Gizmorama
November 15, 2010
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Good Morning,
In evaluating the current rate of progress, scientists have
made a daunting discovery; alternate fuel sources will not
be ready before the oil runs out. If we don't pick up the
pace we will be far off according to this study. Find the
whole story in the third article.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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Space-based solar power described
WASHINGTON - A former president of India says satellites
could harvest the sun's energy from space and beam it to
Earth to solve the global energy crisis. A.P.J. Kalam, along
with the U.S. non-profit National Space Society, has announ-
ced a space-based solar power initiative, SPACE.com reported
Tuesday. Under the initiative's plan, a satellite with a
large array of solar panels would be launched to collect en-
ergy from the sun, and then the energy, converted to a micro-
wave beam, would be transmitted to Earth. A special receiving
antenna on the ground would convert the microwave energy into
electricity to be fed into the into the power grid. Space-
based solar power could turn Earth into a "clean planet, a
prosperous planet, and a happy planet," Kalam said during an
announcement of the initiative. The full technology to
achieve such a project is not yet developed, initiative
leaders admit, but it is important to get it started now.
"I personally believe it is a project of about 15 years,"
Kalam said. He said more countries than just India and the
United States would be needed to make space solar power a
reality. NASA does not have an official space solar power
program, though it has funded research into the field in the
past, and the U.S. military has also experimented with solar
energy beaming as a possible way to deliver power to remote
areas of the world, SPACE.com reported.
New space telescope over budget and late
WASHINGTON - NASA's successor to the Hubble space telescope
is $1.5 billion over budget and will launch at least a year
late, an independent U.S. review board says. The panel in-
vestigating the James Webb Space Telescope program, led by
John Casani of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
Calif., prepared the report at the request of Sen. Barbara
Mikulski, D-Md., USA Today reported Wednesday. The $5 billion
budget has ballooned to $6.5 billion, the panel said, because
the 2008 budget for the project was initially set too low,
and NASA headquarters did not catch escalating cost overruns.
Budget aside, the telescope was described by Mikulski as
"technically sound." "I was heartened that the Casani panel
found JWST to be technically sound and vital to scientific
advancement," Mikulski said in a statement. "But we cannot
let its scientific potential blind us to the continual pat-
tern of cost growth. Simply put, we are not in the business
of cost overruns." "The telescope is an outstanding technical
achievement," Casani said at a NASA briefing. "Money been
spent mainly in technology development and executing the pro-
gram has been money well spent." In a letter to NASA,
Mikulski said the launch of the JWST will be delayed to 2015.
"The good news is that technically we are in good shape,"
says Chris Scolese, associate administrator at NASA Head-
quarters. "We have to make every dollar count."
Study: Energy alternatives won't be ready
DAVIS, Calif. - Given the current pace of research and dev-
elopment, global oil supplies will run out 90 years before
replacement technologies are ready, a U.S. study says. Re-
searchers at the University of California, Davis, based their
conclusions on stock market expectations, on the theory that
long-term investors are good predictors of whether and when
new energy technologies will become commonplace, a university
release said. Two key elements of the new theory are market
capitalizations, based on stock share prices, and dividends
of publicly owned oil companies and alternative-energy com-
panies. Other analysts have used similar equations to predict
events in finance, politics and even sports, the university
said. "Sophisticated investors tend to put considerable
effort into collecting, processing and understanding infor-
mation relevant to the future cash flows paid by securities,"
UC Davis post-doctoral researcher Nataliya Malyshkina said.
"As a result, market forecasts of future events, representing
consensus predictions of a large number of investors, tend to
be relatively accurate." The forecast was published in the
journal Environmental Science & Technology. "Our results sug-
gest it will take a long time before renewable replacement
fuels can be self-sustaining, at least from a market per-
spective," said study author Debbie Niemeier, a UC-Davis
professor of civil and environmental engineering.
Scientists call for new Mars life search
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Finding life on Mars should be the
top priority for any future robotic probes or rovers sent to
the planet, some U.S. scientists argue. The first and only
attempts to search for life on Mars were the Viking missions
launched in 1975, and when they failed to find evidence it
was generally assumed that cold, radiation, the lack of water
and other environmental factors ruled out the chances for
microbial activity on or near the surface of Mars, SPACE.com
reported. The Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled for launch
in 2011, will search for evidence that the Martian environ-
ment was once capable of supporting life, but some scientists
are arguing for a more important search -- for "extant" life
that is active or perhaps dormant but still alive. "There is
no human task more significant and profound than testing if
we are alone or not in the universe, and Mars must be the
first place to look, as it is just facing our front yard,"
astrobiologist Alberto Fairen at the SETI Institute and NASA
Ames Research Center says. "Finding life on Mars would be
the most important scientific achievement of this century,"
he says. Fairen and his colleagues want a new goal for the
next round of robotic investigations on Mars. "We call for a
long-term architecture of the Mars Exploration Program that
is organized around three main goals in the following order
of priority -- the search for extant life, the search for
past life and sample return," Fairen said.
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