This Giant, Ultrathin NASA Balloon Just Broke an Altitude Record

https://www.space.com/41791-giant-nasa-balloon-big-60-breaks-record.html


NASA’s largest scientific balloon, called the ”Big 60,” is pictured here taking off from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on Aug. 17, 2018.


Credit: NASA


NASA’s gigantic, ultrathin balloon, known as the “Big 60,” broke a record for highest balloon altitude maintained during flight when it took to the skies last month.


The space agency released the football-stadium-size, 60-million-cubic-foot (1.7 million cubic meters) scientific balloon from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on Aug. 17 and Aug. 25, according to a NASA statement published Aug. 31.


NASA officials said the Big 60 set a new sustainable-altitude record by reaching 159,000 feet (48,500 m) during an 8-hour flight on Aug. 17, traveling into Earth’s stratosphere and ascending about 5 miles (8 km) higher than the next-largest balloon prototype. [You ‘Knead’ to See Garlic Bread Fly into the Stratosphere, Then Get Eaten! (Video)]

NASA’s Big 60 zero-pressure balloon flew for a total of 8 hours upon launching from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on Aug. 17, 2018.


Credit: NASA


As “NASA’s largest zero pressure balloon to date,” officials said, Big 60 was capable of such a feat because of its enormous size and delicate skin.


“If all of the polyethylene material were spread out on the ground, it would be enough to cover about 20 acres [8 hectares] of land,” space agency officials said in the statement. 


In addition to its size, the Big 60’s thin film, or balloon skin, supported the accomplishment by withstanding temperatures as low as minus 130 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 90 degrees Celsius) — though Earth’s stratosphere is, on average, much warmer, at minus 76 degrees F, or minus 60 degrees C, officials said. They described the film as a “little less than the thickness of kitchen plastic wrap.”

The August testing was Big 60’s first flight since 2002.


Credit: NASA


The temperature-resistant film endured three rounds of testing at Wallops Flight Facility Balloon Research and Development Lab in Virginia during production. 


Future tests will help researchers discern which science missions and new instruments would benefit from hitching a ride on the Big 60. Sarah Fischer, a technologist at the Wallops Balloon Research and Development Lab, said in the statement that the Big 60 can potentially lift a payload as heavy as a small four-wheeler. 


But the Big 60 did carry its own experiments, officials said: Two student payloads in NASA’s Undergraduate Student Instrument Project and a larger, interplanetary cubesat-antenna experiment from the University of Arizona ascended on the Aug. 17 flight, floating for 8 hours.


Follow Doris Elin Salazar on Twitter@salazar_elin. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

via Space.com https://www.space.com

September 12, 2018 at 11:26AM

NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Aces Final Parachute Test Before Moon Flight

https://www.space.com/41802-nasa-orion-aces-final-parachute-test.html


A test version of

NASA’s Orion spacecraft

safely touched down today (Sept. 12) under three parachutes, completing the final parachute test to get the vehicle ready for a journey around the moon and back.


While it will take several weeks to go through the data, early indications are that the test was a success. In this test, which wrapped up around 11 a.m. EDT (8 a.m. PDT, or 1500 GMT), Orion safely deployed all its parachutes in sequence after being released from a C-17 aircraft about 6 miles (9.5 kilometers) up.


Orion then touched down at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona near a group of spectators and NASA officials. Among them was Orion program manager Mark Kirasich, who spoke briefly on NASA Television before the test.


“Orion is our new human exploration spacecraft, and this is a spacecraft that will take people farther in space than we’ve ever gone before,” Kirasich said. The spacecraft has to endure searing heat upon coming back to Earth, because it will return at high speeds from far away; in 2019 or 2020, for example, an uncrewed Orion, launched with NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket, is expected to loop around the moon on a mission that will take several weeks.


“After today if all goes to plan, we are ready for flight. That is just astounding,” added astronaut Randy Bresnik on NASA Television. He joked that he was looking forward to counting to 11, representing the number of parachutes Orion had to deploy before reaching the ground.


