Large Scale Carbon Capture Without The Technology

May 10, 2022 by Jenny List 213 Comments

We humans are in something of a pickle, as we’ve put too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and caused climate change that might even wipe us out. There may still be people to whom that’s a controversial statement, but knowing something needs to be done about it should be a position for which you don’t necessarily have to be a climate change activist glueing yourself to the gates of a refinery.

It’s obvious that we can reduce our CO2 emissions to tackle the problem, but that’s not the only way that atmospheric CO2 can be reduced. How about removing it from the air? It’s an approach that’s being taken seriously enough for a number of industrial carbon capture solutions to be proposed, and even for a pilot plant to be constructed in Iceland. The most promising idea is that CO2 from power stations can be injected into porous basalt rock where it can react to form calcium carbonate. All of which is very impressive, but is there not a way that this can be achieved without resorting to too much technology? Time for Hackaday to pull out the back-of-envelope calculator, and take a look. Continue reading “Large Scale Carbon Capture Without The Technology” →

Will We Ever Shake The Polaroid Picture?

May 9, 2022 by Kristina Panos 47 Comments

Today, most of us carry supercomputers in our pockets that happen to also take instantly-viewable pictures.This is something that even the dumbest phones do, meaning that we can reasonably draw the conclusion that photographic capability has become a basic feature of everyday carry, a necessity of 21st century life.

Despite the unwashed masses of just-plain-bad photographs clouding the digital landscape, photography itself remains as important as ever so we can retain and disseminate information as history unfolds. In a sense, the more instant, the better — unless it comes at the cost of image quality. The invention of photography is on par with the printing press or with language itself in that all three allow us to communicate within our own time as well as preserve The Way Things Were in frozen silence. And no invention made vivid preservation more convenient than the instant camera.

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About As Cold As It Gets: The Webb Telescope’s Cryocooler

May 5, 2022 by Dan Maloney 26 Comments

If you were asked to name the coldest spot in the solar system, chances are pretty good you’d think it would be somewhere as far as possible from the ultimate source of all the system’s energy — the Sun. It stands to reason that the further away you get from something hot, the more the heat spreads out. And so Pluto, planet or not, might be a good guess for the record low temperature.

But, for as cold as Pluto gets — down to 40 Kelvin — there’s a place that much, much colder than that, and paradoxically, much closer to home. In fact, it’s only about a million miles away, and right now, sitting at a mere 6 Kelvin, the chunk of silicon at the focal plane of one of the main instruments aboard the James Webb Space telescope makes the surface of Pluto look downright balmy.

The depth of cold on Webb is all the more amazing given that mere meters away, the temperature is a sizzling 324 K (123 F, 51 C). The hows and whys of Webb’s cooling systems are chock full of interesting engineering tidbits and worth an in-depth look as the world’s newest space telescope gears up for observations.

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Ask Hackaday: Repair Café Or Not?

May 3, 2022 by Jenny List 82 Comments

A huge part of the work our community does, aside from making things and doing a lot of talking about the things we’d like to make, involves repair. We have the skills to fix our own stuff when it breaks, we can fix broken stuff that other people throw out when it breaks, and we can fix broken stuff belonging to other people. As our consumer society has evolved around products designed to frustrate repairs and facilitate instead the sale of new replacements for broken items this is an essential skill to keep alive; both to escape having to incessantly replace our possessions at the whim of corporate overlords, and to fight the never-ending tide of waste.

Repair Cafés: A Good Thing

A German repair cafe — A German repair café. , Redaktion NdW, CC BY 2.0

So we repair things that are broken, for example on my bench in front of me is a formerly-broken camera I’ve given a new life, on the wall in one of my hackerspaces is a large screen TV saved from a dumpster where it lay with a broken PSU, and in another hackerspace a capsule coffee machine serves drinks through a plastic manifold held together with cable ties.

We do it for ourselves, we do it within our communities, and increasingly, we do it for the wider community at large. The Repair Café movement is one of local groups who host sessions at which they repair broken items brought in by members of the public, for free. Their work encompasses almost anything you’d find in a home, from textiles and furniture to electronics, and they are an extremely good cause that should be encouraged at all costs.

For all my admiration for the Repair Café movement though, I have chosen not to involve myself in my local one. Not because they aren’t a fine bunch of people or because they don’t do an exceptionally good job, but for a different reason. And it symbolically comes back to an afternoon over thirty years ago, when sitting in a university lab in Hull, I was taught how to wire a British mains plug. Continue reading “Ask Hackaday: Repair Café Or Not?” →

Mercury Thrusters: A Worldwide Disaster Averted Just In Time

April 18, 2022 by Lewin Day 60 Comments

The field of space vehicle design is obsessed with efficiency by necessity. The cost to do anything in space is astronomical, and also heavily tied to launch weight. Thus, any technology or technique that can bring those figures down is prime for exploitation.

In recent years, mercury thrusters promised to be one such technology. The only catch was the potentially-ruinous environmental cost. Today, we’ll look at the benefits of mercury thrusters, and how they came to be outlawed in short order.

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Scientists Are Now Declaring New Species Via Photos And Video

April 12, 2022 by Lewin Day 22 Comments

Identifying new species is key to the work of zoologists around the world. It’s an exciting part of research into the natural world, and being the first to discover a new species often grants a scientists naming rights that can create a legacy of one’s work that lasts long into the future.

Traditionally, the work of taxonomy involved capturing and preserving an example of the new species. This is such that it could be classified properly and studied in detail by scientists working now and in the future. However, times are changing, and scientists are beginning to identify new species on the basis of videos and photos instead.

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Mothballing Rosalind: How To Put A Space Mission In Storage

April 11, 2022 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

In planetary exploration circles, Mars has quite a bad reputation. The Red Planet has a habit of eating spacecraft sent there to explore it, to the degree that nearly half of the missions we’ve thrown at it have failed in one way or another. The “Mars Curse” manifests itself most spectacularly when landers fail to negotiate the terminal descent and new billion-dollar craters appear on the Martian regolith, while some missions meet their doom en route to the planet, and an unlucky few have even blown up on the launchpad.

But the latest example of the Mars Curse, the recent cancellation of the second half of the ExoMars mission, represents a new and depressing failure mode: war — specifically the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The international outrage over the aggression resulted in economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation of Russia, which retaliated by ending its partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), depriving the mission of its launch vehicle and dooming the mission that would have landed the rover Rosalind Franklin on Oxia Planum near the Martian Equator in 2023.

While there’s still a chance that administrators and diplomats will work things out, chances are slim that it will be in time for the narrow launch window that the mission was shooting for in September of 2022. That means the Rosalind Franklin, along with all the other flight hardware that was nearly ready to launch, will have to be put in storage at least until the next launch window opens in 2024. That begs the question: how does one put a complex spacecraft into storage? And could such mothballing have unintended consequences for the mission when it eventually does fly?

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