Multinational company Boeing brings SENSE NanoSats to Air Force

Boeing, an American aerospace and defense corporation, has given two Space Environmental NanoSat Experiment (SENSE) satellites to the U.S Air Force

These nanosats are 30 x 10 x 10 centimeters in size, and weigh less than nine pounds each. They are scheduled to be sent into orbit in the summer of 2013 on the ORS-3 mission, built to collect and transmit weather data. Each of the nanosat contains a GPS receiver and sensor so that it can gather vdata to help support assessments and weather prediction. These nanosats also have a miniature S-band transceiver to downlink mission and spacecraft data at one megabit per second.

Boeing Phantom Works Advanced Space & Intelligence Systems Director Bruce Chesley said in a statement, "The SENSE nanosats offer customers an affordable, operationally robust option to conduct military missions using spacecraft no larger than a standard loaf of bread.”

What's inside Mariner 2?

Mariner 2 (“Mariner-Venus 1962”), an American space probe to Venus, the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days, was the first robotic space probe, a scientific space exploration mission in which a spacecraft leaves Earth and explores space, to conduct a successful planetary encounter.

The first successful spacecraft/spaceship, a vehicle, vessel or machine designed to fly in outer space, in the Mariner program, which launched a series of robotic interplanetary probes designed to investigate Mars, Venus and Mercury from 1962 to 1973, a program conducted by the American space agency NASA (“National Aeronautics and Space Administration”) who is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research, in conjunction with Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it was a simplified version of the Block I spacecraft of the Ranger program, a series of unmanned space mission by the United States in the 1960s whose objectives was to obtain the first close-up images of the surface of the Moon; and an exact copy of Mariner 1, the first spacecraft of the American Mariner program. The missions of Mariner 1 and 2 spacecraft are together sometimes known as the Mariner R missions. Mariner 2 passed within 35,000 kilometers (22,000 mi) of
Venus on December 14, 1962.

The Mariner probe consisted of a 100 cm (39.4 in) diameter hexagonal bus, to which solar panels (also “solar modules,” “photovoltaic module,” or “photovoltaic panel”), a packaged, connected assembly of photovoltaic cells, instrument booms, and antennas (“aerial”), an electrical device which converts electric power into radio waves, and vice versa, were attached The scientific instruments on board the Mariner spacecraft were: two radiometers (one of each for the microwave--radio waves with wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter, or equivalently, with frequencies between 300 MHz (0.3 GHz) and 300 GHz--and infrared light (“IR”) portions--electromagnetic radiation with longer wavelengths than those of visible light extending from the nominal red edge of the visible spectrum at 0.74 micrometres to 300 micrometers--of the electromagnetic spectrum, the range of all possible frequencies of electromagnetic radiation), devices for measuring the radiant flux (power) of electromagnetic radiation; a micrometeorite (a tiny meteor: a small particle of rock in  space, usually weighing less than a gram) sensor; a solar plasma (in physics and chemistry, is a state of matter similar to gas in which a certain portion of the particles is ionized) sensor; a charged particle sensor; and a magnetometer, a measuring instrument used to measure the strength and perhaps the direction of magnetic fields.

These instruments were designed to measure the temperature distribution on the surface of Venus, as well as making basic measurements of Venus’ atmosphere, a layer of gases that surrounds Venus and that is held in place by the gravity of the planet. Due to the planet’s thick, featureless cloud cover, no camera, or a device that records images that can be stored directly, transmitted to another location, or both, were included in the Mariner unit. Mariner 10, an American robotic space probe launched by NASA on November 3, 1973, to fly by the planets Mercury and Venus, later discovered that extensive cloud detail was visible in ultraviolet (UV) light, electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength shorter than that of visible light, but longer than X-rays, that is, in the range 10 nm to 400 nm, corresponding to photon energies from 3 ev to 12 eV.

See: SpaceX CRS-1's Mission Plan: Flight Day 1 and 2 (October 8-9) 

Science, engineering and technology

The distinction between science, engineering and technology is not always clear. Science, a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe, is the reasoned investigation, or having the capacity for consciously making sense of things for establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices, institutions, and beliefs based on new or existing information; or the study of phenomena, aimed at discovering enduring principles among elements of the phenomenal world, or those observable occurrence, by employing formal (utterances, conceptually similar to a ritual although typically secular and less involved) techniques such as the scientific method, a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.

Technologies, on the other hand, are not usually exclusively products of science, because they have to satisfy requirements such as: utility, which in economics, is a representation of preferences over some set of goods and services; usability, the ease of use and learnability of  a human-made object; and safety, the state of being “safe,” the condition of being protected against physical, social, spiritual, financial, political, occupational, psychological, educational or other types or consequences of failure, damage, error, accidents, harm or any other event which could be considered non-desirable.

Lastly, engineering is the goal-oriented (GO) process of designing and making tools and systems to exploit natural phenomena for practical human means, often (but not always) using results and techniques from science; describing variability in dispositional or situational goal preferences that no individual implicitly sets for him/herself in achievement situations. The development of technology may draw upon many fields of knowledge, including scientific, engineering, mathematical (the abstract study of topics encompassing quantity, structure, space, change, and other properties; it had no generally accepted definition), linguistic (“language” is the human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, and “a language” is any specific example of such system), and historical knowledge (an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about these events), to achieve some practical result.

