Who Has the Best Space Plan: Gingrich, Obama or Romney?

Val — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:52:09 +0000

Forget about presidential politics for a moment. Forget left and right, Republican and Democrat. Forget the GOP primaries and the same tired old debates that have filled the opinion pages for the last four years.

Instead, to determine the next occupant of the White House, try this question on for size: Would you rather build a moon base or start mining the asteroid belt? Or do you think space exploration should be de-emphasized, and that NASA should be run with the help of the business community?

If you favor the moon base, you’re with Republican hopeful Newt Gingrich. The former speaker, a self-confessed space nerd, made that announcement while campaigning Thursday on Florida’s space coast. “By the end of my second term,” he said, “we will have the first permanent base on the moon, and it will be American.”

Former president George W. Bush also directed NASA to aim for a moon base by 2020. (There’s a commercial purpose to this; the moon is likely full of helium-3, a potential energy source for the fusion reactors of the future.) That plan was scrapped by President Obama, who favors sending a manned mission to an asteroid instead.

The asteroid belt is full of minerals such as iron, cobalt and platinum, each worth trillions of dollars Indeed, the worth of a single M-class rock has been conservatively estimated at $10 trillion. Obama wants NASA to put astronauts in that ballpark by 2025.

Both Gingrich and Obama want humans on Mars in the 2030s. Obama wants NASA to take the lead on that, while Gingrich favors cutting the space agency’s budget by 10% and giving that money to the private sector — in the form of a $10 billion prize for the first organization to land on Mars.

And Romney? Gingrich’s rival in the GOP contest has been far less specific about his space plans. But in a recent debate, he suggested his first step would be to have NASA partly funded by commercial interests. “Bring them together, discuss a wide range of options for NASA,” Romney said. “Let’s have a collaborative effort.”

Romney has also said he favors an Apollo-like mission to “excite young people about the potential of space,” but hasn’t said where that mission should go to.

So whose space policy sounds the smartest? Take our poll below, and sound off in the comments.

ATI’s Top 5 Engineering Course Samplers of 2011

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 14:12:26 +0000

What Are the Tools of Your Trade?

Video Clip: Click to Watch

ATI specializes in short course technical training

Our mission here at the Applied Technology Institute (ATI) is to provide expert training and the highest quality professional development in space, communications, defense, sonar, radar, and signal processing. We are not a one-size-fits-all educational facility. Our short classes include both introductory and advanced courses.

ATI’s Top Five Engineering Courses for 2011

The five engineering courses for 2011 are highlighted below:

#1 Practical Statistical Signal Processing – using MATLAB

This 4-day course covers signal processing systems for radar, sonar, communications, speech, imaging and other applications based on state-of-the-art computer algorithms. These algorithms include important tasks such as data simulation, parameter estimation, filtering, interpolation, detection, spectral analysis, beamforming, classification, and tracking. Until now these algorithms could only be learned by reading the latest technical journals. This course will take the mystery out of these designs by introducing the algorithms with a minimum of mathematics and illustrating the key ideas via numerous examples using MATLAB.

Designed for engineers, scientists, and other professionals who wish to study the practice of statistical signal processing without the headaches, this course will make extensive use of hands-on MATLAB implementations and demonstrations. Attendees will receive a suite of software source code and are encouraged to bring their own laptops to follow along with the demonstrations.

Click here for the tutorial

#2 Advanced Topics in Digital Signal Processing

This four-day course is designed for communication systems engineers, programmers, implementers and managers who need to understand current practice and next generation DSP techniques for upcoming communication systems. DSP is more than mapping legacy analog designs to a DSP implementation. To avoid compromise solution appropriate for an earlier time period, we return to first principles to learn how to apply new technology capabilities to the design of next generation communication systems.

Click here for the tutorial

#3 Engineering Systems Modeling WithExcel/VBA

This two-day course is for engineers, scientists, and others interested in developing custom engineering system models. Principles and practices are established for creating integrated models using Excel and its built-in programming environment, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Real-world techniques and tips not found in any other course, book, or other resource are revealed. Step-bystep implementation, instructor-led interactive examples, and integrated participant exercises solidify the concepts introduced. Application examples are demonstrated from the instructor’s experience in unmanned underwater vehicles, LEO spacecraft, cryogenic propulsion systems, aerospace & military power systems, avionics thermal management, and other projects.

