The Physicist

Name: Curiosity
Weight: 2000 pound
Energy: Plutonium powered
Distance travelled: 354 million miles
Expense: $2.5 billion
Launched from: Kennedy Space Center
Landed at: Gale Crater in Mars

NASA has recently succeed to launch their Mars Science Laboratory, the Curiosity. As its name indicates, curiosity could create a curiosity in minds of thousands when it is launched to Mars on 26, November 2011, from Cape Carnaveral. The Curiosity includes a new launch technology, an expendable system with two distinct stages. The Curiosity was launched with an Atlas V Rocket, which utilizes the kerosene and Liquid oxigen. Its RD-180 engine was capable to deliver 850,000 pounds of thrust. Also there were four additional solid rocket boosters each delivering an additional thrust of 306,000 pounds. When the fuel in the main rocket burnt out the main pocket seperated from the payload system containing an upper stage propulsion system called the Centaur-3. This upper stage used liquid hydrogen and liquide oxygen RL-10 engine to carry the payload out of Earth orbit. The RL-10 engine was able to provide another 22,3000 pounds of thrust. These two propulsion systems Atlas and Centaur were reliable technologies that have been in use albeit with countless iterative improvements. Centaur then settled its Cargo on Course, in this case Gale Crater, Mars,before leaving the payload to its interplanetary cruise. Curiosity was provided with a new landing technology called the sky crane. You may have heard that the Mars Science Laboratary is too heavy to rely on airbags. Usually air bags are used to land space crafts and rovers on planetary surfaces.

August 6, was a trilling day for NASA physicists as well as all the science world. Curiosity could launch safely on Martian surface by travelling 354 million miles. Curiosity has certain responsibilities to complete its job in Mars. Curiosity will began its two Earth year mission of drilling and gathering Martian rocks and soil and analysing them with its suite of ten instruments. Its aim is to assess whether Mars is or ever was an environment able to support microbial life. Curiosity has started its works just 2 minuts after the touchdown confirmed. The first image a grain 64 pixel by 64 pixel black and white image that sized one of the rover's wheels and the Martian horizon. Do expect more from Curiosity. http://mobile.nasa.gov/mcs/mobile/splash_home.jsp

Lithium-ion batteries have transformed our lives. Without them, we

wouldn't have laptop computers or cell phones — at least, not the

long-lived, lightweight kind we'reused to — and in thenear future they

may become more important yet. With sufficiently powerful batteries,

renewable energy and electric cars become viable, but we first need to

overcome some serious technological challenges. At the recent American

Physical Society March Meeting in Baltimore, two Berkeley Lab

researchers highlighted different aspects of the problem.



Nitash Balsara: Polymer Electrolytes



"There are many amazing things about lithium-ion batteries that just

don't exist in other kinds of batteries," said Balsara from Berkeley

Lab's Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley.



"Lithium just glides in and out of the electrode." That reversibility

paired with a tremendous energy density gives us portable electronic

devices that can be recharged hundreds of times and pack enormous

power in svelte form-factors.

But there are drawbacks to the technology. The electrolyte in

virtually all lithium-ion batteries is a flammable solvent.

Catastrophic failure often starts with degradation of the electrolyte

and an internal spark can result in an explosion.

To avoid this problem, Balsara and other researchers are developing

non-flammable polymer electrolytes.



The electrolyte has to do two things: shuttle ions between

electrodes, and be mechanically rigid to protect the battery and

prevent electrodes from shorting. This presents a dilemma because soft

polymers are best for ion transport but rigidpolymers provide better

protection.



Balsara's team has hit on a new solution to this challenge. They use

block copolymers – long chains of repeating polymer units – that

self-assemble into layered domains. One of the layers is soft and good

for ion transport, and the other is rigid and provides the necessary

structural support.



In more recent work, they have developed block copolymers for

transport in electrodes. In this case, the rigid domain is a

semi-conducting polymer. Perhaps the most exciting feature is that the

semi-conducting domain can serve as an automatic switch that turns

current off when the batteryapproaches the fully discharged state.



In conventional batteries, external circuits are used to monitor the

state of charge of the battery and to turn it off when it approaches

the fully discharged state.





