India Seeking Outside Collaboration on High-throughput Satellite

“We are looking for international cooperation in this area,” ISRO Chairman K. Radhakrishnan said. 

Credit: Photo courtesy of Indian government

The Indian government wants a high-throughput satellite generating at least 100 gigabits-per-second in orbit within five years and is seeking international partners in its development, ISRO Chairman K. Radhakrishnan said.

If pursued, the project would mark a rare opportunity for foreign suppliers to crack India’s mainly closed satellite telecommunications market, which in any case has shown signs of opening in the past year.

“We are looking for international cooperation in this area,” ISRO Chairman K. Radhakrishnan said in an address to the 65th International Astronautical Congress in Toronto (IAC 2014).

ISRO, with collaboration from domestic companies, builds its own satellites and operates them for its own account, and then acts as India’s telecommunications regulator with respect to pricing and market access by non-Indian satellite fleet operators.

International collaboration on Satellite Communications Systems is a normal part of the Space Industry and provides the most cost effective solution for countries.

Rapid technological advancements and the provision of advanced communications would be readily supported and used to great advantage by India's technologically astute corporations.

For India, the question will be whether to adopt a satellite broadband model such as in the United States, where Hughes Network Systems and ViaSat Inc. own their own satellites, build consumer broadband terminals and sell the service; or to purchase competing technologies.

Maryland-based Hughes Communications, owned by EchoStar Corp., Colorado, has long targeted India as a market ripe for consumer broadband.

The Hughes Comms' SPACEWAY 3 satellite, built by Boeing Satellite Systems International, Inc., was successfully launched on August 14, 2007 by Arianespace and is in its permanent geosynchronous orbital slot of 95° West longitude. 

Credit: Hughes Comms

Hughes has recently purchased Ka-band capacity on a satellite being built for fleet operator Eutelsat of Paris for a consumer broadband project in Brazil.

NISAR: NASA and ISRO Collaboration on Mars Exploration

This stunning view of Mars from India's Mangalyaan spacecraft was released on Sept. 29, 2014, less than a week after the orbiter arrived at the planet.

Credit: ISRO

India's recent Mars success appears to have turned some heads.

NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will investigate ways to collaborate on future missions to Mars, officials said Tuesday (Sept. 30).

The announcement comes just one week after India put its first-ever Mars probe in orbit around the Red Planet, becoming just the fourth entity, after the United States, the Soviet Union and the European Space Agency, to do so.

NASA and ISRO also signed an agreement Tuesday that lays out their respective roles on the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, which is scheduled to launch to Earth orbit in 2020 to study the consequences of climate change on a fine scale.

"The signing of these two documents reflects the strong commitment NASA and ISRO have to advancing science and improving life on Earth," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "This partnership will yield tangible benefits to both our countries and the world."



Bolden and ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan signed the two agreements Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress meeting in Toronto.

The Mars document sets up a NASA-ISRO Mars working group, which will meet once a year to identify and plan out joint activities, which could at some point include a cooperative mission to the Red Planet, NASA officials said.

An artist's concept of the planned NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), satellite in orbit, showing the large deployable mesh antenna, solar panels and radar electronics attached to the spacecraft. 

The mission is a partnership between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Also up for discussion, they added, will be possible ways to coordinate the science activities of India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) probe and NASA's MAVEN spacecraft (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), which arrived at the Red Planet on Sept. 21, just a week before MOM did.

The NISAR mission will employ two different radar frequencies, known as L-band and S-band, to measure and study small surface changes around the globe, officials said.

The new agreement specifies that NASA will provide NISAR's L-band system, a data-communication subsystem and some other gear; ISRO will be responsible for the body of the spacecraft, the S-band system, the rocket and launch services, NASA officials said.

NASA and ISRO have a history of working together. Under an agreement signed in 2008, for example, NASA provided two science payloads for India's Chandrayaan-1 moon mission, which spotted signs of water ice near the lunar north pole after launching in 2008.

