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U.S. is back in the plutonium-238 business

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By producing 50 grams of plutonium-238, Oak Ridge researchers have demonstrated the ability to resume providing an energy source for deep-space missions. (Credit: ORNL)

After a 27-year gap, the U.S. Department of Energy has resumed producing plutonium-238, the radioactive fuel that powers NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars and the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond.

The material will be used in radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, for future space missions. The RTGs generate electricity as well as heat – as shown in “The Martian,” a movie in which an RTG is repurposed to keep a marooned astronaut warm.

They’re particularly suited for missions to the outer planets, where solar-powered probes face greater challenges. Future plutonium-powered missions may include flights to study the mysterious ice-covered moons of Jupiter (such as Europa) or Saturn (such as Enceladus).

“This significant achievement by our teammates at DOE signals a new renaissance in the exploration of our solar system,” John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said today in a news release. “Radioisotope power systems are a key tool to power the next generation of planetary orbiters, landers and rovers in our quest to unravel the mysteries of the universe.”

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Drone registration website has rough takeoff

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After filling out the forms on the FAA’s website, you get a registration number plus instructions on how to use it with your drone. The number has been blacked out in this image. (Credit: FAA)

The Federal Aviation Administration launched its registration website for recreational drones on Dec. 21 – and based on the initial reports, it was a rough ride.

Some would-be registrants reported seeing nothing but a blank screen when they clicked the button to sign up at RegisterMyUAS.FAA.gov. Some said they couldn’t use their credit card to pay the $5 registration fee, or encountered database mix-ups.

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Registering your drone will be like buying online

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Drone operators will encounter this FAA registration page starting Monday. (Credit: FAA)

The Federal Aviation Administration’s drone registration process will be as easy as making an online purchase. In fact, it is an online purchase, with a few extra rules and conditions.

The FAA’s online system won’t go live until Monday – but Chris Foster, an IT manager for the agency, demonstrated how it’ll work for journalists today.

Drone operators will be required to sign up if their remote-controlled aerial vehicles weigh more than 0.55 pounds (250 grams). If the drone is heavier than 55 pounds (25 kilograms), or if it’s going to be used for commercial purposes, you’ll have to register through the FAA’s more complicated paper-based process.

At the end of the online process, you’ll get a registration certificate via email, and you can also print out the certificate from your online account. You’ll have to mark the registration number on all the drones you own, and carry the certificate (on paper or electronically on your smartphone) when you’re flying the drone.

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SPOILER: How Star Wars uses plasma physics

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A detail from the Star Wars movie poster highlights weaponry. (Credit: Lucasfilm / Disney)

Spoiler Alert! This post doesn’t reveal any major plot twists, but it does explore a significant element of the new movie. Stop reading now if you want it to remain a surprise.

X-wing fighter technology hasn’t changed all that much in 30 years, but one of the threats unveiled in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” suggests that the dark side has upped its game when it comes to plasma physics.

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120 teams will vie in Hyperloop pod contest

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A cutaway illustrates the Hyperloop concept. (Credit: Patrick Grimmel via SpaceX)

More than 120 student engineering teams, including a group from the University of Washington, have been chosen for a Hyperloop pod design competition backed by billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla Motors.

Experts at SpaceX selected the teams from hundreds of entries to take part in a Design Weekend, scheduled for Jan. 29-30 at Texas A&M University. More than 1,000 students representing over 100 universities and three high schools will present their concepts to panels of judges at the event, the contest’s organizers said today in a news release. Check out the full list of registered teams.

The judges, representing SpaceX and Tesla as well as universities around the country, will decide which teams get a chance to build and test their design prototypes in the next round of the competition. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx will discuss the future of transportation with the teams at a private event. The design submissions will be put on public display on Jan 30 at Texas A&M’s Hall of Champions in advance of the judges’ decision.

The competition’s final round will take place next summer at a test track that’s being built by SpaceX next to its headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

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Sign up your drone, or else: FAA issues rules

Image: Parrot Bebop drone
The Parrot Bebop drone, weighing in at 14.6 ounces, would have to be registered under the FAA’s newly issued rules. (Credit: Parrot)

The Federal Aviation Administration has laid out the rules for registering recreational drones, starting Dec. 21, plus the penalties for those who don’t.

It’s not likely that drone police will be watching the skies, but if your unregistered drone gets into trouble, you could get into trouble as well: You’ll be required to have a registration certificate when you fly your drone outdoors, and the drone will have to be marked with a registration number.

