TIGER X1: Unmanned Mobility Vehicle

My friend Alex Stewart sent me this link. Thanks for thinking of me, Alex.

The video shows the development of a hybrid walking/wheeled vehicle, which is fascinating.

Too good not to share as soon as I could here on the blog.

Engineering the Scorpion: Mark Hempsell

Sent to me to share and spread the word since the planned presentation of this project has been affected by the Corona virus lock-down.

Interesting Speculation on the Fermi Paradox

I have two major interest; The first is the hard question of what is consciousness; and the second is where are all the aliens?

This Galactic Colonization video I found that discusses a recent paper: The Fermi Paradox and the Aurora Effect: Exo-civilization Settlement, Expansion and Steady States.

What I found useful is the analysis of the confounding variables and the possible solutions to explain what they call, "Fact A:" why we haven't met aliens or found signs of them visiting Earth.

Tagging Dr. Brin who may have an opinion on this?

Solar Science!

In space, without the filtering of Earth’s atmosphere, objects are bombarded with increased photon-energies in the form of X-rays, gamma-rays, and charged particles, all of which cause intense radiation damage. It would be ideal not only to withstand, but to actually harvest that radiation for electrical energy.

The lab of László Forró at EPFL, led by postdocs Bálint Náfrádi and Endre Horváth, have discovered that methylammonium lead iodide (CH3NH3PbI3) can fulfill this purpose. This is a material already used in conventional perovskite solar cells, where it harvests visible-light photons that are then converted into electricity.

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/a-novel-material-turns-space-radiation-into-electr/

Black Holes

Black Holes have been in the news lately, and I've been working to get my head around why a Black Hole looks the way it does, because quite frankly it was doing my head in. The above image, which you can click on to enlarge, explains why a black sun looks like this.

This link will take you to an article with further explanation.

Besides research, because I'm always looking for nifty new science, I've been writing more. This week was the first time in a long while where I managed to beat my target of 200 words a day.

In other news, the world seems to have gone insane, by world I mean the news on the internet, not the planet.

Another Twitter user seems to want to muckrake a dead SF author, which caused me a certain amount of sense of humour loss, because the author was cleared after a Police investigation, and the primary motivator seems to be that awards shouldn't be named after people.

Other than that, I've been reading more. I will have to compile a list of books I've enjoyed and post them here at some point. That's all, catch you on the bounce.

NB: New links first one explains the above. Second explains rotating black holes.

Science in Science Fiction 2019

 

Last year I didn't go to this event run by Dr. David Clements and hosted by Imperial College London as I was in France. So it was nice to be back to listen to experts in their fields present their latest findings.

You can find more info on Science in Science Fiction over here. Check it out.

I didn't take my camera, so there's no pictures of the event, but I did make a connection with Mark Hempsell, director of Hempsell Astronautics Limited who is designing a spaceship to be presented in the British Interplanetary Society journal. It's designed for Earth–Lunar operations with the capability of Mars and Venus missions. The picture of his proposal graces this post.

Very exciting to see this. It may not be obvious from a casual glance but this ship rotates around its central axis to provide centrifugal force for the crew (tumbles rear-over-front).

You can find out more about Mark Hempsell here. And here's his brief:

To immediately satisfy any glimmers of interest and intrigue I have attached a few images.  The technical paper describing the vehicle is very close to completion and hopefully will be published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, although it is not a Society project.

The ship is called the Scorpion.  It is build and serviced using the Skylon launch system (and lots of in orbit assembly).

Key features – 107 m long, unfuelled mass 230-240 tonnes Maximum fuel mass Hydrogen 400 tonnes oxygen 110 tonnes crew 6 people – and (here’s the boring bit) is it intended to mostly be used in Earth Moon space although it can reach Venus and Mars orbits. In the case of Mars with two landers.  Not immediately obvious is that it can land on the Moon’s surface using four LH LOX chemical engines, it can also be spun to provide artificial gravity for the crew.

The engine is another piece of genius from Alan Bond which he calls Serpent.  It indirectly thermodynamically heats hydrogen using a fission reactor. It then augments that heating with arc jets in the 4 thrust chambers.  The thrust is 200 tonnes and the SI 12,760 N s /kg.  The picture is a little misleading in its detail the components are real and connected up correctly but the shape and pipe sizing of the secondary stuff is artistic interpretation.

