Armed with Science | Providing You Information on Military Science and Technology

Saturday Space Sight: Next Station Crew Preps for Launch

Filed under Photos by jtozer on October 20, 2012 at 7:41 am {no comments}

NASA astronaut Kevin Ford (left), Expedition 33 flight engineer and Expedition 34 commander; Soyuz Commander Oleg Novitskiy (center) and Flight Engineer Evgeny Tarelkin (right) clasp hands in front of a Soyuz vehicle mock-up as they wrap up two days of final qualification exams at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia.

The trio is scheduled to launch Tuesday, Oct. 23 in their Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a five-month mission on the International Space Station.

Photo credit: NASA

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(A)I, Dr. Maybury – The Air Force’s (Real Life) Super Scientist

Filed under Featured, Podcast, Robots, Technology by jtozer on October 19, 2012 at 7:23 am {no comments}

When I first got the call that the chief scientist of the Air Force – Dr. Mark T. Maybury – was interested in speaking with me, I was equal parts excited and intimidated.

After some grueling and extensive research (and by that I mean I Googled him), the nervousness increased. I mean this man has a laundry list of credentials in science and technology that are so impressive Tony Stark would give him a high five. Come on, a PhD in Artificial Intelligence? That is the stuff dreams (and often superheroes) are made of, friends.

Don’t let the nice normal scientist look fool you. This man is one radioactive accident away from a superhero suit and a heroic catch phrase.

So it got me thinking. What do I ask that will allow me and my readers to get a glimpse into the real life of the Air Force’s top super scientist?

Naturally I took the most adult and professional route with this.

So if you were a mad scientist, what one thing or device would you create?

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Design A Tank, Make A Million

Filed under Challenge by jtozer on October 18, 2012 at 7:01 am {no comments}

What if you could design a next-generation military ground vehicle?

DARPA is embarking upon a series of three, increasingly complex design challenges to design various subsystems, and eventually a full vehicle design, for a new, heavy amphibious infantry fighting vehicle.

The FANG Challenges are part of DARPA’s Adaptive Vehicle Make portfolio of programs, which seeks to demonstrate that the development timetables for complex defense systems can be compressed by a factor of five. Using a set of new design tools and the VehicleFORGE collaboration environment, participants can work with teammates around the corner or across the country to create the winning design and compete for a total of $4 million in prizes.

The first FANG Challenge, focusing on mobility and drivetrain subsystems, is set to begin in January 2013.
Click here to learn more about the FANG Challenges.

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Army Scientists Demonstrate Rapid Detection of Nerve Agents

Filed under Technology by jtozer on October 17, 2012 at 7:43 am {no comments}

The laser is used to optically “heat” very small particles. (By Joyce P. Brayboy)

Scientists at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory are exploring ways to quickly alert soldiers to deadly gaseous nerve agents in the air using a new approach termed multi-wavelength photoacoustics.

Kristan Gurton, an experimental physicist in the Battlefield Environment Division, or BED, Computational and Information Sciences Directorate at U.S. Army Research Laboratory, or ARL, recognized early in his career that the photoacoustic technique was an extremely sensitive spectroscopic method, able to detect chemical compounds at parts-per-million or parts-per-billion concentrations.

But he also realized that traditional laser photoacoustic spectroscopy would not be appropriate as a viable approach for solving a real-time chemical/biological detection problem.

Photoacoustic spectroscopy, or the photoacoustic effect, is the measurement of light’s absorption by matter, its subsequent heating and conversion to sound. It is traced to Alexander Graham Bell, who among other things, proved that light could have an effect on matter.

“What we needed was a low-cost, easy-to-use method that would quickly and accurately detect one of about 12 common, deadly gasses,” Gurton said. “It had to be fast and it had to be extremely sensitive — to detect hazardous gases at trace levels.”

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Fighting Stigma with Technology

Filed under Technology by jtozer on October 16, 2012 at 7:09 am {no comments}

Written by Dr. Karen O’Brien

The National Center for Telehealth & Technology produces mobile apps and websites to help service members, veterans, and their families enhance their psychological health.

As a mental health provider at Ft. Lewis and a former VA provider, I can’t count the number of times soldiers and veterans have expressed concerns that admitting to a mental health problem might lead to demotion, loss of security clearance, and even discharge from the service.

I have also heard many soldiers and veterans express the view that only “weak” people talk about their problems. We need to turn around the belief that warrior ethos and seeking help are somehow mutually exclusive.

