Yeah Science B-Words!

"Imagine an oasis of warm sunlight surrounded by a desert of freezing cold darkness. Robots inside the oasis perform scientific lab analyses and process icy regolith brought from excavations in the neighboring darkness. This oasis, about the size of a football field, lies in a valley about twice the size of Washington DC, surrounded by peaks the size of Mount Rainier. From its low angle on the horizon, the sun’s rays never shine over the peaks into the valley, until heliostats unfold on these peaks and redirect the rays down to form the oasis of sunlight. This place becomes a large science laboratory and the largest off-Earth producer of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for fueling inter-planetary trips." -The Source Article (click here via nasa.gov)

This idea is one of the coolest floating around in the possible future. Using reflectors to make perpetual solar energy. F-yeah! I say it at least once a week. "Now is an exciting time for science." WE are pushing the envelop on virtually every facet of every field. The connected world has many problems but we all help progress science. It is awe-inspiring and magnificent. I hope to get a field job in Engineering or Mechanics or Electrical Engineering one day but until then I will help with science education....well.....if passing along info counts as that......Continue reading for more info

"This is the Shackleton crater at the lunar South Pole and TransFormers are the heliostats projecting sunlight onto the oasis. This is the vision we propose to bring to life. The TransFormer (TF) concept is a paradigm shift to operating in Extreme Environments (EE). TF are systems that direct energy into energy-depleted (extreme) environments, transforming them, locally, around robots or humans, into mild micro-environments. The robots would no longer need to cope with the cold darkness, covered by blankets and warmed by the heat of RTGs.The analysis determined that it is possible to power and keep warm an MSL-class exploration rover 10km away in the Shackleton crater (SC), and calculated the required TF size (40m diameter for a circular reflector). An unanticipated finding was the understanding that such a reflector could power not only a single rover, but hundreds of MSL-class rovers operating in a sunlit oasis (which receives in total over 1MW from the 40m diameter reflector). It could power and warm up small rovers or devices that cannot carry RTGs. This insight encouraged the team to propose for Phase II the more ambitious mission scenario described above, not only creating a micro-environment around a single exploration rover, but forming an entire “oasis” where equipment for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) can also operate! The proposed mission scenario limits the illuminated area to the carefully selected oasis location, where the ISRU equipment operates and where the excavating robots operating nearby in the darkness come back to warm up and recharge."

A rechargeable battery station would be the first step in interplanetary travel. Think about it. The best part is that it is a feasible operation that we could see in our lifetime (well I'm 28 so MY life time huuuge chance of it, kids definitely in some way,shape or form), how exciting. This is just one phenomenal ideas proposed by NASA. Io9 did an article about them, which is how I discovered this article. This is one of the seven ideas. Read the others ...............

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