For those interested in spaceships I would refer you to check out the Atomic Rockets website.

Opportunity Gone

In memory of Opportunity Rover, posted as it falls under robots and my dream of living in a SF future.

Not much to say really, apart from it saddens me to see the end of this project, but what a ride it has been. Ninety days turns into a 14 year mission. I can truly say, they don't make them like that anymore.

Of course we still have Curiosity, the last one of the four Rovers sent to Mars, still carrying on with the exploration of the planet.

Making Life Multiplanetary

Made me emotional to watch this.  Call me a starry eyed dreamer, but this was what Heinlein wrote about when I was a kid.  I've waited all my life to see mankind go back to visiting other planets.

NASA Trappist

And if you have the time you can listen to the full announcement on YouTube.

Isn't science wonderful?

Chillaxing

All the small rocky planets of the Solar system to fight over.

I have as the groovy kids like to say, been chillaxing: for definition of taking some time out from working on Strike Dog that mean I've been writing for the Galactic Journey, a review of Eric Frank Russell's The Great Explosion, researching what I'm going to write about for the next article, taking pictures of my wargame models for Miniature Wargaming magazine.  Quite frankly I needed to take a break because all this is on top of my work in the NHS, which was a little bit stressful leading up to Xmas.

So, I've been taking some time out to do some me things.  This mostly means sitting at my workbench assembling wargame models.  Some authors draw or paint pictures of the stuff in their imaginations, write songs or poetry, invent new languages.  Me, I make miniature soldiers of my imagined future.  It's the way I roll, but more importantly it makes me happy.

The picture is a reminder that one day I want to write a near future, for definitions of near that might mean up to five hundred years ahead, story set in our Solar system with colonies on other worlds.  It might feature war.  Who am I kidding, it will be a war story set either around Saturn or Jupiter: there advantages and disadvantages to both.

So that's it for now, catch you on the bounce.

SpaceX Falcon 9

Watched this last night on the live feed and was stunned by the landing.  Rocketry has become exciting again and a new generation of scientists and engineers are leading the way into space.  It looks like Heinlein was right, private enterprise will make space accessible not NASA.

Pluto & Reflections – WIP: 1st Aug 2015

If Pluto remained classified as a planet then these other eight worlds would have to be planets too, and there could be another thirty or forty worlds as yet undiscovered.

The last week has been one hell of a roller-coaster ride for me.  I started off at the bottom in the pit of despair (cue Mel Smith doing raspy voice) of facing another week of editing Strike Dog.  As I write this I record that I managed to edit 29,294 words, from eleven chapters, and managed to my usual couple of blogs that came to just under 700 words.  So the week ends on a high.  What a rush.  Could have done without the low though.

I did get a bit distracted by having some pieces of the puzzle of my fourth novel in the Bad Dog series click into place.  So I spent some time making notes and pulling information from my universe bible into what had been mostly a blank Scrivener document with the title Red Dogs.  As always I should add that these are working titles, who knows what the stories will be called when/if published?

Moving on I want to wade into the debate on whether Pluto is a planet or not.

I'm old, so for me Pluto has been a planet all my life and it therefore feels wrong to reclassify it as a dwarf-planet or Plutoid/Plutinoid.  However, when one looks at the evidence behind the decision to do so I can see why it was done.  The first picture explains where we are and what we know about Trans-Neptunian worlds.

However, what I find most intriguing, and an order of magnitude more important than the arguments over Pluto's status as a planet is shown in the picture above.  Pluto forms a binary system with Charon.  Unlike the Earth and Luna, where the orbit that both rotate around lies within the diameter of our planet.  Whereas the Pluto and Charon orbit around a barycenter with the other moons making Pluto unique within our Solar system.

This discovery I think more than makes up for any sentimental reasons for calling Pluto a planet.  Instead it is its own dwarf-binary system.  How awesome is that?

Philae: I'm Back

I'm posting this today, because it's exciting news.  As an SF fan this is the sort of stuff I live for.  Mankind's exploration of space.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33126885

There are some who believe that without humans the exploration of space will not interest the general public, and that may well be true, in that I'm not necessarily representative of the general populace.  But you know what this excites me; at the heart in mouth level of excitement.  It's certainly the best bit of news I've heard all week, and I just wanted to share my excitement with my readers.

Waiting for the cute xkcd cartoon from Randall Munroe now.