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NIAC Selects 2005 Phase I Winners
Pooua writes "The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) has selected its 2005 Phase 1 awards winners. Two of my favorite winners from this year are 'Extraction of Antiparticles Concentrated in Planetary Magnetic Fields' and 'A Deep Field Infrared Observatory Near the Lunar Pole.' A brief summary of the awards is available at Spacedaily. The NIAC Website lists links to PDF articles of all their funded studies (past and current). Slashdot covered NAIC awards winners last year."
Anyone have a link that doesn't try to pop up fastclick crap and also try to lock you in by auto-forwarding you a few levels in?
That said, I thought Artificial Neural Membrane Flapping Wing was pretty interesting. Penguins are looking forward to the possibility of finally putting those puffins in their place.
"Well, Bob, think about the title of the place. National Instute of Advanced Concepts. That's a clue, ya think?"
"All right, quit the sarcasm, buddy. Advanced concepts, huh? Like what? How to find the missing laundry sock, or where all my ballpoint pens go?"
"No, Bob, Douglas Adams already solved those mysteries. Nothing advanced about them any more."
"So like what? Here's a concept: Let's give out awards! Like it?"
"Uhhhh....lacks a certain something. Awards shows are a dime a dozen nowadays. Catch the MTV awards the other day?"
"Yeah, what a rush to see the Breakfast Club bunch again. OK, so what if we tweak these awards. Let's give them a funky name that will fool the ignorant. How about the Advanced Awards? Heh, nifty right?"
"Naaah, too obvious. How about the Stupendous Awards?"
"Man, you need to get out more often. No, we need something obscure....wait, I got it. We'll call it the Phase I Awards!"
"What's the Phase I bit about?"
"Beats me, but it sounds intimidating if you don't know better, and that's all that counts in science."
"Hehe, you devil you, I like it. Now that's an advanced concept!"
"Pass me the beer, willya"
Personally, I prefer the idea of controlling the global weather.
Putting aside the intricacies of controlling such a chaotic enviroment, the impact on an Englishman's typical conversation would be astounding.
Would we be able to adapt?
What would we talk about?
Dyslexics of the world are excited to hear about a new Apple product.
Apple introduces the new iNac and has selected 2005 Winners!
Oh what is it? Who won?
ack... As I read further on, it has nothing to do with Apple. But you did get me at first.
Because I didn't RTFA the headline grabbed my attention.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Pfft... please. That wasn't even in my top 10.
Imagine the awesome bombs and stuff we could build.
It is important to dream and look far ahead, even if the ideas seem ridiculous, some may prove fruitful...
I think not enough importance is given to considering theoretical science such as this and would love to see NASA put less funding into getting us to land on the moon again and more funding into things which will allow us to, possibly, get to Mars or further...
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Of course, as the article points out, you could always send robotic miners to the Jovian moons. Antimatter is probably the most valuable substance by weight in the solar system.
For those who don't want to open up the PDF, here's the abstract for the antimatter recovery scheme:
Well, Mozilla Firefox only opens one popup behind the main window and let me back straight out :).
Pay girls to strip!
Extraction of Antiparticles Concentrated in Planetary Magnetic Fields
sounds like a pink floyd tune....
...you sure this story isn't about the patent office? :-)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts? How about an award for acronyms within acronyms? Better yet, award someone with a better name for this organization. :P
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
Nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
so you harvest anti-matter and then you need to propel yourself using mass. How do you do that, anti-matter+matter = MASSLESS photons. Conversion process (cross section) to heated mass is close to zero, so after having spent all this money into building anti-matter, storing it, the efficiency of the overall system is less than conventional nuclear powered rockets... that's an achievement by most standards...Idiots.
For those who don't know, NIAC is a division of NASA put in place so that whatever outlandish idea people have, when they ask about it, someone at NASA can say, "Yeah, we've got someone looking into that." Rarely does something become usefull. In fact, I am not aware of anything ever making the transition from 'advanced concept' to 'useable technology.' Still it's comforting to know that when these ideas do become feasable, there'll be someone in government we can point to and say, "Hey weren't they supposed to be working on that?" when GE or Mitsubishi starts building the darn things.
The P.I. for the "Deep Field Infrared Observatory Near the Lunar Pole" is... Roger Angel. No, not the baseball writer, the two-ell angel, but the astronomer and telescope designer from the U of A who pioneered using spun-molten-glass as a means of making huge, thin mirrors.
Here's a story from Universe Today and one from space.com.
Bring a little bit of hydrogen with you. Duh! Use the amazingly light and compact energy source known as antimatter to heat the hydrogen up and expel it from a nozzel. Be careful about the idiot part. When you point a finger, four are pointing back at you.
Nuff said.
nuff said, you moro, this is your answer ? look, very energetic gamma-rays come off that reaction (hydrogen + antihyrdogen), look at the wikipedia for gammay ray
"..Also, the higher the energy of the gamma rays, the thicker the shielding required. Materials for shielding gamma rays are typically illustrated by the thickness required to reduce the intensity of the gamma rays by one half (the half value layer or HVL). For example, gamma rays that require 1 cm (0.4 inches) of lead to reduce their intensity by 50% will also have their intensity reduced in half by 6 cm (2.4 inches) of concrete or 9 cm (3.6 inches) of packed dirt..."
in other words, you need considerable mass to stop these gamma rays, which means that as soon as you expand it (in order to eject it in order to move (rocket equation)), your mass will be lower and you won't catch the gamma rays anymore.
Welcome to the world of StarTrek idiots.
I often wondered where the Federation gets all that antimatter for their spaceships to run on. Now we know: it's collected from magnetospheric convergence zones or some such [tech].
(Hmmm, we know from "The Doomsday Machine" that the implosion of a Constitution-class ship's engine yields a measly 400-odd megatons, which probably represents about the mass of, say, a shirt button. But that's still a whole lotta antiparticles, given the nature of the things.)
Thats 6 months salary and ovehead for a single mid-level engineer.
A few years back, NIAC funded a study of a propulsion system based on hydrino energy (where hyrdogen atoms are shrunk to a size smaller than the conventional ground state, in the process releasing 2-3 orders of magnitude more energy than you'd get from combustion of the same amount of hydrogen).
The project was successful. You can read a summary here:
http://users.rowan.edu/~marchese/blr.html
and more details here:
http://users.rowan.edu/~marchese/final-niac.pdf
http://users.rowan.edu/~marchese/finalpres.pdf
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You should be careful with calling people idiots, cause it really does boomerang back.
To help this discussion out, you can propel yourself purely on photons alone, not only that, but photons have been caulculated to be 100% efficient in the ratio of imparted energy and the from that created impulse (thrust). In the case of antimatter drives using purely the gammarays though, there are definitly some problems in hadnling those gammarays, very serious ones infact. No idea if you can fix them enough to produce usable thrust either, but it definitly is possible in principle though.
And, yes, the same ideas - using antimatter to trigger fusion - could be used to make some "cool" weapons. Notably, small nuclear weapons that don't emit fallout. The political consequences of having nuclear weapons that don't emit fallout available I leave to the reader...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)