To the best of my ability I write about my experience of the Universe Past, Present and Future
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Technology that will change the world?
I'm always suspicious of people who talk about "Ending weather" especially since we have had weather warfare now for at least since the 1960s or 1970s worldwide. So, ending weather? I'm not sure I would like to even live in a world with no weather. Often life is boring enough but "No weather?"
That just might be the coup de grace for the human race on earth. by the way "coup de grace" just is a nice way of saying "merciful death blow" or something like that only in French.
Imagine a world where severe storms, tornadoes
and flash flooding are no longer a threat to human life. Or a time when
flying from London to Australia takes less than an hour.
On
the cards The Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), including this optics
module, was developed by Lockheed Martin and the Universityof Arizona.
NIRCam will help us understand dark matter and dark energy, which are
hidden from our telescopes at present
Imagine
a world where severe storms, tornadoes and flash flooding are no longer
a threat to human life. Or a time when flying from London to Australia
takes less than an hour. Picture a future where our understanding of the
dawn of time and the fabric of the universe are so sophisticated that
time travel becomes more than just theory.
All of these
technologies are being worked on right now in a lab in Palo Alto,
California, where Lockheed Martin, the American aerospace and defence
giant, is developing the science it claims could change the world.
Working
alongside Nasa, leading universities across the globe and an array of
commercial partners, the company is focused on four futuristic projects
that could change the course of history: preserving human life,
discovering more about the origins of the universe, flying at the speed
of sound and preventing the end of the world.
Follow the lightning
In
May, tornadoes, flooding and other severe weather cost the American
economy £3 billion (Dh17 billion). During that single month — the
wettest on record — there were 412 reports of tornadoes, according to
AON’s “Global Catastrophe Recap”. In China that same month, 81 people
died and 100,000 homes were damaged and destroyed with the arrival of
the Mei-Yu rains, notching up losses of £3 billion.
The impact of
severe weather on the planet cannot be overestimated. Nowhere is immune
to its effects: in the wake of the 2011 floods in Thailand, where many
IT component parts are manufactured, prices across the global IT
industry soared and a worldwide hard drive shortage followed.
The more accurate our predictions of events such as tornadoes can be, the more lives can be spared.
The
Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) could buy humans more time than
we’ve ever had before. “There’s a lot of activity that happens in the
clouds, independent of a lightning strike on the ground, that gives data
to predict severe weather,” says Scott Fouse, vice-president of
Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Centre. The GLM sensor will be
incorporated into the US weather agency’s weather satellite GOES-R, and
will launch next year.
“It’s an instrument in the same class as
the Hubble telescope, using technology that is usually looking at the
stars to look down at our own planet,” says Steven Jolly, who is chief
engineer on the GOES-R satellite. “There is a steep rise in lightning
activity 10 minutes before tornadic activity forms, which means we could
save many more lives.”
The hi-tech weather tracker, which takes
pictures of the Earth at a rate of 500 frames per second, could also
help aircraft to navigate around storm systems and give ample warning
when electrical grids on the ground are under threat. Variants on the
original GLM are being developed to deploy around the world.
It’s
not just the Earth’s weather that poses a threat to our systems and
aviation. Coronal mass ejections — violent bursts of gas and magnetic
particles from the sun — can extend billions of kilometres into space,
reaching Earth within one to three days. Smaller ejections can shut down
satellites and global communications systems, and interrupt airline
control and electric power grids.
The larger the ejection, the
more dangerous the effects. “They can happen any time,” says Jolly.
“Depending on where the ejection comes out of the Sun and where is
facing it when it hits, certain parts of the world could lose
electricity for up to five months.”
Insurance companies pay out
$10 billion (Dh37 billion) per year for electronic damage related to
these events. A new Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI), which will also be
loaded onto the GOES-R, will track these geomagnetic episodes and help
minimise the disruption and damage by giving fair warning.
Another
instrument, the geoCARB, which is being developed in partnership with
the University of Oklahoma, will also measure carbon levels in the
Earth’s atmosphere to help us accurately model the element’s effect on
life on Earth in years to come.
A postcard from the dawn of time
Lockheed
Martin and the University of Arizona are building a super-sensitive
Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) with the hope of being able to take
pictures of the dawn of time. NIRCam will be launched into space aboard
the James Webb Space Telescope in October 2018 from French Guiana on a
European Space Agency Ariane 5 rocket.
It works by detecting light
using coronagraphs, instruments that allow astronomers to take pictures
of very faint objects around a central bright object. It will be able
to create detailed images of the earliest stars and galaxies in the
process of formation. NIRCam’s coronagraphs work in a similar way to
shielding the sun from your eyes with an upraised hand, which helps to
focus on the view.
“Through spectrometers [special filters] we’ll
be able to understand a lot about the incoming light, such as the
chemical compositions at the time, and see the gaseous clouds beginning
to form,” says Jolly. “That will inform the science of the beginnings of
the universe.”
NIRCam will help us understand dark matter and
dark energy, which are hidden from our telescopes at present — although
we know it’s there — and help us to understand how space and time work
on a fundamental level. “We believe time works in one direction but the
fabric of space does not appear to be the way we think it is,” says
Jolly.
“There are dimples in space caused by large objects such as
the Sun, for example. Could this lead to discoveries around time
travel? I wouldn’t rule anything out.”
