The Defense Advanced Research Programs Agency (DARPA) will soon be awarding a contract to develop an unmanned aircraft called the Vulture that’s capable of flying for five years at a time without stopping, according to the aviation magazine Flight. Essentially, the Vulture is a satellite released into the atmosphere and not into space. But unlike satellites, the Vulture will have to maintain enough power to overcome the Earth’s gravitation pull.
Specifications for the Vulture include the ability to remain in flight for over five years at a time, while performing intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and communication missions. It must also be capable of carrying a 1,000-pound payload and withstand the heavy winds that occur at 60,000 to 90,000 feet - the altitude the Vulture is expected to remain in.
IF civilisation is wiped out on Earth, salvation may come from space. Plans are being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon containing the essentials of life and civilisation, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war.
Construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.
A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. If no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built.
The vault could later be extended to include natural material including microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores.
As a first step to discovering whether living organisms could survive, European Space Agency scientists are hoping to experiment with growing tulips on the moon within the next decade.
According to Bernard Foing, chief scientist at the agency’s research department, the first flowers - tulips or arabidopsis, a plant widely used in research - could be grown in 2012 or 2015.
“Eventually, it will be necessary to have a kind of Noah’s ark there, a diversity of species from the biosphere,” said Foing.
Tulips are ideal because they can be frozen, transported long distances and grown with little nourishment. Combined with algae, an enclosed artificial atmosphere and chemically enhanced lunar soil, they could form the basis of an ecosystem.
Read the entire article at Times Online. See also “‘Lunar Ark’ Proposed in Case of Deadly Impact on Earth” on National Geographic.
Flies have evolved complex mechanisms to regulate their flight, including performing intricate flapping and twisting wing movements, which the robotic fly does 120 times a second. A clamp holds the robot in place to keep it from escaping the camera’s lens. Photos: Robert Wood
Insects are capable of executing stunning aerial feats, including flying upside down, hovering and landing on walls and ceilings. Perhaps for this reason alone, they have inspired a whole suite of flying machines that share key properties with their arthropod forebears. But these robotic fliers are just beginning to conquer flight on the scale of insects. In March 2007, Robert Wood’s microrobotic fly proved it could generate enough thrust to lift off the ground on its own, becoming the first insect-size robot to fly.
The Army has awarded General Atomics an $18.6 million contract to continue developing an extended range/multi-purpose unmanned aerial vehicle. The contract is but one of the extended range unmanned aircraft military planners are looking at for the next few years. In addition, there is more than $500 million for unmanned aircraft systems in the fiscal 2008 war supplemental, which Congress has yet to act on, according to Aviation Week.
First, the General Atomics contract is for the aircraft called the Sky Warrior. The Sky Warrior is built upon the company’s highly successful Predator and I-GNAT ER airplanes. The aircraft, the first of which flew last year, will perform long-endurance – over 40 hours aloft, surveillance, communications relay, and weapons delivery missions with double the weapons capacity of the Predator.
Most of the increase will go to boosting salaries and to pay for higher oil prices, with moderate increased spending for armaments, said Jiang Enzhu, spokesman for the National People’s Congress.
He said spending would total $59 billion in 2008. Other countries say China vastly underestimates how much it spends on its military and the real figure could be three times as much as the publicly released figure.
China has said spending grew 17.8 percent during 2007, to nearly $45 billion. It was the largest annual increase in more than a decade.
LONDON (Reuters) - Killer robots could become the weapon of choice for militants, a British expert said on Wednesday.
Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield said he believed falling costs would soon make robots a realistic option for extremist groups.
In response to a U.S. plan to shoot down a malfunctioning spy satellite, China has warned against threats to security in outer space, without mentioning its own successful anti-satellite missile test last year. The Chinese government also stopped short of linking the planned U.S. strike with Beijing’s repeated calls for a complete ban on space weapons.Security analysts have suggested that Beijing could use the planned U.S. interception to justify the Chinese military’s unannounced destruction of a defunct weather satellite in January 2007. That interception drew criticism from senior U.S. military officials, who complained that it had left a cloud of debris that was dangerous to other space traffic. Chinese experts in turn have questioned the Pentagon’s explanation that it wanted to down the spy satellite to avoid contamination from hazardous fuel on board.
Many of you have recently read that a research team at the University of Illinois led by Min-Feng Yu has developed a process to grow nanowires of unlimited length. The same process also allows for the construction of complex, three-dimensional nanoscale structures.
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