Orbiting gas station could refuel lunar missions

FORGET huge, expensive rockets. A plan being examined by a US government panel would allow smaller, cheaper rockets to fly to the moon and beyond by stopping off at an "orbiting gas station".

The panel convened by order of the White House to assess NASA's plans for the future of human space flight - including the project to send people back to the moon by 2020 - is pondering a radical idea to set up orbiting depots at which relatively small, inexpensive rockets could stop off to pick up fuel.

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Robotics insights through flies' eyes

The fly's brain is hardly bigger than a pinhead, too small by far to enable the fly's feats if it functioned exactly the way the human brain does. It must have a simpler and more efficient way of processing images from the eyes into visual perception, and that is a subject of intense interest for robot builders. Even today, robots have great difficulty perceiving their surroundings through their cameras, and even more difficulty making sense of what they see.

The way flies process the images from their immobile eyes is completely different from they way the human brain processes visual signals. Movements in space produce so-called "optical flux fields" that characterize specific kinds of motion definitively.

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LM Aegis BMD Weapon System Intercepts Ballistic Missile Target

Lockheed Martin's (NYSE: LMT) Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) System today destroyed a ballistic missile target in an at-sea firing under operationally realistic conditions. The event also successfully demonstrated two new capabilities on other ships. These tests mark the continued successful engineering development of the next generational upgrade in Aegis BMD capability.

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Blu-ray Burner Turns Your Desktop Into a Spin Zone

If your hard drive is running out of room to store all the movies, music and software you've accumulated, maybe it's time to get a Blu-ray burner. With the ability to store up to 50 GB on each $3.50 disc, backing up your bootlegs has never been cheaper.

Consider the Mercury Pro 8X Blu-ray Pioneer BDR-203 External. Engineering geeks at OWC packed the utilitarian box with four different interfaces: Firewire 400, Firewire 800, eSATA and USB 2.0, even including the cables for each. Backward-compatible for every type of DVD and CD writable and playable format, it works equally well on Macs (OS X 10.3 and higher) and Windows PCs (XP/Vista).

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Tougher alloys for titanium tanks

Military vehicles could be armoured with titanium alloys better able to withstand bullets and explosions in the future.

The tougher material is the intended result of research being conducted by Prof Wei Sha at Queen's University's School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering.

Sha is developing computer models that will reveal the reasons why titanium deforms and retains damage from strong impacts and fast applied forces.

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Nature-inspired compound

The large-scale production of hydrogen from water and sunlight could be possible with a new catalytic system that takes inspiration from nature.

The five-year research project - sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) - will create a compound that mimics the active site of the enzyme organisms used to convert hydrogen ions to hydrogen gas during anaerobic (without oxygen) respiration.

If successful, the project could provide a springboard towards large-scale water photolysis (converting light energy to chemical energy) for a sustainable hydrogen economy.

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Fossil Fuels without the Fossils?

A theory long on the fringes of petroleum science gained some support from new research this week, but it is probably not enough to launch the concept into the mainstream.

The idea: What if fossil fuels were not fossil after all? What if hydrocarbons could form from chemical reactions deep inside the earth, rather than from the "pressure cooking" of organic matter?

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Blackout Bomb: Air Force's High-Powered Microwave Weapons Fry Enemy Equipment

In modern warfare, where missions are sometimes over in minutes, a blind enemy is a defeated enemy. The electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon detonated miles aboveground would zap an army’s surveillance equipment, but not without causing heavy collateral damage. Instead, a new Air Force tool will fry electronics using high-power microwaves emitted by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

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How Software Found the Air France Wreckage

When Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro disappeared over the Atlantic in the early hours of 1 June, search and rescue teams had to look for survivors in an area almost as big as Great Britain. Not knowing exactly where the Airbus 330-200 went down, French and Brazilian authorities turned to new software developed for the U.S. Coast Guard that uses the location of debris to look back in time to estimate the most likely site of an accident.

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The LED's Dark Secret

The blue light-emitting diode, arguably the greatest optoelectronic advance of the past 25 years, harbors a dark secret: Crank up the current and its efficiencies will plummet. The problem is known as droop, and it’s not only puzzling the brightest minds in the field, it’s also threatening the future of the electric lighting industry.

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Trident II D5 Missile Achieves 127 Successful Test Flights

The U.S. Navy supported the May 26 launch of a U.K. Royal Navy Trident II D5 Fleet Ballistic Missile (FBM) built by Lockheed Martin. The unarmed missile was launched from the submerged Royal Navy submarine HMS Victorious (UK SSBN 06) in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Trident II D5 missile now has achieved 127 consecutive successful test flights since 1989 - a record unmatched by any other large ballistic missile or space launch vehicle.

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