Semiconductors work by having a "tipping point" after which they become conductive. High energy electrons (beta particles) are way higher than the bandgap of basically any semiconductor. They will cause the migration of ions embedded in the semiconductor that enable it to be semiconductive.
Additionally, you have things like hot neutrons, and gamma rays. Hot neutrons will cause fission type interactions with the doping atoms embedded in the semiconductor, changing them into 'something else', and releasing lots of secondary particles in the process. Gamma rays are high energy photons, and contribute to migration in the semiconductor.
All in all, these all cause the semiconductor to disintegrate, and stop functioning.
That's why I suggested keeping all those sensitive parts OUTSIDE of the reactor containment vessel, and using a really fat, electrically shielded data cable and a fiber optic line attached to a dumb manipulator that goes inside instead. That way the electronics are shielded by the reactor containment walls, and however much dirt is between it and the exposed core material.
Use a trailing fiber optic pickup, with the actual CCD and robot controller hardware OUTSIDE the reactor.
Similar in concept to the imaging system used for laparoscopy.
In this case, the "mobile" portion of the robot is made using the "more radiation resistant" larger discrete components, with a fat data cable and fiber optic line dragging behind it, leading to the actual logic controller portion of the robot, parked outside.
That would help with costs, and service life of the robot. (Expensive controller hardware stays outside the reactor, only the driver part needs to be discarded as radioactive waste, and the imaging sensor array is not inside the reactor.)
Far too often, antivirus products follow the "cable television" market strategy:
"Yes, we know you already pay us for a subscription, but we can get so much more out of you by forcing you to see all kinds of shit you really don't want, including adverts for all our other services."
And, in the case of free antivirus, this too:
"We can see that you really dont want our full package, otherwise you would have bought it instead of opting for the free version-- but we feel compelled to try to upsell you each and every possible opportunity, and wont relent at all. We will even be really obnoxious with your notification area, and make your system play audio adverts, because that's how much we really want you to have a subscription (but see the prior market strategy-- we wont let up on the ads even if you do!)"
They invest tons of resources (both computational and time-wise) into making needlessly flashy UIs with big colorful buttons, and scary "CSI: Miami"-esque dialogs, when really--- the part that really matters-- how well they can trap execution events without bogging the system down-- seems to get nearly no love, and appears to get shittier and shittier.
Then you have Windows Defender. It's so plain, you instinctively ignore its presence. Excepting on older XP systems, (where there was a CPU utilization bug), it runs with a very modest system footprint. It does not constantly vomit spam into your system tray, and does not try to milk you for additional service agreements, or to switch to a paid version. It behaves itself very well.
If Avast or AVG behaved like that, instead of trying to be garishly tawdry and whorishly self-promoting like prostitutes, and reduced their system resource consumption habbits accordingly, they would win hands down.
A method similar to what is done for digital HDR recording would fix this problem, but would admittedly add tremendously to the vehicle weight.
EG, you have a single forward optic, but introduce several beam splitters, which then go to individual monochrome CCDs behind the various filters. (use a clear saphire prism beam splitter to get nIR and UV on the same source optic) You then assign each CCD a channel, and develop the image accordingly.
NASA seems to really really love using monochrome imaging systems.
Look, I GET that this is in the outer solar system, and that the sun's light is very pitifully weak out there. I GET that. I understand that they want to gather as much light as is possible in the images.
However, monochrome CCDs dont care what frequency the photons are. As long as they can pass through the forward optics and focus, they will add to the luminosity of the resulting image. That means that dust could be very reflective of IR, or UV light, and it would have the same whiteness. Sure, you could subtract some of that out using special optics for IR and UV, and create some horrid false-color image that does not reflect reality at all, other than artificially showing where there is UV or IR reflectivity, but visible light absorbtion/emission spectra are also very useful for scientific enquiry into such objects.
Why does NASA not at least TRY to get true color images with extended exposure times?
It's been a pet peeve of my for years, and I cant be the only one. I KNOW they can do it, because Voyager took lots of true color images back in the 70s. CCD tech has greatly improved since then.
The program, is the machine learning conditional framework. The training is data that influences program execution. The program is what the machine follows, the behavior exhibited by the program is determined by the training data.
The problem, as you correctly put, is that we dont really have good feedback on what elements of the training data it is weighing on reliably.
The actual program is what defines the conditional framework at the lowest level. It does this faithfully. The emergent properties? That's another story. That is related to the data the AI has collected.
