.

The honor stems from a 19-year ongoing partnership that Prasad a SUNY Distinguished Professor in UBs departments of chemistry, physics, medicine and electrical engineering formed with the Brazilian university.

Since 1999, Prasad has co-authored 19 scientific papers and received grants with UFPE collaborators, given numerous lectures and helped organized conferences at the Brazilian university, hosted UFPE students at UB, and connected UFPE researchers with counterparts in China, France and elsewhere.

Working with UFPE has been one of the most gratifying experiences in my career, said Prasad, who was an early pioneer in nanomedicine, which uses super-small particles, materials and devices to treat and diagnose disease. I am humbled to receive such an honor.

Prasad specializes in the use of optics, photonics and nanotechnology in this field, and has worked with colleagues to study and develop a wide range of new materials that could ultimately improve lives around the world.

These novel materials include miniature luminescent crystals that could be used in image-guided surgery; light-activated nanoparticles that could enable the development of new bioimaging technologies for disease detection; new nanoneurotechnologies for monitoring and enhancing brain functions; and magnetic and laser-activated nanoparticles that could be used for cancer diagnosis and treatment. This latter technology was licensed to UB spinoff Nanobiotix, a publicly traded company and leader in nanomedicine that has maintained close contact with Prasad while working to develop these and other new nanomedicine products.

Prasad has published more than 750 scientific papers, eight edited books and four monographs, and has been named the inventor or co-inventor on numerous patents. In keeping with his emphasis on the translational impact of his research, Prasad has been extremely active in launching startup companies and partnering with industry for co-development of technologies to create new companies. His efforts have led to 9 different companies worldwide.

He has received numerous regional, national and international recognitions for his lifetime achievements, including the Morley Medal; Jacob F. Schoellkopf Medal; Guggenheim Fellowship; Sloan Fellowship; Western New York Health Care Industries Technology/Discovery Award; and Excellence in Pursuit of Knowledge Award of the Research Foundation for SUNY. He was named a fellow of the American Physical Society, OSA (the Optical Society) and SPIE (the international society for optics and photonics).

The SPIE awarded Prasad its highest honor: the Gold Medal. The University at Buffalo awarded him the high honor of the UB Presidents Medal in 2016 in recognition of extraordinary service to the university, and he also received UBs inaugural Innovation Impact Award in 2015 for his contributions to the invention of the technologies licensed to Nanobiotix.

In 2005, he was named one of the Scientific American 50, the magazines list of visionaries from the worlds of research, industry and politics whose recent accomplishments point toward a brighter technological future for everyone. He was on the Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researchers list for 2014 and 2016.

Prasad has received honorary doctorates from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden; the Aix-Marseille University in France; and the National Research Nuclear University (MEPhI) in Russia.

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Paras Prasad receives honorary doctorate in Brazil - UB News Center

Engineering Professors and Graduate Students Talk Nanotechnology and AI at San Diego Comic-Con – Newswise (press release)

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Engineering professors and graduate students talk nanotechnology and AI at San Diego Comic-Con

What: Nanotechnology in TV and film and AI are the focus of two panels featuring faculty members and graduate students at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.

Who:

Nanoengineering professor Darren Lipomi. Lipomi and his lab recently developed a glove that can translate American Sign Language. They are currently improving the glove so that it can allow the wearer to feel objects in virtual reality. His team also works on building flexible electronics and next generation solar cells.

Computer science professor Ndapa Nakashole, whose work focuses on natural language processing and machine learning. Her goal is to develop algorithms that allow computers to better understand and generate human language.

UC San Diego nanoengineering graduate students Jeanne Lemaster and Chava Angell.

When and where:

Thursday 1:30 p.m. Room 8 (Lipomi)

Friday, 4:30 p.m. Room 24 ABC (Nakashole)

More info:

Thursday 1:30 p.m. Room 8 (Lipomi)

Nanotechnology in Sci-Fi: Fact or Fiction

Robin Ihnfeldt, Ph.D. (president/CEO. General Engineering and Research), Aaron Saunders, Ph.D. (research lead, nanoComposix), Darren Lipomi, Ph.D. (associate professor of nanoengineering, UCSD), Jeanne Lemaster, MS (graduate researcher in nanoengineering, UCSD), and Chava Angell, MS (graduate researcher in nanoengineering, UCSD) discuss the use of nanotechnology in popular science fiction. These scientists and engineers will talk about how nanotechnology is portrayed in TV and film from nanites to Mark 42 armor and compare it to cutting edge research applications in nanotechnology today.