Orion has four sets of parachutes that, working together, will bring the spacecraft home safely from trips to the moon or from deep space. The first set is three forward bay cover parachutes, which are supposed to release a cover that protects Orion during the fiery re-entry at 32 times the speed of sound.


Next, Orion deploys two drogue parachutes to stabilize the spacecraft and slow it down. Following that, three pilot parachutes are released to help deploy the three main parachutes. The main chutes then remain deployed all the way until Orion touches down.


This parachute test is the last one for Orion after a decade of development, Kirasich said. The spacecraft is expected to form the backbone of NASA’s deep-space exploration plans, which include a Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway space station around the moon in the next decade.


Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

via Space.com https://www.space.com

September 12, 2018 at 12:52PM

You Don’t Own the Music, Movies or Ebooks You ‘Buy’ on Amazon or iTunes

https://twocents.lifehacker.com/you-dont-own-the-music-movies-or-ebooks-you-buy-on-ama-1829000327


When you purchase music, movies or books from Amazon or Apple’s iTunes store, you might be under the impression that that material is yours to enjoy forever; that’s how CDs and paper books work, after all. Why rent You’ve Got Mail for $3.99 every few months when you can “own” it and watch it whenever, forever, for $9.99?

But you’d be mistaken. Anything digital is temporary, even if you clicked “purchase” rather than “rent.” One unfortunate side effect of that you won’t experience with a physical book or record: Your purchases may just disappear if licensing agreements change.

As outlined in the Twitter thread, Apple states the content provider of the movies in question removed them from the store. And that removed them from the user’s library, even though he had paid money to buy them. It’s easy to see why that’s frustrating (especially since Apple wasn’t willing to cough up a refund for the purchases he no longer has).

“This wouldn’t happen in the physical world. No one comes to your door and demands that you give back a book,” Aaron Perzanowski, a Case Western Reserve University law professor, who studied these digital purchases, told the LA Times in 2016. “But in the digital world, they can just go into your Kindle and take it.”

It’s not like the companies are hiding this fact, though the “buy” buttons may confuse consumers.

For example, Amazon notes in the fine print that “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. The Content Provider may include additional terms for use within its Kindle Content.” You also can’t sell or redistribute your ebooks, as you might with a physical copy. Apple’s fine print states that the licensor “reserves the right to change, suspend, remove, disable or impose access restrictions or limits on any External Services at any time without notice or liability to you.”

There’s no simple way to keep the content you purchase from Apple or Amazon “forever,” though there are some shortcuts. For example, you could try converting Kindle books to PDFs (details on that here). You can also download music you buy from Amazon onto your computer.

The best option? If you can, buy a physical copy of a movie or TV show that comes with a digital download. At least you’ll have a backup in case your digital copy disappears—assuming you still have a player to watch it on.

via Lifehacker https://lifehacker.com

September 12, 2018 at 01:10PM

The Lex Chair: An Exoskeletal Wearable Chair

https://geekologie.com/2018/09/the-lex-chair-an-exoskeletal-wearable-ch.php


wearable-chair-1.jpg

This is the Kickstarter campaign for Astride Bionix’s Lex Chair, a ~$250 exoskeletal chair that looks like some sort of climbing harness and provides a place to sit no matter where you go. Alternatively, save yourself $250 and just do what I do and don’t go anywhere without ample seating.

You can put it on in half a minute, and pull out the legs in just a couple of seconds. It weighs about 2 lb but can support 264 lb.

Three complaints: 1) I’m pushing that weight limit 2) there’s no backrest and 3) your legs are the front legs of the chair! That’s no way to relax. If I wanted to be half a chair I would have gone to furniture school and dropped out after sophomore year.