Again, the danger is not "skynet deciding humans are obsolete", the danger is in "For some reason, our predator drones suddenly started mass murdering our own citizens when winter hit, and people started wearing full face balaclavas." -- Because the training they gave the predator drone in the middle east made it select for people wearing full face covering attire, because that was one of the easier metrics to weigh for.
It does exactly what it is programmed/trained to do, nothing more, nothing less.
The DANGER of AI, especially when integrated into weapons systems, is that the people pushing for it, dont understand that the risks of the AI deciding a friendly is an enemy because of their wearing the wrong colors, (or, enemies getting free passes for the same) IS VERY REAL.
Similar with putting AI in charge of certain kinds of situations, where its programmed methodologies would result in horrible clusterfucks as it maximizes its strategy.
No, AI in a killbot *IS* very dangerous. Just not in the "Kill all humans(install robot overlord!)" way. Instead it is more the "human does not meet my (programmed impossible) description of friendly, and thus is enemy combatant, Kill the human" way.
This is true, however, it seems to me that the direction CBS and Paramount want to take the series is "GI-Joe in space, with boobies and lasers!-- Oh, and throw in some really crooked corporations and government officials too! Everyone relates to those!"
They seem to REALLY want to paint a very dystopian view of where humanity will end up, making any upbeat message of the series into a hollow sounding cliche that not even a koolaid drinker could swallow.
That, and not even a token effort at rigorous scifi. (Voyager's babble was better, imo)
Really, there are all kinds of interesting story opportunities that have gone completely to waste in the star trek compendium to date, and most of them dont need phasers or torpedoes.
Take for instance, the mysterious starless void mentioned only in passing in Enterprise, where it is mentioned that a huge subspace anomaly prevented star formation in that area. ("the barrens") What could possibly create a void "100 light years across", and be natural? Especially given that since it did not form stars, there is little matter there, suggesting very unusual and exotic physics? *I* sure as hell would want to find out what caused it-- but nope-- Not cool enough. No explosions, no boobies--- Nevermind that some really neat possibilities, like it being artificial in nature, or the result of subspace aliens performing research on our universe and creating partially interacting spacetime, or any number of potentially very neat directions it could be taken- Nope- 100ly void is just boring and uninteresting. We just needed an excuse for why nobody was there, so we could circlejerk about the transporter.
Star Trek could be VERY interesting, but it gets discarded for really dull plots anymore.
A guy with PTSD gets given command of a space station in the middle of a war zone, because the federation is stupid, and apparently cant assign duty postings without Q holding their hands.
He is naturally, not very capable, due to his PTSD.
The warzone theme of the series harps really hard on the militaristic side of the federation, (Seeing as we have a revolving badguy trope here, with the Cardassians, then the Jem-Hadar, and then the changelings before finally CBS was merciful and cancelled the series), it is a recurring plot point that the peaceful federation cant be bothered to arm a space station that *HAS* torpedo bays with any torpedos whatsoever, despite even Oberth class science ships having at least 6 standard compliment (You know, that ship that gets one-shot killed in Wrath of Khan? Yeah-- that's an oberth science ship) making this series into a "We REAAAAALLY WANT to make this about wars and battles and stuff, and we really dont like this peaceful federation restriction, so we will make it look cheap, taudry an stupid and throw tantrums until we get our way" type charade--- compared to TNG, where superior badguys do get introduced, but with very strong deliberation by the federation on escalation of conflict, and the focus being not on the explosions and battlefront, but on the ethics of conflict to begin with-- And in many of the conflicts that take place, the federation gets its ass formally handed to it, (Wolf359 for instance) necessitating and illustrating the need for solutions other than violence.
Then you have the "soap opera" bullshit, but that was inherent in the entire franchise. DS9 tried to take it to new levels though. (as did Voyager, but at least it MADE SENSE with voyager.)
If this is the same kind of horrid drek as the "reboot" universe (AKA, the Teen angst IN SPAAAACE universe), then again, hollywood DOES NOT UNDERSTAND.
Startrek was a huge success, because it preached a message of a non-militaristic, peaceful, and progressive future.
Look at the reboot movies-- Rigid militarism, politicians lying their fucking asses off and scheming to perform illegal acts, horrible writing to justify explosions-- horrid horrid drek.
