The Promise and Perils of Mining Asteroids

Image Courtesy :DSI

Encouraged by new space technologies, a growing fleet of commercial rockets and the vast potential to generate riches, a group of entrepreneurs announced Tuesday that they planned to mine the thousands of near-Earth asteroids in the coming decades.
The new company, Deep Space Industries (DSI), is not the first in the field, nor is it the most well-financed. But with their ambition to become the first asteroid prospectors, and ultimately miners and manufacturers, they are aggressively going after what Mark Sonter, a member of DSI's board of directors, called "the main resource opportunity of the 21st century."
Prospecting using miniaturized "cubesat" probes the size of a laptop will begin by 2015, company executives announced. They plan to return collections of asteroid samples to Earth not long after.
"Using low cost technologies, and combining the legacy of [the United States'] space program with the innovation of today's young high tech geniuses, we will do things that would have been impossible just a few years ago," said Rick Tumlinson, company chairman and a longtime visionary and organizer in the world of commercial space [not sure what commercial space means].
"We sit in a sea of resources so infinite they're impossible to describe," Tumlinson said.
Added Value
There are some 9,000 asteroids described as "near-Earth," and they contain several classes of resources that entrepreneurs are now eyeing as economically valuable.
Elements such as gold and platinum can be found on some asteroids. But water, silicon, nickel, and iron are the elements expected to become central to a space "economy" should it ever develop.
Water can be "mined" for its hydrogen (a fuel) and oxygen (needed for humans in space), while silicon can be used for solar power systems, and the ubiquitous nickel and iron for potential space manufacturing. 
Sonter, an Australian mining consultant and asteroid specialist, said that 700 to 800 near-Earth asteroids are easier to reach and land on than the moon.
DSI's prospecting spacecraft will be called "FireFlies," a reference to the popular science fiction television series of the same name. The FireFlies will hitchhike on rockets carrying up communication satellites or scientific instruments, but they will be designed so that they also have their own propulsion systems. The larger mining spacecraft to follow have been named "DragonFlies."
Courtesy: NGC

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Happy Birthday: The Internet is 30 years old now

The Internet which has transformed the lives of billions of people across the world, turned 30 on Tuesday. The computer network officially began its technological revolution when it fully substituted previous networking systems on 1 January, 1983.

Known as "flag day", it was the first time the US Department of Defence (DoD)-commissioned Arpanet network fully switched to use of the Internet protocol suite (IPS) communications system.

Using data "packet-switching", the new method of linking computers paved the way for the arrival of the World Wide Web.

"I don't think that anybody making that switch on the day would have realised the importance of what they were doing," the Daily Telegraph quoted Chris Edwards, an electronics correspondent for Engineering and Technology magazine, as saying.

"But without it the internet and the World Wide Web as we know them could not have happened."

Commenting on the historic event's impact on the world, Edwards said: "The internet means there is nowhere and no one in the world you can't reach easily and cheaply."

Based on designs by Welsh scientist Donald Davies, the Arpanet network began as a military project in the late 1960s.

It was developed at prestigious American universities and research laboratories, such as the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute.

Starting in 1973, work on the powerful and flexible IPS and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) technology which would change mass communications got under way.

The new systems were designed to replace the more vulnerable Network Control Program (NCP) used previously, making sure the network was not exposed to a single point of failure.

This meant a single attack could not bring it down, making it safer and more reliable, the report said.

By January 1 1983, the substitution of the older system for the new Internet protocol had been completed and the Internet was born.

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee was then able to use it to host the system of interlinkd hypertext documents he invented in 1989, known as the World Wide Web.

Courtesy: Fisrtpost