Click here for the tutorial

#4 Wavelets: A Conceptual, Practical Approach

Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) are in wide use and work very well if your signal stays at a constant frequency (“stationary”). But if the signal could vary, have pulses, “blips” or any other kind of interesting behavior then you need Wavelets. Wavelets are remarkable tools that can stretch and move like an amoeba to find the hidden “events” and then simultaneously give you their location, frequency, and shape. Wavelet Transforms allow this and many other capabilities not possible with conventional methods like the FFT.

This course is vastly different from traditional math-oriented Wavelet courses or books in that we use examples, figures, and computer demonstrations to show how to understand and work with Wavelets. This is a comprehensive, in-depth, up-to-date treatment of the subject, but from an intuitive, conceptual point of view. We do look at a few key equations from the traditional literature but only AFTER the concepts are demonstrated and understood. If desired, further study from scholarly texts and papers is then made much easier and more palatable when you already understand the fundamental equations and how they relate to the real world.

Click here for the tutorial

#5 Computational Electromagnetics

This 3-day course teaches the basics of CEM with application examples. Fundamental concepts in the solution of EM radiation and scattering problems are presented. Emphasis is on applying computational methods to practical applications. You will develop a working knowledge of popular methods such as the FEM, MOM, FDTD, FIT, and TLM including asymptotic and hybrid methods. Students will then be able to identify the most relevant CEM method for various applications, avoid common user pitfalls, understand model validation and correctly interpret results. Students are encouraged to bring their laptop to work examples using the provided FEKO Lite code. You will learn the importance of model development and meshing, post- processing for scientific visualization and presentation of results.

Click here for the tutorial

Course Outline, Samplers, and Notes

Determine for yourself the value of these or our other courses before you sign up. See our samples (See Slide Samples) on some of our courses.

Or check out the new ATI channel on YouTube.

After attending the course you will receive a full set of detailed notes from the class for future reference, as well as a certificate of completion. To see the complete course listing from ATI, click on the links at the bottom of the page.

Please visit our website for more valuable information.

About ATI and the Instructors

Since 1984, ATI has provided leading-edge public courses and onsite technical training to DoD and NASA personnel, as well as contractors. ATI short courses are designed to help you keep your professional knowledge up-to-date.

Our courses provide you a practical overview of space and defense technologies which provide a strong foundation for understanding the issues that must be confronted in the use, regulation and development such complex systems.

Our short courses are designed for individuals involved in planning, designing, building, launching, and operating space and defense systems. Whether you are a busy engineer, a technical expert or a project manager, you can enhance your understanding of complex systems in a short time. You will also become aware of the basic vocabulary essential to interact meaningfully with your colleagues.

ATI’s instructors are world-class experts who are the best in the business. They are carefully selected for their ability to clearly explain advanced technology.

U.S. Must Take Space Storm Threat Seriously, Experts Warn

admin — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:50:22 +0000

A severe solar storm has the potential to take down telecommunications and power grids, and the country needs to work on being better prepared, said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Lubchenco is also the U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere.
“This is not a matter of if, it’s simply a matter of when and how big,” Lubchenco said of the potential for a dangerous solar flare. “We have every reason to expect we’re going to be seeing more space weather in the coming years, and it behooves us to be smart and be prepared.”

The space weather threat is becoming more dire as our sun ramps up toward its period of solar maximum, predicted for around 2013. Activity on the sun fluctuates on a roughly 11-year cycle, and our star has been relatively dormant for a while.

That’s clearly starting to change, though, as evidenced by a class X solar flare – the strongest kind – that erupted from the sun Feb. 14.
“I think the events of this week certainly underscore how important it is for us to be paying attention to space weather and to be prepared to respond to, and mitigate, potential impacts,” Lubchenco said. “As we enter into a period of enhanced solar activity it seems pretty clear that we are going to be looking at the possibility of not only more solar events but also the possibility of some very strong events.”
The Feb. 14 flare unleashed a wave of charged particles that streamed immediately toward Earth, as well as coronal mass ejections, or blobs of plasma, that took days to arrive here. When they did, they interacted with Earth’s magnetic field to cause geomagnetic storms that wiped out radio communications in the Western Pacific Ocean and parts of Asia, and caused airlines to reroute some polar flights to avoid radio outages.

