India Makes History With Chandrayaan-3 Landing

August 24, 2023 by Tom Nardi 33 Comments

Yesterday, the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft performed a powered soft-landing on the Moon, officially making India the fourth country to achieve a controlled descent to the lunar surface. Up to this point, only the United States, China, and the Soviet Union could boast successful landings on our nearest celestial neighbor.

What’s more, Chandrayaan-3 has positioned itself closer to the Moon’s south pole than any other mission in history. This area is of great interest to scientists, as there is evidence that deep craters in the polar region contain considerable deposits of frozen water. At the same time, the polar highlands receive almost constant sunlight, making it the perfect location to install solar arrays. These factors make the Moon’s south pole an ideal candidate for a future human outpost, and Chandrayaan-3 is just one of several robotic craft that will explore this area in the coming years.

But as is usually the case with space exploration, the success of Chandrayaan-3 didn’t come easy, or quickly. The ISRO started the Chandrayaan program in 2003, and launched the Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008. The craft successfully entered lunar orbit and surveyed the surface using a wide array of instruments, many of which were provided by foreign space agencies such as NASA and the ESA. In 2019 the far more ambitious Chandrayaan-2 mission was launched, which included a lander and small rover. While the orbiter component of Chandrayaan-2 was a complete success, the lander crashed into the Moon’s surface and was destroyed.

With Chandrayaan-3 now safely on the surface of the Moon, there’s much work to be done in the coming days. The planned mission lifetime for both the lander and rover is a single lunar day, which equals just about two weeks here on Earth. After that, the vehicles will be plunged into a long stretch of frigid darkness which they likely won’t survive.

Continue reading “India Makes History With Chandrayaan-3 Landing” →

Sharkskin Coating Reduces Airliner Fuel Use, Emissions

August 23, 2023 by Lewin Day 66 Comments

The aviation industry is always seeking advancements to improve efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. The former is due to the never-ending quest for profit, while the latter helps airlines maintain their social license to operate. Less cynically, more efficient technologies are better for the environment, too.

One of the latest innovations in this space is a new sharkskin-like film applied to airliners to help cut drag. Inspired by nature itself, it’s a surface treatment technology that mimics the unique characteristics of sharkskin to enhance aircraft efficiency. Even better, it’s already in commercial service! Continue reading “Sharkskin Coating Reduces Airliner Fuel Use, Emissions” →

A Soyuz-2.1b rocket booster with a Fregat upper stage and the Luna 25 lunar lander blasts off from a launchpad at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur Oblast, Russia.

Luna 25’s Demise: Raising Fundamental Questions About Russia’s Space Program

August 21, 2023 by Maya Posch 79 Comments

The recent news that Russia’s Luna 25 Moon lander had made an unexpected lithobraking detour into the Moon’s surface, rather than the expected soft touchdown was met by a variety of responses, ranging from dismay to outright glee, much of it on account of current geopolitical considerations. Yet politics aside, the failure of this mission casts another shadow on the prospects of Russia’s attempts to revive the Soviet space program after a string of failures, including its ill-fated Mars 96 and Fobos-Grunt Mars missions, the latter of which also destroyed China’s first Mars orbiter (Yinghuo-1) and ignited China’s independent Mars program.

To this day, only three nations have managed to land on the Moon in a controlled fashion: the US, China, and the Soviet Union. India may soon join this illustrious list if its Chandrayaan-3 mission’s Vikram lander dodges the many pitfalls of soft touchdowns on the Moon’s surface. While Roscosmos has already started internal investigation, it does cast significant doubt on the viability of the Russian Luna-Glob (‘Lunar Sphere’) lunar exploration program.

Will Russia manage to pick up where the Soviet Union left off in 1976 with the Luna 24 lunar sample return mission?

Continue reading “Luna 25’s Demise: Raising Fundamental Questions About Russia’s Space Program” →

A Quarter Century Of The IMac

August 18, 2023 by Jenny List 39 Comments

Growing older as an engineer turns out to be a succession of moments in which technologies and devices which you somehow still imagine to be cool or exciting, reveal themselves in fact to be obsolete, indeed, old. Such a moment comes today, with the25th anniversary of the most iconic of 1990s computers, Apple’s iMac. The translucent all-in-one machine was and remains more than simply yet another shiny Mac, it’s probably the single most influential home computer ever. A bold statement to be sure, but take a look at the computer you’re reading this on, indeed at all your electronic devices here in 2023, before you dismiss it.

Any colour you want, as long as it's beige — Any colour you want, as long as it’s beige. Leon Brooks, Public domain.

