Cosmic Log
NASA’s Flight Opportunities program has selected 15 promising space technologies for testing on suborbital flights, and almost half of them are set to fly on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship.
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space venture, headquartered in Kent, Wash., started flying science payloads to the edge of space and back more than two years ago. This week’s NASA announcement solidifies Blue Origin’s status as a leader in suborbital space science missions.
The International Space Station’s flight controllers detected a minute pressure leak overnight, but a temporary fix was made with epoxy and a gauze wipe. The six-person crew is in no danger, NASA said.
In a status update, NASA said the leak was isolated to a hole that’s about 2 millimeters (0.07 inches) in diameter in the orbital compartment of the Soyuz MS-09’s orbital module, which is attached to Russia’s Rassvet module. “This is a section of the Soyuz that does not return to Earth,” NASA explained.
When Boeing’s customers said they wanted a stretched-out 737 MAX jet, there was one big problem: The 737’s landing gear was too short to handle it.
Fortunately, Boeing’s engineers came to the rescue, with a stretched-out landing gear to match the fuselage of what’s now known as the 737 MAX 10.
The way the engineers resolved the issue, well more than a year ago, is a testament to how Boeing uses technology to accommodate market demands, even if those demands seem unmeetable at first glance.
“We always like to look at how we can address market demand with the technology and engineering solutions that would be required,” Gary Hamatani, chief project engineer for Boeing’s 737 MAX program, told GeekWire this week.
REDMOND, Wash. — The vehicles sitting in the parking lot here at the headquarters of Kymeta Corp., a flat-panel antenna startup backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, are a car fan’s dream. But Microsoft’s Scott Montgomery says you have to look under the hood. And under the roof.
“The vehicles themselves are literally just four wheels and an engine to get the platform where we need it to go,” Montgomery, who’s a senior industry solution manager at Redmond-based Microsoft, told GeekWire.
“What I always tell folks is, forget about the cars,” he said. “It’s really not about the cars. It’s about everything that sits within the cars, and also what sits within the cloud.”
The platform is a combination of hardware, software and cloud computing connections that can turn a sport-utility vehicle into a mobile communications hub for police officers, firefighters or disaster response teams, complete with industrial-strength data servers and satellite links.
Kymeta, Microsoft and other vendors organized today’s parking-lot demo to show journalists, officials and VIPs how their platforms can work together to address future worst-case scenarios, such as the West Coast earthquake threat known as the Really Big One.
Seattle-based WiBotic is unveiling a wireless power system designed for DJI’s commercial-grade drones, a product that opens the way for seamless recharging as applications for long-lasting drones take off.
The power system works with the high-end DJI Matrice 200 and Matrice 210 drones, and is compatible with WiBotic’s PowerPad for companies seeking an end-to-end turnkey solution for drone recharging. Installation can take as little as 10 minutes, the company says.
The Commercial Spaceflight Federation says Taber MacCallum, co-founder and chief technology officer of Arizona-based World View Enterprises, will serve as its new chairman of the board. MacCallum takes the reins from Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and principal investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission.
The next few months are due to bring two amazing interplanetary encounters: a rendezvous with an asteroid and a flyby past a mysterious icy object beyond Pluto on the solar system’s edge. Over the past few days, we’ve gotten our first fleeting peeks at both targets, and the view will only get better from now on.
It’s been six years since physicists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, but they’re just now confirming what most of the mysterious subatomic particles do when they decay.
They’re transformed into bottom quarks, they announced today.
That’s not exactly a surprise: The mainstream theory of particle physics, known as the Standard Model, suggests that’s the most common course followed by the Higgs, which exists in the particle collider for only an instant before breaking down. About 60 percent of the Higgs bosons created in high-energy are thought to turn into a pair of bottom quarks, which is No. 2 on the mass scale for six “flavors” of quarks.
It took several years for researchers to nail down the evidence to a standard significance of 5-sigma — the same standard that applied to the Higgs boson’s discovery in 2012.
After Tesla CEO Elon Musk got emotional during a market-moving interview this month, Amy Nelson, CEO and founder of The Riveter, says she can understand the kind of stress he’s under.
“You’ve got a few more years of running a company under your belt, but trust me: I feel your pain,” Nelson, one of the leaders in Seattle’s community of female business founders, wrote last week in an essay posted on Forbes’ website.
The essay addressed a follow-up question sparked by Musk’s candor about the stresses of running a company: Can women CEOs afford to be as candid as Musk was? Nelson’s take: They can’t.
A year ago, the College Board saw the numbers of female students and underrepresented minority students taking the Advanced Placement exam for computer science more than double — but what about this year?
As Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi puts it, “the momentum continues.”
The statistics don’t quite match last year’s triple-digit percentage increases. But they do show a narrower gap between female students as well as black and Latino students on one side, and male students as well as white and Asian students on the other.