I don’t even know how to categorize this…it’s just stunning.

To quote Elvis: “Technology is Cool!”

Update: So you say, “Big deal, that’s neato, but what would I use that for.”  Well take a look at this video.

That’s so cool it made me cry.

Place a Knight on a chess board and following the rules of chess move it to land on every square only once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight%27s_tour

On an 8 × 8 board, there are exactly 26,534,728,821,064 (directed, i.e. two tours along the same path that travel in opposite directions are counted separately) closed tours.

Extrasolar Planets

The big news this week is the discovery of the smallest exoplanet yet discovered, Gliese 581 e in the constellation Libra.  The new planet is just twice the mass of earth, and orbits it’s red dwarf parent star in just under 4 days.

Gliese 581 is just 20 light years away and has 3 other known planets.  Extra solar planet hunters are finding more and more multi planet systems around nearby dwarf stars.  Gliese 876, for example, is another similar multi planet system, just 15 light years away in the constellation Aquarius.  55 Cancri is another similar system, except it is a yellow dwarf binary system.  In spite of orbiting very different parent stars, these multi planet solar systems are structurally similar to our own solar system.

In other news, a recent article suggests our galaxy is probably dirty with sister earths, greatly increasing the likelihood of finding life on other planets.

Mercury

MESSENGER has finally sent back new images from it’s 3rd flyby of Mercury.

Earth

China has announced specifications for a new super heavy lifter.  The new launch platform will weigh 675 tons, and be capable of launching a 12 ton payload to GEO or 25 tons to LEO.  ESA has launched 2 new space telescopes, new space telescopes, Herschel and Planck.

Moon

India’s Chandrayaan-1 has sent new images of the moon to probe the possible existence of water in permanently shadowed craters.

Mars

Spirit has been plagued by troubles.  First, a glitch caused a loss of data from memory.  To make maters worse, Spirit has become badly stuck in loose sand.  Mission engineers are still working on a plan to try to get out of the difficult situation.

In other Mars news, the Russian Phobos-Grunt sample return mission to the moon Phobos will also include a sample of microbes from Antarctica to see if they can survive the trip.
 

DSR 2.8

This may be the dawn of a bold new era in space exploration.  For years space enthusiasts and entrepreneurs have pondered what on earth we could do, in space, that would turn a big profit.  And, space junk may be the key.  Low earth orbit is full of debris, and sooner or later we will need a costly cleanup.  In the end, it could be the garbage business that finally makes the first space billionaires.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/

We at techRivet aims to please.

You think you have a hobby?  Steve Eves has a hobby.

Read all about it here: One man's quest to honor America's Saturn V rocket

Lessons In Survival

Morgan's research—the first of its kind—produced some fascinating findings about who does the best job resisting the interrogators and who stays focused and clearheaded despite the uncontrollable fear. Morgan looked at two different groups going through this training: regular Army troops like infantrymen, and elite Special Forces soldiers, who are known to be especially "stress hardy" or cool under pressure. At the start or base line, the two groups were essentially the same, but once the stress began, and afterward, there were significant differences. Specifically, the two groups released very different amounts of a chemical in the brain called neuropeptide Y. NPY is an abundant amino acid in our bodies that helps regulate our blood pressure, appetite, learning and memory. It also works as a natural tranquilizer, controlling anxiety and buffering the effects of stress hormones like norepenephrine, one of the chemicals that most of us simply call adrenaline. In essence, NPY is one of the fire hoses that your brain uses to extinguish your alarm and fear responses by keeping the frontal-lobe parts of your brain working longer under stress

The science is cool, but reading about the SEAL training was freaky.

PG&E just requested approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to enter into a power purchase agreement with Solaren Corp.  Solaren would deploy a solar array into space to beam an anticipated 850 gigawatt hours for the first year and 1,700 gigawatt hours for the subsequent years.

An actual contract from an actual Power company.

Wow.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30198977/

Boerman said Solaren's plan called for four or five heavy-lift launches that would put the elements of the power-generating facility in orbit. Those elements would dock automatically in space to create the satellite system. Boerman declined to describe the elements in detail but noted that each heavy-lift launch could put 25 tons of payload into orbit.

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-04/top-10-telescopes-all-time

Cool list.