WASHINGTON - NASA is announcing a new initiative to launch small cube-shaped satellites for education and not-for-profit organizations. CubeSats are a class of research spacecraft called picosatellites, having a size of approximately four inches, a volume of about one quart, and weighing no more than 2.2 pounds.

This is NASA's first open announcement to create an agency-prioritized list of available CubeSats. They are planned as auxiliary payloads on launch vehicles already planned for 2011 and 2012.

"We're anticipating some exciting proposals for this pilot program with hopes to break down the barriers to the launching of CubeSats," said Jason Crusan, chief technologist for NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate in Washington. "There are organizations that have been waiting a long time for a chance to see their satellites fly in space."

Proposed CubeSat payloads must be the result of development efforts conducted under existing NASA-supported activities. Investigations proposed for this pilot project must address an aspect of science, exploration, technology development, education or operations encompassed by NASA's strategic goals and outcomes as identified in the NASA Strategic Plan and/or NASA's Education Strategic Coordination Framework.

Collaborators will be required to provide partial reimbursement of approximately $30,000 per CubeSat. NASA will not provide funding to support CubeSat activity or development. Selection does not guarantee an availability of a launch opportunity.

Proposals must be submitted electronically and be received by 4:30 p.m. EDT April 15. Submissions will be evaluated by NASA personnel. Selection is anticipated by June 30.

For additional information on this announcement and a complete list of requirements, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/home/CubeSats_initiative.html

For more information on NASA's Strategic Plan, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/budget

For more information on NASA's Education Strategic Coordination Framework, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/performance/strategic_framework.html

Source: NASA

Additional, suggested searches:

Bibliography.

Related Products.

More about this topic at Andinia.com.

Debates about this in our forum.

Related games and entertainment.

If a spaceship with aliens from other part of the universe would come to our planet and enter a low Earth orbit in order to observe us, where would they find the most savage humans?

This would make a lot of sense as a question for any exploration leader: It is evident that before landing, risks should be properly assessed and understood. So, what could they do? They could see us using some sort of telescope, or they could enter our data networks and take a look at our history, or they could simply watch TV.

Without doubt, the leader of such an expedition would be interested in anything and everything, but in order to understand the risks involved in meeting us he, she or it would probably be less interested in the beginning about our ancient history than in current events, relative power ratios, recent history and future trends. So, he would look back at our resume for - perhaps - a hundred years.

And within that time span, the leader of such an expedition would see that we humans had our share of self-provoked disasters. He - we assume that we are speaking about a "he", although it could be she or it, of course - would learn a bout Stalin, Hitler, Lenin, Mao and the factions that took part in the most destructive events that happened in our planed within that span of time: the United States, China, Russia, Germany, Japan, France and the United Kingdom.

He would further see that two of those factions - what we know as countries - are no longer in the destruction business, so Japan and Germany would soon be taken out of the sample. But he would also see that two additional factions have already replaced them: Israel and its neighbours.

And among the remaining factions, it would be interesting for the alien expeditionaries to establish which ones would represent the highest danger in terms of both their destructive capacity as well as their intentions: Russia would certainly impress and disquiet them for the nation's arsenals as well as its bloody history, but since they and the Chinese have been quiet lately, they would have to be monitored but they seem to be at least thoughtful. Israel and its neighbours are quarrelling bitterly, but their troubles are relatively domestic, while the faction known as France seems to be not quite active in this regard, so, they could also be taken out of the picture.

And what is left? Two factions: the United States and the United Kingdom. These have been at war for decades, unabated, with a myriad of enemies. Considering that they call themselves "democracies" - a concept to be pondered aside by our alien friends - it becomes apparent that the people living in those nations just love destruction because they actually chose to be so. If there is something that could be seen constantly in the history of these two factions - or countries, as Earthlings call them - is that they have been fighting wars all around their planet against scores of enemies from which, naturally, they have nothing good to say. But as it doesn't speak well about a person to have more enemies than friends, it doesn't really speak well about a nation to have so many wars, from a place called "the Falklands" (other factions call it "Malvinas", so who's right?) to other place known as "Ulster", to "Vietnam", "Iraq", "Afghanistan" and so on, they seem to be poised to take part in destructive events all around the planet.

