NASA designs one-person hovercraft
Good Morning,
Check out the first article for details on a new type of
hovercraft designed by NASA. It’s called the Puffin and it
is a one unique contraption that may bring a whole new
perspective on flight.
Until Next Time,
Erin
NASA designs one-person hovercraft
HAMPTON, Va. - NASA unveiled its design for a one-person
aircraft that would take off vertically, hover, and then
cruise horizontally, U.S. officials said. The nearly silent
12-foot-tall Puffin would stand on end like a space ship,
lift off vertically and then cruise horizontally with the
pilot lying prone as if in a glider, NASA said in a release.
The twin-engine Puffin was designed by Mark Moore, an aero-
space engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton,
Va. The Puffin was designed with the help of engineers at
the Massachusetts and Georgia institutes of technology and
the National Institute of Aerospace. Moore and his team were
to discuss the Puffin’s design Wednesday in San Francisco
at a meeting of the American Helicopter Society.
Red groupers architects of the sea
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Red groupers act as architect and engi-
neer in creating habitats for commercially important species
in the Gulf of Mexico, marine biologists said. While snork-
elers and recreational divers may think the groupers slug-
gish, scientists at Florida State University say they’re hard
workers who excavate and maintain crevices that provide crit-
ical habitat for spiny lobsters and other species. The
groupers laboriously remove sand from the ocean floor to
expose hard rock needed for the propagation of corals and
sponges and the animals they shelter, said Felicia Coleman,
head of Florida State’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory. The
excavation sites, which can measure 16-feet across, attract
prey species for the grouper’s diet and other beneficial
species such as cleaner shrimp that pick parasites off the
groupers. “So it is no surprise that (groupers) are remark-
ably sedentary,” Coleman said. “Why move if you are clever
enough to make everything you need come to you?”
Phoenix craft lifeless, Spirit inches free
PASADENA, Calif. - The Phoenix spacecraft seeking microbial
life near the Martian North Pole shows no signs of life it-
self and may be frozen, said the U.S. space agency. The ro-
botic lander, which completed its five-month mission in
August 2008, gave off no signals when the Mars Odyssey space-
craft orbiting the planet passed over Phoenix’s location 30
times since Monday, NASA said. Phoenix was not designed to
survive the frigid Martian winter, but NASA and University
of Arizona scientists said they hoped to re-establish con-
tact if the lander can recharge its batteries during the
Martian spring, which has begun. The scientists said they
would try to make contact with Phoenix again next month and
in March. Meanwhile, the agency’s embattled Mars rover Spirit
– stuck wheel-deep in a Martian sand trap since last May —
managed to move a half-inch, NASA said Thursday. It was the
first upward motion for the rover since escape attempts be-
gan in November, the National Aeronautics and Space Admini-
stration said. Spirit is in Mars’ Southern Hemisphere, where
it’s fall. Its top-mounted solar arrays, vital for generating
power, are not in a favorable position to keep the rover
alive through a Mars winter, space and astronomy news Web
site Space.com reported. The rover’s robotic arm — which is
supposed to conduct geological analysis of Martian rocks and
planetary surface features — is not able to generate enough
force to move the golf cart-size rover free of its trap, said
Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission managers in Pasadena.
Nuclear fission algorithm is created
ARGONNE, Ill. - U.S. Department of Energy scientists say
they’ve created a computer algorithm that allows a substan-
tially enhanced view of nuclear fission. The Argonne
National Laboratory scientists said the algorithm, known
as the neutron transport code, enables researchers for the
first time to obtain a highly detailed description of a
nuclear reactor core. “The code could prove crucial in the
development of nuclear reactors that are safe, affordable
and environmentally friendly,” laboratory officials said in
a statement. To model the complex geometry of a reactor
core currently requires billions of spatial elements, hun-
dreds of angles and thousands of energy groups — all of
which lead to problem sizes with quadrillions of possible
solutions, the researchers said. Such calculations exhaust
computer memory of the largest machines, they said, and
therefore reactor modeling codes typically rely on various
approximations. “The (neutron transport code) is intended to
reduce the uncertainties and biases in reactor design calcu-
lations by progressively replacing existing multilevel aver-
aging techniques with more direct solution methods based on
explicit reactor geometries,” said Andrew Siegel, leader of
Argonne’s reactor simulation group. Officials said the code
has run successfully in some of the world’s fastest super-
computers, including the IBM Blue Gene at Argonne and the
Cray XT5 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Astronomer: Life possible on other planets
LONDON - Britain’s leading astronomer says the universe could
contain life forms more developed than the human beings of
Earth. Deployment of space telescopes capable of detecting
inhabitable planets around distant stars increase the chances
of finding life, said Martin Rees, president of the Royal
Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge.
“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in
forms that we can’t conceive,” Rees told the BBC in a story
published Monday. “And there could, of course, be forms of
intelligence beyond human capacity, beyond as much as we are
beyond a chimpanzee,” Rees said. While such discoveries are
a “long shot,” finding even a simple life form on another
planet would be one of the great discoveries of this century,
he said. Rees, a cosmologist and astrophysicist, was one of
the world’s first scientists to propose that enormous black
holes power quasars — distant galaxies with an active gal-
actic nucleus.