NEXT TIME COULD BE WORSE

However, experts say we got off fairly lucky with this recent solar storm, and that future eruptions could cause worse damage, particularly to the sensitive transformers and capacitors in power grids. If some of these were harmed, there could be power outages for days, weeks, months, or even, in the case of severe damage, years, experts warned.
“It turned out that we were quite well protected this time, so not much happened,” said European Space Agency scientist Juha-Pekka Luntama. “In another case things might have been different.”
Space weather hasn’t posed quite such a threat before, because during the last solar maximum, around 10 years ago, the world wasn’t as dependent on satellite telecommunications, cell phones and global positioning system (GPS) – all technologies that could be disrupted by solar flares.
“Many things we take for granted today are so much more prone to the effects of space weather than was the case during the last maximum,” Lubchenco said. The problem is likely to get even worse as the world could likely become more technologically dependent by the time the next solar maximum rolls around, and the next.

Russia Talks Of Permanent Moon Base

admin — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:51:55 +0000

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos says it is in talks with European and U.S. partners about creating permanent manned research bases on the moon.

“We don’t want the man to just step on the moon,” Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin said in a radio interview Thursday.

“Today, we know enough about it, we know that there is water in its polar areas,” he said, and “we are now discussing how to begin [the moon's] exploration with NASA and the European Space Agency.”

Talk of a base harkens back to Cold War-era plans to create a permanent outpost on the moon, a subject of interest to Soviet and U.S. scientists since the late 1950s, RIA Novosti reported.

Popovkin mentioned two options, to “either to set up a base on the moon or to launch a station to orbit around it.”

Russia is proceeding with plans to send two unmanned missions to the moon by 2020, the Luna Glob and the Luna Resource.

Ever dreamt of programming for NASA? Here is your chance!

Val — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:54:05 +0000

On January 4, 2012 NASA launched http://code.nasa.gov to further expand the agency’s open source software development. Now all the citizens can participate in NASA’s existing projects and well as discuss the progress of the projects on forums. This will give public an opportunity to help pioneer the future of space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research. Now the current projects include:

SunPy – project is an effort to create an open-source software library for solar physics using the Python programming language. More information at http://www.sunpy.org.

Save ( Synchronization, Archival, Validation, and IP Exchange) – lightweight framework for creating high availability systems

Mutil (Multi-Threaded Multi-Node Utilities) – set of standard utilities that employ multiple types of parallelism and other optimizations to achieve maximum performance on modern file systems.

RFPs and RFIs: Do You Know What to Always Include and What Should Never Be Included?

admin — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:48:43 +0000

Video Clip: Click to Watch

How to build solid RFIs and RFPs for complicated systems,

which will maximize the number of highly qualified bidders

This three-day course on proposal writing is designed for engineers, scientists, project managers and other professionals who design, build, test, buy or sell complex systems. Each topic is illustrated by real-world case studies discussed by experienced system development and acquisition professionals. Key topics are reinforced with small-team exercises. Over two hundred pages of sample Requests for Proposal (RFP) and Requests for Information (RFI) and are provided. Students assess real RFIs and RFPs in class using checklists and templates provided

You will become aware of the basic vocabulary essential to interact meaningfully with your colleagues. If you or your team are in need of more technical training, then boost your career with the knowledge needed to provide better, faster, and cheaper solutions for sophisticated DoD and NASA systems.

Why not take a short course? ATI short courses are less than a week long and are designed to help you keep your professional knowledge up-to-date. Our courses provide a practical overview of space and defense technologies which provide a strong foundation for understanding the issues that must be confronted in the use, regulation and development of complex systems.

What You Will Learn From This Course:

What are Requests for Proposal (RFP)?
How do they differ from Requests for Information (RFI)?
How can they help us cost-effectively buy robust systems that meet not only the specification but also meet the needs and expectations of the end users?
What makes “good” RFIs and RFPs?
What should always be included and what should never be included in them?
What is the one item that, if missing from the RFP, will ensure no reputable firm will bid the job?
What is the one thing that inexperienced RFP writers inadvertently do that guts the competitiveness (only one company will bid) and practically guarantees protests of any contract award?
What RFP components and features will attract the most qualified bidders?

