1000 Miles Of Empty Space

Officially dubbed the Bloodhound SSC -- short for supersonic car -- the pencil-shaped racer is meant to become the fastest car in the world and the first to reach 1,000 miles per hour -- faster than a speeding bullet. A car that fast doesn't just run on tires. It runs on 200-pound circles of aerospace aluminum that can absorb 50,000 times the force of gravity.

1000 Miles of Empty Space

Like Wi-Fi, TV whitespace is a wireless connection that uses different frequency bands. TV white space operates in 470 MHz to 698 MHz, while Wi-Fi operates in 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Speed-wise, it really depends on the model of the radio, the vendor, the antenna length, and other factors. New radios can support more than 50 Mbit/s. Wi-Fi, similarly, speed depends on several factors, such as the range, the line of sight, and so on, but they can support up to 1000 Mbit/s using the IEEE 802.11ac standard. The range is a crucial difference between Wi-Fi and TV white space. On average, TV white space range is 6 miles, but it can be less or more depending on different aggregates, such as noise, line of site and so on. One of the three main TV white space manufactures, Carlson wireless, advertises that their radios can go up to 24.8 miles. Both have low power consumption - 20 to 100 watts depending on the device, the antenna length, the vendor, and so on. Both technologies meet the government security standards such as FIPS 197 Compliance (Advanced Encryption Standards). While Wi-Fi works great in cities, TV white space works great in rural areas.[6] Graph 1 illustrates the differences between TV white space and Wi-Fi.

On February 27, 2009, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the Association for Maximum Service Television asked a Federal court to shut down the FCC's authorization of white space wireless devices. The plaintiffs allege that portable, unlicensed personal devices operating in the same band as TV broadcasts have been proven to cause interference despite FCC tests to the contrary. The lawsuit was filed in a United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The petition for review states that the FCC's decision to allow white space personal devices "will have a direct adverse impact" on MSTV's and NAB's members, and that the Commission's decision is "arbitrary, capricious, and otherwise not in accordance with law.".[40] A Motion to Govern the case was due to be considered on February 7, 2011.[41] In May 2012, the NAB announced it was dropping its court challenge of rules that allow the unlicensed use of empty airwaves between existing broadcast channels.[42]

Well, nothing in space stands still. Everything either orbits around something else, or moves toward or away from something else. So how do space engineers aim a spacecraft so it lands on Mars or meets up with a particular comet or asteroid? Not only are Earth and the target constantly moving in their different orbits around the Sun, but our Earthly launch pad is spinning at about 1,000 miles per hour when we launch the rocket!

Since the exosphere gradually fades into outer space, there is no clear upper boundary of this layer. One definition of the outermost limit of the exosphere places the uppermost edge of Earth's atmosphere around 190,000 km (120,000 miles), about halfway to the Moon. At this distance, radiation pressure from sunlight exerts more force on hydrogen atoms than does the pull of Earth's gravity. A faint glow of ultraviolet radiation scattered by hydrogen atoms in the uppermost atmosphere has been detected at heights of 100,000 km (62,000 miles) by satellites. This region of UV glow is called the geocorona.

Although the exosphere is technically part of Earth's atmosphere, in many ways it is part of outer space. Many satellites, including the International Space Station (ISS), orbit within the exosphere or below. For example, the average altitude of the ISS is about 330 km (205 miles), placing it in the thermosphere below the exosphere! Although the atmosphere is very, very thin in the thermosphere and exosphere, there is still enough air to cause a slight amount of drag force on satellites that orbit within these layers. This drag force gradually slows the spacecraft in their orbits, so that they eventually would fall out of orbit and burn up as they re-entered the atmosphere unless something is done to boost them back upwards. The ISS loses about 2 km (1.2 miles) in altitude each month to such "orbital decay", and must periodically be given an upward boost by rocket engines to keep it in orbit.

If run continuously, these lasers would use up the entire world's electricity supply in seconds. Luckily, the only reason these lasers can put out such intense power is that they concentrate the release over an extremely short period of time -- usually less than a trillionth of a second. The extremely short laser pulse is then focused down to a point a few thousandths of a millimeter across, and can be 10 trillion trillion times brighter than the surface of our sun. It's so powerful that scientists are using them to rip apart empty space itself in a quest to learn more about the fundamental laws of our universe.

I want to embrace the cosmos as you show meI want to be dizzy in this Earth,with tremors of the same frequency as nebular dustI want to retard from the sun, to witness the universe,And look past every lunar eclipse, to that vantage point shall I traverse,But of course my soul not noble enough to fly through empty spaces without the guidance of your words.

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The absence of water vapor in the winter skies above the South Pole is the reason why many cosmologists flock to this harsh place to do their work. Here, they can search the farthest reaches of space for the afterglow of the Big Bang, which is blocked by water vapor in the atmosphere. The Big Bang was a catastrophic explosion that created the universe some 14 billion years ago. As the expanding universe cooled, elementary particles condensed to form the first light elements, hydrogen and helium, and released a cloud of radiation still visible today as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Temperature fluctuations in the CMB in turn reveal the origins of planets, stars, and galaxies that started forming 300,000 years after the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background is being studied using two telescopes at the Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica. Both the DASI and the VIPER telescopes are creating some of the first fine-scaled maps of the very early universe. To map the sky, the VIPER telescope houses an instrument called ACBAR (Arcminute Cosmology Bolometer Array Receiver) co-designed by Professor Bill Holzapfel of the University of California at Berkeley. ACBAR measures minute temperature differences in the CMB. To do that, the instrument has to be cooled to just above absolute zero (-273). The South Pole in winter is cold, it can get to –100 degrees Fahrenheit here, but not cold enough. To cool the instrument even further, ACBAR is housed within a thermos that is itself nested in a thermos and cooled using liquid helium. With this supercool instrument, Bill’s group hopes to continue mapping the fine details of the background radiation and to study galaxy clusters from deep space. The last stop on our tour was the "clean sector" where the world’s most pure air blows across a thousand miles of empty ice on the polar plateau. Upwind of the South Pole station, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration built a lab to study global changes in the earth’s atmosphere and continued a long tradition of studying weather and the atmosphere dating back to 1957. NOAA’s South Pole observatory was one of the first sites to measure the thinning of the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere over Antarctica and the southern tip of South America. Ozone helps block UV radiation from reaching the surface of the earth, protecting living organisms from damaging radiation. In the early spring, this ozone layer is partially eaten away by atmospheric pollutants called chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) that drifted there from human sources on the surface. By mid-summer, the ozone layer thickens up again but not before it can start damaging living cells (an increase in skin cancer in Chile, Argentina and New Zealand has been attributed to ozone thinning). Scientists continue to monitor the ozone layer from Antarctica, and levels of CFCs have been dropping after an international treaty was signed in 1987 that curbed their production. But it might be another decade or more for these pollutants to clear from the stratosphere and for the ozone hole to disappear. The South Pole is also an ideal place to study the concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and how they might contribute to global warming. Because there are few, if any, sources of carbon dioxide on the polar plateau, this is a barometer for measuring whether the global concentrations of these gases are increasing. Posters on the wall show a clear and steady trend of increasing CO2 levers from 1957 to the present. Although it’s hard to really understand how increased greenhouse gases and global warming will affect life on earth when you’re exposed to temperatures well below freezing, this research is vitally important to understanding how human activity can impact world climate. It’s also a wonderful place to stare out the window at the most expansive and empty landscape I’ve ever seen. 041b061a72