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Tonight (or tomorrow morning, depending on how you look at it and where you are geographically) Curiosity will be landing on Mars. Its payload has ten times the mass of other rovers sent to the planet, and the goal for the rover is to check if life could or did exist there.
Curiosity, unlike other craft sent up, is capable of testing rock and dirt samples onboard itself; the plutonium power supply is predicted to last for 687 Earth days/one Mars year. Scientific instruments carried by the rover include spectrometers, the Mars Hand Lens Imager (designed to take highly magnified images), the Mast Camera (for taking pictures of the landscape), and the Radiation Assessment Detector.
The news, as you might expect, is causing quite the buzz. The only problem? EDL, or "Entry, Descent, and Landing". It takes several stages for the rover to descend from the atmosphere to the ground and for seven minutes there will be nothing from Curiosity. It may even be longer than that until we on Earth know if it successfully landed (due to the position of two satellites around Mars and the rover's position relative to Earth); if it doesn't reach the planet all in one piece, there will never be a signal at all.
This span of time between entry and landing is (rather aptly) called the 7 Minutes of Terror.
In the words of NASA scientists:
Or if you'd rather not watch a video, this graphic sums up the process:
Detailed animation of what the landing should look like:
If you'd like to find out when the rover will be landing in YOUR timezone, go HERE. You can bet I'll be up in the middle of the night checking the feeds; and speaking of feeds, BoingBoing has a handy list of resources, and I believe that SciShow, MarsCuriosity, and NASA TV will be streaming live about the landing.
Nanotechnology is the science of building objects the size of atoms and molecules, from 1-100 nanometers.
A nanometer (nm) is a billionth of a meter (10 to the power of -9) or about the length of six carbon atoms; for further comparison, the size of a red blood cell is around 7,000 nm. The word "nano" comes from the Greek word for dwarf. Richard Feynman (who won the Nobel Prize for Physics) was the first to lecture on nanotechnology in 1959, though the phrase itself was coined in 1974 by Norio Taniquichi.
Matter at the nanoscale displays unique physical, chemical, and biological traits, and nanotechnology can create materials that are stronger, more conductive, more chemically reactive, reflect more light, and have different magnetic properties. These changes are called quantum effects, and happen only at the nanoscale.
Nanotechnology has applications in a wide range of fields, such as medicine, computing, information and communications technology, the aerospace industry, materials synthesis, and imaging and printing. It has been used in sunscreens, cosmetics, clothes, eyeglasses, Tupperware products, computers, baseball bats and tennis rackets, automobiles, and batteries, to name a few. Future uses may include the engineering of building materials, drugs, artificial tissues, food, solar panels, improvement of water and air quality, and there are even experiments being done to see if an invisibility cloak could be made with nanoparticles.
It has been predicted that by 2014, $2.5 trillion worth of goods will have some form of nanotechnology, or around 15% of all global output. There is a more negative side to nanotechnology, however, since it could have negative effects on living things (humans included) and create new nano pollutants, in addition to other other unforseen dangers.
Notable Nanotechnologist:
Naomi Halas
Naomi Halas is the Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, and the Director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics (which she founded) at Rice University. She has over 15 issued and pending patents and is the co-founder of Nanospectra Biosciences, Inc., a company developing photothermal cancer therapy. She is a Fellow of the Optical Society, the American Physical Society, the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Her research group focuses on metallic nanoparticles and nanostructures and their optical characteristics, including light absorption and scattering and plasmon-plasmon interactions (a plasmon is the oscillation of free electrons). Projects involve diagnostic and therapeutic nanoparticles and their potential uses in cancer therapy and imaging, and light-triggered gene therapy (nanoparticles are deposited in cells, and light causes them to release DNA).
Do you worry about the potential issues that nanotechnology could bring with it? Or do you think humanity's engineering at the nanoscale is more on the positive side? Or (as with so many fields these days) both?
