SPHERES USE IN HUMAN EXPLORATION TELEROBOTICS TEST

NASA

ISS Update: SPHERES with Telerobotics Project Manager Terry Fong

NASA Public Affairs Officer Brandi Dean talks with Terry Fong, Telerobotics Project Manager, about how the Synchronized Position, Hold, Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES, are being used for a Human Exploration Telerobotics test.

U.S. Department of Defense Armed with Science Update

U.S. Department of Defense Armed with Science Update

Cassini descubre un río Nilo en miniatura en una luna de Saturno

Cassini descubre un río Nilo en miniatura en una luna de Saturno

Fernsehdokumentation zeigt einzigartige 3D-Aufnahmen aus der ISS

Fernsehdokumentation zeigt einzigartige 3D-Aufnahmen aus der ISS

L’espace pour vous : le portail Internet de l’ESA évolue

L’espace pour vous : le portail Internet de l’ESA évolue

André Kuipers geeft lezing over Marsreizen

André Kuipers geeft lezing over Marsreizen

IS THERE WATER ON MERCURY?

The First Solar DayAfter its first Mercury solar day (176 Earth days) in orbit, MESSENGER has nearly completed two of its main global imaging campaigns: a monochrome map at 250 m/pixel and an eight-color, 1-km/pixel color map. Apart from small gaps, which will be filled in during the next solar day, these global maps now provide uniform lighting conditions ideal for assessing the form of Mercury’s surface features as well as the color and compositional variations across the planet. The orthographic views seen here, centered at 75° E longitude, are each mosaics of thousands of individual images. At right, images taken through the wide-angle camera filters at 1000, 750, and 430 nm wavelength are displayed in red, green, and blue, respectively.
Release Date: October 5, 2011
Image Credit-NASA-Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory-Carnegie Institution of Washington

FROM: NASA
NASA Spacecraft Finds New Evidence for Water Ice on Mercury

WASHINGTON -- A NASA spacecraft studying Mercury has provided compelling support for the long-held hypothesis the planet harbors abundant water ice and other frozen volatile materials within its permanently shadowed polar craters.

The new information comes from NASA's MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft. Its onboard instruments have been studying Mercury in unprecedented detail since its historic arrival there in March 2011. Scientists are seeing clearly for the first time a chapter in the story of how the inner planets, including Earth, acquired their water and some of the chemical building blocks for life.

"The new data indicate the water ice in Mercury's polar regions, if spread over an area the size of Washington, D.C., would be more than 2 miles thick," said David Lawrence, a MESSENGER participating scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md., and lead author of one of three papers describing the findings. The papers were published online in Thursday's edition of Science Express.

Spacecraft instruments completed the first measurements of excess hydrogen at Mercury's north pole, made the first measurements of the reflectivity of Mercury's polar deposits at near-infrared wavelengths, and enabled the first detailed models of the surface and near-surface temperatures of Mercury's north polar regions.

Given its proximity to the sun, Mercury would seem to be an unlikely place to find ice. However, the tilt of Mercury's rotational axis is less than 1 degree, and as a result, there are pockets at the planet's poles that never see sunlight.

Scientists suggested decades ago there might be water ice and other frozen volatiles trapped at Mercury's poles. The idea received a boost in 1991 when the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico detected radar-bright patches at Mercury's poles. Many of these patches corresponded to the locations of large impact craters mapped by NASA's Mariner 10 spacecraft in the 1970s. However, because Mariner saw less than 50 percent of the planet, planetary scientists lacked a complete diagram of the poles to compare with the radar images.

Images from the spacecraft taken in 2011 and earlier this year confirmed all radar-bright features at Mercury's north and south poles lie within shadowed regions on the planet's surface. These findings are consistent with the water ice hypothesis.

The new observations from MESSENGER support the idea that ice is the major constituent of Mercury's north polar deposits. These measurements also reveal ice is exposed at the surface in the coldest of those deposits, but buried beneath unusually dark material across most of the deposits. In the areas where ice is buried, temperatures at the surface are slightly too warm for ice to be stable.

MESSENGER's neutron spectrometer provides a measure of average hydrogen concentrations within Mercury's radar-bright regions. Water ice concentrations are derived from the hydrogen measurements.

"We estimate from our neutron measurements the water ice lies beneath a layer that has much less hydrogen. The surface layer is between 10 and 20 centimeters [4-8 inches] thick," Lawrence said.

Additional data from detailed topography maps compiled by the spacecraft corroborate the radar results and neutron measurements of Mercury's polar region. In a second paper by Gregory Neumann of NASA's Goddard Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., measurements of the shadowed north polar regions reveal irregular dark and bright deposits at near-infrared wavelength near Mercury's north pole.
"Nobody had seen these dark regions on Mercury before, so they were mysterious at first," Neumann said.

The spacecraft recorded dark patches with diminished reflectance, consistent with the theory that ice in those areas is covered by a thermally insulating layer. Neumann suggests impacts of comets or volatile-rich asteroids could have provided both the dark and bright deposits, a finding corroborated in a third paper led by David Paige of the University of California at Los Angeles.

"The dark material is likely a mix of complex organic compounds delivered to Mercury by the impacts of comets and volatile-rich asteroids, the same objects that likely delivered water to the innermost planet," Paige said.