The "Need" to "reboot" the series comes from some idiots in a board room feeling that the original message of the series was stilted, and not in line with modern audiences.
Guess what, the ORIGINAL series was considered "Unsuited for modern audiences" back in the 60s too! FOR THE SAME REASONS.
No, idiots in the board room-- it DOES NOT need more boobie time, more teen angst, bad drama, or more explosions. What it needs, is that original formula of "A better future than one ruled by horrible corporations, big money, and authoritarian government *IS* possible, and this is how it can happen".
If you fail to deliver that, you are not delivering star trek.
Simply not the same as a PCIe asic. I dont care how much theoretical bandwidth there is on USB3, or that they did away with polled mode. It is not the same if nothing else but because it has to go through two different driver stacks for data to enter and leave the media. The idea here is security consciousness, not simple function. Smaller attack surface is better.
The requirement that it be silica glass to be called "glass" is a fabrication made entirely by yourself. I used the term correctly. A glass is any solid substance lacking an orderly molecular arrangement. That's why metals can be glasses, as noted above.
As for solar only based sintering (on mars), I still think it is doable, and could be simulated on earth with appropriate feedstocks, and occultation of the Fresnel lens to model the 60% or so reduction of solar intensity.
A Fresnel lens from a big screen rear projection TV produces a focal point suitable for this purpose on earth. (It can melt pure silicon oxide without a flux, which has a vitreous transition temp of 1475k) We would need a significantly larger one on mars, but still within the realm of being sent there rolled up in a shipping tube.
The idea I had in mind is more akin to a high temp version of a cotton candy machine.
A central vessel at the spin axis is under the focal point of a Fresnel lens. A small shaker chute dispenses more dust to this crucible as material is removed. The crucible has two or three small holes through which material may be expelled, and it rotates at several hundred rpm. The mechanical stretching needed for glass fiber comes from the fiber hitting the side of the hopper, while the axis continues to rotate. This should produce a cotton wool like glass fiber, which should be workable into simple construction forms.
Due to the aridity, even water soluble glasses may end up being useful, if nothing else but for creating dust collection filters for atmospheric concentrators.
So saline that it will literally burn your skin off on contact (because it is basically bleach).
Frozen, and buried under a lot of overburden.
The first kind avoids sublimation and freezing due to its high salinity. It is useless for astronaut/colonist use. Would require extensive reprocessing to be made useful. Not cheap.
The second kind avoids sublimation due to the pressure exerted by the overburden, and the frigid deep soil temperatures of Mars. Mining it requires removal of the overburden (strip mining), which is not cheap. Once exposed, it will begin sublimating immediately. A great deal will be lost to this form of evaporation, and the mine strip will be geologically unstable, due to the volatility of the ice. Not cheap.
Putting dirt into sandbags? Potentially very cheap.
I still think they need to look into solar sintering based glass fiber production. Sinterable dust is all over on mars, and already loaded with melt temp reducing salts. The median bulk composition of Martian dust needs to be released for materials research, to see if viable glasses can be produced this way. (You just need a bead of glass and a centrifuge to spin off glass fiber. Even with the lower light levels, this should be doable on Mars. That gives the raw material for sandbag based habitat construction.)
So far though, I have yet to see a good bulk mineral assay of martian dust, only formulations for simulants that simulate texture for landings. That is not useful for evaluating glass quality for fiber production.
At best, this article would act a bit like a gathering "lens" for neutrinos if this idea is true. The lens is "very small", and the amount of neutrinos passing through it is very small compared to the vast volume of neutrinos passing through the earth.
Purposeful generation of neutrinos for research purposes are many orders of magnitude more intense, and even with said scattering, are more like a high power search light than the tiny little magnifying glass type concentrator this device would represent by analogy.
If the new vectors of travel for the neutrinos passing through the device are not laser-like (strongly collimated, and very parallel) the neutrinos will disperse, like light being emitted from a flashlight. Get far enough away, you cannot reliably detect the light of the flashlight even with it aimed right at you.
SK2 is underneath a mountain, because the detectors are not directional per se-- (instead, they arrange the detection elements such that they can compute intersections through the grid of detectors, and use timing values to determine which side of the detector the event passed through first) and the need to eliminate other sources of excitation from cosmic particles is very real to keep confidence of signal high.
Due to the combination of factors, the best place you could put the test article is right on top of the detector, above ground. A scaled up test article to maximize ambient neutrino cross section would probably be needed.