Failure to do so could leave you open to civil penalties of up to $27,500, or criminal penalties including fines of up to $250,000 and three years in prison.

“Make no mistake: Unmanned aircraft enthusiasts are aviators, and with that title comes a great deal of responsibility,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a news release. “Registration gives us an opportunity to work with these users to operate their unmanned aircraft safely. I’m excited to welcome these new aviators into the culture of safety and responsibility that defines American innovation.”

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Want to do fusion research? Here’s your chance

Image: Brendan Cassidy at General Fusion
General Fusion’s Brendan Cassidy shows off a test reactor in Burnaby, B.C. (Photo by Alan Boyle)

It’s not clear when fusion power will pay off, but there’s a way to earn a cool $20,000 in fusion research. And you don’t even have to be a plasma physicist or an energy entrepreneur.

All you have to do is make perfect sense out of the data generated by the plasma experiments being conducted by General Fusion in Burnaby, B.C.

“The challenge is basically to come up with a metric for predicting the performance of a plasma shot,” Brendan Cassidy, the company’s crowdsourcing project leader, told GeekWire.

General Fusion is a private venture that’s attracted tens of millions of dollars in venture capital, including investments from Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. Over the past five years or so, the company has conducted about 100,000 experiments. Those experiments, or shots, involve injecting blobs of super-heated hydrogen gas into plasma chambers and studying how they behave. A single shot lasts somewhere around a thousandth of a second.

“Our shot data includes signals from nearly 100 probes measuring things like magnetic field strength, plasma density and the spectral composition of plasma light,” Cassidy explained in a blog post outlining the challenge. “There are also configuration settings for each shot, and calculated single point, or scalar, metrics.”

The quality of the plasma varies from shot to shot, and General Fusion’s researchers don’t fully understand why. It’d be nice to distill the shot data into algorithms that predict which settings will produce the best shots.

Toward that end, hundreds of gigabytes of data from previous shots are being made available for a challenge titled “Data-Driven Prediction of Plasma Performance.” After signing up, competitors can download the data, look for correlations and patterns, devise their algorithms and send them in for evaluation by March 9.

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Night-vision drones could come to the rescue

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DJI says the thermal-imaging Zenmuse XT camera can go on its Inspire 1 and Matrice M100 drones.

One of the world’s best-known drone manufacturers, DJI, has partnered with one of the world’s best-known infrared imaging companies, FLIR Systems, to create thermal-imaging cameras for aerial vehicles.

But don’t expect to take your DJI Phantom out for night-vision flights anytime soon: These cameras are designed for higher-end drones and specialized applications. And besides, the Federal Aviation Administration hasn’t cleared drones for routine nighttime flying.

he cameras coming out of the collaboration between China-based DJI and Oregon-based FLIR are more likely to be used during the day – for example, to help firefighters see through smoke, to help farmers monitor crop health from above, or to assist in search-and-rescue operations. Infrared imaging is particularly well-suited for those applications, day or night.

And sure, if law enforcement agents are looking for the bad guys after dark, thermal-imaging drones can come in handy. Night-vision aerial imagery, conducted using a camera-equipped helicopter, played a crucial role in capturing Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

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Experts find quicker way to teach a computer

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This illustration gives a sense of how characters from alphabets around the world were replicated through human vs. machine learning. (Credit: Danqing Wang)

Researchers say they’ve developed an algorithm that can teach a new concept to a computer using just one example, rather than the thousands of examples that are traditionally required for machine learning.

The algorithm takes advantage of a probabilistic approach the researchers call “Bayesian Program Learning,” or BPL. Essentially, the computer generates its own additional examples, and then determines which ones fit the pattern best.

The researchers behind BPL say they’re trying to reproduce the way humans catch on to a new task after seeing it done once – whether it’s a child recognizing a horse, or a mechanic replacing a head gasket.

“The gap between machine learning and human learning capacities remains vast,” said MIT’s Joshua Tenenbaum, one of the authors of a research paper published today in the journal Science. “We want to close that gap, and that’s the long-term goal.”

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Boeing rolls out its first 737 MAX jet

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Boeing employees and VIPs surround the first 737 MAX jet to roll out in Renton. (Credit: Boeing)

Thousands of Boeing employees turned out today for the rollout of the first Boeing 737 MAX jet, a redesigned version of the long-lived model that’s way more fuel-efficient.

The freshly painted blue-and-white MAX No. 1 had its coming-out party at Boeing’s final assembly factory in Renton, Wash. – sparking a flurry of tweets from attendees:

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