ARCAS: Aerial Robotics Cooperative Assembly System

ARCAS

There are many situations where it's impossible, complicated or too time-consuming for humans to enter and carry out operations.

Think of contaminated areas following a nuclear accident, or the need to erect structures such as antennae on mountain tops.

These are examples of where flying robots could be used.

Robots taught to think and act autonomously

The EU's ARCAS project (Aerial Robotics Cooperative Assembly System) has designed a range of different flying robots with multi-joint manipulator arms to work together on grasping, transporting and depositing parts safely and efficiently.

The autonomy and skills of the robots is being developed to build or disassemble structures for a host of future applications, from rescue missions to inspection and maintenance in the energy and space sectors.

'The idea is that the robots should be able to fly in anywhere where it is impossible or impractical for piloted aircraft or ground robots to operate,' explained ARCAS project manager Professor Aníbal Ollero, of the University of Seville.

'We have helicopters, and multi-rotor systems with eight rotors to give more hovering control, increase the payload and carry arms with greater degrees of freedom.'

Up to 10 mini-prototypes have been demonstrated working together on an indoor test bed at CATEC , the Advanced Aerospace Technologies Centre in Seville, Spain.

Larger outdoor demonstrations using adapted helicopters and bigger multi-rotors have been performed at the facilities of DLR , the German national aerospace research centre, near Munich, and the University of Seville , to grasp bars and transport them over distance before depositing them.

The idea of flying robots is not new, of course. A large range of unmanned aerial vehicles are already in use, not least to take photographs and collect other sensor data.

But ARCAS is pioneering in that the flying robots are being equipped with arms to perform increasingly complicated manipulation tasks autonomously.



They are programmed with briefing information and 3D maps to orient them, equipped with sensors to adapt to mistakes (such as the dropping of a part) or changing circumstances (like weather conditions), and even taught how to land safely in an emergency or fly home automatically when they lose contact with base.

'The robots work very well," said Professor Ollero. 'We still need to improve accuracy and repetitiveness in different conditions, but the results are very promising.'

'We have demonstrated aerial manipulation with six- and seven-joint arms and perception and planning functionalities, and this is a first worldwide.'

Now the aim is to improve the robots' robustness and reactivity, working them together in bigger numbers and increasing the complexity of tasks they perform.

From pipeline inspection to space junk

ARCAS is paving the way for the flying robots to be used in applications as soon as national safety laws allow.

At first, this is likely to be for inspection and maintenance purposes: oil and gas pipelines and electricity networks stretching over thousands of kilometres, for example.

In the medium term, the team believes the robots could cooperate in fast building of structures, such as antennae stations in remote areas or platforms between buildings, say, to rescue people from fires.

In the long term, post-2020, they will be able to dismantle satellites, service space stations or even help remove space junk.

The ARCAS project (Aerial Robotics Cooperative Assembly System), involves eight partners from five countries and is funded to the tune of 6.15 million euros by the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme. It began in 2011 and finishes in November 2015.

Professional and amateur astronomers join forces: Pro-Am Venture

Starting in the upper left and moving clockwise, the galaxies are M101 (the "Pinwheel Galaxy"), M81, Centaurus A, and M51 (the "Whirlpool Galaxy"). 

M101 is a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way, but about 70% bigger. 

Credit: X-ray: NASA /CXC /SAO; Optical: Detlef Hartmann; Infrared: NASA /JPL-Caltech

Long before the term "citizen science" was coined, the field of astronomy has benefited from countless men and women who study the sky in their spare time.

These amateur astronomers devote hours exploring the cosmos through a variety of telescopes that they acquire, maintain, and improve on their own.

Some of these amateur astronomers specialise in capturing what is seen through their telescopes in images and are astrophotographers.

What happens when the work of amateur astronomers and astrophotographers is combined with the data from some of the world's most sophisticated space telescopes?

