A team led by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has been selected by NASA to develop a concept for a space mission to characterize the mysterious “Dark Energy” that permeates the Universe and causes its expansion to accelerate.
Known as Destiny, the Dark Energy Space Telescope, the small spacecraft would detect and observe more than 3,000 supernovae over its two-year primary mission to measure the expansion history of the Universe, followed by a year-long survey of 1,000 square-degrees of the sky at near-infrared wavelengths to measure how the large-scale distribution of matter in the Universe has evolved since the Big Bang. Used together, the data from these two surveys will have 10 times the sensitivity of current ground-based projects to explore the properties of Dark Energy, and will provide data critical to understanding the origin of Dark Energy, which is poorly explained by existing physical theories.
“Destiny’s strength is that it is a simple, low-cost mission designed to attack the puzzling problem of Dark Energy directly with high statistical precision,” said Tod R. Lauer, the Principal Investigator for Destiny and an astronomer at NOAO. “We build upon grism technology used in the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to help us provide spectra of the supernovae as well as images. Spectra are critical to diagnosing the properties of the supernova, but are very difficult to obtain with more traditional cameras. Destiny’s grism camera, however, will take simultaneous spectra of all objects in its field. This is a major advantage of our approach, which greatly increases the ability to detect and characterize these distant stellar explosions.”
The discovery of a mysterious force now known as Dark Energy was announced in 1998 by two independent teams of astronomers who were studying distant supernovae as a way to measure how the expansion rate of the Universe has changed over time. These teams (both of whom used NOAO telescopes in Chile to discover the supernovae) were surprised to discover that, rather than slowing down, as had been expected, the expansion rate of the Universe is actually speeding up as the Universe ages. To explain this surprising phenomenon, scientists have been forced to conclude that the Universe contains not only ordinary matter and dark (invisible) matter, but also an ingredient called Dark Energy that permeates all of space and propels this expansion. Understanding the origin and properties of Dark Energy is probably the most outstanding problem in cosmology today.
“Destiny is designed to exploit two complementary paths—supernovae and large scale distribution of matter—to measure Dark Energy in a manner that is less susceptible to unknowns than any single technique,” said Dominic J. Benford of NASA Goddard, the Deputy Principal Investigator for Destiny.
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Nuclear hardened iPod
OK, so maybe it can't withstand nukes, but a company called YoTank claims it has made a case for an iPod that will withstand a direct hit from an RPG or a mortar round. The product called iTank "is machined from solid aluminum and polished to a mirror like finish, and the screen is protected by machined lexan; which makes the case virtually unbreakable."
I guess if you're in a war zone or are really hard on your iPod you might consider this....
The Cost of Alternative Fuel
Given the fact that that oil production is often in the hands of countries and leaders who are hostile to US interests, it becomes clear that we as a country have to do better to become more energy independent. But we need to be clear-eyed and examine just what the alternatives cost. James T. Bartis, Mark A. Bernstein, Tom LaTourrette, and Debra Knopman have done just such an analysis for the Rand Corporation and it's a good idea to peruse this paper so you may be informed about what the tradeoffs really are from a scientific and economic perspective as opposed to a political one.
The paper is entitled In Search of Energy Security: Will New Sources and Technologies Reduce Our Vulnerability to Major Disruptions? and their overall assessment is that
In the short term, the strategies that can be deployed the most productively are conservation, improved efficiency, and other demand-side measures. There are physical and economic limits, however, to how far these measures can take us toward a more secure future. Simultaneously, we need to explore new supplies of fossil-fuel resources, push technological advances in production and utilization of these resources, and perhaps reconsider the role that nuclear power could play if its waste and proliferation issues can be satisfactorily resolved. Over the next several decades, we need to pursue a mixture of demand-side and supply-side measures to keep up with the energy requirements of U.S. and world population growth and to reduce the risks inherent in our current, limited energy portfolio.
We learn that shale oil can be a major source of new fossil fuel supply
The United States contains massive amounts of oil in mineral deposits, known as oil shale, in the border area of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. The recoverable energy from these deposits might be more than the equivalent of 800 billion barrels of crude oil — more than triple the known oil reserves of Saudi Arabia.
But before we start telling the dictators of the world to take their oil and shove it
many uncertainties remain regarding the development of oil shale in ways that are economically, technologically, environmentally, and socially sound. Substantial development remains a dream that will not become reality for decades, at the earliest.
Hydrogen has been offered as a good long-term solution by many, but
many significant barriers remain. To begin with, hydrogen itself is not an energy source but rather an energy carrier. It must be derived from another energy source, such as electricity or natural gas, thus entailing processes that require significant energy input. There are major uncertainties regarding technology, the cost-effectiveness of hydrogen, its environmental impact, its commercial viability, and the need for a hydrogen distribution system.
Reinforcing the reality that you don't get anything for nothing.
The reality is that neither new energy sources nor new energy technologies can reduce our vulnerabilities in the next 10 to 20 years.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying.
