Excalibur XM982 GPS Shell

Aegis Missile Defense Test

Orion to the Moon - NASA ANIMATION

Solara Launches A Global, 2-Way Handheld Interactive Satellite Text Messenger

Solara Remote Data Delivery Incorporated announced today the release of the
Field Tracker 2100, an interactive text messenger with automatic GPS tracking and 2-way communications anywhere on earth. The Solara Field Tracker 2100 operates over the Iridium satellite network, making it the only handheld device with on-screen interactive text messaging and GPS tracking with truly global coverage.

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NASA offers $1.5 million for 200MPG aircraft

NASA today opened up the completion for its Green Flight Challenge which offers up to $1.5 million for an aircraft that can average at least 100 mph on a 200-mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon.

Co-sponsored by the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency (CAFE) Foundation the competition is scheduled for July 2011 at the Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa, Calif. A variety of innovative experimental aircraft using electrical, solar, bio-fuel or hybrid propulsion are expected to enter. Several major universities and aircraft builders have expressed their intention to enter teams in the challenge, NASA stated.

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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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Safety of combat military vehicles examined

A Queen's University Belfast academic is working on research that could help protect the lives of military based in Afghanistan.
Professor Wei Sha from Queen's School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering has been testing how safe vehicles with titanium alloys are when attacked by bullets or explosions.

Professor Sha's research examines the damage tolerance of the popular material titanium. It is the first research of its kind to reveal the reasons behind the deformation and damage of titanium alloys under strong impact or fast applied force.

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Researchers Develop “Brain-Reading” Methods to Uncover a Person’s Mental State

The brain perceives information before it reaches a person’s awareness. But until now, there was little way to determine what specific mental tasks were taking place prior to the point of conscious awareness.

Scientists at Rutgers University in Newark and the University of California, Los Angeles have developed a highly accurate way to peer into the brain to uncover a person’s mental state and what sort of information is being processed before it reaches awareness.

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Tech Smoothes Way to Cheaper Electronics

A new technique to produce ultra-smooth metal surfaces could secure a future of sensitive medical detectors, more efficient solar cells and faster computers, according to new research published today in the journal Science.

The key to this new technique is a five-minute epoxy that could actually be found at a local hardware store.

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Raytheon Awarded $16 M for Aegis Radar Contracts

The U.S. Navy has awarded Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) two contracts that extend the company's legacy of performance and support for the Aegis weapons system.Under the contracts, Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) will provide an AN/SPY-1 radar transmitter ordnance alteration kit to enhance the radar's processing performance and multi-mission capability. The company will also continue its performance-based logistics support, including spares and repairs for Aegis weapons systems used by the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. Raytheon will also manage system repairs in support of foreign military sales.

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U.S. Suspends Delivery on GPS-Guided 155mm Shells

The U.S. Army has temporarily suspended delivery of Raytheon's GPS-guided, 155mm Excalibur artillery rounds due to problems with its Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), service officials said.

"The XM982 [Excalibur] round is required to operate in an environment that exceeds 15,000 times the force of gravity. There was an inherent lack of design robustness in the qualified IMU configuration which resulted in a failure rate of approximately five percent.

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Barracuda UAV Returns to the Air

EADS Defence & Security has resumed flight tests of its Barracuda UAV, following the loss of the first prototype. The Barracuda, dubbed "the largest UAV ever built in Europe" by the manufacturer, has been test-flown from CFB Goose Bay, Canada.

In the course of four flights, the Barracuda flew autonomously along preprogrammed routes over Newfoundland and Labrador. A data link to a ground station was maintained for flight safety purposes.

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Out of Whole Cloth: Tarian Rocket Protection

Working with Britain’s Ministry of Defense, a transatlantic firm named AmSafe has come up with a novel solution to anti-tank rockets: fabric panels mounted on the sides of trucks and armored vehicles.

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Details of the Ares I Upper Stage

The committee charged with reviewing the future of U.S. human spaceflight is listening to Ares I team members describe how the rocket will work. They must convince the independent panel of experts that the rocket's design is safe and reliable, and that Ares I should be the vehicle the U.S. uses to send humans to the moon and eventually Mars.

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Russian Navy ends first stage of Nerpa sub trials in Far East

The first stage of new sea trials of Russia's Nerpa nuclear attack submarine, which was damaged in a fatal accident in previous tests, has been successfully completed, the Amur shipyard said on Monday.

The vessel resumed sea trials on July 10 in the Sea of Japan following extensive repairs.

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Self-Healing Wiring May Be Future Electrical Standard

elf-healing wire technology, developed as part of an FAA initiative to combat the problems associated with aging aircraft, has been licensed to Ohio-based Pinnacle Systems–its first commercial licensee. As part of a suite of research projects at the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI) aimed at eliminating the time-consuming task of tracing wire faults, wire that can repair its own insulation after it is damaged was developed by research chemist Robert Kauffman.

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Air Force tests anti-ground C-130 laser

An Air Force C-130 incinerated a dummy ground target by firing a megawatt-class chemical oxygen iodine laser at White Sands Missile Range, N.M, during a June 13 test of the service’s Advanced Tactical Laser (ATL), Boeing officials said.

“We fired the laser in-flight. We hit a target board on the ground,” said Gary Fitzmire, vice president of Boeing’s directed energy systems.

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Total Recall: Pentagon Looks to ‘Optimize’ Troops’ Minds

The U.S. military is racing to master the mind. Last year, Pentagon researchers kick-started a program to replicate a cat’s brain. In April, they requested proposals that would reproduce a monkey mind — and then test its neural pathways to understand brain damage. They’re even trying to create an entirely new model for human cognition that’s based on thermodynamics; your brain as heat energy.

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Organic LED

Silicon Valley-based SRI International and the Japanese firm SDK have produced an efficient organic light-emitting diode (OLED) light source that could one day replace incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs.

A combination of SDK's light-emitting polymer materials and SRI's cavity organic light-emitting diode (COLED) technology has enabled researchers to achieve an output of 30 lumen per watt for blue light – higher than any other reported polymer OLED device.

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Point Blank, DuPont launch new armor line

U.S. company Point Blank Solutions Inc. in collaboration with DuPont Protection Technologies announced the launch of new ballistic armor systems.

Point Blank Solutions announced the release of its Hi-Lite XP ballistic armor integrated with DuPont's Kevlar XP woven fabric technologies for a new protective body armor system. Tennessee-based Protective Apparel Corporation of America is also releasing its Perform XP armor system with the DuPont woven fabric.

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