Really Rocket Science

Chelyabinsk is one happy town. They've come a long way from being "the most contaminated spot on the planet."

Here's an interesting story from Slashdot:

Citizens of the Russian town Chelyabinsk calculated when the satellite, QuickBird, which takes images for Google Earth and Google Maps, would cross above their city and used people to make a giant smiley face. A rock concert on the main square attracted many people and everyone got a yellow cape. It looks like someone at Google was quicker than usual to put up the new data. Maybe Google likes the idea of an entire town working hard to get its 15 minutes of fame. The article has a screenshot of Google Maps and images taken directly at the event."

They did pretty good:

This isn't the first time that Google Earth or Google Maps has captured something interesting from space. Longtime readers of Really Rocket Science will recall the Ipod that fell to Earth, which we wrote about way back in March of 2006:

But there's more to be seen than "Ipods" and smiley faces in the world of Google Earth. GoogleSightSeeing.com -- whose tag line is "Why Bother Seeing the World for Real?" has a great series of blog posts on cool sights that you can see right from your computer desk. Be sure to check out this map of global points of interest.

Here's a clip on Chelyabinsk:

It's hard to believe for some of us who think of dial-up internet as a thing of the past, but up to 10 million Americans who live in our nation's most remote places still don't have the option of DSL or cable internet.

But dial up won't suffice in today's age of YouTube and World of Warcraft, so what to do?

The answer is satellite broadband Internet. 

We've written in the past about several of the players in the market, such as Wild Blue, HughesNet, and Spacenet's Starband.  But today we want to focus on SkyWay USA, which touts itself as "rural America's low-cost satellite provider."

For just $49 in equipment costs (after a rebate) and a monthly basic subscription of $29.95, you can be up and running with SkyWay USA in a matter of days. Installation is so easy, according to this press release (caution if you're still on dial-up: opens in PDF) that Skyway claims they've even had a 69 year old grandmother install the system.

So how does it work?

Skyways use a hybrid or combination model, using your phone line for sending commands (upload) and satellite for content (download).

For capacity, they use Echostar Fixed Satellite Services -- at least according to MarketWatch. (On their own website, SkyWay says it is partnering with SES Americom.)

FSS is the division of EchoStar that uses DISH Network's excess capacity. Dean Olmstead,  who was behind the AMERICOM2Home concept, notes that SkyWay USA will be using both the Ku- and Ka-band capacity of Echostar FSS.  

Qualcomm is teaming up with SkyTerra’s Mobile Satellite Ventures (MSV) and ICO Global Communications to integrate satellite communications into mass-market cellular handsets, Wireless Week reports:

Under the agreement, Qualcomm will integrate satellite and cellular communication technology by developing a satellite protocol and including it in the firmware of select Qualcomm multimode baseband chips.  Qualcomm also plans to support the L- and S-Band frequencies, in which MSV and ICO operate, in select RF processors.

In essence, the same mobile chipsets at the heart of wireless devices will let handset makers produce satellite-capable devices at comparable scale and cost.

I guess this might mean the end of the "can you hear me now?" commercials, eh?

The quality of the players in this venture (no pun intended) bode well for its ultimate outcome. Qualcomm developed its satellite-based asset-tracking service, OmniTRACS, years before GPS technology became commercially available. OmniTRACS  is what's inside those little white domes you see on on Sears trucks.

Here's a video of how it works: 

Qualcomm is also working on the Google Android phone, which is supported by the Android open-source operating system and intended as a major competitor to the Apple iPhone:

Qualcomm is likely to face stiff competition in the future from chipmakers who want in on the Android action. 

Perhaps we'll see similar functionality as what's found in the Thuraya system, with the Android switching between GSM and satellite as required?

Time will tell.

The Shenzhou VII spacecraft will blast off tomorrow with three astronauts aboard, one of whom will be the first Chinese to walk in space:

The taikonauts, as they are known in the mainland, will be equipped with space-age gadgets as well as down- to-earth pencils.

Responding to the challenge experienced by international experts in producing a writing instrument that works in no-gravity conditions, mainland scientists came up with the common lead pencil. Thicker than the earth variety, China's space pencil has a special carbon compound.

