August Links

Creating fnords with technology.

Kuiper-Belt Object 2014 MU₆₉, New Horizon's next target, may be two objects in close proximity.

The Hubble Space Telescope discovers an exoplanet with a warm stratosphere. A zone of where atmospheric temperature increases with altitude—a stratosphere—is common for planets in the solar system, but this is the first positive detection in another system. The detection involved oxidane gas, but the planet in question is undoubtedly too hot to have liquid water on the surface.

A federal excise tax on ammunition pays for state wildlife conservation, which garnered a lot more money during the Obama years due to gun control concerns.

Cephalopods evolve faster by RNA editing than DNA mutation. This is basically unheard-of in animal species, which poses some interesting questions for biologists.

U.S. Army team discovers a new technique for manufacturing hydrogen from water and aluminum alloys. If it scales up economically, it might finally be viable to switch away from polluting hydrogen fuels. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long to find out.

Asteroid 3122 Florence will pass Terra at 7 million kilometers distance on September 1. This will be its closest approach for the next several hundred years, and should be a good target for amateur astronomers.

Solar flares don't leave an impact on polar nitrate records. This is interesting because dozens of other chemicals do leave an ice-core trace after solar flares, but some of the biggest flares don't show any evidence.

Our World In Data crunched the numbers, and nuclear power plants are still the safest energy source. If anything, their analysis is pessimistic; I might do a follow-up post at a later date. Related: IAEA on nuclear storage accidents.

Senior Design

Yesterday, I was camping to watch the solar eclipse. Today, I'm back at school, diving into the material for senior year. My space-focused classes haven't met yet (updates on that front possibly tomorrow), but already the workload shaping up to be just as tough as last year's graduates warned us it would be.

The aerospace senior design classes focus on the AIAA Design Competitions. This year, the undergraduate individual aircraft request is to propose a Close Air Support (CAS) vehicle to replace the A-10. It's a shame Alex had to push back 521 a year, because this sounds right up his alley.

Our first assignment is Block 1 of a combined report, which will be due on Monday, September 11. By that point in time, we will have needed to have derived a mission profile from the specifications, reviewed the history of similar aircraft, and extrapolated from that data to perform the weight, wing, and powerplant sizing. All of it will naturally need to be summarized, formatted, and referenced.

On the subject of formatting, we've been given a few options for producing our reports. The standard approach is to use Microsoft Word, which has an unfortunate tendency to completely obliterate carefully-tweaked documents. Alternatively, we can use Adobe InDesign, which few of us know but allows for more meticulous curation. Because the design curve on InDesign is so steep, Dr. Barrett is offering some extra-credit for its use. LaTeX is also permitted, but will not garner any extra credit. I specifically taught myself LaTeX this summer to avoid the hassle of using MS Word this fall, so LaTeX it will probably be.

What we don't have a choice about is submitting our designs to competition. Knowing that these proposals will actually be judged may provide additional motivation to produce something decent. Or maybe adding pressure will only cause more problems. We'll just have to wait and see!

In either case, I should probably start reading. There's an awful lot to learn.