Imagine a world in which storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and lightning are no longer dangerous to humans. The world in which the flight from London to Sydney takes one hour. Imagine a future in which our knowledge of matter is so deep that time travel becomes a reality. Scientists are already working on these technologies in California, Palo Alto, in the laboratories of Lockheed Martin, the world giant in aerospace engineering and aircraft construction.
Lockheed Martin works side by side with NASA, the world's leading universities and powerful commercial partners. Scientists are focused on four projects that will fundamentally change our world:
preservation of human life;
discovery of new knowledge about the origin of the universe;
flights with the speed of sound;
prevention of the end of the world.
Following the zipper
Lightning activity high above the cloud bank will help scientists to detect when tornadoes will form...source
In May, tornadoes, floods and other natural disasters cost the US economy more than $ 4.5 billion. According to the insurance company AON, 412 tornadoes occurred in one month. In China, 81 people died in the same month and 100,000 houses were damaged and destroyed with the arrival of May-yo rains.
No one is immune from weather disasters. In 2011, as a result of floods in Thailand, the factories for the production of computer components suffered, as a result, worldwide prices for hard drives have risen.
An accurate forecast of the upcoming tornado will help save lives. The lightning map (GLM) will give people a chance to escape from the disaster.
Scott Fouse, vice president of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center, says that lightning is formed in the clouds and only after a while reach the ground, so you can anticipate the disaster. Sensors to collect data on lightning scientists will connect to the US satellite GOES-R, which will be launched next year.
The chief engineer of GOES-R satellite Stephen Jolly explains that the sensors are made using the technology of the Hubble telescope, only now we will look not at the stars, but on Earth. The tornado begins 10 minutes after the beginning of the activity of lightning, and these 10 minutes will save many lives.
The weather tracker, shooting the Earth at a speed of 500 frames per second, will help aircraft to get through the storm and send a warning signal to the electrical networks under threat on Earth. Scientists plan to deploy the GLM system over the whole world.
In addition to bad weather, a threat to electrical systems and aviation creates coronal mass ejections - substances from the solar corona. Overcoming billions of kilometers in space, particles of matter reach the Earth in 1-3 days. Even small emissions can degrade the signal from satellites, and we will lose control over aircraft and electrical systems.
coronal mass ijections...source
The larger the ejection, the more dangerous the consequences. Depending on the time when the emission occurs, from the place in the sun in which it occurs, and from the direction of the particles, some parts of the world may lose electricity for up to 5 months. Payments of insurance companies related to damage from coronal mass emissions are about $ 10 billion per year. The ultraviolet thermal imager mounted on the GOES-R satellite will warn in advance of the upcoming emissions.
Another tool on GOES-R, geoCARB, is being developed in conjunction with the University of Oklahoma. It measures the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere so that we can predict the changes associated with its quantity.
source
Traveling in time and shooting nascent galaxies
Lockheed Martin and the University of Arizona are developing a super-sensitive near-infrared camera, which they hope to capture the light of the earliest stars and galaxies at the stage of their formation. Astronomers installed a coronagraph in the camera, which takes pictures of weakly visible objects near bright sources. The mechanism of operation of the coronagraph in NIRCam is similar to when we cover our eyes with the palm of the sunlight to see something.
NIRCam will be launched into space aboard the James Webb Space Telescope in October 2018 from French Guiana with the help of the Ariane-5 missile. With the help of spectrometers, scientists learn more about the nature of light and see how gas clouds form. This will help to understand a lot about the origin of the universe.
With NIRCam, researchers will study dark matter and dark energy. Now they are hidden from our telescopes, but we know that they exist. This knowledge will lay the foundation for understanding the interaction of space and time.
Research with NIRCam is important not only for cosmologists, but for the whole world: they will affect the belief system and change the religious beliefs of mankind.
Twenty times faster than sound
source
The idea of hypersonic travel is not new. The term appeared in the 70s and designated a speed of 5 Mach, that is, 5 times the speed of sound. A lot of projects are devoted to attempts to overcome the speed of sound dozens of times. Developers from Germany by 2030 plan to launch Hypersonic SpaceLiner, which can fly from Europe to Australia in 90 minutes. The company Lockheed Martin is engaged in the development of technology that allows you to overcome the speed of 20 Mach - 24 498 km / h - and a speed of 30 Mach.
Attempts to reach a speed of 20 Mach were broken due to the lack of reliable materials that could withstand the heat generated at these speeds. Now scientists have a material that cools themselves, "spilling" electrons, as the human body releases sweat.
Lockheed Martin works together with the Imperial College of London, which owns a hypersonic wind tunnel, which is necessary for testing materials. Supersonic flights are needed not only for ordinary passengers to quickly move from country to country. They are important for providing immediate humanitarian assistance or assistance to victims of natural disasters, although in the first years of use the cost of supersonic flights will be very high.
Along with hypersonic materials, other developments will be used to create future machines. For example, carbon nanotubes, which are 50,000 times thinner than a human hair, will be used in batteries.
We use space technology in aircraft building, in the automotive industry and already in everyday life. We invented sensors with a power supply that can be switched on and off independently, without wires. This will create satellites, thousands of times smaller in size than the current ones. And what will the cars be like? Who knows!...Stephen Jolly
End of the world prevention
In 2013, a meteorite measuring about 15 meters across in Chelyabinsk fell, and about 2,000 people were affected. This is the first case in modern history, when a large meteorite fell and caused considerable destruction. Small meteorites are constantly falling to Earth. A meteorite of about 400 meters in diameter may be a global threat. But such fly to Earth once in a thousand years, according to scientists from NASA.
Currently, NASA observes more than 1,400 asteroids that can cause significant damage. The Earth is protected by giant planets of the solar system, which "pull" meteorites to themselves. Therefore, the last serious meteorite fell to Earth in 1908 again in Russia and caused an earthquake with a magnitude of 5 on the Richter scale. The place of his fall was deserted, only one person was killed. If the meteorite fell 4 hours and 47 minutes later, it would erase St. Petersburg from the face of the earth, whose population was at that time more than a million people.
66 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs wandered around the earth, a meteorite about 10 km wide crashed onto the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, forming the Chicxulub Crater. The force of the impact was equivalent to the one billion bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima, and triggered a chemical reaction that "boiled" the Earth.
source
Scientists from NASA and Lockheed Martin are working to prevent similar catastrophes in the future. NASA maintains a directory of near-Earth objects since 1998, and in 2016 plans to launch a mission that will change the relationship of mankind with asteroids.
The unmanned mission of OSIRIS-REX will travel to the asteroid Bennu, one of the most potentially dangerous asteroids. There is a high probability that it will crash into the Earth at the end of the XXII century. OSIRIS-REX will fly to Bennu, take a sample of its composition and bring it to Earth. Scientists hope to understand how to affect the asteroid and its orbit. Also, the mission can find chemical elements not yet known to scientists on the asteroid.
The preservation of our planet is more than just its protection from the fall of the meteorite. For example, one of the biggest mysteries: what happened to the atmosphere on Mars, what caused the drastic changes in the climate? In 2013, the mission MAVEN was launched, which, perhaps, will provide answers to these questions and help to understand whether the future of the Red is not ready for the planet.
Contents:
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/11843943/Four-space-technologies-that-will-change-the-world-in-your-lifetime.html
- https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/about/search_program.html
- https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/nircam.html
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