The drone experimental X-51A WaveRider, a hypersonic aircraft capable of flying over the Pacific Ocean some 5,793 kilometers per hour, was tested today by the Pentagon on a flight "key" to the development of its technology, confirmed a source of Department of Defense.
From a hangar at Edwards Air Force U.S. in the Mojave Desert (California), a team of aerospace engineers tuned the device, which could cover the distance between New York and London in less than an hour.
The project, developed by the U.S. space agency (NASA) and the Agency Advanced Research Projects U.S. Defense (DARPA), was tested by anchoring the X-51A Waverider to the wing of a former B-52 bomber. The X-51A WaveRider should have flown at hypersonic speed for 300 seconds to dive later in the Pacific Ocean.
Although the same sources were unable to provide information on the results obtained, have been successfully completed, the ship should have been destroyed during testing, making it impossible to recover, but the engineers could use all the data recorded during the flight to the development of hypersonic technology in military applications.
The X51A test flight was the third experiment of a program that began in 2004. The first Waverider, built by Boeing, was tested in May 2010 at 3,500 kilometers per hour for 143 seconds, before a technical failure put an end to the test ahead of time, and the second, who was executed in June 2011 and also ended earlier than expected but it did generate concrete data.
The Air Force plans to develop and use technology to move hypersonic missiles or aircraft anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes instead of hours, in order not to let the enemy reaction time. Besides the speed, the aircraft will fly at high altitude hypersonic away from enemy fire or a missile. NASA and the Pentagon is funding three national centers in the country to study the hypersonic flight.
The WaveRider program will cost $ 140 million as estimated by the military development website, Globalsecurity.com.
All we ever see an earthworm. These beings are dragged along the ground alternately compressing and relaxing the muscles that have over their bodies, moving slowly with each wave of contractions. Well, this strange but efficient propulsion system has been imitated by a team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University and Seoul National University, who have built a robot called Meshworm that not only moves like a worm, but is able to "survive" with a hammer or footprints. Part of the project funding comes from the ubiquitous agency DARPA.
The researchers in robotics often tend to "brainstorm" in (or blatantly copied) nature. We've seen robots with legs fast as a cheetah, flying and even some can swim like a fish. However, there is still room for surprise. In the last hours, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT for its acronym in English) has issued a press release in which you can see a job that its engineers have made together scientists from Harvard University and the University Seoul National. This is the robot called Meshworm whose main feature is to mimic the way it moves and shifts an earthworm.
Earthworms crawl along the ground through a mechanism that basically boils down to alternately compress and stretch muscles that have over their bodies, moving slowly with each sequence of contractions. The snails and sea cucumbers also used to move a similar mechanism, called peristalsis, and the food moves through the inside of our body like ripples through our gastrointestinal tract. The robot Meshworm, composed almost entirely of soft materials, it is also very strong. As you can see in the video, is capable of withstanding a person will pass over or blows with a hammer.
Sangbae Kim, Esther and Harold E. Edgerton, project managers, say a robot "soft and flexible as it can be useful for traversing rough terrain or made by small cracks." The "muscles" of the robot is constructed with a wire of an alloy of nickel and titanium that has a certain shape memory, able to expand or contract when their temperature varies. Winding a wire around a tube these plain, form "muscle rings" like those with live worms because when they get a small stream segments wire mesh tube pressure, they deform and drive robot forward. The results of this work were presented at society through an article published in the journal IEEE / ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, explaining that it could be the first of a new generation of robots, soft and lightweight, ideal for exploring hard to reach spaces.
Kim explains that earthworms possess two main muscle groups: circular muscle fibers surrounding the tube-shaped body of the worm, and other longitudinal muscle fibers that run along it. The two groups of muscles work together so that the worm can move slowly. The research team set out to design a similar system, using "body" built a long tube with a heat seal polymer mesh. It is placed on the "muscles" nickel-titanium, thanks to the current provided by a computerized system, were able to move the robot. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Pentagon agency that is always behind any project that could have a military application, provided some of the funds used to create the Meshworm.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the agency linked to the Department of Defense United States that is responsible for developing research projects related to the U.S. Army. The structure of the agency is quite large and has the support of companies, universities and research centers across the country with which develops projects as PETMAN, AVATAR, forays into the world of Big Data or insect-cyborgs in which intend to install embedded systems. Given that the work of DARPA should reverse in the U.S. Armed Forces, the agency announced a new line of work and seeking to develop nanochips that can be implanted in the troops and monitor, at a distance, their vital signs.
Why monitor the health of the soldiers? The idea of DARPA is that this implant allows the control of any mission to detect, proactively, any enfedermedad the soldier to avoid having to perform, for example, a medical evacuation in the middle of a mission. Seen this way may at first glance may seem that research is novel because, today, there are multiple tele-assistance systems and remote patient monitoring but in the eyes of this DARPA research has much to offer and can make a before and after.
According to data provided by DARPA, most medical evacuations taking place in the front are derived from common diseases and injuries not caused in combat so that, by monitoring, could detect these mishaps occur long before, and Therefore, replacing its effective if necessary.
DARPA wants to develop this system on a chip that can be implanted in soldiers and also has the ability to transmistir information on vital signs and also to send data on their position or even his psychological state. The truth is that the project is quite striking and, frankly, is very close to the border of invasion of privacy, for example, when a soldier is on leave, going to the reserve or withdrawn.
