Our solar system is a chaotic place – literally. Rewinding orbital possibilities quickly becomes too complex and too numerous for astronomers to calculate. That means we only know the orbital movements of Earth and the other planets over the past 60 million years or so. To look further back, scientists are pulling core samples from deep under Earth’s surface to examine long-ago climate change and learn about how the planets moved hundreds of millions of years ago.
Scientists used two core
Using the schlieren photography technique, NASA was able to capture the first air-to-air images of the interaction of shockwaves from two supersonic aircraft flying in formation.
NASA
In order to acquire this image, originally monochromatic and shown here as a colorized composite image, NASA flew a B-200 at around 30,000 feet while the pair of T-38s remained in formation and flew at supersonic speeds at the precise moment they were directly beneath the B-200.
NASA
When aircraft fly faster than the speed of sound, shockwaves travel away from the vehicle, and are heard on the ground as a sonic boom.
NASA
It wasn’t an easy shot to get, but the end results of NASA’s efforts to capture air-to-air images of supersonic shockwaves sure seem worth it.
To take these unprecedented photos, the space agency updated the imaging system on one of its Beechcraft B200 Super King Air aircraft. NASA scientists upgraded the camera so that it could capture a wider field of view, improved its connection to data storage, and increased its frame rate to 1,400 frames per second.
Then, the B200 flew up to about 9,100 meters. Meanwhile, two T-38 jets flew in formation, less than 10 meters apart, only about 600 meters away from the B200 aircraft. All three planes had to be in the right place, and a result, the camera system took exceptionally high-quality images of shockwaves created by the two T-38 aircraft and the interaction of the shockwaves between the two jets.
“We never dreamt that it would be this clear, this beautiful,” J.T. Heineck, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, said. “I am ecstatic about how these images turned out. With this upgraded system, we have, by an order of magnitude, improved both the speed and quality of our imagery from previous research.”
Quieter sonic booms
An aircraft traveling faster than the speed of sound creates a shockwave, essentially a pressure front that pushes into the surrounding air. In this case, flying the B200 aircraft above the T-38s provided a new vantage point for observing shockwaves, as well as their interaction. Ground-based observers perceive a sonic boom as the shockwave from a supersonic aircraft crosses their location.
This photography effort wasn’t a project to create art, even though the resulting images are stunning. Rather, scientists want to better understand the formation of shockwaves and their resulting sonic booms as part of a NASA project to develop quieter supersonic aircraft.
NASA and Lockheed Martin are developing a “low boom” flight demonstrator, the X-59 aircraft, to test technologies for lower-impact sonic booms. This aircraft may be ready for test flights in 2022, and NASA wants to have equipment ready to measure its capabilities. By then, NASA wants to have perfected its use of the schlieren imagery technique that captured these new images and data.
With this kind of data, NASA or commercial companies may be able to convince regulators to permit over-land, less-disruptive supersonic air travel. Although the Concorde was done in by a number of factors and stopped flying in 2003, one of its biggest limitations was the fact that it could only fly from coastal destinations to coastal destinations above the speed of sound.
It’s not quite seeing through walls, but scientists are working to engineer light beams so that they can pass through an opaque medium without scattering, according to a new paper.
We all have a few shows that we love. When that show is one with seven or eight seasons then choosing which episode to rewatch on a Saturday afternoon can be a bit of a challenge. For me, that typically means watching the same five or six episodes over and over again, but there’s something to be said for giving some…
China’s dystopian “social credit” system—which penalizes citizens found to have engaged in some type of misconduct by imposing a number of restrictions on their activities—has already resulted in tens of millions of rejected attempts to purchase plane or train tickets, the Guardian reported on Friday.
This is a video demonstration of MIT’s new Mini Cheetah headless quadruped robot: a smaller, 20-pound version of their non-mini Cheetah robot previously seen HERE and HERE . What can it do? KILL. Plus trot over rugged terrain at twice the average human’s walking speed, sidestep, walk diagonally and in spirals, and do backflips so it can flip over your head and attack from the rear. It can also swivel its legs to either walk right-side up OR upside-down, so if you thought flipping it on its back like a Koopa Troopa was going to save you, you were wrong and you are dead now. *stamps F on forehead* This concludes your robot apocalypse survival simulation. It’ll be another $80 to take the test again, but you will receive a holographic sticker if you pass. Keep going for the video demonstration, the very end of which is a bunch of crash and burns.
Thanks again to Ochre, who agrees it’s time to ice the cake and wrap up this human party.
via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/
It was just last week when we heard that the 20Gbps USB 3.2 connectivity may show up on new devices later this year, but today, Intel is already talking about an even speedier USB4. At a Taipei event earlier today, the company revealed that this next-gen spec will once again utilize dual channels to achieve 40Gbps speeds, even on existing 40Gbps-certified USB-C cables.
Better yet, thanks to Intel finally offering Thunderbolt 3 to manufacturers with open licensing, USB4 will be integrating this tech and thus effectively becoming the "new" Thunderbolt 3. In other words, USB4 will pretty much be the mother of all wired connectivity options, and will be ready for more powerful PCIe plus DisplayPort devices.
This is great news for consumers, as this means 40Gbps is the new baseline for all future USB ports, and this in turn will likely be deployed across products much quicker than Thunderbolt 3 did. To date, there are only 463 devices certified with Thunderbolt 3.
It’s still early days for USB4 though, as the USB Promoter Group won’t be sharing detailed specs until around mid-2019. Furthermore, there’s no word on USB4’s compatibility with future versions of Thunderbolt; but Intel did clarify that it will continue promoting the Thunderbolt brand alongside USB4. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this development, which will likely get an official announcement around the time of Computex Taipei.
