Whatever your feelings on the overall expense and scientific value of space programs, there’s something unspeakably awesome about the whole concept of sending probes three billion kilometres across the Solar System to land on another planet or the moon.
On Thursday of last week the $3 billion Huygens space probe landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, parachuting to the icy surface with a series of experiments on board. The probe’s twin, Cassini, orbited the moon and relayed the probe’s discoveries back to researchers at the European and Italian space agencies with a delay of approximately an hour and seven minutes between communications.
It took seven years for the probe to get there, travelling at about 18,000 kilometres an hour.
Scientists believe Titan has the same general gas and mineral composition as the earth, albeit one that is locked in a deep freeze, and that results could help us to better understand how our unique atmosphere formed. It’s also the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere, which is intriguing in itself.
While some can argue that the $3 billion spent on the probe could have been better spent on earth-bound science, space probes do have a way of capturing the public’s attention.
If appreciating our own unique and fragile environment means sending probes to uninhabitable moons orbiting far-off planets, then it’s worth the expense – we need to understand just how unique and fragile Earth is before we have a hope of saving it.
Whistler astronomer John Nemy will be giving a presentation on Alien Worlds for the Whistler Naturalists on Thursday, Jan. 20 at Millennium Place, starting at 7:30 p.m. For those who have been to Nemy’s presentations before, it promises to be another spectacular evening of music, narration and slides, including several pictures taken by Nemy himself. The presentation will also feature images from the Hubble Telescope and Cassini Mission to Saturn.
If you’ve never been to one of these presentations, get there early – seats are hard to come by.
For more information on John Nemy and the Pacific Observatory, visit www.nemy.com.
Spray-on power cells a massive breakthrough
A project by University of Toronto researchers discovered a nano-technology process that allows solar cells to turn the sun’s infrared rays into power, potentially increasing the efficiency of solar cells by 500 per cent.
Solar technology is currently too expensive to be cost-effective with other power sources, and although cheaper plastic cells are becoming available, they are considerably less efficient than expensive silicon-based systems.
This new plastic material pioneered at UofT will be inexpensive, efficient, and could have a far-reaching impact on the way we produce power while weaning us off our dependency on limited and harmful fossil fuels.
Because the technology, called "quantum dots," can be sprayed as a polymer, it is also extremely flexible. A T-shirt coated with the dots could be used to charge your cell phone. A briefcase coated in dots could charge the laptop inside. Clear window coatings could double as solar collectors, powering electrical appliances and car batteries while still letting visible light through.
For more information on this technology, visit the University of Toronto website at www.utoronto.ca/bin6/050110-832.asp.
Battle of the cheap PC’s
Wal-Mart (www.walmart.com) is planning to release a series of complete PC computers and laptops for under $550 US, including peripherals and software.
Dell (www.dell.ca) answered back with plans for a desktop PC including a monitor, speakers, mouse and keyboard for $450 US.
Apple has also gotten into the affordable computing game, offering the new Mac Mini for $500 US ($629 Cdn) – without a keyboard, mouse, speakers or monitor. Even a basic monitor, mouse and keyboard will probably set you back about $300 US, so maybe it’s not that big a bargain after all unless you already have those things lying around. Check it out at www.apple.ca.
While computers continue to take huge leaps in performance, each leap leaves a lot of unused parts – perfectly good, state-of-the-art only a year-and-a-half ago parts – just lying around. New manufacturing techniques and materials have also cut costs considerably for everything from processors to flat screen LCD monitors.
Consumers, especially lower income consumers, will benefit the most from the introduction of affordable computers. And while the lower-priced systems are also an expression of competition in the market, there is a possibility that the companies have another agenda as well.
I don’t know if there’s a name for it in the business world. I like to think of it as the ‘Columbia House Crotch Kick’ after my own brief experience as a Columbia House CD customer – The first 10 CDs were a penny. The next 10, which I didn’t even want but was forced to buy because I didn’t send back the cards in time, were $175.
Another example of the Crotch Kick is computer printers – they sell you the printer for less that it’s worth because they want you to shell out for expensive ink cartridges. Yet another example is the X-box – it sells for less than the sum of its parts because Microsoft wants to sell you games.
Are cheap computers just the beginning of another Crotch Kick? Is Apple selling cheap computers because they want people to download music using iTunes to play on their iPods? Is Wal-Mart selling computers so they can sell you software, ink cartridges, and provide you with a pre-loaded gateway onto their own online music store? Is Dell offering cheap computers to put their competitors out of business, allowing them to gain a greater share of the PC market?
It helps to view these things cynically and skeptically because that’s how big business operates.
A penny my ass!