I concur with a prior poster that testing the device near a strong source of artificial neutrinos (to get a higher rate of intersection with the device) and testing for greater thrust relative to proximity of the neutrino source is another good test. It would nicely explain some of the inconsistency in the results published on the em-drive.
There is much less distance straight down through the mountain over the top of the detector than there is passing through the earth.
The possibility that it is neutrinos (Nobody ever takes the suggestion of pointing the damn thing at the neutrino detector in Japan and asking if they get a measurable increase in neutrino flux seriously, and everyone just summarily rules them out as "totally not the thing we are looking for" for this device) has some merit, (despite the above.)
See section 2 of this paper for instance, on converting neutrino flavor, using a high Q resonant cavity with strong RF signal (sound familiar?) . The paper has a different goal in mind (conversion of neutrino flavor, vs simply interacting with neutrinos) and so it has different requirements for the cavity.
If the cavity is selectively interacting with ambient neutrinos, and imparting them with a slight change in momentum in a preferred direction, the conservation law requires the device's momentum to change accordingly. Unlike a photon, a neutrino has REAL mass. As such, significantly more momentum could be transferred to one than one gets with a photon.
For real. Take the test article to Japan, point it at the detector, and see if a small spike in neutrino flux happens. It does not need to measure thrust, or any other such stuff. Just see if there is a change in neutrino background corresponding to device activation. The device is small, so it needs to be right on top of the detector. (The detector is huge and underground, and cant be moved. The test article is much more portable.)
Slashdot Mirror
Semiconductors work by having a "tipping point" after which they become conductive. High energy electrons (beta particles) are way higher than the bandgap of basically any semiconductor. They will cause the migration of ions embedded in the semiconductor that enable it to be semiconductive.
Additionally, you have things like hot neutrons, and gamma rays. Hot neutrons will cause fission type interactions with the doping atoms embedded in the semiconductor, changing them into 'something else', and releasing lots of secondary particles in the process. Gamma rays are high energy photons, and contribute to migration in the semiconductor.
All in all, these all cause the semiconductor to disintegrate, and stop functioning.
That's why I suggested keeping all those sensitive parts OUTSIDE of the reactor containment vessel, and using a really fat, electrically shielded data cable and a fiber optic line attached to a dumb manipulator that goes inside instead. That way the electronics are shielded by the reactor containment walls, and however much dirt is between it and the exposed core material.
Random suggestion--
Use a trailing fiber optic pickup, with the actual CCD and robot controller hardware OUTSIDE the reactor.
Similar in concept to the imaging system used for laparoscopy.
In this case, the "mobile" portion of the robot is made using the "more radiation resistant" larger discrete components, with a fat data cable and fiber optic line dragging behind it, leading to the actual logic controller portion of the robot, parked outside.
That would help with costs, and service life of the robot. (Expensive controller hardware stays outside the reactor, only the driver part needs to be discarded as radioactive waste, and the imaging sensor array is not inside the reactor.)
Far too often, antivirus products follow the "cable television" market strategy:
"Yes, we know you already pay us for a subscription, but we can get so much more out of you by forcing you to see all kinds of shit you really don't want, including adverts for all our other services."
And, in the case of free antivirus, this too:
"We can see that you really dont want our full package, otherwise you would have bought it instead of opting for the free version-- but we feel compelled to try to upsell you each and every possible opportunity, and wont relent at all. We will even be really obnoxious with your notification area, and make your system play audio adverts, because that's how much we really want you to have a subscription (but see the prior market strategy-- we wont let up on the ads even if you do!)"
They invest tons of resources (both computational and time-wise) into making needlessly flashy UIs with big colorful buttons, and scary "CSI: Miami"-esque dialogs, when really--- the part that really matters-- how well they can trap execution events without bogging the system down-- seems to get nearly no love, and appears to get shittier and shittier.
Then you have Windows Defender. It's so plain, you instinctively ignore its presence. Excepting on older XP systems, (where there was a CPU utilization bug), it runs with a very modest system footprint. It does not constantly vomit spam into your system tray, and does not try to milk you for additional service agreements, or to switch to a paid version. It behaves itself very well.
If Avast or AVG behaved like that, instead of trying to be garishly tawdry and whorishly self-promoting like prostitutes, and reduced their system resource consumption habbits accordingly, they would win hands down.
But no, fleecing idiots is much more profitable.
