Schlagwort: mars

  • Build your own NASA Curiosity rover

    Build your own NASA Curiosity rover

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    Put together your own remote-controlled Curiosity rover with the help of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a Raspberry Pi.

    NASA JPL rover Raspberry Pi

    Why wouldn’t you want one of these?!

    NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

    To educate the curious about the use of rovers in space, the Pasadena-based NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) built a mini-rover, ROV-E, to tour classrooms, museums, and public engagement events.

    NASA JPL rover ROV-E Raspberry Pi

    The original ROV-E comes with a much higher price tag, so the JPL engineers decided to scale it down for home makers

    And so engaged was the public by the rover and its ability to manoeuvre harsh terrain, rocks, and small children, that the JLP engineers have published a building plan that allows rover-enthused makers to build their own for around $2500 using off-the-shelf parts.

    Curiosity for the curious

    The JPL open-source rover is a scaled-down model of Curiosity, the car-sized rover currently on day 2187 of its mission to explore the surface of Mars.

    NASA JPL rover Raspberry Pi

    The Mars rover sings Happy birthday to itself on 5 August every year, and this fact breaks out hearts!

    And while the home-brew version of Curiosity may not be able to explore the Red Planet, project sponsor Tom Soderstrom believes it can offer plenty of opportunities to future STEM pioneers:

    “We wanted to give back to the community and lower the barrier of entry by giving hands-on experience to the next generation of scientists, engineers, and programmers.”

    A Pi at the heart of the rover

    The rover uses a variety of tech makers may already have in their arsenal, including USB cameras and a Raspberry Pi. JPL’s design also gives you the option to swap out components with alternatives.

    NASA JPL rover Raspberry Pi

    Control the rover however you please: via a games controller, a smartphone, or a program of your own design

    To control the rover, JPL decided to use a Raspberry Pi:

    We chose a Raspberry Pi to be the ‘brain’ of this rover for its versatility, accessibility, simplicity, and ability to add and upgrade your own modifications. Any method with which you can communicate with a Raspberry Pi (Bluetooth, WiFi, USB devices, etc.) can be interfaced into the control system of the robot.

    Full plans for the six-wheel rover are available on JPL’s GitHub, where they also list all parts required, final specs, and supporting info such as links to the project forum and parts suppliers. You can also visit the official project website to control your own rover on the surface of Mars…a simulated rover, of course, but one can dream!

    Website: LINK

  • How Can We Support A Million Lives On Mars?

    How Can We Support A Million Lives On Mars?

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    HP Mars Home Planet challenges engineers, architects, designers, artists, and students to design an urban area for a million people on the red planet.

    Is there life on Mars? Imagine a future when one million people call the red planet home. Together with NVIDIA, HTC VIVE and other partners, HP has launched HP Mars Home Planet, an exciting call for global collaboration to solve the challenges of urbanization using virtual reality (VR).

    Establishing human civilization on Mars, which happens to be about 225 million km away, will be no small feat. And yet NASA has identified it as our best option to support human life on another planet. Designing the buildings, transportation networks, vehicles, and essential infrastructure requires leaps of imagination and ingenuity.

    Get ready for HP Mars Home Planet. The challenge will bring together creative thinkers across professional disciplines and elite educational institutions to simulate what life on Mars could be like. Engineers, architects, designers, artists, and students from around the world are invited to participate, either as individuals or in teams, and can design whatever inspires them, from robots to vehicles to skyscrapers to entire city plans.

    HP and NVIDIA teamed up with Technicolor, Autodesk, Unreal Engine, Fusion, Launch Forth and HTC VIVE to launch HP Mars Home Planet at this year’s SIGGRAPH, the world’s largest, most influential conference and exhibitions for computer graphics and interactive techniques.

    Three competitive phases: Concept, Model, Render

    During the first phase participants focused on sketching buildings, transportation, and infrastructure concepts for Mawrth Vallis—Welsh for Mars Valley—a potential landing site identified by NASA. The concepts have to reflect the conditions on Mars, such as its weaker gravity, lack of oxygen, and exposure to radiation.

    The concept phase wraps up in early November, and winners will receive HP ZBooks and HP Z Workstations. High-powered HP Z Workstations propel high- performance, complex work for game-changing, ground-breaking companies like Nike, Tesla, DreamWorks, and NASA—and like designing a sophisticated civilization on Mars.

    In the modeling phase, participants will create a 3D model focusing on any aspect of the future built environment on Mars, with the help of Autodesk software.

    In the rendering phase, participants will create a still, animated, real-time, or VR rendering depicting their invention for a smart city or region on Mars that supports life for a million humans.

    STEM on Mars

    Around the world, schools and universities can join in the challenge, too. HP Mars Home Planet Education League teams will participate to support learning in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

    To collaborate, participants will use Launch Forth, a crowd-powered SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform for product design and development. Launch Forth’s community members focus on solving problems, designing products, and learning from experts.

    Stay tuned to the HTC VIVE blog as we continue to update you on this fascinating project. If you would like to learn more, then head over to the Launch Forth platform to get involved.

