Curiosity and the God of War November 29, 2011
Posted by Mr G in Applied Science, Astronomy, Physics, Space Travel.comments closed
The Curiosity Rover has started its journey to Mars. The Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) is biggest robotic probe we have ever sent to Mars, the size of a car. It is 5 times larger and 10 times the mass of the two rovers Spirit and Opportunity that we landed on Mars in 2004. Each was due to run for 90 Mars days – Spirit finally broke in 2010 and Opportunity is still going having driven 21 miles so far. The Curiosity rover is nuclear powered – so it does not rely on solar panels – should be running for 668 Mars days (which are slightly shorter so this is 688 Earth days). It might run a lot longer though if it does as well as the previous two.
Here is the launch…
Landing something that size is a problem – before we wrapped probes in air bags and after a parachute slowed it down they bounced onto the ground.
This one needs a bit more care. It involves a heat shield, a parachute and a rocket powered hovering crane that lowers the rover the last few meters.
This is a computer animation of what the rest of the journey will be like.
It’ll hopefully land at Gale Crater on Mars in August 2012.
Mr G
Sources NASAKennedy YouTube channel, The Guardian, Wikipedia
Like this:
Are airships making a comeback? November 23, 2011
Posted by Mr G in General.comments closed
Airships have a bit of a mixed history.
Everyone loved the Zeppelins (well – the way they were used after the War)
Giving people luxury transport across vast oceans, faster than boats, bigger, more comfortable and a better range than planes.
Then along came the Hindenburg disaster. (There are many videos of YouTube – But I am not going to post one here)
Since then, airships tended to be smaller designs filled with helium. Now a new company Hybrid Air Vehicles is trying to revitalise commercial airships.
With designs that can lift heavier cargo and transport it longer distances, with less fuel, do not need long runways and are cheaper to buy than a cargo plane. You can find facts and figures about these designs here.
The Telegraph has written about HAV too.
It is not just cargo that is set to get the airship treatment – cruise holidays could be heading back to the skies.
Design company Seymourpowell has envisioned a time when we take cruises through the sky. You can read more about this on the Geeks are Sexy website.
Mr G
Sources: BBC, Wikipedia Commons, HAV, Fast Company, The Telegraph, Seymourpowell, Geeks are Sexy
First Post of the Year – First New Science from the LHC November 16, 2011
Posted by Mr G in Applied Science, How Science Works, Physics, Y12 & 13.comments closed
The Large Hadron Collider has been running for over a year now and scientists have a massive amount of data to go through.
So far they have been looking for things we already know about, just to check the thing is working properly.
Now they have started looking for new Physics – in this case trying to work out why the antimatter and matter created at the Big Bang did not cancel each other out. 1 particle in billions of billions got left behind.
LHCb, the detector looking for the beauty quark has noticed that the matter and antimatter quarks are decaying in different ways.
You can see the red curve is different for matter B particles (left graph) and antimatter B particles (right graph). This extra time might be the reason why more matter existed than antimatter after the universe had started expanding.
At the moment the data is mostly certain (sigma 3.5) – we need a sigma of 5 for a formal discovery to be published. Sigma is a measure standard deviation, the likelihood of the results being by chance.
- Particle physics has an accepted definition for a “discovery”: a five-sigma level of certainty
- The number of standard deviations, or sigmas, is a measure of how unlikely it is that an experimental result is simply down to chance rather than a real effect
- Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a “loaded” coin
- The “three sigma” level represents about the same likelihood of tossing more than eight heads in a row
- Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row
- A five-sigma result is highly unlikely to happen by chance, and thus an experimental result becomes an accepted discovery
