| Blog - A Nuclear-Powered Mars Hopper and Blog - A Laptop You Can Break Down by Hand, Then Recycle |
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Researchers at the Space Research Center in the United Kingdom have developed a concept for a Mars rover that would use nuclear power and propellant gathered from the Martian atmosphere to hop a kilometer at a time. A vehicle that hops such a distance could cover diverse areas faster than current wheeled rovers, says Hugo Williams, lead researcher for the new hopper concept.Taking giant leaps across a planet is not a new idea. Researchers at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts have developed a prototype of such a vehicle. But the recent work stands out because it would gather carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere, heat it up, and discharges it through a rocket nozzle to propel the vehicle. While it will take the vehicle about a week to refuel after making a hop, Williams says having its fuel source in-situ would extend its operational time and range. [Read the full article] Researchers demonstrate a collaborative augmented reality game.Credit: Courtesy of Columbia University.Augmented reality (AR) places interactive, virtual objects and effects over the real world, and it has huge potential for gaming. Imagine wearing an AR headset to play chess with animated virtual pieces on a real chess board, or to fight computerized zombies running into your own home.For this to happen, computer scientists need to make sure players' views and motions are in sync, which is doubly hard with two players, because both players need to see the virtual objects in the same space. A new AR environment designed by computer scientists at Columbia University is a step toward this kind of two-player AR gaming. A game, dubbed "ARmonica," lets two people create a floating, musical world to collaboratively make music.Each player wears a pair of Vuzix AR glasses, through which they see a real-time video feed of their environment (slightly different for each eye). [Read the full article] For decades, rocket scientists have dreamed of combining the solid and liquid-fueled engines found in launch vehicles into a single "hybrid" engine. Such an engine would possess the stability of solid-fueled engines but the controllability of liquid-fueled engines.While hybrid engines have appeared on craft such as Virgin Galactic's SpaceShip One, they are not as common as they could be, in part because it's difficult to get the two phases of matter within them -- solid and liquid -- to combine during a burn completely and consistently.One solution just revealed in a patent issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would be to create complicated channels within which liquid oxidizer could flow in a block of solid rocket fuel by using stereolithography, also known as 3D printing. In other words, it would literally "print" a tube of rocket fuel one millimeter-thin layer at a time. [Read the full article] 
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