Strange indeed if they consider themselves to be "democracies", a form of government that implies that Earthlings solve their issues by negotiating. Clearly, those countries are not democracies despite the fact that they believe they are, for any sufficiently advanced society would act upon others in the same way that they would like to be acted upon by others, and not by force. At the very least, they are incapable of talking so the leadership that they want to have in their world is completely questionable. I other words: those in the so-called United States and United Kingdom are the most disunite regards other human beings. They are clearly very competent in technical and military terms, but more inept than average at solving disputes in a peaceful manner. They cannot be considered as the best Earthlings to talk to, save for starting an interplanetary war.

Source: Pablo Edronkin, Andinia.com

Additional, suggested searches:

Bibliography.

Related Products.

More about this topic at Andinia.com.

Debates about this in our forum.

Related games and entertainment.

In the long run we will all be death, right? Maybe not, but what should humankind do in order to survive in the millennia to come? This question is not just something that has religion as its reference point, but actually science.

Human beings have been for quite some time on Earth; we have been around for a little more than a million years, which is a lot, especially if you consider candles on birthday cakes, but if we measure our stay against other things, it really isn't so much: dinosaurs ruled the planet for almost two hundred million years, then they don't even measure up to life's evolution on our planet, which is about twenty times older. We can't compare with the age of the solar system or the universe, so we really amount for very little in the general order of things: Carl Sagan once made a striking comparison, saying that if we could squeeze the history of the universe into one of our years, humankind would have appeared just on the final moments before the end of the last day. So, while our telescopes might seem big as we look out in the cosmos, if we took the inverse perspective, we would only see a very little planet.

From that perspective and once you consider all the factors involved in the very long evolution of life, it is almost a miracle that we still exist. Just consider this: It is estimated that about once every hundred million years, a meteor capable of annihilating the majority of all life forms on the planet strikes its surface, threatening even its structural integrity in geophysical terms. So, with life hanging here for almost 4.000 million years, maths say that we could have been wiped out 400 times, over and over.

If you live in a neighbourhood with a little bit of insecurity, thieves going around, and we have been shot, stabbed and attacked around four hundred times in our life, the thing to do would really be to do something about the problem. Then, since meteors could plausibly have the same effect on our lives - and cool, nifty new cars - than volleys of bullets, the right thing to do about those obnoxious pieces of rock would be to protect ourselves. And if you now live in fear, consider this too: There are threats that we are merely starting to understand now, such as solar flares, supernovae and black holes. None of these are in our immediate space-temporal vicinity, for now, but considering the lapses of time that we are talking about in our new perspective, it is highly probable that humankind will sooner or later confront such problems.

Nikolai Kardashev, a Russian astronomer, created a few decades ago a model to understand the progress of any civilisation in the cosmos based on the use that it makes of its energy. What we know today as the Kardashev scale establishes several criteria to define how available energy is used and thus, what could each civilisation, at each of its own evolutionary stages could eventually control. For example, according to that scale, a type I civilisation would control all the energy available in its own home planet. Thus, events such as typhoons and quakes could be ameliorated or even stalled completely. Such civilisation would be capable of surviving against all planetary catastrophes. According to Sagan, we are now approaching the definition of a type I civilisation: It is expected that we will control all the energy available on Earth in no more than two hundred years. We already have some degree of control over some forms of energy and we can, at least, forecast some catastrophic events such as extreme weather, floods and so on. We still can't accurately predict things like earthquakes, much less control them, but hopefully we will get there too. So, according to this and Sagan's opinion, we would be around a 0,80 in the Kardashev scale.

This means that a type I civilisation would be safe in principle, from all sorts of planetary catastrophes. In order to achieve further levels of survivability, such as leaving a solar system suffering from an incoming black hole or with a failing star, or even repairing their own sun, a civilisation would have to evolve further and the Kardashev scale predicts that too: things like interstellar travel would have to be fairly common among them and we are still a little bit further from there; this does not mean that we should do nothing about it because even the longest trek begins with a single step, and while this might seem a bit like science fiction, we should remember that just a little more than a century ago flying through the atmosphere seemed as unlikely as travelling to Proxima Centauri these days, yet humankind did it. Ultimately, our survival depends on having enough imagination.

Source: Andinia.com

Additional, suggested searches:

Bibliography.

Related Products.

More about this topic at Andinia.com.

Debates about this in our forum.

Related games and entertainment.