Collaborations between professional and amateur astronomers reveal the possibilities and are intended to raise interest and awareness among the community of the wealth of data publicly available in NASA's various mission archives.

This effort is particularly appropriate for this month because April marks Global Astronomy Month, the world's largest global celebration of astronomy.

The images in this quartet of galaxies represent a sample of composites created with X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and optical data collected by an amateur astronomer.

In these images, the X-rays from Chandra are shown in pink, infrared emission from Spitzer is red, and the optical data are in red, green, and blue.

The two astrophotographers who donated their images for these four images, Detlef Hartmann and Rolf Olsen, used their personal telescopes of 17.5 inches and 10 inches in diameter respectively.

More details on how these images were made can be found in this blog post.

However, the long exposures of these objects may help to reveal phenomena that may otherwise be missed in the relatively short snapshots taken by major telescopes, which are tightly scheduled and often oversubscribed by professional astronomers.

Therefore, projects like this Astro Pro-Am collaboration might prove useful not only for producing spectacular images, but also contributing to the knowledge of what is happening in each of these cosmic vistas.

Supersonic Flight: NASA Centres Collaborate to Tackle Sonic Boom

This rendering shows the Lockheed Martin future supersonic advanced concept featuring two engines under the wings and one on top of the fuselage (not visible in this image).

Image Credit: NASA/Lockheed Martin

Since the Concorde’s final landing at London’s Heathrow Airport nearly a decade ago, commercial supersonic air travel has been as elusive as a piece of lost luggage.

However, this hasn’t stopped NASA from continuing the quest to develop solutions that will help get supersonic passenger travel off the ground once more and, while aerospace engineers have made significant progress in their understanding of supersonic flight, one significant challenge remains: the loud sonic boom.

Peter Coen

“There are three barriers particular to civil supersonic flight; sonic boom, high altitude emissions and airport noise. Of the three, boom is the most significant problem,” said Peter Coen, manager of NASA’s High Speed Project with the agency’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s (ARMD) Fundamental Aeronautics Program (FAP).

The level of concern over sonic boom annoyance became so significant that the Federal Aviation Administration prohibited domestic civil supersonic flight over land in 1973.

This prohibition helped quiet the skies and reduce potential impacts on the environment.

However, it also dashed hopes of introducing supersonic overland passenger service within U.S. airspace during the Concorde era.

Overcoming this sonic boom prohibition has kept engineers busy at the four NASA centers that conduct aeronautics research in California, Ohio and Virginia.

This rendering shows The Boeing Company's future supersonic advanced concept featuring two engines above the fuselage.

Image Credit: NASA/Boeing

Since the maximum acceptable loudness of a sonic boom is not specifically defined under the current FAA regulation, NASA and its aviation partners have been researching ways to identify a loudness level that is acceptable to both the FAA and the public, and to reduce the noise created by supersonic aircraft.

Using cutting-edge testing that builds on previous supersonic research, NASA has been exploring “low-boom” aircraft designs, and other strategies that show promise for reducing sonic boom levels.

Previous research by NASA, the military and the aircraft industry has determined that a variety of factors, from the shape and position of aircraft components to the propulsion system's characteristics, determine the make-up of a supersonic aircraft's sonic boom.

Therefore, engineers are able to tune or “shape” a boom signature through design to minimize the loudness of the boom it produces in flight.

The most recent possible supersonic aircraft designs reflect what's needed to meet NASA's low-boom requirements.

These requirements specify targets for boom loudness, aerodynamic efficiency, and airport noise for an N+2, second generation beyond current technology, aircraft design that could be flying by the years 2020 through 2025.

Similar to designs of the past, the current concepts are characterized by a needle-like nose, a sleek fuselage and a delta wing or highly-swept wings. It’s the details of how those designs are shaped that result in the reduced sonic boom.

One design, proposed by industry partner Lockheed Martin, mounts two engines under the wing in a traditional configuration with one additional centerline engine above the wing.

