“During the Cold War, the CIA considered building a bird-sized drone designed to spy on the communist bloc,” reports Popular Mechanics. “The drone would carry ‘black box’ spy packages into Russia and China, as well as take secret photographs — all while hiding in plain sight disguised as a bird…” The project envisioned a fleet of 12 bird-shaped drones, powered by…
Tag: plutonium
Why NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance will use nuclear power to stay warm
A spacecraft is only as strong as its power source, which is why when NASA was designing its Perseverance Mars rover, the agency turned to radioactive plutonium. Source: https://www.livescience.com/mars-rover-perseverance-nuclear-power-source-explained.html
Plutonium-238 to help power Perseverance on Mars
After its long journey to Mars beginning this summer, NASA’s Perseverance rover will be powered across the planet’s surface in part by plutonium produced at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-07-plutonium-power-perseverance-mars.html…
NASA is Trying To Save Voyager 2 After a Power Glitch Shut Down Its Instruments
Last Saturday, Voyager 2’s software shut down all five of the scientific instruments onboard because the spacecraft was consuming way too much power. Engineers at NASA don’t know what triggered this energy spike and are currently trying to get the interstellar probe, which was launched in 1977, back to normal operations. Its primary mission was supposed to last five years. In…
Current Model For Storing Nuclear Waste May Not Be Sufficiently Safe, Study Says
pgmrdlm quotes a report from ABC News: The current model the U.S. and other countries plan to use to store high-level nuclear waste may not be as safe as previously thought. The materials used to store the waste “will likely degrade faster than anyone previously knew” because of the way the materials interact, according to research published Tuesday in the journal…
Voyager 2 sends back insights on interstellar space
Voyager 2 left the realm of the sun’s influence a year ago today, becoming the 2nd craft ever to do so. This week, the journal Nature Astronomy published 5 new papers describing what Voyager 2 has been seeing on its journey into the unknown. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/voyager-2-new-published-papers-boundary-interstellar-space…
New Device Harvests Energy In Darkness
In new research published on Thursday in the journal Joule, Dr. Raman, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, demonstrated a way to harness a dark night sky to power a light bulb. The New York Times reports: His prototype device employs radiative cooling, the phenomenon that makes buildings and parks feel cooler than the surrounding air after…
Oliver Sacks’ Recommended Reading List of 46 Books: From Plants and Neuroscience, to Poetry and the Prose of Nabokov
Image by Luigi Novi. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons We remember Oliver Sacks as a neurologist, but we remember him not least because he wrote quite a few books as well. If you read those books, you’ll get a sense of Sacks’ wide range of interests — invention, perception and misperception, hallucination, and […]
Oliver Sacks’ Recommended Reading List of…
Melting Glaciers Could Unleash Nuclear Fallout Trapped Within the Ice
An international research project found that high concentrations of radioactive material in glaciers around the world could be exposed due to climate change. Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5wx5x/melting-glaciers-could-unleash-nuclear-fallout-trapped-within-the-ice…