Technology Trends

NASA’s New Horizons mission, which is planned for launch in January 2006, will reach Pluto and Charon — the “double planet” — in July 2015. And a key component for a successful mission is a nuclear space battery using plutonium, and which will carry a ‘Made in Idaho’ sticker. Its general purpose heat source (GPHS) will contain quadruple-encapsulated Plutonium-238 (Pu-238). According to the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), this is the only way to power a spacecraft where the Sun’s intensity is only 1 percent of what it is on Earth. It would require a solar array of about the size of a football field to power the spacecraft when it reaches Saturn. So, the only way to achieve this mission is to use another source of energy, plutonium. Read more…

Before going further, let’s read on the New Horizons web site, maintained by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), the reasons to go to Pluto.

Our solar system contains three zones: the inner, rocky planets; the gas giant planets; and the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is the largest body of the icy, “third zone” of our solar system. The National Academy of Sciences placed the exploration of the third zone in general — and Pluto-Charon in particular — among its highest priority planetary mission rankings for this decade. New Horizons is NASA’s mission to fulfill this objective.

Just for your information, the picture above shows the sizes of Pluto and Charon if they were projected on the United States (Credit: JHU/APL).

And this Science Overview gives us more details about the mission.

New Horizons is scheduled to launch in January 2006, swing past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in February or March 2007, and reach Pluto and its moon, Charon, in July 2015. Then, as part of an extended mission, the spacecraft would head deeper into the Kuiper Belt to study one or more of the icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least a billion miles beyond Neptune’s orbit. Sending a spacecraft on this long journey could help us answer basic questions about the surface properties, geology, interior makeup and atmospheres on these bodies.

For more information about this mission to Pluto and Charon, you should read about other key components of the spacecraft and browse this gallery.

Now, it’s time to look at the nuclear space battery which will used for this mission.And let’s start by anecdotal details provided by KIFI, a TV station from Idaho Falls.

The INL is at it again, but this time they are working on a project that doesn’t just affect our town or even the globe, it actually has a universal impact.

Scientists are making a battery that can send a spacecraft to the end of our solar system.

John Kotec, deputy manager at DOE, said, “We think it’s fascinating and fantastic. The thought of something with a ‘Made in Idaho’ sticker on it going to Pluto in 10 years is pretty exciting for us.”

For the mission to be a success, the team at the INL has only a two-week window to get the ship up and out. That’s in 2006. If they don’t make it in time, they’ll have to wait four years for their next chance.

In other words, if this space battery doesn’t work correctly next year, the New Horizons spacecraft will not reach Pluto before 2019.

Now, in “Energizing Space Exploration,” the Idaho National Laboratory gives more details about its own goals, which is to provide the nuclear technology necessary for powering “the most intriguing discoveries in our solar system.” Below is a diagram of the nuclear space battery that will go to Pluto, extracted from a Space Batteries Fact Sheet (PDF format, 2 pages, 470 KB).

The General Purpose Heat Source (GPHS) is the building block for the Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG). These heat sources contain quadruple-encapsulated Plutonium-238 (Pu-238) used to produce heat, which is subsequently converted into electricity.

But why use plutonium?

In space, power is a precious commodity. In Earth’s orbit, a five-foot-square solar panel will produce about 300 watts of electricity which is about as much as an RTG. To produce the same power at Saturn, where the Sun’s intensity is only 1 percent of what it is on Earth, would require a 6,430 square foot solar array — about the size of a football field. A launch of a spacecraft with such a solar array would not be possible. Without systems like these that enable spacecraft to operate reliably and predictably for many years in harsh environments, exploration into the far reaches of the solar system would not be possible.

Will this space battery be ready next year? Stay tuned…

Sources: KIFI, Idaho Falls, June 10, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Astronomy
  
  
• NASA
  
  
• Nuclear
  
  
• Space
  

It’s not the first time I’m mentioning the Virgo Consortium and how it is dedicated to look at the early stages of our universe (read here or there). But now, the Telegraph, U.K., tells us that these astrophysicists have completed the Millennium Run simulation which shows how our universe was looking 13.7 billion years ago. And if like me, you like big numbers, the whole simulation is the result of 500,000 trillion calculations done at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics which adds that their supercomputer simulation explains the formation of galaxies and quasars just after the Big Bang. Read more…

These opening paragraphs of the Telegraph article will give you an idea of the size of this simulation.

