NASA's RapidScat to Unveil Hidden Cycles of Sea Winds

Credit: JPL/NASA

Ocean waves, the hot sun, sea breezes, the right combination makes a great day at the beach.

A different combination makes a killer hurricane.

The complex interactions of the ocean and the air above it that can create such different outcomes are not yet fully known.

Scientists would especially like to understand the role that the daily heat of the sun plays in creating winds.

In a few months, NASA will send an ocean wind-monitoring instrument to a berth on the International Space Station.

That unique vantage point will give the International Space Station Rapid Scatterometer (ISS-RapidScat), the ability to observe daily (also called diurnal) cycles of wind created by solar heat.

Winds contribute to motion in the ocean on every scale, from individual waves to currents extending thousands of miles.

They affect local weather as well as large-scale, long-term climate patterns such as El Niño.

Across the tropical Pacific, winds help or hinder local economies by allowing nutrient-rich water to well up from the ocean depths, nourishing marine life to the benefit of coastal fisheries, or blocking its upwelling.

Since the hours of daylight are totally predictable, you might expect their influence on winds to be equally obvious. But that's not the case.

According to Sarah Gille, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, "There's an enormous amount of diurnal wind variation between 30 degrees north and south of the equator, and we don't understand the timing. It's clear that the winds aren't just triggered every day at noon [when the sun is highest]."

Scatterometer observations from satellites have proven invaluable for understanding ocean winds.

A scatterometer is a type of radar that bounces microwaves off Earth's surface and measures the strength and direction of return signals.

The more uneven the surface, the stronger the return signals. On the ocean, higher winds create larger waves and therefore stronger return signals.

The return signal also tells scientists the direction of the wind, because waves line up in the direction the wind is blowing.

The reason spaceborne scatterometers haven't helped much with the specific question of daily wind cycles has to do with their orbits.

All modern instruments have been in sun-synchronous orbits, in which a satellite is always oriented at the same angle relative to the sun.

In this type of orbit, a satellite passes over every location at the same fixed times, for example, 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. over the equator.

The resulting data can't throw much light on the question of how winds develop over the course of a day.

More information: For more information about ISS-RapidScat, visit: winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/RapidScat/

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to Unveil Manned Dragon ‘Space Taxi’ on May 29

SpaceX Dragon cargo freighter berthed to the International Space Station during recently concluded SpaceX-3 mission in May 2014. 

An upgraded, manrated version will carry US astronauts to space in the next two to three years. 

Credit: NASA

SpaceX CEO, founder and chief designer Elon Musk is set to unveil the manned version of his firms commercial Dragon spaceship later this week, setting in motion an effort that he hopes will soon restore America's capability to launch US astronauts to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station (ISS) by 2017.

Musk will personally introduce SpaceX's 'Space Taxi' dubbed 'Dragon V2' at what amounts to sort of a world premiere event on May 29 at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, CA, according to an official announcement this evening (May 27) from SpaceX.

"SpaceX's new Dragon V2 spacecraft is a next generation spacecraft designed to carry astronauts into space," according to the SpaceX statement.

The manned Dragon will launch atop the powerful SpaceX Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket from a SpaceX pad on the Florida Space Coast.

Dragon was initially developed as a commercial unmanned resupply freighter to deliver 20,000 kg (44,000 pounds) of supplies and science experiments to the ISS under a $1.6 Billion Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA during a dozen Dragon cargo spacecraft flights through 2016.

Musk is making good on a recent comment he posted to twitter on April 29, with respect to the continuing fallout from the deadly crisis in Ukraine which has resulted in some US economic sanctions imposed against Russia, that now potentially threaten US access to the ISS in a boomerang action from the Russian government:

"Sounds like this might be a good time to unveil the new Dragon Mk 2 spaceship that @SpaceX has been working on with @NASA."

"No trampoline needed," Musk tweeted. The 'Dragon V2' is an upgraded, man rated version of the unmanned spaceship that can carry a mix of cargo and up to a seven crewmembers to the ISS.

Dragon is among a trio of US private sector manned spaceships being developed with seed money from NASA's Commercial Crew Program in a public/private partnership to develop a next-generation crew transportation vehicle to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS by 2017, a capability totally lost following the space shuttle's forced retirement in 2011.

NASA astronauts and industry experts check out the crew accommodations in the Dragon spacecraft under development by SpaceX. 

The evaluation in Hawthorne, Calif., on Jan. 30, 2012, was part of SpaceX’s Commercial Crew Development Round 2 agreement with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. 

Credit: NASA

Since that day, US astronauts have been totally dependent on the Russian Soyuz capsules for ferry rides to orbit and back.

The Boeing CST-100 and Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser 'space taxis' are also vying for funding in the next round of contracts to be awarded by NASA around late summer 2014.

All three company's have been making excellent progress in meeting their NASA mandated milestones in the current contract period known as Commercial Crew Integrated Capability initiative (CCiCAP) under the auspices of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.

German Festo Scientists unveil 'BionicKangroo Robot' - Video

German tech leader Festo has built a robot that mimics the way a kangaroo moves -- able to absorb and store the energy of a jump's landing, and quickly and efficiently use that energy to initiate the next hop.

They call it the BionicKangaroo Robot.

If a human tries to move around simply by jumping, he or she is likely to get very tired, very fast.

The human body isn't designed to jump over and over again.

The same doesn't hold true for a kangaroo, of course -- the hopping mammal, omnipresent throughout most of Australia, gets around exclusively via leaps and bounds.

Now, scientists in Germany have replicated the jumping motion of a kangaroo in a robot.


One of the keys to a kangaroo's jump is its highly specialized achilles tendon.

"In the artificial kangaroo, we realised the function of the natural Achilles tendon by means of an elastic spring element made of rubber," Heinrich Frontzek, head of corporate communications at Festo, explained in a press release.

The robot features advanced technologies that propel a powerful jump while enabling balance and flexibility.

Frontzek and the research team at Festo hopes the robo-roo will lead to new and even more complex developments in robotic kinetics.

Scientists to Unveil 'Major Discovery' at Harvard Astrophysics Center

This illustration summarizes the almost 14-billion-year-long history of our universe. 

It shows the main events that occurred between the initial phase of the cosmos, where its properties were almost uniform and punctuated only by tiny fluctuations, to the rich variety of cosmic structure that we observe today, ranging from stars and planets to galaxies and galaxy clusters. 

Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

A team of scientists will unveil what they bill as a "major discovery" in the field of astrophysics on Monday (March 17) in a presentation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

CfA officials did not detail the nature of the astrophysics discovery in a media alert. They only stated that the center will "host a press conference at 12:00 noon EDT (16:00 UTC) on Monday, March 17th, to announce a major discovery."

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is made up of the Harvard College Observatory and the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory.

Scientists at the center pursue studies of those basic physical process that determine the nature and evolution of the universe," according to the CfA website's official description.