A method similar to what is done for digital HDR recording would fix this problem, but would admittedly add tremendously to the vehicle weight.
EG, you have a single forward optic, but introduce several beam splitters, which then go to individual monochrome CCDs behind the various filters. (use a clear saphire prism beam splitter to get nIR and UV on the same source optic) You then assign each CCD a channel, and develop the image accordingly.
NASA seems to really really love using monochrome imaging systems.
Look, I GET that this is in the outer solar system, and that the sun's light is very pitifully weak out there. I GET that. I understand that they want to gather as much light as is possible in the images.
However, monochrome CCDs dont care what frequency the photons are. As long as they can pass through the forward optics and focus, they will add to the luminosity of the resulting image. That means that dust could be very reflective of IR, or UV light, and it would have the same whiteness. Sure, you could subtract some of that out using special optics for IR and UV, and create some horrid false-color image that does not reflect reality at all, other than artificially showing where there is UV or IR reflectivity, but visible light absorbtion/emission spectra are also very useful for scientific enquiry into such objects.
Why does NASA not at least TRY to get true color images with extended exposure times?
It's been a pet peeve of my for years, and I cant be the only one. I KNOW they can do it, because Voyager took lots of true color images back in the 70s. CCD tech has greatly improved since then.
Whoosh.
The program, is the machine learning conditional framework. The training is data that influences program execution. The program is what the machine follows, the behavior exhibited by the program is determined by the training data.
The problem, as you correctly put, is that we dont really have good feedback on what elements of the training data it is weighing on reliably.
The actual program is what defines the conditional framework at the lowest level. It does this faithfully. The emergent properties? That's another story. That is related to the data the AI has collected.
No, they hilariously told him to "speak English" after he called Trump a "dangerous demagogue".
The resulting reply, "Trump, Bad man." was epic.
Again, the danger is not "skynet deciding humans are obsolete", the danger is in "For some reason, our predator drones suddenly started mass murdering our own citizens when winter hit, and people started wearing full face balaclavas." -- Because the training they gave the predator drone in the middle east made it select for people wearing full face covering attire, because that was one of the easier metrics to weigh for.
It does exactly what it is programmed/trained to do, nothing more, nothing less.
The DANGER of AI, especially when integrated into weapons systems, is that the people pushing for it, dont understand that the risks of the AI deciding a friendly is an enemy because of their wearing the wrong colors, (or, enemies getting free passes for the same) IS VERY REAL.
Similar with putting AI in charge of certain kinds of situations, where its programmed methodologies would result in horrible clusterfucks as it maximizes its strategy.
No, AI in a killbot *IS* very dangerous. Just not in the "Kill all humans(install robot overlord!)" way. Instead it is more the "human does not meet my (programmed impossible) description of friendly, and thus is enemy combatant, Kill the human" way.
This is true, however, it seems to me that the direction CBS and Paramount want to take the series is "GI-Joe in space, with boobies and lasers!-- Oh, and throw in some really crooked corporations and government officials too! Everyone relates to those!"
They seem to REALLY want to paint a very dystopian view of where humanity will end up, making any upbeat message of the series into a hollow sounding cliche that not even a koolaid drinker could swallow.
That, and not even a token effort at rigorous scifi. (Voyager's babble was better, imo)
Really, there are all kinds of interesting story opportunities that have gone completely to waste in the star trek compendium to date, and most of them dont need phasers or torpedoes.
Take for instance, the mysterious starless void mentioned only in passing in Enterprise, where it is mentioned that a huge subspace anomaly prevented star formation in that area. ("the barrens") What could possibly create a void "100 light years across", and be natural? Especially given that since it did not form stars, there is little matter there, suggesting very unusual and exotic physics? *I* sure as hell would want to find out what caused it-- but nope-- Not cool enough. No explosions, no boobies--- Nevermind that some really neat possibilities, like it being artificial in nature, or the result of subspace aliens performing research on our universe and creating partially interacting spacetime, or any number of potentially very neat directions it could be taken- Nope- 100ly void is just boring and uninteresting. We just needed an excuse for why nobody was there, so we could circlejerk about the transporter.
Star Trek could be VERY interesting, but it gets discarded for really dull plots anymore.
Dont you know? EVERYONE orients the false gravity of their vessels to the galactic ecliptic plane! /s
Oh, like one that has actual antimatter particles whirling around inside it, and possibly leaking deadly gamma rays wasn't edgy enough? ;)
Nope. Just not a whore looking for dollars, slapping branding on something it does not belong on.
