"Reinvent the Toilet Challenge": Solar-powered toilet ready for India debut

CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Tesfayohanes Yakob, left, and research engineer Dana Haushulz are shown here with a novel solar-thermal toilet developed by a team led by CU-Boulder Professor Karl Linden as part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" to improve sanitation and hygiene in developing countries. 

Credit: University of Colorado Boulder

A revolutionary University of Colorado Boulder toilet fueled by the sun that is being developed to help some of the 2.5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation will be unveiled in India this month.

Dana Haushulz

The self-contained, waterless toilet, designed and built using a $777,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has the capability of heating human waste to a high enough temperature to sterilize human waste and create biochar.

Biochar is a highly porous charcoal, said project principal investigator Karl Linden, professor of environmental engineering.

The biochar has a one-two punch in that it can be used to both increase crop yields and sequester carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

The project is part of the Gates Foundation's "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge," an effort to develop a next-generation toilet that can be used to disinfect liquid and solid waste while generating useful end products, both in developing and developed nations, said Linden.

Since the 2012 grant, Linden and his CU-Boulder team have received an additional $1 million from the Gates Foundation for the project, which includes a team of more than a dozen faculty, research professionals and students, many working full time on the effort.

Tesfayohanes Yakob

According to the Gates Foundation, the awards recognize researchers who are developing ways to manage human waste that will help improve the health and lives of people around the world.

Unsafe methods to capture and treat human waste result in serious health problems and death – food and water tainted with pathogens from fecal matter results in the deaths of roughly 700,000 children each year.

Linden's team is one of 16 around the world funded by the Gates "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" since 2011.

All have shipped their inventions to Delhi, where they will be on display March 20-22 for scientists, engineers and dignitaries.

Construction

Karl Linden

The CU-Boulder invention consists of eight parabolic mirrors that focus concentrated sunlight to a spot no larger than a postage stamp on a quartz-glass rod connected to eight bundles of fiber-optic cables, each consisting of thousands of intertwined, fused fibers, said Karl Linden.

The energy generated by the sun and transferred to the fiber-optic cable system, similar in some ways to a data transmission line, can heat up the reaction chamber to over 600 degrees Fahrenheit to treat the waste material, disinfect pathogens in both feces and urine, and produce char.

NASA's Mars Curiosity MSL debuts autonomous navigation

This mosaic of images from the Navigation Camera (Navcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows the scene from the rover's position on the 376th Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Aug. 27, 2013). (Click on the image to see bigger version)

The images were taken right after Curiosity completed the first drive during which it used autonomous navigation on unknown ground. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has used autonomous navigation for the first time, a capability that lets the rover decide for itself how to drive safely on Mars.

This latest addition to Curiosity's array of capabilities will help the rover cover the remaining ground en route to Mount Sharp, where geological layers hold information about environmental changes on ancient Mars.

The capability uses software that engineers adapted to this larger and more complex vehicle from a similar capability used by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, which is also currently active on Mars.

Using autonomous navigation, or autonav, Curiosity can analyze images it takes during a drive to calculate a safe driving path. This enables it to proceed safely even beyond the area that the human rover drivers on Earth can evaluate ahead of time.

On Tuesday, Aug. 27, Curiosity successfully used autonomous navigation to drive onto ground that could not be confirmed safe before the start of the drive.

This was a first for Curiosity. In a preparatory test last week, Curiosity plotted part of a drive for itself, but kept within an area that operators had identified in advance as safe.

"Curiosity takes several sets of stereo pairs of images, and the rover's computer processes that information to map any geometric hazard or rough terrain," said Mark Maimone, rover mobility engineer and rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

"The rover considers all the paths it could take to get to the designated endpoint for the drive and chooses the best one."

The drive on Tuesday, the mission's 376th Martian day, or "sol," took Curiosity across a depression where ground-surface details had not been visible from the location where the previous drive ended.

The drive included about 33 feet (10 meters) of autonomous navigation across hidden ground as part of a day's total drive of about 141 feet (43 meters).

"We could see the area before the dip, and we told the rover where to drive on that part. We could see the ground on the other side, where we designated a point for the rover to end the drive, but Curiosity figured out for herself how to drive the uncharted part in between," said JPL's John Wright, a rover driver.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity left the "Glenelg" area on July 4, 2013, on a "rapid transit route" to the entry point for the mission's next major destination, the lower layers of Mount Sharp. 

As of Aug. 27, 2013, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has driven about 0.86 mile (1.39 kilometers) since leaving Glenelg, with about 4.46 miles (7.18 kilometers) remaining to get to the entry point. 