Shenzhou VII will release a small satellite to monitor the operation of the spacecraft itself and the progress of the spacewalk. During the mission, new satellite communications technology will be tried out as well.

China is using five satellite tracking ships to monitor the mission. They're now in place:

The final Yuanwang ship arrived at its destination on Monday, said Jian Shilong, director with the China Maritime Tracking and Control Department.

The ships will remotely track and support the Shenzhou VII space shuttle which will blast off in late September.

Four ships are on the Pacific ocean and one is on the Atlantic.

"In previous missions including the Shenzhou V and Shenzhou VI missions, only four tracking ships were deployed," Jian said. "We added one more to the Shenzhou VII mission to monitor the taikonaut's extra-vehicular activities."

Jian said the tracking ships will monitor the entire space walk and also keep tabs on the depressurization of the orbital module when taikonauts leave and re-enter the spaceship.

The Yuanwang ships can control the shuttle's solar panels, its orbit maneuvers and maintenance.

 In all, China boasts a fleet of six Yuanwang space tracking ships which have carried out 68 expeditions and traveled more than1.4 million sea miles in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans.

The tracking ships, combined with 20 terrestrial surveying stations, constitute China's space telemetry network.

Why the extra ship? Because the planned space walk is a big deal in Chinese popular culture -- presenting an unprecedented [communications] challenge for the Chinese, who want to provide seamless, high-quality live video feeds of the outing.

A space industry source explains:

The source said China had proved to the world it could maintain long-distance communication with its lunar project, but stable broadband communication had always been a barrier for Chinese technology. The deficiency meant China was still unable to compete with the US and Russia in the civilian commercial communication satellite markets.

But in the past couple of years, China had achieved several breakthroughs in antennas that were used for rapid communication with the Earth, and the space walk "will be a window to show how much China has caught up in this highly important field", the source said.

Because the antenna was directional and must be pointed to a small target area, the source said the astronaut would probably emerge from the spacecraft while orbiting over China, to enable the Chinese people to witness the event.

 And what will they do on the spacewalk? Nothing much, really:

When asked about what the astronaut will actually do outside the spacecraft Qi said he once suggested retrieving the national flag that hangs outside the spaceship. After consideration it was finally decided the astronaut would perform some test and control experiments. He added, "Whether it's fetching the national flag or doing some experiments, the astronaut will have to do something, so that it's not just a case of proving our ability to put someone outside the spaceship."

In Europe, there's been a huge coordinated effort by scientists to monitor the state of the environment through the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security program, or GMES for short.

Of course, GMES is a bit of a tongue twister, which is why GMES now has a new name: Kopernikus, named, of course, after the Polish astronomer.

Their motto is "We care for a safer world."  Involving projects in numerous countries around the world, the objective of Kopernikus is to monitor the state of the environment on land, at sea and in the atmosphere and to improve the security of the citizens in a world facing an increased risk of natural and other disasters.

The ESA provides additional information:

More than 40 European and non-European Earth Observation satellites have united to provide data to GMES Services over the next years. ESA will coordinate the data acquisitions seeking to optimise resources from the variety of European and non-European EO satellite missions. Considered missions include ESA Member States’ missions, such as France’s Spot and Pleiades satellites, Germany’s TerraSAR-X, Italy’s CosmoSkyMed, the UK-led DMC constellation (including the soon-to-be launched DMC-UK2 and Spain’s Deimos-1), as well as Canada’s Radarsat, Israel’s Eros and other non-European missions distributed through European companies. In addition, ESA will act as data provider for its own EO missions, such as Envisat and ERS-2, as well as its Third Party Missions.

Here's a great video of how the birds give scientists a nice view of the earth:

The 49th state has been in the news lately, but we heard from the 50th state yesterday when Sen. Daniel Inouye raised the alarm that the next president could be a victim of the current administration’s handling of the digital TV transition:

“I am troubled that a bipartisan and noncontroversial public policy goal, intended to help our emergency first responders better serve and protect the American people, may end up as an albatross around the neck of our next president,” Inouye said.

The House will hold a hearing tomorrow morning on the status of the DTV transmission; the Senate will hold one next week.