    Website: LINK

  • Going Interstellar – Laser Propulsion Could Take Humans to Mars in Just 3-Days

    Going Interstellar – Laser Propulsion Could Take Humans to Mars in Just 3-Days

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    Philip Lubin, a researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Experimental Cosmology Group, has proposed an innovative propulsion method that could eventually transport humans to Mars in 3-days or less. It involves an unmanned spacecraft with a one-meter DE-STAR laser sail that is propelled by aiming a powerful laser at it while still in Earth orbit, thus accelerating the craft to a significant fraction of the speed of light.

    laser-propulsion

    „As an example, on the eventual upper end, a full scale DE-STAR 4 (50-70 GW) will propel a wafer scale spacecraft with a one meter laser sail to about 26 percent the speed of light in about 10 minutes, reach Mars (1 AU [astronomical unit, the Earth-Sun distance]) in 30 minutes, pass Voyager 1 in less than 3 days, pass 1,000 AU in 12 days and reach Alpha Centauri in about 15 years,“ said Lubin.

  • NASA’s Curiosity Rover Discovers Replica of Egypt’s Great Pyramid on Mars

    NASA’s Curiosity Rover Discovers Replica of Egypt’s Great Pyramid on Mars

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    NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered areplica of one of Egypt’s Great Pyramids on Mars. What you can see above ground is ‚car-sized‘, but researchers say that it may be just the tip of a much larger structure buried beneath. One of them says: „It appears that the Nasa operators of Curiosity deliberately chose not to take another photo or zoom in on the pyramid. ‚If they however did so, none of these subsequent photos were released to the general public.

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  • These Aren’t Blueberries, Just Breathtaking Pictures Captured by the Mars Rover Opportunity

    These Aren’t Blueberries, Just Breathtaking Pictures Captured by the Mars Rover Opportunity

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    No, you aren’t looking at pictures of blueberries scattered over rocks, but real images of the Martian landscape photographed by the Mars Rover Opportunity. The discovery of these Martian clusters a decade ago provided some of the first evidence of liquid water on the red planet.

     

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  • Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking: Time Travel Documentation

    Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking: Time Travel Documentation

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    The promise of time travel has long been one of the world’s favorite scientific „what-ifs?“ Hawking explores all the possibilities, warping the very fabric of time and space as he goes. From killing your grandfather to riding a black hole, we learn the pitfalls and the prospects for a technology that could quite literally, change everything.

    Copyright © Discovery Communications

    Official Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn4WHIxTa50

  • Mind-Blowing Video Shows How Mars Looked 4-Billion Years Ago

    Mind-Blowing Video Shows How Mars Looked 4-Billion Years Ago

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    Mars may currently be a desolate planet, but it definitely sustained life at one point of its existence. In addition to Curiosity discovering water on the Red Planet’s surface, scientists have also found large amounts of phosphates on meteorites originating from there. These two elements – water and phosphates – are necessary for life to form on a planet.

    mars-with-water

    According to Dvice, „Mars‘ atmosphere today is not prone to sustaining life because of its low pressure and temperature. Under current conditions on the planet, water usually appears as ice or vapor, never staying in its liquid phase for long. However, after studying the surface of Mars, along with minerals present on its surface, scientists believe that its atmosphere was a lot different and may have been conducive for oceans of liquid water to develop on the planet. The large craters on Mars suggest that there were such bodies of water, with channels that connected them.“

    Official Source: http://www.dvice.com/2013-11-14/video-shows-habitable-mars-4-billion-years-ago

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKPrwY0Ycno#t=0

  • 12 Mind-Blowing Pictures of the Red Planet Captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

    12 Mind-Blowing Pictures of the Red Planet Captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

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    The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is a multipurpose spacecraft designed to conduct reconnaissance and Exploration of Mars from orbit. The US$720 million spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin under the supervision of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. MRO’s telecommunications system will transfer more data back to Earth than all previous interplanetary missions combined, and MRO will serve as a highly capable relay satellite for future missions.

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    MRO contains a host of scientific instruments such as cameras, spectrometers, and radar, which are used to analyze the landforms, stratigraphy, minerals, and ice of Mars. It paves the way for future spacecraft by monitoring Mars‘ daily weather and surface conditions, studying potential landing sites, and hosting a new telecommunications system.

    Official Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3yVKAADQ6M&feature=player_embedded#t=0

  • Over 200,000 People Have Applied for a One Way Trip to Mars

    Over 200,000 People Have Applied for a One Way Trip to Mars

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Should the Mars One project become a reality, the team will have to narrow down the number of candidates to just 24-40 from the 200,000+ applicants.

    The £4,000,000,000 project was founded in 2010 by engineer Bas Lansdorp, who plans to recoup its costs by selling the broadcasting rights to the mission. The Dutch group wants to launch a supply mission that will land on Mars as soon as October 2016, followed by a ’settlement rover‘ in 2018.

    Mars One
    Mars One

    They added that landing systems will be tested eight times before they are used to transport humans – a move that Mars One said will make the trips ‚much safer than moon missions‘. The second round will include an interview with Mars One committee members, and candidates advancing to the third round will compete against one another.

    The third round will include a series of challenges to prepare candidates for the potential mission and will be broadcast on television and online.

    The group said it aims to have a human settlement on Mars within a decade. Journey time to Mars, which is approximately 40 million miles away depending on its position in orbit, would be around 200 days.

    Official Source: LINK