Approximately one in five veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan have been formally diagnosed with either PTSD or major depression. Yet, stigma – the fear of being negatively labeled by others – is still the number one barrier to seeking treatment for mental health care. At the National Center for Telehealth & Technology, we produce mobile apps and websites to help service members, veterans, and their families enhance their psychological health.

Because these technology tools can be accessed anonymously anywhere, anytime, users can avoid any fear of stigma.

To make these technology tools even more useful, we need to understand the reasons people seek or choose not to seek mental health services. Our ongoing Stigma Study is an important step in understanding, and fighting, stigma. If we can better understand how it develops and how to undermine it, we can increase the chances that our service men and women will seek the help they need.

You can help us by participating in the Stigma Survey on AfterDeployment.org. The survey takes only a few minutes and is completely anonymous. You can take the survey here.

Dr. Karen O’Brien is a therapist and subject matter expert with the Research, Outcomes, Surveillance, and Evaluation (ROSE) division of the National Center for Telehealth & Technology.

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Army Refining Airburst Technology

Filed under Technology by jtozer on October 15, 2012 at 7:54 am {no comments}

A Soldier fires the XM25, an airburst weapon system which will soon undergo a second Forward Operational Assessment.

The U.S. Army is preparing to conduct a second Forward Operational Assessment of its XM25 Counter Defilade Target Engagement airburst weapon system.

Program managers are seeking to expedite development of the system, refine and improve the technology, and ultimately begin formal production by the fall of 2014, service officials said during a roundtable Sept. 20 at Fort Benning’s Maneuver Center of Excellence.

The weapon fires a high-explosive airburst round capable of detonating at a specific, pre-determined point in space near an enemy target hidden or otherwise obscured by terrain or other obstacles.

“The XM25 brings a new capability to the soldier for the counter-defilade fight, allowing him to be able to engage enemy combatants behind walls, behind trees or in buildings,” said Col. Scott Armstrong, project manager, Soldier Weapons. “The weapon fires a programmable airburst 25mm smart round. It consists of the weapons system with a target-acquisition control system mounted on top. Development of the system is going well.”

The XM25 represents the state-of-the art in terms of airburst technology, consisting of a programmable 25mm round, a sensor and a fire-control system, said Dr. Scott Fish, Army chief scientist.

Using laser-rangefinder technology, the fire control system on the weapon uses computer technology to calculate the distance the round must travel in order to explode at a particular, pre-determined point in space, he explained.

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Hurricane Forecasting

Filed under Technology, Videos by jtozer on October 14, 2012 at 7:06 am {no comments}

Inside a cylinder – about the size of a roll of paper towels – lives a circuit board filled with sensors. It’s called a dropsonde, or “sonde” for short.

It’s a work horse of hurricane forecasting, dropping out of “Hurricane Hunter” airplanes right into raging storms. As the sonde falls through the air, its sensors gather data about the atmosphere to help us better understand climate and other atmospheric conditions.

Video provided by the National Science Foundation YouTube Channel

“Dropsondes have a huge impact on our understanding of hurricanes and our ability to predict hurricanes,” explains electrical engineer Terry Hock at the Earth Observing Laboratory in the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) located in Boulder, Colorado.

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Hock and his colleagues at NCAR have been designing, building and improving dropsonde technology for more than 30 years.

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Saturday Space Sight – Auroras Over North America

Filed under Photos, Space by jtozer on October 13, 2012 at 7:28 am {no comments}

On October 4-5, 2012, a mass of energetic particles from the atmosphere of the Sun were flung out into space, a phenomenon known as a coronal mass ejection. Three days later, the storm from the Sun stirred up the magnetic field around Earth and produced gorgeous displays of northern lights

NASA satellites track such storms from their origin to their crossing of interplanetary space to their arrival in the atmosphere of Earth.

Using the “day-night band” (DNB) of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite acquired this view of the aurora borealis early on the morning of October 8, 2012. The northern lights stretch across Canada’s Quebec and Ontario provinces in the image, and are part of the auroral oval that expanded to middle latitudes because of a geomagnetic storm.

The DNB sensor detects dim light signals such as auroras, airglow, gas flares, city lights, and reflected moonlight. In the case of the image above, the sensor detected the visible light emissions as energetic particles rained down from Earth’s magnetosphere and into the gases of the upper atmosphere. The images are similar to those collected by the Operational Linescan System flown on U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites for the past three decades.

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