This group of potential tube casualties includes a disproportionately large portion of Spanish-speaking, elderly and low-income Americans. Of the 21 million US households that rely exclusively on over-the-air television, the GAO found that almost half had incomes under $30,000 and that about 28 percent of them were Hispanic.

In advance of today's House Commerce Committee "DTV Transition" hearing, the Consumer Electronics Association released new research findings.

According to their market research, consumer awareness of the digital-TV transition is now at 86%, up 12 percentage points from the beginning of the year. 32% of households with at least one analog-only over-the-air TV have applied for converter boxes, while another 37% know they will have to and plan to do so by year's end. That adds up to 14 million converter boxes, the CEA said, for which the National Telecommunications and Information Administration should have enough coupons to cover.

Meanwhile, Wilmington, North Carolina last week became the first city in the U.S. to make the all digital transition, well ahead of next year's February 17th deadline.

Those of you who may be working on the digital transition might want to follow this great blog on Wilmington's transition, to gain a little advance insight into the stumbles and successes that Wilmington is facing with its residents in the immediate aftermath of the transition.

Local station WECT has also put up an informational page on their site, which will probably be held up as a good example for other stations to follow.

We can't say that the "DTV Answers Booth" in Wilmington, pictured above, was overwhelmed by the curious, however.

Broadcasters certainly have their work cut out for them as the transition approaches, with lots of educating to do. Here's a PDF from the FCC site featuring an analysis of calls from the second day of the Wilmington transition.

You may have heard about OnStar's anti-theft device:

What happens is this — if you report your car as stolen, you can then call OnStar and have them work with law enforcement to use the car's GPS system to find where your vehicle's located. OnStar will then have the police make visual contact with your vehicle and once they've determined it's safe to do it, will shut down the drivers ability to manually control acceleration. Basically, they shut down the accelerator, causing the vehicle to coast to an idle speed — but not causing the driver to lose steering or braking control. At the point in which the vehicle comes to a stop (or close to it — idle speed) — the police can then apprehend the "perp.

For those of you without OnStar, there are stand-alone alternatives, such as LoJack and Inilex. While neither of these will physically slow down a vehicle (think how different the OJ chase scene would have been if OnStar had been around then!), they can be used effectively for theft recovery.

But here's the Catch-22. With the economy in a slowdown, crime is up. But with the economy in a slowdown, your cash is down. 

What do do? DIY.

The DIY SPY has a "Retro GPS tracker which, when combined with their tracking software, can be used to determine where a vehicle has travelled. Unfortunately, it appears you have to retrieve the unit to download the data, which makes it less than ideal for recovering stolen vehicles, but not a bad item to have in any modern PI's bag of tricks.

If you want to go even cheaper, you can build your own "Ghetto Lojack" for $30 by picking up a cheap boost mobile phone at Target and combining it with the Mologogo website, which we first blogged about here.

If you've got the dough, and the REI outfit to match it, you could always get a SPOT personal locator beacon (with their great slogan: "live to tell about it") for $170.

Need more info? Detailed instructions for a Smart Car Surveillance System using a mobile phone can be found here; and here's an open-source solution for your iPhone or laptop.

Did you see it?

The brightest explosion ever seen was observed in March this year, Physorg.com reports. Now a team of astronomers from around the world have combined their data from satellites and observatories to explain what happened.

What they saw -- and indeed, it was visible to the naked human eye -- was a Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) aimed directly at our solar system.

A Gamma Ray Burst is not to be confused with Gamera:

GRBs are bright -- but they are easy to miss.  NASA explains:

Like galactic fireworks in the night, gamma-ray bursts briefly light up the stellar sky as only the most powerful explosions in the universe can. Yet as magnificent as gamma-ray bursts are, their fleeting nature makes them elusive and difficult to study....

Gamma-ray bursts are incredibly intense releases of gamma radiation. Found at the highest frequency end of the electromagnetic spectrum, gamma radiation is a particularly energetic form of light that can only be generated by the most powerful astronomical events. Scientists suspect that these sporadic explosions may signal the birth of black holes or the death of stars.

The first gamma-ray bursts were detected in 1967 by the U.S. military's Vela satellites. This fleet of satellites was originally designed to monitor nuclear weapons testing and could sense large releases of gamma radiation. While orbiting the Earth, a Vela satellite recorded a burst of concentrated gamma energy from deep space. For the first time, a gamma-ray burst was observed by humans.