This dark insulating material is a new wrinkle to the story, according to MESSENGER principal investigator Sean Solomon of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.

"For more than 20 years, the jury has been deliberating whether the planet closest to the sun hosts abundant water ice in its permanently shadowed polar regions," Solomon said. "MESSENGER now has supplied a unanimous affirmative verdict."

MESSENGER was designed and built by APL. The lab manages and operates the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed for the directorate by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

THE MOON PHASE AND LIBRATION FOR 2013

FROM: NASA

Moon Phase & Libration 2013: Additional Graphics

This visualization shows the phase and libration of the Moon throughout the year 2013, at hourly intervals. Each frame represents one hour. In addition, this version of the visualization shows additional relevant information, including the Moon's orbit position, subsolar and subearth points, distance from the Earth, and more.

Les vols en apesanteur s’ouvrent au grand public

Les vols en apesanteur s’ouvrent au grand public

AF receives space award

AF receives space award

CHEOPS auf der Suche nach der zweiten Erde

CHEOPS auf der Suche nach der zweiten Erde

Internationale Konferenz zu Gefahren durch Weltraummüll

Internationale Konferenz zu Gefahren durch Weltraummüll

THE SMELL OF MARS

FROM: NASA

SAM Sniffs the Martian Atmosphere

NASA's Curiosity rover uses SAM to make the most sensitive measurements ever to search for methane gas on the red planet

U.S. Department of Defense Armed with Science Update

U.S. Department of Defense Armed with Science Update

ARMY SCIENTISTS SHARE IN PATENT FOR FORERUNNER OF QUANTUM NEURAL DYNAMICS COMPUTER CHIP

FROM: U.S DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE

Army Scientists Earn Patent for Advanced Neural Chip
by jtozer
Armed With Science

Two Army scientists and a university professor earned a patent for the forerunner of a powerful quantum neural dynamics computer chip. The device uses nonstandard mathematics to accomplish analog problem solving at high speed.

"The patent covers different ways to make computer chips," said Army scientist and principal investigator Ronald E. Meyers. "These computer chips can represent biological and physical processes."

Meyers and his colleague, Army mathematician Keith Deacon, joined forces with Dr. Gert Cauwenberghs, a professor of bioengineering and biology and co-director of the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California at San Diego.

"This is as a first step toward large-scale non-Lipschitz intelligent information processing systems," Cauwenberghs said.

Cauwenberghs worked with Meyers and Deacon to map the mathematics onto an analog "continuous-time neural architecture." He also designed and tested the integrated circuit implementing the architecture.

implementing the architecture.
"Experimental data from our silicon integrated circuit demonstrated the elements of terminal repulsion and attraction in neural dynamics and synaptic coupling," he said.
In other words, by using different mathematics, the scientists potentially removed a limit on how fast functions can change — clearing the way for ultra high-speed computing.
"The chip has a lot of application to both the military and civilian use," Meyers said.
A unique aspect of the research is the use of synaptic connections for interfacing neurons and learning through feedback, which is modeled after biological systems, Meyers said.

It’s all part of the futuristic vision of quantum computing. Researchers believe one day they will effectively harness individual atoms to build complex super-computers.

Meyers delves into quantum physics research projects at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Currently his project is to invent a secure communications system immune to the awesome power of future quantum computers.

"Quantum computing will give unparalleled computational ability," he said. "We’re talking about an ability to compute that exceeds exponentially millions of times greater than any of the computers that exist or are on the drawing boards using conventional approaches."

Meyers said neural chips can be made with classical computers or in the future with quantum computers.

"This is a different type of chip that we’ve developed … and it’s somewhat in between," Meyers said. "It’s not a classical approach, and it’s not quantum yet. But, we’re wanting to evolve the concepts into quantum computing."

The research took several years. The
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent Sept. 11.

"It looks like a breakthrough to others but it’s just a lot of hard work, continuous work," Meyers said. "When you put something out it’s a milestone. It means you’re able to explain it in a way that the Patent Office understands, or that other scientists understand. So what happened here is we’re looking into one of the most important problems that the Army faces and it turns out — from my perspective, the ones that are not solved and are most important."

Meyers is listed as the inventor on 14 patents. He co-authored a book, "From Instability to Intelligence: Complexity and Predictability in Nonlinear Dynamics," — covering nonlinear equations in math, physics and biology, and authored a plethora of scientific papers.

"Problems are unsolved because they’re difficult to tackle," he said. "I tend to seek out a different path … to go toward solving problems that before have not been solved. I think I have a background that can do that. I’ve gained some insight. It’s putting together your experience and you’re trying to project it into the future. And so in my mind I see how things can be applied in the future and I look at how to solve these. Quite often if you go for the hardest unsolved problem, that’s the one that gives you the most benefit."

Inspired by difficult problems, Meyers said he and his small team of scientists and mathematicians is focused on the end-user of this technology.

"We work for the soldier," Meyers said. "We work for the warfighter and that’s what our thinking is. That’s why we’re trying to solve these difficult problems. As Army scientists we are responsible to really help these soldiers operate in a way that can defend the country and protect them and anticipate any threats and deal with them in an effective manner.

———–

By David McNally, RDECOM
From
www.army.mil