Virgin Atlantic released this promotional video for their new satellite launch system, The Galactic Launcher One. The idea is to use aircraft based launches to significantly reduce the cost of putting 500 lbs. payloads into orbit. The claim is that this system is cheap enough to open space to individual businesses, organizations or even universities.

 

This is WhiteKnightTwo and LauncherOne demonstrating the air launch concept.

Source: Virgin Galactic via Gizmodo

A website launched last month called “Build the Enterprise.” It isn’t some cheesy fan fiction site or else I wouldn’t be posting about it here. The curator of the site claims that he’s an experienced electrical engineer from a Fortune 500 company and he legitimately thinks that if mankind pooled its resources, we could actually build a starship in the next 20 years. The plans for his Enterprise use the same basic shape as the ship from Gene Rodenberry’s science fiction show because it’s actually quite functional once you move a couple of things around. This “Gen 1 Enterprise” would house 1000 people, be run on a nuclear reactor and have ion propulsion. It’s really quite well thought out and planned to the point of having schedules and projected budgets. Check it out for yourself.

Sources: Build the Enterprise via IO9

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory released this animation of the next Mars Rover, the Curiosity. Once launched from Earth, it will take 8.5 months to reach Mars. Once there, it will explore the surface using a laser and robot arm that collects samples for the lab tools inside it’s body. The Curiosity will be powered by a radioisotope system that generates electricity from the heat of the decay of plutonium. This will give the rover at least two years of exploration on the surface of Mars.

Source: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory News

The NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory took this video of the Venus transit on June 5th, 2012. We’re able to see it for the first time like this thanks to the technology developed for the SDO. It’s pretty amazing. I’ll let NASA explain the details:

“On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event–the transit of Venus across the face of the sun.  This event happens in pairs eight years apart that are separated from each other by 105 or 121 years.  The last transit was in 2004 and the next will not happen until 2117.

The videos and images displayed here are constructed from several wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light and a portion of the visible spectrum.  The red colored sun is the 304 angstrom ultraviolet, the golden colored sun is 171 angstrom, the magenta sun is 1700 angstrom, and the orange sun is filtered visible light.  304 and 171 show the atmosphere of the sun, which does not appear in the visible part of the spectrum.”

Source: NASA Explorer on YouTube

This is another video from astronaut and chemist, Dr. Don Pettit, on the International Space Station. He’s the same guy who made the Bubbles and Anti-Bubbles in Space video. This time he’s experimenting with water droplets on speakers. He’s playing tones through the speakers and sweeping through different frequencies to observe their effects on the droplets. The interesting thing about this is that there is no gravity to dissipate the waves from the surface of the water. The water droplets are able to hold some very interesting shapes depending on their size and the tone frequency.

To break this down even further, you have to take a look at wave behavior. Lets take what we’re seeing on the surface of those water droplets and break it down into a 2D scenario. This is a crash course on standing wave behavior by Professor Brian Cox with help from Simon Pegg. Before you watch it, remember that the surface of water has elastic properties due to surface tension. That’s to say that you can put energy into it by stretching it and it will use that energy to return to its original shape.

Now to bring it all together, the spring in the second video is the equivalent of the surface of the water droplets in the first video. How big the water droplet it effectively changes the spring rate, or how stiff the spring is. The two guys moving the ends of the spring in the second video are the equivalent of the speaker making tones in the first video. If you expand the spring into a three dimensional dome shape, you can start to see why the water droplets look the way they do in the first video. When the spring is excited slowly, you get a small number of very large waves (2D) or ripples (3D) that move slowly. As the frequency increases, the excitation is moving faster and you get a lot more small waves and ripples that are moving at much higher speed. As the frequency gets very high, the surface of the droplets become chaotic and that’s when it starts to shoot the droplets off. Knowing what you now know about wave behavior, what do you think the answer to Don’s Challenge Question is?

Sources: Physics Central APS and The BBC on YouTube.