It is the result of 500,000,000,000,000,000 (500,000 trillion) calculations made by one of the biggest supercomputers in Europe after it was given information on the current composition of the universe, the microwave radiation left over after the Big Bang and the laws of physics.

The ultra-high-resolution simulation was created by tracking 10 billion particles of dark matter, the mysterious and invisible material that spreads out across the universe in gigantic strands, through the evolution process.

They focused on the evolution of a cubic region measuring two billion light years on each side — about 0.5 per cent of the universe — from just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang until the present.

You’ll find many images and movies on this page. This particular picture shows a large-scale light distribution in the Universe (Credit: Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics). And if you’re interested, you’ll also find a huge version of the poster of the Millennium Run in A0 format — for 280 MB.

The Max Planck Institute gives additional details about the simulation.

The Virgo consortium, an international group of astrophysicists from Germany, the UK, Canada and the USA has just released first results from the largest simulation ever of cosmic structure growth and of galaxy and quasar formation.

This “Millennium Run” used more than 10 billion particles to trace the evolution of the matter distribution in a cubic region of the Universe over 2 billion light-years on a side. It kept busy the principal supercomputer at the Max Planck Society’s Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany for more than a month.

By applying sophisticated modelling techniques to the 25 Tbytes of stored output, Virgo scientists are able recreate evolutionary histories both for the 20 million or so galaxies which populate this enormous volume and for the supermassive black holes which occasionally power quasars at their hearts.

The research work makes the cover story of the June 2 issue of Nature under the title “Evolution of the universe.”

Here is a link to the abstract of the Virgo paper, “Simulations of the formation, evolution and clustering of galaxies and quasars,” which “shows how comparing such simulated data to large observational surveys can clarify the physical processes underlying the buildup of real galaxies and black holes,” according to the Max Planck Institute.

Sources: Nic Fleming, Telegrapgh.co.uk, June 2, 2005; Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics Press Release, June 2, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Astronomy
  
  
• Physics
  
  
• Space
  
  
• Supercomputers
  

The LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) telescope is a new IT radio-telescope which will use about 20,000 simple radio antennae when it’s completed in 2008. At this time, it will cover an area with a diameter of 360 kilometers centered over the Netherlands. Its small radio antennae will detect radio wavelengths up to 30 meters, and because the ionosphere can bend some of these radio waves, the Lofar images might be somewhat blurry. So all the information captured by these antennae will be digitized and sent to a computing facility at a rate of 22 terabits/second today, and almost 50 terabits/second in 2010. This is the reason why Lofar needs Stella, an IBM supercomputer installed recently in Groningen, also in the Netherlands, to process signals from up to 13 billion light years from Earth. Stella consists of 12,000 PowerPC microprocessors and has a computing power of 27.4 teraflops. Read more…

Let’s start with the opening paragraphs of an article from New Scientist, “Huge radio telescope boasts supercomputer brain.”

One of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is to be the brain of a revolutionary new radio telescope called LOFAR. The telescope will look back to the time of the very first stars, map our galaxy’s magnetic field and perhaps discover the mysterious sources of high-energy cosmic rays.

Instead of one large rigid dish, LOFAR will use thousands of simple radio antennae. Their signals will be woven together at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands by STELLA, the new supercomputer, which was launched on Tuesday and is unofficially ranked as the third most powerful on the planet.

LOFAR needs its own supercomputer because it aims to detect radio wavelengths of up to 30 metres. Such long-wave radio images are blurry, and the only way to make them sharper is to build a vast array of detectors spread over hundreds of kilometres.

Now, let’s move to the General Information section of the LOFAR website for more specific information.