Technology is often a consequence of science and engineering--although technology as a human activity precedes the two fields. For example, science might study the flow of electrons, subatomic particles with a negative elementary electric charge, in electrical conductors, a material which contains moving electric charges in physics, by using already-existing tools and knowledge. This new-found knowledge may then be used by engineers to create new tools and machines, such as semiconductors, electrical conductivity intermediate to that of a conductor and an insulator; computers, a general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a finite set of arithmetic or logical operations; and other forms of advanced technology. In this sense, scientists and engineers may both be considered technologists; the three fields are often considered as one for the purposes of research and references.

The exact relations between science and technology, a term of art used to encompass the relationship between science and technology, in particular have been debated scientists, historians and policymakers in the late 20th century, in part because the debate can inform the funding of basic and applied science. In the immediate wake of World War II (“Second World War,” “WWII,” “WW2”), a global war that was underway by 1939 and ended in 1945, for example, in the United States it was widely considered that technology was simply “applied science” and that to fund basic science was to reap technological results in due time. An articulation of this philosophy could be found explicitly in “Science--The Endless Frontier,” a treatise on postwar science policy by Vannevar Bush, an American engineer, inventor and science administrator known for his work in analog computers, for his role an initiator and administrator of the Manhattan Project, for founding Raytheon, and for the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer with a structure analogous to that of the World Wide Web: “New products, new industries, and more jobs require continuous additions to knowledge of the laws of nature... This essential new knowledge can be obtained only through basic scientific research.” In the late-1960s, however, this view came under attack, leading towards initiatives to fund science for specific tasks (initiatives resisted by the scientific community). The issue remains contentious--though most analysis resist the model that technology simply is a result of scientific research.

See: Fathers of the Modern Medical Science

History of materials science

The history of materials science, an interdisciplinary field applying the properties of matter to various areas of science and engineering, is the study of how different materials were used as influenced by: the history of Earth, encompassing the development of the planet Earth from its formation to the present day; and the culture (a modern concept based on a term first used in classical antiquity by the Roman orator, Cicero: “cultura animi”) of the peoples, or nation who share a common language, ethnicity, descent, or history, of the Earth.

The material of choice of a given era is often a defining point. The following phrases such as the following are good examples: Stone Age, a broad prehistoric period during which stone was widely used to make implements with a sharp-edge, a point, or a percussion surface; Bronze Age, a period characterized by the use of copper and its alloy bronze as the chief hard materials in the manufacture of some implements and weapons; and the Steel Age, which is actually the Industrial Revolution, a period from 1750 to 1850 where changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times.

Originally deriving from the manufacture of ceramics, an inorganic, nonmetallic solid prepared by the action of heat and subsequent cooling, and its putative derivative metallurgy, materials science is one of the oldest forms of engineering and applied science. Modern materials science evolved directly from metallurgy, a domain of materials science that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their intermetallic compounds, and their mixtures, which are called alloys, which itself evolved from mining and (likely) ceramics and the use of fire.

A major breakthrough in the understanding of materials occurred in the late 19th century, when the American scientist Josiah Willard Gibbs, an American scientist who made important theoretical contributions to physics, chemistry, and mathematics, demonstrated that the thermodynamic properties (the branch of natural science concerned with heat and its relation to other forms of energy and work) related to atomic structure, the basic unit of matter that consists of a dense central nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons, in various phases, which in the physical sciences, is a region of space (a thermodynamic system), throughout which all physical properties of a material are essentially uniform, are related to the physical properties of a material.

Important elements of modern materials science are a product of the space race, a mid-to-late 20th century competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (USA) for supremacy in space exploration: The understanding and engineering, or the science, skill, and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and also build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes, of the metallic alloys, a mixture or metallic solid solution composed of two or more elements, and silica (“silicon dioxide”), an oxide of silicon with the chemical formula SiO2, and carbon (the chemical element with symbol C and atomic number 6) materials; used in the construction of space vehicles enabling the exploration of space.

Materials science has driven, and been driven by, the development of revolutionary technologies such as: plastics, any of a wide range of synthetic or semi-synthetic organic solids that are moldable; semiconductors, which has electrical conductivity intermediate to that of a conductor and an insulator; and biomaterials, or any matter, surface, or construct that interacts with biological systems.          

Before the 1960s (and in some cases decades after), many “materials science” departments were named “metallurgy” departments, from a 19th and early 20th century emphasis on metals. The field has since broadened to include every class of materials, including: ceramics (ceramic engineering, the science and technology of creating objects from inorganic, non-metallic materials); polymers, chemical compound or mixture of compounds consisting of repeating structural units created through a process of polymerization; semiconductors; magnetic materials (magnetism is a property of materials that respond to an applied magnetic field); medical implant materials, a medical device manufactured to replace a missing biological structure, support a damaged biological structure, or enhance an existing biological structure; and biological materials (materiomics, the holistic study of material systems).

See: Telcos and Broadband Plans

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