Steven Harris: Electrode Failure



Steven Harris, also from the Materials Sciences Division, focuses on

the electrodes of lithium-ion batteries, and he sees a lot of room for

improvement.



"Currently these electrodes are made by pouring crushed graphite into

a cauldron and adding eye of newt and stirring," Harris joked at the

APS meeting. "So maybe we can do better than that."

Harris comes from a background in fracture mechanics where the only

thing that matters in predicting failure is the presence and size of

inhomogeneities, such as cracks or variations in local density. So he

reasoned that inhomogeneities should also make a big difference in

battery failure. For example, local pore structure variation should

dictate whether and where electrodes can be overcharged.



To better understand how inhomogeneities affect lithium transport,

Harris took time-lapse video of lithium diffusing into graphite, which

changes color as it absorbs lithium. The resulting videos show

distinct anisotropy intransport around cracks and defects, a far cry

from the heterogeneous transport assumed in the models currently used

to optimize batteries.



Harris suggests that understanding and controlling these

inhomogeneitiescould be the key to building a better battery.



Data provided by Berkeley Lab

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/science-shorts/2013/04/15/to-build-a-better-battery/



Posted by jonweiner on April 15, 2013.

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On Saturday, an asteroid the size of one and a half football fields flew within 240,000 milesof Earth. If the space rock had hit land, it would have leveled an area the size of San Francisco Bay. If it had hit the Pacific Ocean, the impact would have sent a tsunami to every facing shore. But what is perhaps most alarming about this particular asteroid, called 2013 ET, is that, until March 3, no one had any idea it was headed toward Earth. Scott Hubbard , a consulting professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford, thinks we can do something about that. Hubbard, a former directorof NASA Ames Research Center, is also the program architect forthe B612 Foundation , which aims to track down the hundreds of thousands of unknown asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth. Many asteroids that come near Earth – such as 2013 ET, or 2012 DA14, the football stadium-size asteroid that passed inside the orbit of Earth's communication satellitesin February ­­– have unusually long orbits. There are an estimated million of these near-Earth asteroids longer than 100 meters, or about 300 feet. But because they are relatively small and spend so much time far from Earth, scientists tend to find them only by chance. "We know about 90 to 95 percent of the asteroids larger than a kilometer," Hubbard said."But we know only maybe 1 percent of the asteroids in the 100 meter range." This is worrisome, considering that an impact from a 100-meter asteroid would be equal to detonating a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb. The first step toward protectingthe planet from these asteroids,Hubbard said, is to detect them. To that end, B612 is in the process of raising public funds to build an asteroid-hunting space telescope called Sentinel . Near-Earth asteroids are particularly difficult to spot. In addition to being relatively small, they are comprised mostly of black carbon, so they blend in with the equally black background of space. The upside to being dark is that the rocks absorb a decent amount of heat, which will make them obvious to Sentinel's planned array of infrared detectors. "Once we detect an asteroid and track it long enough to know what the orbit is, then wecan just apply the laws of physics and know exactly where it will be 50 to 100 yearsfrom now," Hubbard said. Using this method, Sentinel, which will cost around $450 million to build and launch, should discover nearly all the asteroids larger than 140 meters, and about half of those between 50 and 140 meters. "The fundamental technology needed to achieve this exists, we just need to demonstrate that the detectors are sensitive enough and scale up to what we need," he said. "We're drawing on the heritage from two previous space telescopes, Kepler, which was used to detect exoplanets, and Spitzer, an infrared telescope. So far it all looks very doable, but we need a prototype to confirm thedesign." Should Sentinel find an asteroid on a crash course with Earth, the Hayabusa and Deep Impact spacecraft (asteroid and comet impactors, respectively) would provide a basic strategy for deflecting the rock: run something into it. "We just need to alter its velocity by about the speed of an ant walking, and over the years its course will be changedenough so that it will miss Earth," Hubbard said. "You don'tneed a nuclear bomb to do that." Another plan calls for a gravity tractor, a process that involves placing an object in the vicinity of the rock. The gravitational interaction between the asteroid and the object throws off the asteroid's velocity by a tiny amount that multiplies overtime so that it misses Earth. But neither of these solutions ispossible unless we know an asteroid is bearing down on us a few years in advance, making efforts such as Sentinel all the more important. Original article lies at http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/march/near-earth-asteroid-031113.html