Valley Proofs

Scientists from NASA Ames started a robotics research project with the Northern California chapter of the Mars Society. The goal of the project is to extend available commercial hardware by developing a software platform that will field test several augmenting concepts for human exploration of Mars. The hardware and guidance system field trials will take place in the Mojave desert. Teleoperation, autonomous capability and research simulations will be conducted at the Society’s Mars Desert Research Station where NASA will operate the robotic facility during several crew rotations. Dr. Chris McKay, the NASA lead on this project arranged for us a tour of the facilities and explained the various research projects and spaceflight preparations that take place there - very, very, interesting. I am not a big fan of large pics in this blog, but I had to make an exception for the one above. There’s a more extensive collection of photos on my photography blog. You can reach it here .

The CHM is a block away from Google headquarters. I took the opportunity today to attend the demonstration of the first commercial quantum computer. The computer, designed by a collaborating network of scientists from several countries under leadership from Dr. Geordie Rose, was built by D-Wave and features 16 qubits or quantum bits. The hardware for a quantum computer (QC) can be one of the following: assemblies of individual atoms trapped by lasers; optical circuits, for example using photonic crystals; semiconductor-based designs, usually including atomic-scale control of dopant atom distribution or quantum dots; and superconducting electronics. Dr. Rose chooses superconducting electronics as the basis of this computer since the fabrication is a known and it scales well. The qubits themselves are not atomic sized but macroscopic features as they use a property of superconducting materials named Cooper pairs. Cooper pairs are bosons, which have no restrictions into how many can occup

It’s late and my eyes are a bit strained so I’ll keep this short. Computer scientist and Turing award laureate Jim Gray was reported missing on January 28th. The Coast Guard and also many of his friends immediately started a search operation. The Guard with C-130s, helicopters and patrol boats his friends with smaller private planes. He was sailing from San Francisco bay to the nearby Farallon islands when reported missing. On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area, generating thousands of images, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is used to distribute the imagery among Internet users everywhere in order to shard the effort of searching for Jim’s boat. Being a sailor myself, I just reported on over 200+ pieces of imagery and quick scanned about the same number. We’ll see in the coming days if this changes anything for his family and friends, it’s certainly an inspired merge between satellite imagery and Internet technology. Pitch into the image analysis effort

Continuing on Mars a little bit, one of the interesting long term consequences of exploring and eventually colonizing Mars is the fact that the colonists may be branching human civilization. Zubrin and Wagner don’t go into great depths trying to describe what the civilization would look like but note that it would give a fresh start to part of humanity and it would certainly be a different start as the physical conditions on Mars are radically different than those on earth. As part of mission support in simulations on earth on the arctic and desert stations I witnessed human factors research - however, this research was in essence limited to the workings of small teams in an isolated environment and for short periods of time. There was nothing touching on economy or social order in those simulations, and it couldn’t be as the crew sizes and objectives were completely different. Now apparently a group of people from Sweden and their supporters are trying to, in a way, create a “new bran

New observations just came in from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, areas imaged in 1999 and 2000 were recently re imaged. Comparing the two sets of images revealed new features in the more recent set of images hinting strongly at the presence of liquid water on the red planet. This is not the only data indicating the possible presence of subsurface water on Mars. But as it was said at the press conference held at JPL, “There are basically several lines of evidence. The first is the.morphology of the features that we see suggests that they were emplaced by a afluidized material, as opposed to a liquid material, something that was dirt mixed in with something that gave it mobility. The attributes that we see, it moved very slowly on a steep slope, which means that it was changing its properties as it was moving down slope. But it’s easily diverted around very, very subtle topography and it has very long, finger-like terminations at the ends of these flows. Those are all attributes of someth

Last week a talk on fusion by Robert W. Bussard was posted on Google video. He is a physicist and proponent of fusion through inertial electrostatic confinement . An approach that does away with large scale engineering of machines that cost billions of dollars and have yet to break even and actually output energy harnessed from fusion. Though electrostatic confinement has its detractors Mr. Bussard claims the majority are defending their own very expensive rice bowls. In his talk he provides data and an overview of the technology involved in achieveing reliable fusion while saving vast amounts of money, which he points, are currently being absorbed by the ITER project. It is an interesting geopolitical issue as well, it’s a fact that classic tokamaks are expensive technology mastered only by a handful of most affluent nations whereas electrostatic confinement is demonstrable at a garage level ( another one ). Bussard’s experimental setup is not much larger and if feasible could mea

This video came by email a couple of minutes ago. And a story that ran on CNN. “HOST: I’m curious, have you ever googled anybody? Do you use Google? BUSH: Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see — I’ve forgot the name of the program — but you get the satellite, and you can — like, I kinda like to look at the ranch. It remind me of where I wanna be sometimes.”