LOFAR is the first telescope of this new sort, using an array of simple omni-directional antennas instead of mechanical signal processing with a dish antenna. The electronic signals from the antennas are digitised, transported to a central digital processor, and combined in software to emulate a conventional antenna. The cost is dominated by the cost of electronics and will follow Moore’s law, becoming cheaper with time and allowing increasingly large telescopes to be built.

So LOFAR is an IT-telescope. The antennas are simple enough but there are a lot of them - 25000 in the full LOFAR design. To make radio pictures of the sky with adequate sharpness, these antennas are to be arranged in clusters that are spread out over an area of ultimately 350 km in diameter. (In phase 1 that is currently funded 15000 antenna’s and maximum baselines of 100 km will be built).

Below is a general diagram of the LOFAR-STELLA interaction picked from the System section of the LOFAR website (Credit: LOFAR).

Details are scarce about the STELLA supercomputer, built by IBM using some of its Blue Gene/L technology. Reuters gave some information last week in “Europe’s Biggest Supercomputer Eavesdrops on Stars.”

Running on 12,000 PowerPC microprocessors, the computer can execute 27.4 Teraflops, or 27.4 trillion floating-point operations, per second.

The new computer will consume 150 Kilowatts of power — the equivalent of 2,500 60-watt light bulbs — which is considered economical for a supercomputer, IBM said.

If you understand Dutch, you also can read this news release about this supercomputer.

Now we have to wait to see if the happy couple of Lofar and Stella can produce images as beautiful as Hubble gave us during the last decade.

Sources: Various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Astronomy
  


• IBM
  


• Space
  


• Supercomputers
  

In “Scientists Set to Change Face of Cosmology,” the Korea Times writes that “a team of Korean scientists conducted the largest-ever simulation experiment to understand the evolution of the universe. The simulation, which involved 8.6 billion mass particles distributed just like after the Big Bang, took 4 years of computation. But here, I’m confused. Last September, in “Simulating the Whole Universe,” I mentioned another simulation done by the Virgo Consortium which used 10 billion mass points. The goals were different. The Virgo team wanted to simulate the entire life of our universe while the Korean team is trying to understand the evolution of the universe during its first 80 days. Still, the Virgo simulation used more mass particles than the Korean one. Am I missing something here?

Let’s start with some details about the Korean simulation.

The scientists, led by Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) professor Park Chang-bom, said Friday their team carried out the four-year project using a supercomputer.

Park’s team used 8.6 billion massive particles that were distributed just like after the Big Bang and calculated the formation and evolution of the universe thereafter during 80 days.

The simulation is about eight times larger than the previous largest test and about 2,000 times bigger than Park’s first trial based on 4-million particles in 1990, the largest back then.

“We will finish analyzing the calculation for the next two years through early 2007 and the analysis might completely change the face of the current cosmological model,” Park predicted.

But here is a short quote of the August 2004 issue of IEEE Spectrum that I mentioned last September (see above for the link).

An international group of cosmologists, the Virgo Consortium, has realized the first simulation of the entire universe, starting 380,000 years after the Big Bang and going up to now.

The fundamental challenge for the Virgo team is to approximate that reality in a way that is both feasible to compute and fine-grained enough to yield useful insights. The Virgo astrophysicists have tackled it by coming up with a representation of that epoch’s distribution of matter using 10 billion mass points, many more than any other simulation has ever attempted to use.

I hope some alert reader will help me to understand how 8.6 billion is larger than 10 billion…

Now, it’s time to return to the Korean simulation and to some of its puzzling results.

The analysis of Park’s team might conflict against the discovery of the Sloan Great Wall, a series of clusters of galaxies with a size of 1.4 billion light-years, by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

“The likelihood that such big clusters of galaxies exists is just about 2 percent under the legacy model, insinuating it might be dead wrong. If more conflicting proof emerges, the old model will need to be overhauled,” he said.

The Park’s team is going to represent Korea in the SDSS project, where he will join other researchers from the U.S., Europe and Japan.

Finally, and just for your viewing pleasure, below is an image of Messier 44, a cluster of stars in our galaxy. Here is a link to a larger version.

Sources: Kim Tae-gyu, The Korea Times, January 7, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Astronomy
  


• Space
  


• Supercomputers