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Posts Tagged “

Darpa

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space navigation

How to Find Your Way Home by the Light of a Pulsar

How do you navigate when you're floating out in deep space? By pulsar, that's how. In outer space (and even in Earth orbit) GPS doesn't do you a whole lot of good, so space scientists at the PLANS navigation conference in Monterey, CA this week have put together a couple of papers designed to show that a spacecraft could navigate autonomously by triangulating off the X-ray light emitted from pulsars scattered throughout the universe. The new system promises to be for space what GPS is for Earth; pretty useful when your stranded out past Saturn wondering "maybe that should have been a right at Titan..." More »

2:02 PM on Wed May 7 2008
By Michael Reilly
1,935 views, 12 comments

Latest by Brock: @Daveinva: Good answer. This is some seriously forward thinking. It will be quite a while (to say the least) before we really need to do any extra-solar navigating. We need to see some serious advances in technology before we can more »

military scifi

The U.S. Military is Looking for a Few Good X-Men

The U.S. military is famous for getting inspiration from science fiction — witness the not-very-aptly-named Star Wars defense system — and now they're turning to comic books too. Unfortunately, they're learning from the bad guys. DARPA has just announced a new project called the Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition (MAHEM), named after Magneto, one of the supreme bad guys from X-Men. And it's exactly the sort of weapon the magnetic-fields-manipulating Magneto would use: a jet of molten metal propelled by magnetic fields into its target. Could it really work? More »

4:04 PM on Thu Apr 24 2008
By Annalee Newitz
2,079 views, 27 comments

Latest by RAHfanboy: @braak: "Yeah, all it required instead was turning the US from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor." You blame that on SDI? I would blame pandering politicians on both sides of the aisle for spending our way into more »