Friday, 4:30 p.m. Room 24 ABC

Artificial Intelligence: Will Computers Take Over the World?

As scientists move closer to achieving artificial intelligence, what is next? How does real AI science compare to its depictions in movies, on TV, and in books? Could AI save the worldor be its doom? Join the Fleet Science Center as they bring together Craig Titley (co-executive producer/writer, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), William Wisher Jr. (screenwriter, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day) to discuss the future of artificial intelligence with Dr. Ndapa Nakashole (assistant professor, UCSD Artificial Intelligence Group) and other AI researchers.

See the article here:

Engineering Professors and Graduate Students Talk Nanotechnology and AI at San Diego Comic-Con - Newswise (press release)

GGCS 2017: Five ways to clean up the world’s drinking water – Professional Engineering (subscription)

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Clean water supply was a major talking point at the GGCS summit in Washington this week

This week, hundreds of eminent engineers and students gathered in Washington DC for the third Grand Global Challenges Summit.

In 2008, the engineering academies of the USA, China and the United Kingdom devised 14 grand challenges for engineers to tackle in the 21st century.

Some are lofty, science-fiction goals such as reverse engineer the brain, or provide energy from fusion. You can imagine Elon Musk sitting down with a copy of the list and a pen - founding a company to go with each one.

Others have simpler, and perhaps more noble goals. One particularly hot topic at this years summit - particularly fitting given how the heavens opened just minutes before the opening reception - was the supply of clean water.

Weve still got thousands of people dying every week of water-borne diseases, said Lord Alec Broers, who helped devise the 14 challenges, and gave an update on progress so far at the conference.

Engineers from all over the world are working on the problem, and several student groups showcased their groundbreaking ideas at the conference. Here are some of the solutions that caught our eye when we visited the GGCS summit this week.

A team of students from Colorado State University have devised a method for filtering water using sound. Their technology could even remove smaller bacteria and bugs that sneak through traditional filters. Ultrasonic waves cause these tiny microbes to group together and settle out of the solution. Acoustic filtering could be used in drinking water treatment to provide cheaper, less energy-intensive, and overall more sustainable disinfection, write the papers authors.

A team from the University of Bath took a completely different approach. Theyve developed a wind-powered diffuser that can produce up to 100 litres of drinking water every day, for a cost of around 500 per device. It works by cooling and heating air by forcing it through a nozzle, creating condensation which can then be collected on surfaces that are protected against bacteria.

A group of product design students from Bournemouth University took second prize, and $15,000, in the GGCS pitching competition, where they had to present their idea to a group of judges. MoreWater is a modular, multi-stage water filtration system. It was designed with the slum of Korail, in Bangladeshs capital Dhaka in mind. Season flooding during the rainy season disrupts water sources, and creates a high-risk of infection.

The MoreWater purifier is a solar-powered solution that feeds water through a series of layers - similar to how mineral water is naturally filtered through rock. Each module can be removed individually to make maintenance easier.

According to its creators, the device can supply a households water purification needs for 10 years.

Nano-material could be a game-changer for vast areas of engineering - from the production of batteries, to the treatment of medical conditions. They may have a role to play in making our drinking water safer as well. Solar-powered nano-materials that can clean up water have been a focus of recent work, and Chenjie Shi of Shanghai University presented work on a particular material that could help break down organic compounds such as pesticides and herbicides in drinking water. However, these nano-materials are expensive to produce in any practical quantities.

Saltwater could be turned into drinking water using black paper, plastic and the power of the sun, according to researchers from New York States Buffalo University, whose work was on show at the GGCS summit. It consists of a plastic casing and black paper to absorb the heat of the sun - a cheaper solution than expensive nano-materials. This evaporates the water, which separates it from any contaminants, and then when it condenses its collected in a separate container. Using extremely low-cost materials, we have been able to create a system that makes near maximum use of the solar energy during evaporation. At the same time, we are minimizing the amount of heat loss during this process," said lead researcher Qiaoqiang Gan, PhD, associate professor of electrical engineering in the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, when the work was first published in January.

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GGCS 2017: Five ways to clean up the world's drinking water - Professional Engineering (subscription)