The rover's drive on Aug. 27, the 376th sol (Martian day) of the mission, was the first Curiosity drive using the rover's autonomous navigation capability to safely drive beyond the area that rover drivers on Earth could evaluate from images before the drive. 

The rover can analyze stereo images that it takes during the drive and choose the best path to continue driving. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Curiosity is nearly two months into a multi-month trek from the "Glenelg" area, where it worked for the first half of 2013, to an entry point for the mission's major destination: the lower layers of a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mound called Mount Sharp.

The latest drive brought the distance traveled since leaving Glenelg to 0.86 mile (1.39 kilometers). The remaining distance to the Mount Sharp entry point is about 4.46 miles (7.18 kilometers) along a "rapid transit route."

That route was plotted on the basis of images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The actual driving route, which will be based on images from Curiosity's own cameras, could be longer or shorter.

Curiosity's science team has picked a few waypoints along the rapid transit route to Mount Sharp where driving may be suspended for a few days for science.

The rover has about 0.31 mile (500 meters) left to go before reaching the first of these waypoints, which appears from orbiter images to offer exposed bedrock for inspection.

"Each waypoint represents an opportunity for Curiosity to pause during its long journey to Mount Sharp and study features of local interest," said Curiosity Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

"These features are geologically interesting, based on HiRISE images, and they lie very close to the path that provides the most expeditious route to the base of Mount Sharp.

We'll study each for several sols, perhaps selecting one for drilling if it looks sufficiently interesting."

After landing inside Gale Crater in August 2012, Curiosity drove eastward to the Glenelg area, where it accomplished the mission's major science objective of finding evidence for an ancient wet environment that had conditions favorable for microbial life.

The rover's route is now southwestward. At Mount Sharp, in the middle of Gale Crater, scientists anticipate finding evidence about how the ancient Martian environment changed and evolved.

Murchison Widefield Array: Square Kilometre Array precursor debuts

Credit: mwatelescope.org

Solar storms, space junk and the formation of the Universe are about to be seen in an entirely new way with the start of operations today by the $51 million Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope.

The first of three international precursors to the $2 billion Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, the MWA is located in a remote pocket of outback Western Australia.

It is the result of an international project led by Curtin University and was officially turned on this morning by Australia's Science and Research Minister, Senator Kim Carr.

Using leading edge technology, the MWA will become an eye on the sky, acting as an early warning system that will potentially help to save billions of dollars as it steps up observations of the Sun to detect and monitor massive solar storms.

It will also investigate a unique concept which will see stray FM radio signals used to track dangerous space debris.

The MWA will also give scientists an unprecedented view into the first billion years of the Universe, enabling them to look far into the past by studying radio waves that are more than 13 billion years old.

This major field of study has the potential to revolutionise the field of astrophysics.

Steven Tingay

"This collaboration between some of astronomy's greatest minds has resulted in the creation of a groundbreaking facility," Director of the MWA and Professor of Radio Astronomy at Curtin University, Steven Tingay said.

"Right now we are standing at the frontier of astronomical science. Each of these programs has the potential to change our understanding about the Universe."

The development and commissioning of the MWA, the most powerful low frequency radio telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, is the outcome of nearly nine years' work by an international consortium of 13 institutions across four countries (Australia, USA, India and New Zealand).

The detailed observations will be used by scientists to hunt for explosive and variable objects in the Milky Way such as black holes and exploding stars, as well as to create the most comprehensive survey of the Southern Hemisphere sky at low radio frequencies.

From today, regular data will be captured through the entirely static telescope which spans a three kilometre area at the CSIRO's Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, future home to the SKA.

The data will be processed 800 kilometres away at the $80 million Pawsey High Performance Computing Centre for SKA Science, in Perth, carried there on a link provided by the NBN and enabled by AARNet. The MWA will be the Pawsey Centre's first large-scale customer.

Nine major research programs were announced at the launch, with more than 700 scientists across four continents awaiting the information the telescope has now begun to capture.

"Given the quality of the data obtained during the commissioning process and the vast areas of study that will be investigated, we are expecting to see preliminary results in as little as three months' time," Professor Tingay said.

"This is an exciting prospect for anyone who's ever looked up at the sky and wondered how the Universe came to be.

"The MWA has and will continue to lift the bar even higher for the SKA."

Peter Hall

Under Professor Tingay and fellow colleague Professor Peter Hall's guidance, Curtin University has been awarded a $5 million grant by the Australian Government to participate in the SKA pre-construction program over the next three years, with the MWA's unique insight being used to develop a low frequency radio telescope that is expected to be 50 times more sensitive.

The MWA project recognises the Wadjarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the site on which the MWA is built and thanks the Wadjarri Yamatji people for their support, as well as that of Astronomy Australia Limited.
Australia.