The James Webb space telescope is now at its destination orbit at the L2 LaGrange point and has started its calibration and final tuning using a star in the constellation of Ursa Major named HD84406 which will take about 6 months in all to complete and already the first engineering …
The Most Powerful Continuous Magnets Yet Made
To some, magnets are just the things that hold family photos and to-do lists to the fridge door but in reality, magnets and magnetism make the world go around. Magnets are everywhere, every electric motor, generator, loudspeaker, mechanical hard drive, microwave oven and of course equipment like MRI machines which …
What Has NASA Done Ever for Us – The CMOS Image Sensor
Alright, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, road, the fresh water and public health, what have the romans ever done for us. Much like the Monty Python scene from Life of Brian, some might well say What has NASA ever done for us? NASA is …
Hubble and Webb Space Telescopes, the story so far…
After 40 million man-hours of work, huge cost overruns and delays which have made the length of time from inception to launch longer than the entire moon program including Mercury and Gemini and Apollo, the James Webb space telescope is almost ready to launch. But even at the last minute, …
How AI is Taking over your Phone
If you’ve bought a new smartphone in the last couple of years you may well have noticed that it’s quite a bit smarter and more capable than models of just a few years earlier. Now some might put it down to the CPUs, memory and general computer hardware becoming faster …
TV From The Moon – Apollo’s Live TV Cameras
The fateful first steps of Neil Armstrong on to the lunar surface and his immortal words, “That’s One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” was broadcast to a worldwide audience of about 600 million and yet it was touch and go as to whether it would be …
What They Really Had Planned for Apollo
We all know what the major goal of the Apollo program was, to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s basically to beat the Soviets and prove that the capitalist system was better than the communist one. But once that’s done what would happen the …
MOSFET – The Most significant invention of the 20th Century
What makes a truly world-changing invention?. There are many contenders for the most significant invention of the 20th century, the jet engine, the airplane, television, the internet, the computer and antibiotics are all worthy contenders but unless you live like an 15th-century hermit or a part of an undiscovered tribe, …
America’s Failed High Speed Tilting Train – The UAC Turbotrain
Whilst the US doesn’t spring to mind when you think about high-speed rail, in the late 1960’s it was the first place along with Canada to have a advanced commercial high-speed tilting train service Capable of 170 mph or 274km/h. It was powered by multiple gas turbine engines, built like …
SkyLab – Maybe the Most Important Space Programs So Far.
Think of a long term base in space and everyone thinks of the International Space Station which has been the longest and most successful space program so far. But the hard-learned lessons that have kept the ISS continuously manned for over 20 years came from our very first attempt to …