For a spacecraft to overtake a comet, let alone touch down and ride it sunward, requires trick-shot billiards on an astronomical scale. But that’s exactly what the ESA/NASA International Rosetta Mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is doing. Launched a decade ago aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, its loop-the-loop, gravity-slingshotting journey has juiced its speed enough to overtake the comet, which can reach speeds of up to 83,885 mph (135,000 kph), and set it up to land in November 2014. Which raises the question…
Category Archives: Space
The Other Grand Tour: 10 Stunning Space Stopovers
Cosmos is back, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is tooling around the universe in Carl Sagan’s Ship of the Imagination. But suppose someone handed you the proverbial keys? Where in space and/or time would you go?
If you don’t have a ready answer, never fear. I’ve put together an itinerary that can’t fail, whether your tastes run to science or sightseeing. Sure, we might have to break a few physical laws and grow a few extra senses along the way but, hey, it’s not called the Ship of Literal Reality, is it? So hang your fuzzy planets from the rearview and strap in for a star-spanning tour, a jaunt from the local neighborhood to the unreachably distant (and disproportionately dangerous) corners of the universe, en route to…
The Future: At the Corner of Close and Soon
Somehow the future we get is never quite the one we were promised. Then again, sometimes the very ideas wrapped in the pages of sci-fi and Popular Science are right under our noses, in disguise. After all, we have hand-held sensor-communicators and miraculous supermaterials – they just take the rather mundane form of carbon-fiber-wrapped smartphones.
Maybe our blindness arises from our physical and electronic architecture. Has exchanging Googie buildings for Google caused us to overlook the flying-car equivalents that fill our everyday lives, or soon will? Read on.
Tracking 2013’s Tastiest Tech
Looking back on the tech trends, triumphs and tribulation of 2013, a few patterns emerge: Private projects took off even while privacy took a beating; robots and AI servants made great strides while their drone cousins stalked us with cameras and weapons; reality was simultaneously augmented and scrutinized, while 3-D-printing and private-sector space races seemingly brought the whole world into the realm of DIY.
Laser Communications Gets a Zap(pa) from Moon Unit
Lasers rank among the most vital and widespread technologies in the industrialized world, but for years they were considered a solution looking for a problem. One possible application lay in communications: Lasers, being of higher frequency and energy than radio, held the potential to communicate more information per second.
Fast-forward to October 2013, when NASA pulled off one of the most impressive proofs-of-concept in history. That month, a spacecraft orbiting the moon sent data 239,000 miles to Earth via a pulsed laser beam at a download rate of 622 megabits per second (by comparison, high-speed consumer data plans are usually measured in the tens of megabits). Everyone from cryptographers to high-speed Wall Street traders sat up and took notice. Sound cool? Read on as I explain…