Cubesat
Posted January 30, 2011 at 5:51pm
A group called NexusOne PhoneSat project made up of NASA Ames students, some Google employees, and two NASA contractors strapped Googles Nexus One to the back of a rocket and launched it from the Nevada desert high into the atmosphere to test the device’s performance up in the air.
It seems that this project may have been partically inspired by the project of two MIT students in 2009, who flew a camera up to 93,000 feet in an old weather balloon and photographed the curvature of the earth, for the low low price of $148. This is well short of the widely-accepted Kármán line, which is at 100km (62 miles) up, but it’s in the stratosphere, and it’s still impressive. To give you an idea of how high that is, when the balloon burst, the beer-cooler took 40 minutes to come back to Earth. The project was no doubt also inspired by the Cubesat initiative led by Stanford and California State Polytechnic Universities which has sought to develop very small satellites which can be affordably launched by universities.
The group’s two Nexus Ones hitched rides on anIntimidator-5 rocket to go 28,000 feet into the atmosphere. The rocket was launched by the Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation, a group of rocket enthusiasts.
“The purpose of flying the Nexus One is to find a low-cost satellite solution,” says Thomas Atchison, chairman of the Mavericks Foundation. “The radio, processing power, sensors and cameras in smartphones potentially have the same capability as those in satellites.”
The idea is to drive down satellite cost by using off-the-shelf products and components, says Atchison.
“Today’s satellites are the size of Greyhound buses,” he says. “But I believe they are going to get smaller and more frequently deployed. This is a first-step effort.”
The smartphone in your pocket has about 120 times more computing power than the average satellite, which has the equivalent of a 1984-era computer inside. “You can go to Walmart and buy toys that work better than satellites did 20 years ago,”” said NASA physicist Chris Boshuizen.
The whole goal of the project is to make satellites cheap and affordable, so that anyone with bit of time and a couple of thousand dollars can send their own satellite into space.
Upgrading the computing power of satellites using cellphones would mean increased satellite capabilities, possibly including artificial intelligence.
“We’re not sure yet exactly what people will want to do with their satellites, and that’s the point,” said NASA education specialist Matt Reyes. “What can you imagine doing with your phone in space?”
If the cellphones ultimately get used to power satellites, they will probably be sent up without a screen and with a different battery to make them lighter. The screen and battery make up 90 percent of the Nexus One’s weight.
Next, the team will build a stabilizing mechanism for the satellite using the cellphone, $100 toy gyroscopes and parts similar to those of the Mindstorms Lego, so the satellite can orient itself in space. By installing three spinning gyroscopes and getting them to spin at different velocities, a satellite can move in any direction. The same technique is currently used on many satellites, but requires multimillion dollar technology.
Surrey Satellite Technology is now planning on launching this idea into space later this year with the STRaND-1 (Surrey Training, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator) being made from advanced and off-the-shelf components of one of Googles Android smartphones.
It’s also rumoured that the FAA may approve cellphone use of satellite airwaves, at the request of Lightsquared a satellite broadband startup. This would be a nice tie up with extremely cheap, tiny Android powered satellites. It’s possible to imagine a super-cheap satellite broadband network.
Posted January 30, 2011 at 5:46pm
Windowfarmers: Low tech way to grow food indoors in urban environments.
Posted January 30, 2011 at 5:05pm
If the experiments prove successful, scientists are hoping to be able to launch a trial satellite system generating solar power as early as 2016, according to Kyodo New reports.
Posted January 24, 2011 at 8:30pm
High Economic Cost of Top Students Not Wanting to Teach
Efforts to help US schools become more effective generally focus on improving the skills of current teachers or keeping the best and ejecting the least effective ones. The issue of who should actually become teachers has received comparatively little attention. Yet the world’s top-performing systems—in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea—recruit 100 percent of their teaching corps from students in the top third of their classes. In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent of new teachers who come from the top third work in high-poverty schools, where attracting and retaining talented people is particularly difficult. A McKinsey survey of nearly 1,500 top-third US college students confirms that a major effort would be needed to attract them to teaching. Among top-third students not planning to enter the profession, for example, only 33 percent believe that they would be able to support a family if they did. The stakes are high: recent McKinsey research found that an ongoing achievement gap between US students and those in academically top-performing countries imposes the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession.
