Aeronautics

The Phantom Ray UAV got some air time today, with a little help from a jumbo jet.

Boeing's futuristic unmanned aerial vehicle took a 50-minute flight today riding piggyback on a NASA Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a modified 747 designed to ferry space shuttles from one terrestrial site to another. The aerospace giant had said earlier in the year that the Phantom Ray was on track to make its first flight, but this may not be exactly what it had in mind.

The first flight of the Phantom Ray, which is designed to fly autonomously, is now scheduled for "… Read more

commentary It's been eight years in the making so far, and has gone through any number of delays and problems, but Boeing's 787 Dreamliner is still one of the most-anticipated commercial airplanes in history. And with the plane's testing program under way for almost exactly a year, it is edging closer and closer to carrying its first passengers.

Now, fans of the innovative plane--it is made from 50 percent composite material and is expected to offer carriers up to 20 percent savings on fuel--can get a fix unlike any offered before. With Edgar Turner's new book, &… Read more

NASA failed to remove sensitive data from computers that it sold, according to an audit report released this week.

The agency has been selling off computers, hard drives, and other equipment associated with the Space Shuttle program as it winds down.

But the audit (PDF) by the NASA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found security breaches at four NASA facilities: the Kennedy and Johnson Space Centers and the Ames and Langley Research Centers.

Specifically, the audit discovered that 10 computers from the Kennedy Center were released to the public even though they still contained sensitive NASA data and had … Read more

If you like big and green, NASA's Ames Research Center will soon have something for you: the world's largest and greenest airship.

The space agency announced today that the Mountain View, Calif., research center's Moffett Field will soon play host to a mammoth 265-foot-long and 65-foot-diameter airship from Kellyton, Ala.'s E-Green Technologies. The Bullet Class 580 will be developed and tested at Ames in 24,000 square feet of Ames' famous Hangar 2.

The new airship, which has a planned first flight date of early 2011, is expected to run on algae-based biofuel, and fly at … Read more

The X-37B, an unmanned U.S. Air Force space plane whose mystery mission set off a round of speculation over the spring and summer, returned to Earth early this morning after its maiden flight lasted 220 days in orbit.

The space plane landed at 1:16 a.m. PT today at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, officially making it the U.S.'s first unmanned vehicle to return from space and land on its own, according to Boeing, which designed the craft. Launched in April from Cape Canaveral by an Atlas 5 rocket, the X-37B was designed to stay … Read more

Look at who's logging supercomputing time these days and you are likely to get a glimpse of some major innovations on the horizon.

The U.S. Department of Energy announced today it has just granted the largest award ever of the department's supercomputing time through it's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, now in it's sixth year.

The large award, a total of 1.7 billion hours distributed over 57 projects, was partially attributed to the fact that the Energy Department has been expanding its supercomputing capacity, and, therefore, simply has the means to grant more time. But it also reflects a growing interest in using computer modeling now that it has increased in sophistication, according to the Energy Department.

The INCITE program is somewhat like the lottery in that everyone has a chance. The Energy Department has an open application process in which any scientist, whether working in the academic or commercial world, is welcome to submit a request to win supercomputing hours, and it's not restricted to energy-related science.

The winning hours are divided between two supercomputers, the IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory aka "Intrepid," and the Cray XT5 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory aka "Jaguar," which recently lost its first place status to China's Tianhe-1A as the world's most powerful supercomputer.

Among these latest 57 recipients, are large companies like Boeing and General Electric that are going to use the time for sophisticated modeling of potential designs for jet engines and wind turbines, respectively. There are also the climate change and earthquake prediction simulation projects, as one might expect.

Most interesting to the energy sector perhaps is the Lithium/Air Battery Project led by Jack Wells, group leader of the Computational Nanotechnology Group at the Center for Engineering Science Advanced Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His team will be running simulations of lithium/air battery reactions. A successful version of the air battery would be capable of storing 10 times the amount of energy as a lithium ion battery of the same weight. Such a battery might make electric cars more competitive compared to gas-powered cars since it would offer greater driving range on a single charge than current models.… Read more

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.--After three launch delays due to technical problems and bad weather, the shuttle Discovery was grounded again Friday. Its final launch is delayed until at least November 30 because of a hydrogen leak in a vent line attached to the ship's external tank.

After the scrub was declared, engineers discovered a large crack in the protective foam insulation on the tank that likely would have caused a launch delay, even if the leak had not developed. Engineers have not yet evaluated the crack to know what sort of repairs, if any, might be needed or … Read more

The U.S Air Force seems to do a lot to make the lives of its pilots and air crew more comfortable.

Just the other day, one heard about a new chair that stops fliers from losing their lasagne before its full nutritional value can be enjoyed.

Now, emerges news that the Air Force is retiring a lovely centrifuge that helped pilots stay, well, conscious.

According the the U.S. Air Force's own Web site, the Physiological Training Center at Holloman Air Force Base is shutting down its spinning centrifuge in favor of a new centrifuge being built to … Read more

The first live Twitter messages from space were less than a year ago, but already astronauts have moved on to geolocation: Douglas C. Wheelock, commander of the Expedition 25 mission, earned the "NASA Explorer" badge on Foursquare for checking into the International Space Station on Friday morning.

Foursquare business development rep Eric Friedman said on the company blog that Wheelock was "the first human to ever use a location-based service from space," leaving open the possibility that aliens somewhere else in the universe may have developed their own social-networking services and consequently, as far as we … Read more