Keep going for a handful more shots and the Kickstarter video in case you need this in your life (no judging, I’m just holding out for a practical, wearable bed).

wearable-chair-2.jpg

wearable-chair-3.jpg

wearable-chair-4.jpg

wearable-chair-5.jpg

Thanks to Brett DA, who agrees there’s nothing wrong with just sitting on the ground and crying with your head in your hands.

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via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/

September 11, 2018 at 04:28PM

Verizon’s 5G Home internet and TV service launches October 1st

https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/11/verizon-5g-home/



Verizon

Today Verizon announced it’s launching “the world’s first commercial 5G broadband internet service” on October 1st. 5G Home service uses the next generation wireless technology to offer home internet service without a cable or fiber hookup. Residents of “certain neighborhoods” in Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles and Sacramento can pre-order access beginning on Thursday. Priced at $50 for people who already have Verizon wireless and$70 for those who don’t, it’s promising speeds of “around 300 Mbps” up to 1 Gbps, with no data caps.

A video angle comes courtesy of Apple and Google. The package includes three months of free access to YouTube TV, plus a free Apple TV 4K or Chromecast Ultra. “White glove” installation is free, as well as a free router and “router upgrades” due next year, plus a promise that customers will get first dibs on 5G Mobile devices once those hit the market.

Verizon owns Engadget’s parent company, Oath (formerly AOL). Rest assured, Verizon has no control over our coverage. Engadget remains editorially independent.

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

September 11, 2018 at 04:45PM

AI Detects 72 Fast Radio Bursts Coming from a Distant, Unknown Source

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/?p=26993

Blazing across the sky for mere milliseconds, fast radio bursts (FRBs) are among the newest and most puzzling astronomical phenomenon. They come from extreme distances and appear without any known rhyme or reason, making them almost impossible to study in detail.
But luckily, artificial intelligence is helping researchers learn about this mysterious occurrence. By using machine learning technology, a team of astronomers was able to study 72 new radio bursts blasting from FRB 121102 — the

via Discover Main Feed https://ift.tt/1dqgCKa

September 11, 2018 at 02:43PM

A Massive Floating Boom Is Supposed To Clean Up The Pacific. Can It Work?

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/11/646724291/a-massive-floating-boom-is-supposed-to-clean-up-the-pacific-can-it-work?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news


A nearly 2,000-foot-long tube is towed offshore from San Francisco Bay on Saturday. It’s a giant garbage collector, and the brainchild of 24-year-old Boyan Slat, who aims to remove 90 percent of ocean plastic by 2040.

The Ocean Cleanup


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The Ocean Cleanup

A nearly 2,000-foot-long tube is towed offshore from San Francisco Bay on Saturday. It’s a giant garbage collector, and the brainchild of 24-year-old Boyan Slat, who aims to remove 90 percent of ocean plastic by 2040.

The Ocean Cleanup

We humans have deposited a huge amount of plastic in Earth’s waters. There are now five garbage-filled gyres in the world’s oceans — the largest and most notorious being the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, with its estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, spread across an area twice the size of Texas.

One of the people trying to figure out how to clean up the ocean is Boyan Slat, a 24-year-old Dutch social entrepreneur who has been working to invent a solution since he was 17. His idea — for a giant floating system that would corral the plastic so it can be scooped out — is on the verge of reality.

He founded a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup, and picked up a major environmental award from the United Nations along the way. Tech investors including Peter Thiel and Marc Benioff got behind his go-big ethos, and Slat raised a reported $35 million to get his idea afloat.

On Saturday, a vessel that usually tows oil rigs instead towed Slat’s giant garbage-catcher some 300 miles offshore from San Francisco Bay. For two weeks, engineers will monitor how the system handles the battering waves in the Pacific before towing it 1,100 more miles to the patch.

The system‘s centerpiece is a nearly 2,000-foot-long plastic tube with a 10-foot skirt attached beneath, forming a U-shaped barrier designed to be propelled by wind and waves. Its aim is to collect plastic as it floats — and then every few months, a support vessel would come by to retrieve the plastic, like an oceanic garbage truck. The plastic would then be transported back to land for recycling.