Computers in the 1990s were beige and boring. Breathtakingly so, a festival of the generic. If you had a PC it came in the same beige box as every single other PC, the only thing breaking the monotony being one of those LED 7-segment fake-MHz displays. Apple computers took the beige and ran with it, their PowerMac range being merely a smoother-fronted version of all those beige-box PCs. This was the period following the departure of Steve Jobs during which the company famously lost its way, and the Bondi blue Jonny Ive-designed iMac was the signature product of his triumphant return.

That’s enough pretending to have drunk the Apple Kool-Aid for one article, so why are we marking this anniversary? The answer lies not in the iMac’s hardware, though its 233MHz PowerPC G3 and ATI graphics driving a 15″ CRT were no slouch for the day, nor even in its forsaking of all their previous proprietary interfaces for USB. Instead it’s the design influence of this machine, as it ushered in a new era of technological devices whose ethos lay around how they might be used rather than in simply showering the interface with features. At the time the iMac spawned a brief fashion for translucent blue in everything from peripherals to steam irons, but in the quarter century since your devices have changed immeasurably in its wake. We still don’t like that weird round mouse though.

Header image: Rama, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Why Nuclear Bombs Can’t Set The World On Fire

August 17, 2023 by Lewin Day 63 Comments

Before the first atomic bomb was detonated, there were some fears that a fission bomb could “ignite the atmosphere.” Yes, if you’ve just watched Oppenheimer, read about the Manhattan Project, or looked into atomic weapons at all, you’ll be familiar with the concept. Physicists determined the risk was “near zero,” proceeded ahead with the Trinity test, and the world lived to see another day.

You might be wondering what this all means. How could the very air around us be set aflame, and how did physicists figure out it wasn’t a problem? Let’s explore the common misunderstandings around this concept, and the physical reactions at play.

Continue reading “Why Nuclear Bombs Can’t Set The World On Fire” →

Screwdrivers And Nuclear Safety: The Demon Core

August 15, 2023 by Al Williams 61 Comments

Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin were two of many people who worked on the Manhattan Project. They might not be household names, but we believe they are the poster children for safety procedures. And not in a good way.

Harry Daghlian (CC-BY-SA 3.0, Arnold Dion)

Slotin assembled the core of the “Gadget” — the plutonium test device at the Trinity test in 1945. He was no stranger to working in a lab with nuclear materials. It stands to reason that if you are making something as dangerous as a nuclear bomb, it is probably hazardous work. But you probably get used to it, like some of us get used to working around high voltage or deadly chemicals.

Making nuclear material is hard and even more so back then. But the Project had made a third plutonium core — one was detonated at Trinity, the other over Nagasaki, and the final core was meant to go into a proposed second bomb that was not produced.

The cores were two hemispheres of plutonium and gallium. The gallium allowed the material to be hot-pressed into spherical shapes. Unlike the first two cores, however, the third one — one that would later earn the nickname “the demon core” — had a ring around the flat surfaces to contain nuclear flux during implosion. The spheres are not terribly dangerous unless they become supercritical, which would lead to a prompt critical event. Then, they would release large amounts of neutrons. The bombs, for example, would force the two halves together violently. You could also add more nuclear material or reflect neutrons back into the material.

Continue reading “Screwdrivers And Nuclear Safety: The Demon Core” →

Ku-Go: The World War II Death Ray

August 11, 2023 by Al Williams 66 Comments

Historians may note that World War II was the last great “movie war.” In those days, you could do many things that are impossible today, yet make for great movie drama. You can’t sneak a fleet of ships across the oceans anymore. Nor could you dig tunnels right under your captor’s nose. Another defining factor is that it doesn’t seem we seek out superweapons anymore.

A Churchill Bullshorn plough for clearning minefields — one of Hobart’s “Funnies”

Sure, we develop better planes, tanks, submarines, and guns. But we aren’t working on anything — that we know of — as revolutionary as a rocket, an atomic bomb, or even radar was back in the 1940s. The Germans worked on Wunderwaffe, including guided missiles, jets, suborbital rocket bombers, and a solar-powered space mirror to burn terrestrial targets. Everyone was working on a nuclear bomb, of course. The British had Hobart’s Funnies as well as less successful entries like the Panjandrum — a ten-foot rocket-driven wheel of explosives.

Death Ray

Perhaps the holy grail of all the super weapons — both realized and dreamed of was the “death ray.” Of course, Tesla claimed to have one that didn’t use rays, but particles, but no one ever successfully built one and there was debate if it would work. Tesla didn’t like the term death ray, partly because it wasn’t a ray at all, but also because it required a huge power plant and, therefore, wasn’t mobile. He envisioned it as a peacekeeping defensive weapon, rendering attacks so futile that no one would dare attempt them.

Continue reading “Ku-Go: The World War II Death Ray” →