The other industry partner currently working with the NASA High Speed Project, The Boeing Company, proposes two top-mounted engines in a departure from historical aircraft design.

Read the full article here

Scientific collaboration to develop affordable High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system

Scientists have announced a collaboration to develop an affordable photovoltaic system capable of concentrating, on average, the power of 2,000 suns, with an efficiency that can collect 80 percent of the incoming radiation and convert it to useful energy.

The proposed system can be built anywhere sustainable energy, drinkable water and cool air are in short supply at a cost of three times lower than comparable systems.

A three-year, $2.4 million (2.25 million CHF) grant from the KTI - Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation has been awarded to scientists at IBM Research; Airlight Energy, a supplier of solar power technology; ETH Zurich (Professorship of Renewable Energy Carriers) and Interstate University of Applied Sciences Buchs NTB (Institute for Micro- and Nanotechnology MNT) to research and develop an economical High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system.

Based on a study by the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association and Greenpeace International it would take only two percent of the Sahara Desert's land area to supply the world's electricity needs.

Unfortunately, current solar technologies on the market today are too expensive and slow to produce, require rare Earth minerals and lack the efficiency to make such massive installations practical.

The prototype HCPVT system uses a large parabolic dish, made from a multitude of mirror facets, which is attached to a tracking system that determines the best angle based on the position of the sun.

Once aligned, the sun's rays reflect off the mirror onto several microchannel-liquid cooled receivers with triple junction photovoltaic chips—each 1x1 centimeter chip can convert 200-250 watts, on average, over a typical eight hour day in a sunny region.

The entire receiver combines hundreds of chips and provides 25 kilowatts of electrical power. The photovoltaic chips are mounted on microstructured layers that pipe liquid coolants within a few tens of micrometers off the chip to absorb the heat and draw it away 10 times more effective than with passive air cooling.

The coolant maintains the chips almost at the same temperature for a solar concentration of 2,000 times and can keep them at safe temperatures up to a solar concentration of 5,000 times.

The direct cooling solution with very small pumping power is inspired by the hierarchical branched blood supply system of the human body and has been already tested by IBM scientists in high performance computers, including Aquasar.

Prof. Ralph Eichler, President of ETH Zurich and Dr. John Kelly, Senior Vice President IBM Research, present Aquasar. 

Photo: Michael Lowry, IBM Research – Zurich

Aquasar is an HPC system developed together by the two institutions using water to directly cool the integrated circuits.

The water with a temperature of about 60o C is used to heat the building of ETH Zurich.

The goal of this research project is to reduce the energy footprint of computing systems: It is assumed that computers use about 5 to 10% of the electricity worldwide.

Aquasar has a computing power of 6 Teraflops and consumes about 20 kilowatt of electricity. Water cooling on the chip may be the big next step to build larger supercomputers and to go to Exaflops (Computer processing speed of one quintillion (10^18) floating point operations per second).

NASA Orion Spacecraft: ESA ATV Providing the Driving Force

ESA is making a major cotribution to the NASA Orion Spacecraft program.

Both agencies continue with the confident spirit of international cooperation that forms the foundation of the International Space Station.

ESA has agreed with NASA to contribute the driving force for the Orion spacecraft, planned for launch in 2017.

Ultimately, Orion will carry astronauts further into space than ever before using a module based on Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle technology.

Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATVs) have been successfully resupplying the International Space Station since 2008.

The fourth in the series, ATV Albert Einstein, is being readied for launch next year from Kourou, French Guiana.

The ATV-derived service module, sitting directly below Orion's crew capsule, will provide propulsion, power, thermal control, as well as supplying water and gas to the astronauts in the habitable module.

This collaboration between ESA and NASA continues the spirit of international cooperation that forms the foundation of the International Space Station.

ATV is a versatile showcase of European technology performing many functions during a mission to the International Space Station.

