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POPSGPS for the Moon -Helping Humans Navigate the Lunar Surface "We will help with navigation, but also with astronauts' health as well," Li said. "We want them to avoid the stress of getting lost, or getting frustrated with the equipment. Lunar navigation isn't just a technology problem, it's also biomedical." The researchers have named the entire system the Lunar Astronaut Spatial Orientation and Information System (LASOIS).
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POPSMars Soil Resembles Veggie-Garden Dirt What kind of life can persist in the atmosphere thousand times less dense, planet-wide dust storms and average (!) temperature -63 grad.C? Primitive bacterial? As on Earth poles.
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POPSRise of the Inflatable Car Just when you thought the boasting from XP couldn’t get any more far-fetched, the cars also have the added advantage of being able to be driven off a cliff without serious injury and the capability to float in the event of flood or tsunami. But surely they’ll just burst? Well, actually no they won’t. Not only are they constructed out of the same polymer materials used to cushion NASA's rovers when they landed on Mars; multiple chambers will protect the vehicle from just popping like a balloon. Ludicrous as they might sound, these cars may well be the future of driving as we know it. At around $10,000, these vehicles should be in production by 2010 so don’t be surprised if a miniature bouncy castle on wheels overtakes you on the motorway in a few years time.
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POPSMars rovers still roving I worked with the lead on this project at Cornell. He was so nervous about actually getting the rovers TO Mars, who knew they'd still be going 3 years later!
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POPSWhy America Needs to Explore Space I've often heard people question the "waste" of money to the space program. In their ignorance they simply do not know all the advances we've developed for the pittance in cost. Much more knowledge in the article.
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POPSSuperefficient solar cells 2x as conventional silicon cells Because energy from the sun, although abundant, is diffuse, generating one gigawatt of power (the size of a typical utility-scale plant) using traditional photovoltaics requires a four-square-mile area of silicon, says Jerry Olson, a research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, CO. A concentrator system, he says, would replace most of the silicon with plastic or glass lenses or metal reflectors, requiring only as much semiconductor material as it would take to cover an area the size of a typical backyard.
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