Where's
the Edge? - NASA's Advanced Space
Transportation Program looks at ways to turn
science fiction into reality. Where's the edge
of knowledge? Where does science turn into
science fiction? Will humans ever travel to
another star system? Or are we doomed to only
experience another star's warmth vicariously
through our robots? The answers to these
questions are always changing. One hundred
years ago travel to the moon -- by means of
Jules Verne's cannon ship -- was fiction.
Today, travel to the moon is science history!
Ninety years ago, John Carter traveled to Mars
in Edgar Rice Burroughs' imagination. Today,
we are actually designing the technologies and
ships to visit the red planet...
Folding
a Lincoln into a Volkswagen - On the
heels of NASA's 7th annual Great Moonbuggy
Race, engineers from the Apollo program
discuss the challenges of building the
original Lunar Rover. - Can you imagine what
might happen if your car broke down while you
were driving... on the Moon? No, Triple-A is
not a cell-phone call away. A concerned
motorist is not going to stop and lend a hand.
And forget about walking home. If this sounds
silly, don't forget that about 30 years ago
people actually were driving around on Earth's
satellite. During three of the Apollo missions
to the Moon in the early '70s, astronauts in
bulky white space suits cruised the Moon's
rugged gray terrain in their custom-designed
"moon car..."
3D
mugshots could catch criminals -
Criminals could soon be caught with the help
of a computer program that creates
three-dimensional mugshots from security
camera footage. Closed circuit television (CCTV)
cameras are increasingly being used to help
bring criminals to justice. But the images
they produce are often too fuzzy and
indistinct to be of any help. New software in
development at Staffordshire University, UK,
combines a series of CCTV images filmed at
different angles. These are
"stitched" together to produce a 3D
mugshot...
Analysis
couched in secrecy - The next time
you're conversing in a chat room or posting
messages to an online bulletin board, don't be
surprised if a sociologist or anthropologist
pops in to ask you a few questions. Or perhaps
someone already is examining your behavior
without your knowing it. As more mainstream
users wander onto the Web, researchers are
following close behind. The American
Association for the Advancement of Science
sponsored a workshop last summer on the
ethical and legal implications of such
research, the amount of which, the association
says, is "vast..."
Impressions
of a remarkable night - Aurora pictures! - From 21.00 UT on April 6
until 01.00 UT at April 7 a fantastic Aurora display was
seen from my hometown Utrecht in the Netherlands. At
20.45 UT the first sign of the aurora was seen: a long
vertical red cloud in the north-east. This was followed
by activity in the north-west from 21.00 UT-22.30 UT.
There were several red clouds with white-yellow
streamers appearing from time to time. Most of these
streamers lasted for one ore two minutes. Near the
northern horizon the sky was a bright green-blue.
Activity dropped and only weak activity was seen after
22.00 UT...
Now, Just A
Blinkin' Picosecond! - NASA scientists are working to solve
the need for computer speed using light itself to
accelerate calculations and increase data bandwidth. April
28, 2000 -- Watches tick in seconds. Basketball games
are timed in 10ths of a second, and drag racers in
100ths. Computers used to work in milliseconds
(1,000ths), then moved up to microseconds (millionths),
and now are approaching nanoseconds (billionths) for
logic operations - and picoseconds (trillionths!) for
the switches and gates in chips. "That's great in theory,"
says Dr. Donald Frazier of NASA's Marshall Space Flight
Center. "Except that electronic signals, even with
Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) and maximum
miniaturization, are bogged down by many aspects of the
solid materials they travel through. So we've had to
find a faster medium for the signals - and the answer
seems to be light itself!"
Interstellar
Dust in the Wind - NASA's STARDUST probe is collecting
samples of a cloud of gas and dust that is moving
through our solar system from interstellar space. April
24, 2000 - Like an excited kid hoping to snag a fly
ball at a professional baseball game, NASA's Stardust
spacecraft has extended its high-tech "catcher's
mitt" to collect a valuable space souvenir - a
batch of interstellar dust particles...