So how was the GRB captured back in March? A bit of luck, combined with teamwork:

GRBs are the Universe's most luminous explosions. Early in the morning of March 19, the Swift satellite, a joint NASA/UK/Italian mission, pinpointed an extremely bright GRB and immediately sent out an alert to observatories around the world. Two robotic wide-field optical cameras in Chile also observed the brief flash: "Pi of the Sky," which is operated by the Centre for Theoretical Physics in Warsaw, Poland, and TORTORA, based at ESO’s La Silla Observatory. TORTORA is operated by a Russian-Italian collaboration. Within minutes many more telescopes were observing, allowing for the most detailed study of a bright GRB ever undertaken using data from gamma-ray to radio wavelengths. 

Want to see it yourself? The Penn State website has some cool videos and images that you can check out; also be sure to watch this clip from Google video:

Remember all those AOL CDs that used to clutter up your mail box, and served as great drink coaster during your austere grad school days?

We haven't seen them as often in our mailbox as we used to, but we still have a pretty good collection of old software CDs, misburned DVDs, and some really embarrassing music CDs that are best left unmentioned.

What to do with them all? We observed just the other day that it's getting darker earlier, and we may soon be needing some additional light in the Really Rocket Science lair.

And thus we arrive at today's DIY Friday project: build your own CD stack lamp!

 The project is relatively simple:

 The pile of CDs that had been massing in my room was growing to epic proportions. So I decided to make myself a CD lamp. The circular base was actually cut using a template on a table saw, then sanded after clamping it in a drill press. The cold cathode lamp is from NewEgg....

There are several other designs online, but this is one of the better ones that I have found.

Check out the additional photos here.  When completed, the lamp also serves as a rather luminous shrine to duct tape.

(Hat tip to Lifehacker.)

There's little doubt that GPS has made the world a better place. The combination of satellite technology and an old fashioned map has kept a lot of people -- yours truly included -- from getting stupidly lost. It's also made waiting for the bus a far less mysterious endeavor.

Increasingly, too, when people do stupid-- and criminal-- things, GPS is helping to unravel those mysteries, too.

The AP reports on how the proliferation of GPS is being used in forensics:

The growing popularity of GPS systems — in cars, cell phones and other handheld devices — gives authorities another powerful tool to track suspects.

Among recent cases:

_ In September, a man in Butte, Mont., pleaded guilty to rape shortly after a judge ruled that evidence from the GPS unit in his car could be used against him at trial. Prosecutors planned to use it to show that Brian D. Adolf "prowled" through town looking for a victim.

_ In New Brighton, Pa., a trucker's GPS system led police to charge him with setting his own home on fire. GPS records showed his rig was parked about 100 yards from his house at the time of the fire.

_ In the case of a missing Chicago-area woman named Stacy Peterson, investigators sought GPS records from the SUV owned by her husband, former police officer Drew Peterson. She still hasn't been found, and no one has been charged....

 "What we're dealing with here is a use of the technology that I don't think the good people at Magellan or Garmin or TomTom really thought about when they were developing it," says one police detective:

Detectives are often able to extract map searches and desired destinations that have been entered into a GPS unit by the user. Some devices are equipped with a "track back" feature that can show where the unit was at a particular time....

The GPS feature on a cell phone has already helped solve at least one crime. In 2006, police in Virginia Beach, Va., used the GPS on a homicide victim's cell phone to find the phone and her purse in a garbage can behind a home. The home was linked to the man who was eventually charged with killing her.

Jon Price, a trainer at Garmin Ltd., the leading maker of commercial GPS units in the U.S., started getting calls five years ago to work with law enforcement in cases involving GPS data from the company's units was being used as evidence.

Price estimates he's helped with about 25 criminal cases, some of them involving GPS-equipped boats running drugs out of South America. He's testified as an expert witness in a half-dozen cases...

"Typically the GPS data being used is for the purpose of contradicting (defendants') alibis," Price said.

GPS data is usually just one part of the criminal case, however, as attorneys must also prove the defendant possessed the unit and entered the information into it.