(Source: mckinseyquarterly.com)
Posted January 3, 2011 at 4:00am
Military to unleash new system that ‘can see everything’
The Washington Post
© January 3, 2011
By Ellen Nakashima
and Craig Whitlock
In ancient times, Gorgon was a mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them. In modern times, Gorgon may be one of the military’s most valuable new tools.
This winter, the Air Force is set to deploy to Afghanistan what it says is a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.
The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a “soda straw” area the size of a building or two.
With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James Poss, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.”
Questions persist, however, about whether the military has the capability to sift through huge quantities of imagery quickly enough to convey useful data to troops in the field.
Officials also acknowledge that Gorgon Stare is of limited value unless they can match it with improved human intelligence - eyewitness reports of who is doing what on the ground.
The Air Force is exponentially increasing surveillance across Afghanistan. The monthly number of aircraft surveillance sorties has more than doubled since last January, and quadrupled since the beginning of 2009.
Indeed, officials say, they cannot keep pace with the demand.
“I have yet to go a week in my job here without having a request for more Air Force surveillance out there,” Poss said.
But adding Gorgon Stare will generate oceans more data to process.
“Today an analyst sits there and stares at Death TV for hours on end, trying to find the single target or see something move,” Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a conference in New Orleans in November. “It’s just a waste of manpower.”
The hunger for these high-tech tools was evident at the conference, where officials told several thousand industry and intelligence officials they had to move “at the speed of war.” Cartwright pressed for solutions, even partial ones, in a year or less.
The development of Gorgon Stare began about 18 months ago and is based on the work of Air Force scientists who came up with the idea of stitching together views from multiple cameras shooting two frames per second. Currently, full-motion video is shot at 30 frames per second from one camera mounted on a Predator or the larger Reaper drone. That makes for more fluid video, but also more difficulty in assembling frames quickly to get the wide-area view.
Technological advances now make it possible for a soldier on the ground to receive any portion of a panoramic view in real time, streamed to a portable device about the size of an iPad, Poss said. At the same time, nine other soldiers can get the same or a different view. The images will be stored so analysts can study them to determine, for instance, who planted an improvised bomb or what the patterns of life in a village are.
The Air Force has also taken tips from the purveyors of pop culture. It is working with Harris Corp. to adapt to the war zone ESPN’s technique for tagging key moments in National Football League videotape. Just as a sportscaster can call up a series of archived quarterback blitzes as soon as a player is sacked on the field, an analyst in Afghanistan can retrieve the past month’s worth of bombings on a particular stretch of road with the push of a button, officials said.
The Air Force placed a contractor on the set of a reality TV show to learn how to pick out the interesting scenes shot from cameras simultaneously recording the action in a house. And taking a page from high-tech companies such as Google, the Air Force will store its reams of video on servers placed in used shipping containers in Iowa.
The Air Force is looking to mount wide-area surveillance cameras on airships that can stay aloft for up to two weeks.
“If you look into the not-too-distant future, what these technologies will allow us to do is remove more and more ground forces and replace them with sensors where we normally would have to rely on people going somewhere to find something out,” said retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, who served as deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
But other military officials caution that a counterinsurgency requires an understanding of the local population. “That really only comes from human intelligence or boots on the ground,” said Army Col. Steven Beckman, the former intelligence chief for coalition forces in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
“We can get the 3-D geo-intelligence that tells us what every building, what every street looks like in Marja,” he said at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation conference in New Orleans in November. But such intelligence needs to be “underpinned by a degree of local knowledge… to enable us to maximize that.”
Gorgon Stare is being tested now and officials hope it will be fielded within two months.
http://hamptonroads.com/2011/01/military-unleash-new-system-can-see-everything
Posted January 3, 2011 at 3:52am
![IPCC feels the heat as it is told to get its facts right about global warming
By Stephen Foley in New York (Tuesday, 31 August 2010)
The powerful international panel set up to advise governments on the effects of global warming needs a major overhaul, an independent investigation has concluded.
In the latest review designed to limit the fallout from what sceptics called ‘Climategate’, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was told it should be much clearer in explaining the science.
The report warned the panel against repeating errors that damaged its credibility and fuelled climate change sceptics.
And the review did nothing to lessen the pressure on the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajenda Pachauri, who has been assailed by opponents for failing to respond properly to the revelation of errors in the panel’s latest Assessment Report, and for also working as a consultant to energy companies.