The space freighter reboosts the Station and can even push the orbital complex out of the way of space debris.

While docked, ATV becomes an extra module for the astronauts. Lastly, at the end of its mission it leaves the Space Station with waste materials.

"ATV has proven itself on three flawless missions to the Space Station and this agreement is further confirmation that Europe is building advanced, dependable spacecraft," said Nico Dettmann, Head of ATV's production programme.

Thomas Reiter, ESA director of Human Spaceflight and Operations says: "NASA's decision to cooperate with ESA on their exploration programme with ESA delivering a critical element for the mission is a strong sign of trust and confidence in ESA's capabilities, for ESA it is an important contribution to human exploration."

Dan Dumbacher, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development at NASA headquarters in Washington DC, agrees: "It is a testament to the engineering progress made to date that we are ready to begin integrating designs of an ESA-built service module with Orion."

The first Orion mission will be an unmanned lunar fly-by in 2017, returning to Earth atmosphere at a speed of 11 km/s - the fastest re-entry ever.

CERN: OPERA Feb 2012 Update on Neutrinos

The OPERA collaboration has informed its funding agencies and host laboratories that it has identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam.

If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronizations.

It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight. The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken.

If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos. The potential extent of these two effects is being studied by the OPERA collaboration.

New measurements with short pulsed beams are scheduled for May.

Robotic Kilobots swarm and collaborate

If robots can learn to cooperate, teams of automatons could patrol borders or help out in the home. So far, it's been hard to test software that coordinates robot swarms because of the cost and difficulty of maintaining several robots.

But now an army of low-cost, social robots, designed by Mike Rubenstein and his team at the WYSS Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is proving to be a feasible way to test these systems (see video above).

In this video, you can see some of the complex behaviour they are capable of. They can disperse to explore their surroundings, play "follow the leader", or even mimic foraging behaviour.

In this last example, robots locate a food source while maintaining contact with a bot that represents their nest. When they find the food, a green light turns on and they head back to simulate depositing their find.

The tiny machines, called Kilobots, are about four centimetres in diameter and carry a battery that lasts for up to three hours. They're cheap enough to make in large numbers: according to the project site, the parts for each bot cost around US $14 and take 5 minutes to assemble.

The robots move around on three stiff legs, using two vibration motors to rotate, go straight ahead, or move along a curved path. They communicate by bouncing infrared signals off the ground, which can be used to measure how far away other bots are.

An onboard microprocessor can be programmed with simple behaviors, such as "stay 10 centimetres away from other bots." But all of the robots can also be controlled at once using a master controller hanging overhead.

For more cooperative robots, check out this video of flying robo-jugglers.

Using bowling balls as tracker Balls - CERN Bulletin

The bowling balls - CERN Bulletin

This will be of interest to youngsters as a history lesson and it will be the recollection of a distant memory for us old grey hairs. It's a great example as to how some of the technology developed, back in the 60's, in the days when a mouse was simply a) an irritating rodent that ate your lunch, b) something for biologists and chemists to experiment on, or c) a boon companion for lonely geeks who spent too many long winter nights in the science lab.

40 years ago, the web, Wikipedia and Google did not exist. Communications were minimal and this meant that the sharing of information was very slow, unreliable and based on published papers. It was much more difficult to know what everyone was working on and whether other people in other parts of the world, or even in the same laboratory, were facing the same problems or developing the same tools or solutions as you.

At that time, Bent Stumpe was an electronics engineer, newly recruited to work on developments for the SPS Central Control room. One of the things his supervisor asked him to build as soon as possible was a device to control a pointer on a screen, also called a tracker ball.

The heart of the device was the 'ball' that the user would move his hand over, while the cursor followed the corresponding movements on the screen. “We needed very round, well balanced and smoothly moving balls and after much thought and discussion, we thought that bowling balls best met these requirements”, recollects Bent Stumpe.

Read the full article by following the link here