Faster than the speed of sound
The
idea of hypersonic space travel is not a new one. The term has been
around since the 1970s and refers to speed above Mach 5, which is five
times the speed of sound. There are a number of different commercial
ventures hoping to crack hypersonic — one German project for a
Hypersonic SpaceLiner that could travel from Europe to Australia in 90
minutes will be ready by 2030, according to its makers.
Lockheed
Martin is now developing Mach 20 — more than 24,000 kilometres per hour —
and Mach 30 technologies. That could take a flight from the United
Kingdom to Australia down to less than an hour.
Attempts to reach
Mach 20 consistently have been thwarted by a lack of robust materials
that can withstand the temperatures generated at these speeds, which is
why the next generation of hypersonic materials are as unusual as they
are deeply complex. “We have a material that cools itself by shedding
electrons like the human body cools itself by sweating,” says Fouse.
Lockheed
Martin is working alongside Imperial College London, which owns a
hypersonic gun tunnel, which is used to test these materials. “They’re
at the cutting edge,” says Fouse.
Hypersonic flight has
applications beyond consumer travel. In defence, it could give
governments the upper hand over enemies and, in the event of a
humanitarian crisis, it could eventually allow aid to reach victims much
faster although the cost of travel will be very high in the early
years.
Hypersonic materials will be used alongside other
innovations, such as carbon nanotubes, to create these machines of the
future. These tiny tubes — 50,000 times smaller than the width of a
human hair — are making leaps in battery innovation and nanotechnology.
“From
the way we design spacecraft to aircraft to cars and wearables [tiny
computers in our clothing or jewellery], carbon nanotubes are changing
the paradigm,” says Jolly. “Now, we have sensors with their own power
source that can turn themselves on and off, without any wires. This can
make extremely small and sophisticated satellites — about one thousandth
of the size they are now — but think what a car might look like in the
future. At the moment, who knows?”
Avoiding Armageddon
In
2013, a 15-metre wide asteroid hit Chelyabinsk, in Russia, injuring
around 2,000 people. It was the first time in recent history that an
asteroid of any significant size had made it through the Earth’s
atmosphere to cause devastation on the ground.
Space rocks hit our
planet all the time but only the larger ones are problematic; to pose a
global threat, an asteroid needs to be more than 400 metres wide,
according to Nasa, but these only strike Earth once every 1,000
centuries.
Nestled in our solar system, the Earth is protected by
giant planets, which pull dangerous objects away from us. The last
serious Earth impact occurred in 1908, when, again a meteor hit Russia,
triggering an earthquake that measured a five on the Richter scale. The
crash site was so remote that only one man died. Had it hit just 4 hours
and 47 minutes later, it would have taken out St Petersburg, which had a
population of just over one million.
It is now widely accepted
that 66 million years ago, during the Cretacean period, dinosaurs roamed
the Earth until an asteroid or comet approximately 10 kilometres wide
hit the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, an area now known as the Chicxulub
crater. The power of the impact was equivalent to more than a billion
Hiroshima bombs and set off a chemical reaction that boiled the Earth,
wiping out all life except plants.
Scientists at Nasa and Lockheed
Martin are now trying to work out a way to prevent this kind of
cataclysmic event. Nasa-funded projects have been working to catalogue
90 per cent of so-called “near-Earth objects” since 1998, but a mission
is set to launch in September 2016 that will change man’s relationship
with asteroids.
“If a big enough object were to encounter the
Earth, that would be a really bad day,” says Jolly. “We need to work out
how to approach these near-Earth objects and what we can do to change
the orbits of these things.”
OSIRIS-REx is a manned mission to the
asteroid Bennu, one of the most potentially hazardous asteroids; it has
a relatively high probability of slamming into the Earth in the late
22nd century. Nasa is presently monitoring more than 1,400 asteroids
that could potentially cause significant damage.
“OSIRIS-REx will
go to a near-Earth object, take a sample and bring it home,” says Jolly.
“We’re not blowing anything up but this is the beginning. We are
learning how to impact the path of an asteroid.”
But preserving
the planet involves more than asteroid defence. “One of the biggest
mysteries is what happened to water on Mars,” says Fouse, “We built
MAVEN for Nasa to orbit Mars and dip in and take samples to understand
what happened to the atmosphere. That data may help us to better
understand our own complex environment. Is this what’s in store for our
own planet far into the future?”
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015
Sidebar
Hypersonic travel
What is hypersonic travel?
It
is loosely defined as “Mach 5”, or five times faster than the speed of
sound, which would be 6,200 kilometres per hour at sea level
Why is it difficult to achieve?
In
hypersonic travel, temperatures get so hot that the air molecules
become unstable and start losing electrons. The air begins to change
chemically and becomes an electrically-charged field
How close are we?
So far, most hypersonic test flights have been unmanned and experimental, and have lasted for no more than a couple of minutes
But?
The
X-15, operated by the United States Air Force and Nasa secured the
official world record for the highest speed ever reached by a manned,
powered aircraft in June 2015. Its maximum speed was 7,274 kilometres
per hour or Mach 6.72
When was the first recorded hypersonic flight?
The
V-2 rocket, first used in the Second World War by Nazi Germany, reached
a maximum velocity of 8,288 kilometres per hour — more than five times
the speed of sound
What’s faster than hypersonic?
Hypersonic
is an open-ended term. However, “warp speed”, as suggested by the “Star
Trek” series, would be faster. Warp 9.6 is 1,909 times the speed of
light.
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