The report did not criticise him personally, but it said that the IPCC needs a clear conflict-of-interest policy, should avoid ‘straying into advocacy’, and should no longer allow chairmen to preside over more than one assessment report. He said he would not resign.
The IPCC was established to pull together the latest scientific work on climate change, using hundreds of volunteers drawn from the ranks of academics working in the field, and report to governments a consensus on the likely dangers facing the planet.
But a furore erupted over the IPCC’s work last year when it was discovered that one of the most widely reported claims in the 2007 assessment report - that the Himalayan glaciers would be melted by global warming by 2035 - was based on a mistaken interpretation of the underlying science. The real figure should have been 2350. The report also mis-stated the percentage of the Netherlands which is below sea level.
Earlier reviews concluded that the errors did not come close to undermining the overall conclusions of the IPCC’s work, namely that climate change is real, man-made, getting worse, and destined to have big impacts on sea levels, and therefore on human life. The assessment report cited 10,000 scientific papers and ran to 3,000 pages.
The investigation, by an international panel of scientists called the Inter-Academy Council, did not concentrate on the science but rather on the structure of the IPCC, although it had some criticism of inaccuracies in the writing of the assessment report.
‘Authors reported high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence. Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach “high confidence” to the statements’, it said. One summary for policy makers ‘contains many such statements that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or not expressed clearly’.
Howard Shapiro, the Princeton University professor who chaired the review, said the Himalayan glacier error ‘did dent the credibility of the process’ and ‘came from just not paying close enough attention to what [peer] reviewers said’.
The response to the discovery of the errors was ‘slow and inadequate’, he concluded, and the IPCC should hire an executive director and communications staff to make its work more robust in future.
Dr Pachauri said he intended to continue work on the next assessment report, due to be published in 2013 and 2014. “This is a mission that I cannot shirk and cannot walk away from,” he said.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l801xj05rT1qzl91zo1_400.jpg)
IPCC feels the heat as it is told to get its facts right about global warming
The powerful international panel set up to advise governments on the effects of global warming needs a major overhaul, an independent investigation has concluded.
In the latest review designed to limit the fallout from what sceptics called ‘Climategate’, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was told it should be much clearer in explaining the science.
The report warned the panel against repeating errors that damaged its credibility and fuelled climate change sceptics.
And the review did nothing to lessen the pressure on the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajenda Pachauri, who has been assailed by opponents for failing to respond properly to the revelation of errors in the panel’s latest Assessment Report, and for also working as a consultant to energy companies.
The report did not criticise him personally, but it said that the IPCC needs a clear conflict-of-interest policy, should avoid ‘straying into advocacy’, and should no longer allow chairmen to preside over more than one assessment report. He said he would not resign.
The IPCC was established to pull together the latest scientific work on climate change, using hundreds of volunteers drawn from the ranks of academics working in the field, and report to governments a consensus on the likely dangers facing the planet.
But a furore erupted over the IPCC’s work last year when it was discovered that one of the most widely reported claims in the 2007 assessment report - that the Himalayan glaciers would be melted by global warming by 2035 - was based on a mistaken interpretation of the underlying science. The real figure should have been 2350. The report also mis-stated the percentage of the Netherlands which is below sea level.
Earlier reviews concluded that the errors did not come close to undermining the overall conclusions of the IPCC’s work, namely that climate change is real, man-made, getting worse, and destined to have big impacts on sea levels, and therefore on human life. The assessment report cited 10,000 scientific papers and ran to 3,000 pages.
The investigation, by an international panel of scientists called the Inter-Academy Council, did not concentrate on the science but rather on the structure of the IPCC, although it had some criticism of inaccuracies in the writing of the assessment report.
‘Authors reported high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence. Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach “high confidence” to the statements’, it said. One summary for policy makers ‘contains many such statements that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or not expressed clearly’.
Howard Shapiro, the Princeton University professor who chaired the review, said the Himalayan glacier error ‘did dent the credibility of the process’ and ‘came from just not paying close enough attention to what [peer] reviewers said’.
The response to the discovery of the errors was ‘slow and inadequate’, he concluded, and the IPCC should hire an executive director and communications staff to make its work more robust in future.
Dr Pachauri said he intended to continue work on the next assessment report, due to be published in 2013 and 2014. “This is a mission that I cannot shirk and cannot walk away from,” he said.
Posted August 31, 2010 at 12:32am