Course Outline, Samplers, and Notes

BUILDING SOLID REQUESTS FOR PROPOSALS

After taking this course you will be able to write solid RFPs and RFIs and you will know how a well-crafted one is organized, structured, designed and built by an acquisition/procurement enterprise (either government or a contractor).

After attending the course you will receive a full set of detailed notes at the beginning of the class for future reference and can add notes and more detail based on the in-class interaction, as well as a certificate of completion. Please visit our website for more valuable information.

About ATI and the Instructors

Our mission here at ATI is to provide expert training and the highest quality professional development in space, communications, defense, sonar, radar, and signal processing. We are not a one-size-fits-all educational facility. Our short classes include both introductory and advanced courses.

ATI’s instructors are world-class experts who are the best in the business. They are carefully selected for their ability to clearly explain advanced technology.

Mack McKinney, president and founder of a consulting company, has worked in the defense industry since 1975, first as an Air Force officer for eight years, then with Westinghouse Defense and Northrop Grumman for 16 years, then with a SIGINT company in NY for six years. He now teaches, consults and writes Concepts of Operations for Boeing, Sikorsky, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, Raytheon Missile Systems, Joint Forces Command and all the uniformed services. He has US patents in radar processing and hyperspectral sensing.

Dates and Locations

The dates and locations of this short course are below:

Jan 31-Feb 2, 2012 Virginia Beach, VA

May 1-3, 2012 Virginia Beach, VA

Russia’s Phobos-Ground To Crash Into Indian Ocean

Val — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:55:13 +0000

Russia’s space agency predicts that the fragments of a failed Russian space probe’s could fall into the Indian Ocean, far away from any populated areas.

Roscosmos said yesterday that the Phobos-Ground’s debris could fall between Saturday and Monday anywhere along a broad swath between 51.4 degrees north to 51.4 degrees south.

That includes the bulk of the land surface, but spares most of Russia’s territory along with Scandinavia and a large part of Canada.

The agency said the mid-point in the three day window at 1448 IST Sunday when fragments could come crashing down correspond to a place in the Indian Ocean, about 1,700 kilometres west of Jakarta.

Roscomos said, however, that the forecast will be clarified as the probe’s orbit draws closer to Earth.

Would you like to see Earth’s night lights from space? Here is your chance!

Val — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:49:15 +0000

Thanks to some Tweeter happy astronauts and a new camera technology that was able to shoot high-resolution photos even as the station moved at a rapid 17,500 miles an hour some 240 miles above Earth’s surface.

The amazing photo tweets were first noticed in 2010 by author L. Douglas Keeney. He went through 300,000 NASA images and chose the best 400 photos for his book Lights of Mankind: The Earth at Night as Seen from Space.

Here are just a few of them. Enjoy!

Psssst…What Have You Heard about ATI’s Acoustics Course?

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:30:47 +0000

A Typical Acoustic Impulse Response of a Room

Video Clip: Click to Watch

ATI’S ACOUSTICS FUNDAMENTALS, MEASUREMENTS & APPLICATIONS COURSE

Here is what we have heard from some of our students:

“Great instructor made the course interesting and informative. Helped clear-up many misconceptions I had about sound and its measurement”
“Enjoyed the in-class demonstrations; they help explain the concepts. Instructor helped me with a problem I was having at work, worth the price of the course!”

This three-day course is intended for engineers and other technical personnel and managers who have a work-related need to understand basic acoustics concepts and how to measure and analyze sound. This is an introductory course and participants need not have any prior knowledge of sound or vibration. Each topic is illustrated by appropriate applications, in-class demonstrations, and worked-out numerical examples.

Since 1984, the Applied Technology Institute (ATI) has provided leading-edge public courses and onsite technical training to DoD and NASA personnel, as well as contractors. Whether you are a busy engineer, a technical expert or a project manager, you can enhance your understanding of complex systems in a short time. You will become aware of the basic vocabulary essential to interact meaningfully with your colleagues. If you or your team is in need of more technical training, then boost your career with the knowledge needed to provide better, faster, and cheaper solutions for sophisticated systems.

