Around the World of Science in 80 seconds

While on Earth we are expecting the next-generation 1.3 Gbps router by Netgear at the beginning of 2013 and are also excited to see the new step on evolution of processors as Intel’s Ivy Bridge with its 37 percent more processing speed with the use of just half the energy, outside our cozy planet, science is getting ready to enter a new era.

Welcome to the new God Rush; this one is going to happen far away from California – actually, far above.

Did you ever dreamed about being an astronaut or a miner when you were a kid? Maybe even a combination of both as a space miner? Well, today is your lucky day.

The visionaries from Planetary Resources figured that our planet resources are scarce and they are not gonna last for longer if we keep this rhythm of exploitation – not breaking news, but who’s doing anything about it? – and had a good idea: hey; if there are lots of asteroids floating out there, why don’t we start digging them? After all, all you need is some hundreds millions of dollars to generate tens of billions annually.

“Many of the scarce metals and minerals on Earth are in near-infinite quantities in space. As access to these materials increases, not only will the cost of everything from microelectronics to energy storage be reduced, but new applications for these abundant elements will result in important and novel applications.”

Peter H. Diamandis, M.D., Co-Founder and Co-Chairman, Planetary Resources, Inc. says that one single 500-meter platinum-rich asteroid may contain the equivalent of all the Platinum Group Metals mined in history, for example.

And it is not just about platinum; they may possibly find new materials, develop new technologies, definitely make some pressure on the global economy and hopefully not get any dangerous space bacteria.

We know about approximately 9,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and there are more than 1,500 that are energetically as easy to reach as the Moon. The company has developed a spacecraft named Arkyd-100 Series that will be used in low-Earth orbit and ultimately help prioritize the first several NEA targets for the company’s follow-on expeditions.

Meanwhile, in the University of Cambridge, astronomers are now initiating a European-wide program, hailed as the premier European astrophysics space mission of the decade, to create the first 3D map made of a colossal picture of our Milky Way Galaxy that reveals the details of a billion stars, BBC News reports. Thanks to the Gaia satellite, due to be launched into space in August 2013 and whose heart is the largest digital camera ever built, they’ll be able to gather billion-pixel video data in three dimensions of a billion stars, galaxies, quasars, and solar system asteroids –which may be useful for our entrepreneurship in asteroid mining.

Gaia’s installation consists of an amazing cluster of 108 identical servers used for the bulk of the data processing, and 9 additional servers used for monitoring, backup and control. The individual servers are connected by a high-speed 40 gigabit Infiniband network to allow rapid communication and transfers of large data volumes and each of the 108 servers have powerful 2 6-core CPUs, 48 gigabytes of RAM and 9 terabytes of hard-disk storage. Therefore, the whole bulk processing system has 1296 processing cores, around 5 terabytes of RAM and nearly 1 petabyte of hard-disk storage for use during the active processing.

Here on Earth, I would be happy just by having a car with anti-fogging and self-cleaning windshields, but who’s inventing that? Oh, the guys from MIT. Thank you!