If you want flashy explosions and bad politics, go watch star wars.
Do I really need to approach this?
DS9 plot synopsis:
A guy with PTSD gets given command of a space station in the middle of a war zone, because the federation is stupid, and apparently cant assign duty postings without Q holding their hands.
He is naturally, not very capable, due to his PTSD.
The warzone theme of the series harps really hard on the militaristic side of the federation, (Seeing as we have a revolving badguy trope here, with the Cardassians, then the Jem-Hadar, and then the changelings before finally CBS was merciful and cancelled the series), it is a recurring plot point that the peaceful federation cant be bothered to arm a space station that *HAS* torpedo bays with any torpedos whatsoever, despite even Oberth class science ships having at least 6 standard compliment (You know, that ship that gets one-shot killed in Wrath of Khan? Yeah-- that's an oberth science ship) making this series into a "We REAAAAALLY WANT to make this about wars and battles and stuff, and we really dont like this peaceful federation restriction, so we will make it look cheap, taudry an stupid and throw tantrums until we get our way" type charade--- compared to TNG, where superior badguys do get introduced, but with very strong deliberation by the federation on escalation of conflict, and the focus being not on the explosions and battlefront, but on the ethics of conflict to begin with-- And in many of the conflicts that take place, the federation gets its ass formally handed to it, (Wolf359 for instance) necessitating and illustrating the need for solutions other than violence.
Then you have the "soap opera" bullshit, but that was inherent in the entire franchise. DS9 tried to take it to new levels though. (as did Voyager, but at least it MADE SENSE with voyager.)
But thanks for the bait there AC.
If this is the same kind of horrid drek as the "reboot" universe (AKA, the Teen angst IN SPAAAACE universe), then again, hollywood DOES NOT UNDERSTAND.
Startrek was a huge success, because it preached a message of a non-militaristic, peaceful, and progressive future.
Look at the reboot movies-- Rigid militarism, politicians lying their fucking asses off and scheming to perform illegal acts, horrible writing to justify explosions-- horrid horrid drek.
The "Need" to "reboot" the series comes from some idiots in a board room feeling that the original message of the series was stilted, and not in line with modern audiences.
Guess what, the ORIGINAL series was considered "Unsuited for modern audiences" back in the 60s too! FOR THE SAME REASONS.
No, idiots in the board room-- it DOES NOT need more boobie time, more teen angst, bad drama, or more explosions. What it needs, is that original formula of "A better future than one ruled by horrible corporations, big money, and authoritarian government *IS* possible, and this is how it can happen".
If you fail to deliver that, you are not delivering star trek.
Simply not the same as a PCIe asic. I dont care how much theoretical bandwidth there is on USB3, or that they did away with polled mode. It is not the same if nothing else but because it has to go through two different driver stacks for data to enter and leave the media. The idea here is security consciousness, not simple function. Smaller attack surface is better.
Not my definition. It is the definition used in chemistry, AND material science.
No silicon to be found in "metallic glass" for instance.
http://engineering.jhu.edu/mat...
The requirement that it be silica glass to be called "glass" is a fabrication made entirely by yourself. I used the term correctly. A glass is any solid substance lacking an orderly molecular arrangement. That's why metals can be glasses, as noted above.
As for solar only based sintering (on mars), I still think it is doable, and could be simulated on earth with appropriate feedstocks, and occultation of the Fresnel lens to model the 60% or so reduction of solar intensity.
A Fresnel lens from a big screen rear projection TV produces a focal point suitable for this purpose on earth. (It can melt pure silicon oxide without a flux, which has a vitreous transition temp of 1475k) We would need a significantly larger one on mars, but still within the realm of being sent there rolled up in a shipping tube.
When I say "glass", it is not necessarily "amorphous silicon dioxide". It is more " amorphous phase metal oxide". It need not be silicon oxide.
"glass" refers to its structure, not composition.
glass thus does not require silicon to be created. an example is oxide glass, made from 90% alumina.
there ARE clay formations and claystone formations on mars, which would produce viable glasses.
The idea I had in mind is more akin to a high temp version of a cotton candy machine.