Course Outline and Notes

The course starts with introductory concepts. With this background, the students are then schooled in waves, radiation and measurements. The course concludes with a discussion of representative applications, including outdoor sound propagation (temperature and wind effects) and environmental effects.

What You Will Learn:

How to make proper sound level measurements
How to analyze and report acoustic data
The basis of decibels (dB) and the A-weighting scale
How intensity probes work and allow near-field sound measurements
How to measure radiated sound power and sound transmission loss
How to use third-octave bands and narrow-band spectrum analyzers
How the source-path-receiver approach is used in noise control engineering
How sound builds up in enclosures like vehicle interiors and rooms

After attending this course you will receive a full set of detailed notes at the beginning of the class for future reference and can add notes and more detail based on the in-class interaction, as well as a certificate of completion. Each student will also receive a copy of the textbook, Acoustics: An Introduction by Heinrich Kuttruff.

Please visit our website st the links below for more valuable information.

About ATI and the Instructors

ATI’s instructors are world-class experts who are the best in the business. They are carefully selected for their ability to clearly explain advanced technology.

Dr. Alan D. Stuart, Associate Professor Emeritus of Acoustics, Penn State, has over forty years experience in the field of sound and vibration. He has degrees in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and engineering acoustics. For over thirty years he has taught courses on the Fundamentals of Acoustics, Structural Acoustics, Applied Acoustics, Noise Control Engineering, and Sonar Engineering on both the graduate and undergraduate levels as well as at government and industrial organizations throughout the country.

Dates and Locations

The dates and locations of this short course, are below:

April 10-12, 2012 in Silver Spring, MD

July 17-19, 2012 in Bremmerton, WA

Will Air Force’s Secret Robot Space Plane Be Spying on China?

Val — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:19:38 +0000

The U.S. Air Force’s top secret X-37B space plane may be spying on China, according to a report in Spaceflight magazine.
The unmanned craft was launched into Earth’s orbit 10 months ago, but the Air Force has kept quiet on its mystery mission, where it’s been, and when it will return. Faithful onlookers now believe the space plane might be snooping on China’s new space station, Tiangong-1 — after discovering how closely their orbits matched.

The U.S. Air Force launched the robotic X-37B space plane in early 2010 on a space mission that remains a secret — even after the craft touched ground 225 days later at Vandenberg Air Force Base. In early 2011, the ship took off again on its latest mission.

“Space-to-space surveillance is a whole new ball game made possible by a finessed group of sensors and sensor suites, which we think the X-37B may be using to maintain a close watch on China’s nascent space station,” Spaceflight Editor Dr. David Baker told the BBC.
Built by Boeing’s Phantom Works division, the 29-foot-long X-37B spacecraft was originally developed by NASA in 1999 before it was eventually taken over and classified by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The robot craft’s official purpose is to test new spaceflight technologies but there has been speculation about X-37B’s potential military capabilities with Iran’s PressTV calling the vehicle a “secret space warplane” — an opinion partly echoed by Brian Weeden, a technical adviser to the Secure World Foundation and a former orbital analyst with the U.S. Air Force.
Weeden suspects that the X-37B may be testing out gear for the National Reconnaissance Office, the intelligence agency that builds and operates the U.S.’s spy satellites — which would explain the secrecy.
“As we know through experience, everything and anything about them [the NRO] is classified,” Weeden told Space.com early last year.
The space plane, also known as the Orbital Test Vehicle-2, was boosted into Earth orbit atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 5, 2011, and amateur skywatchers have been keenly tracking it ever since.
“The parallels with X-37B [and Tiangong-1] are clear,” Baker said in this month’s Spaceflight. “With a period differential of about 19 seconds, the two vehicles will migrate toward or against each other, converging or diverging, roughly every 170 orbits.”
But Weeden and others believe the orbital similarities between the two could be a red herring.
“A typical spy satellite is in a polar orbit, which gives you access to the whole Earth,” Weeden told the BBC.
“The X-37B is in a much lower inclination which means it can only see a very narrow band of latitudes — and the only thing that’s of real interest in that band is the Middle East and Afghanistan.”