If it works, The Ocean Cleanup plans to deploy a fleet of 60 such devices, which the group projects can remove half the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years’ time.

But will it actually work? Slat doesn’t know.


The Ocean Cleanup
YouTube

His team has changed its concept over time, switching from a moored system to a drifting one, in order to act more like the plastic it’s trying to catch. They tested a prototype on the North Sea but say the Pacific will be the real challenge.

“We believe that every risk that we can eliminate in advance we have been able to eliminate,” he said in a video prior to Saturday’s launch. “But that doesn’t mean that all risks have been eliminated. Truly, the only way to prove that we can rid the oceans of plastic is to actually go out there and deploy the world’s first ocean-cleaning system.”

The Ocean Cleanup hopes to reduce the amount of plastics in the world’s oceans by at least 90 percent by 2040. But many experts on plastic pollution have expressed concerns about whether the project will be effective.

For one thing, most of the plastic that ends up in the ocean doesn’t end up in these garbage gyres.


The Ocean Cleanup
YouTube

“Based on the latest math, we think that about 8 million metric tons of plastic is flowing in to the ocean from land around the world,” says George Leonard, chief scientist at Ocean Conservancy. And he says that only around 3 to 5 percent of that total amount of plastic actually winds up in the gyres.

“So if you want to clean up the ocean,” Leonard says, “it may in fact be that the open ocean is not the place to look.”

Part of the issue is that not all plastic is buoyant. A lot of it sinks immediately — and thus won’t be captured by this floating boom, said Eben Schwartz, marine debris program manager for the California Coastal Commission.

“It would be wonderful if we can clean up the surface of the gyre, but since so much more of the trash in the ocean actually doesn’t end up on the surface of the gyre, it’s even more critical that we address where it’s coming from and try to stop it at its source,” Schwartz recently told NPR’s Here and Now.

Then there’s the question of whether the project might cause unintended environmental consequences. Specifically: Can you capture plastics without ensnaring marine life?

“We know from the fishing industry that if you put any kind of structure in the open ocean, it will attract a whole community of animals, both large and small, to that particular piece of structure,” Leonard says.

Fishermen sometimes create fish aggregating devices (FADs) that intentionally create little floating ecosystems to attract fish. “There’s a worry that this could become a very large FAD and attract a whole number of larger fish and marine mammals and seabirds that might be impacted by it,” he says.

Plus, the Ocean Cleanup’s system is made of high-density polyethylene, a kind of plastic — what if it becomes part of the problem it’s trying to solve?

“I sort of wonder what kinds of microplastics this thing is going to be generating on its own, assuming that it’s even functioning exactly as designed,” oceanographer Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association told Wired. And if the boom gets busted in a big storm, well: “If it’s shedding nano-size particles and then gets smashed into 200-meter-long pieces, you’re really covering the whole size range there.”

And then there’s the worry that a big, expensive project like The Ocean Cleanup diverts money and attention away from other efforts that are known to be effective — such as waste management policies to keep the garbage from getting into the ocean in the first place.

A 2015 study found that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Thailand were the leading sources of plastic waste in the world’s oceans.

“The science points to about a half a dozen countries in Southeast Asia which are rapidly developing economies that are heavily reliant on plastic, and lack the kind of waste management infrastructure that I think many of us in the U.S. take for granted,” Leonard says.

He points to one low-tech way to help fight plastics in the ocean: picking up trash in your own local waterways. His organization’s annual International Coastal Cleanup takes place Sept. 15, when he says nearly a million people are expected to work to remove some 20 million pounds of trash from beaches and waterways around the world.

Leonard says the Ocean Conservancy is skeptical that the giant trash collector will work, “but we’re being enthusiastic, and we hope it does.”

“The ocean really needs all the help it can get.”

via NPR Topics: News https://ift.tt/2m0CM10

September 11, 2018 at 03:22PM