A central vessel at the spin axis is under the focal point of a Fresnel lens. A small shaker chute dispenses more dust to this crucible as material is removed. The crucible has two or three small holes through which material may be expelled, and it rotates at several hundred rpm. The mechanical stretching needed for glass fiber comes from the fiber hitting the side of the hopper, while the axis continues to rotate. This should produce a cotton wool like glass fiber, which should be workable into simple construction forms.
Due to the aridity, even water soluble glasses may end up being useful, if nothing else but for creating dust collection filters for atmospheric concentrators.
The martian water tends to be 2 kinds:
So saline that it will literally burn your skin off on contact (because it is basically bleach).
Frozen, and buried under a lot of overburden.
The first kind avoids sublimation and freezing due to its high salinity. It is useless for astronaut/colonist use. Would require extensive reprocessing to be made useful. Not cheap.
The second kind avoids sublimation due to the pressure exerted by the overburden, and the frigid deep soil temperatures of Mars. Mining it requires removal of the overburden (strip mining), which is not cheap. Once exposed, it will begin sublimating immediately. A great deal will be lost to this form of evaporation, and the mine strip will be geologically unstable, due to the volatility of the ice. Not cheap.
Putting dirt into sandbags? Potentially very cheap.
I still think they need to look into solar sintering based glass fiber production. Sinterable dust is all over on mars, and already loaded with melt temp reducing salts. The median bulk composition of Martian dust needs to be released for materials research, to see if viable glasses can be produced this way. (You just need a bead of glass and a centrifuge to spin off glass fiber. Even with the lower light levels, this should be doable on Mars. That gives the raw material for sandbag based habitat construction.)
So far though, I have yet to see a good bulk mineral assay of martian dust, only formulations for simulants that simulate texture for landings. That is not useful for evaluating glass quality for fiber production.
At best, this article would act a bit like a gathering "lens" for neutrinos if this idea is true. The lens is "very small", and the amount of neutrinos passing through it is very small compared to the vast volume of neutrinos passing through the earth.
Purposeful generation of neutrinos for research purposes are many orders of magnitude more intense, and even with said scattering, are more like a high power search light than the tiny little magnifying glass type concentrator this device would represent by analogy.
If the new vectors of travel for the neutrinos passing through the device are not laser-like (strongly collimated, and very parallel) the neutrinos will disperse, like light being emitted from a flashlight. Get far enough away, you cannot reliably detect the light of the flashlight even with it aimed right at you.
SK2 is underneath a mountain, because the detectors are not directional per se-- (instead, they arrange the detection elements such that they can compute intersections through the grid of detectors, and use timing values to determine which side of the detector the event passed through first) and the need to eliminate other sources of excitation from cosmic particles is very real to keep confidence of signal high.
Due to the combination of factors, the best place you could put the test article is right on top of the detector, above ground. A scaled up test article to maximize ambient neutrino cross section would probably be needed.
I concur with a prior poster that testing the device near a strong source of artificial neutrinos (to get a higher rate of intersection with the device) and testing for greater thrust relative to proximity of the neutrino source is another good test. It would nicely explain some of the inconsistency in the results published on the em-drive.
There is much less distance straight down through the mountain over the top of the detector than there is passing through the earth.
The possibility that it is neutrinos (Nobody ever takes the suggestion of pointing the damn thing at the neutrino detector in Japan and asking if they get a measurable increase in neutrino flux seriously, and everyone just summarily rules them out as "totally not the thing we are looking for" for this device) has some merit, (despite the above.)
See section 2 of this paper for instance, on converting neutrino flavor, using a high Q resonant cavity with strong RF signal (sound familiar?) . The paper has a different goal in mind (conversion of neutrino flavor, vs simply interacting with neutrinos) and so it has different requirements for the cavity.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ex/9...
If the cavity is selectively interacting with ambient neutrinos, and imparting them with a slight change in momentum in a preferred direction, the conservation law requires the device's momentum to change accordingly. Unlike a photon, a neutrino has REAL mass. As such, significantly more momentum could be transferred to one than one gets with a photon.
For real. Take the test article to Japan, point it at the detector, and see if a small spike in neutrino flux happens. It does not need to measure thrust, or any other such stuff. Just see if there is a change in neutrino background corresponding to device activation. The device is small, so it needs to be right on top of the detector. (The detector is huge and underground, and cant be moved. The test article is much more portable.)
No, cron has a binary. It is indeed a binary for a daemon, but it is named 'cron', and lives in /usr/sbin
crond would be what you would find in /etc/init.d