- As crews remove contaminated soil and liquid from Ohio toxic train wreck site, concerns emerge about where it’s going CNN
- Contaminated waste shipments from Ohio derailment to resume Southeast Missourian
- Ohio train derailment waste being sorted, looking for disposal sites The Washington Post
- Ohio among worst in nation for train accidents and hazardous material spills, our investigation finds Dayton Daily News
- Michigan, Texas officials unaware Ohio contaminated soil, water, taken to their areas: ‘We were sandbagged’ Fox News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: liquid
Watch a Real-Life ‘Terminator’ Robot Turn Into Liquid to Escape a Cage
Scientists have created a tiny robotic system that can transition from solid to liquid and back again, bringing a bit of classic sci-fi lore to life while they’re at it.
It’s been 30 years since killer liquid metal robots entered our nightmares courtesy of 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. That movie’s shape-shifting T-1000 robot could seemingly overcome any obstacle while turning parts of itself into weapons at will.
The specter of Skynet and the robot apocalypse have haunted us ever since, and now an international team of researchers has finally given us a real-world version of a T-1000, although with more altruistic aims.
The team says it was inspired not by Hollywood, but by the humble sea cucumber, which can transition between soft and rigid body states.
“Giving robots the ability to switch between liquid and solid states endows them with more functionality,” says Chengfeng Pan, an engineer at The Chinese University of Hong Kong who led the study.
As if to gesture at Terminator-inspired night terrors, Pan and colleagues demonstrate this increased functionality by placing one of their miniature robots in a simulated jail cell and showing how it might escape.
It can be a little tough to see what’s going on in the video above, but basically the robot melts itself down to a liquid, flows between the bars and into a waiting mold where it cools, reforms itself and then pops back up. Granted, this escapee is a little less terrifying than a T-1000 since it needs a mold at the ready to reconstitute itself, but it’s still enough to agitate any Luddite.
The demonstration is part of a study published Wednesday in the journal Matter.
Senior author Carmel Majidi from Carnegie Mellon University said magnets make all of this futuristic phase transitioning possible.
“The magnetic particles here have two roles… One is that they make the material responsive to an alternating magnetic field, so you can, through induction, heat up the material and cause the phase change. But the magnetic particles also give the robots mobility and the ability to move in response to the magnetic field.”
The particles are embedded in gallium, which is a metal with a very low melting point of just 86 degrees Fahrenheit (about 30 Celsius), creating a substance that flows more like water than other phase-changing materials, which are more viscous.
In tests, the mini robots were able to jump over obstacles, scale walls, split in half and re-merge all while being magnetically controlled.
“Now, we’re pushing this material system in more practical ways to solve some very specific medical and engineering problems,” said Pan.
In other demonstrations, the robots were used to solder circuits, to deliver medication and clear a foreign object from a model stomach.
The researchers envision the system being able to conduct repairs in hard-to-reach spaces and serving as a “universal screw,” which melts into a screw socket and solidifies with no actual screwing required.
The team is particularly excited about the potential medical uses.
“Future work should further explore how these robots could be used within a biomedical context,” said Majidi. “What we’re showing are just one-off demonstrations, proofs of concept, but much more study will be required to delve into how this could actually be used for drug delivery or for removing foreign objects.”
Hopefully the list of foreign objects that need removal won’t ever include weaponized miniature melting robots, as they might prove difficult to track down and extract.
This new shape shifting, liquid robot can escape from a cage
But, in contrast with the film, the inventors of this robot believe their discovery can be used for good — particularly in clinical and mechanical settings — by reaching hard-to-reach spaces.
The robot was presented as part of a study into the metal microparticles, known as a type of magnetoactive phase transitional matter, that can morph shape, move quickly, be controlled easily and carry many times its own body weight.
The scientists behind the study, who published their findings Wednesday in the journal Matter, created the robot using a composite of metals with a low melting point.
“This material can achieve Terminator-2 like performance, including fast movement and heavy load bearing when it is in its solid state, and shape changing in its liquid state,” Chengfeng Pan, an engineer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who co-authored the study, told The Washington Post, when asked about his discovery and the comparisons being made to the Terminator movies.
“Potentially, this material system can be used for applications in flexible electronics, health care, and robotics.”
By blasting the robot with magnetic fields at alternating currents, scientists increased its temperature to 95 Fahrenheit (35 Celsius) and caused it to morph from a solid into a liquid state in 1 minute 20 seconds. Once transformed into liquid metal, the figurine could be steered through the narrow gaps of its locked cage by more magnets — demonstrating its morphability.
It is the first time a material capable of both shifting shape and carrying heavy loads has been identified for use in microbots, according to scientists at the Chinese, Hong Kong and American universities who worked on the study — solving a riddle that has confounded miniature robot makers who previously struggled to achieve both morphability and strength in their designs.
In its liquid form, the robot could be made to elongate, divide, and merge. In solid form, it was steered at speeds exceeding 3 mph and carried heavy objects up to 30 times its own weight. The combination means a robot made from the material could be deployed to fix electronics in difficult to reach places, for example working as a makeshift screw or for electronic soldering in tight spots.
In another experiment, researchers demonstrated how the robot could be deployed inside a model human stomach to remove an unwanted foreign object. Scientists steered the solid-form robot, measuring less than 0.4 inch in width, through the fake organ until it had located the foreign object. It was then melted by remotely controlled magnetic fields, stretched in its new liquid metal state around the object — and once securely hugging it — cooled back into a solid, allowing it to tow the foreign object out of the chamber.
The shape-shifting material is the latest in a string of developments across the burgeoning field of miniature robotics — as scientists race to identify potential medical and mechanical applications for tiny robots in everyday life.
Recent microrobotic innovations include robots small enough to potentially crawl through human arteries, intelligent enough to be taught to swim, and others capable of flying through the air powered by tiny onboard power supplies.
“We’re still early in the exploration of what kind of materials can do this,” Brad Nelson, a Pprofessor of Robotics at ETH Zurich who was not part of the study, told The Washington Post. One of the most interesting areas of research in microrobotics right now is in clinical applications — particularly the delivery of drugs to the brain or for treating blood clots, he adds.
While the metal microbot unveiled on Wednesday is instructive, its use of neodymium iron boron — toxic to humans — means it would only be clinically safe for use inside humans if it were completely removed from the body afterward, Nelson says.
“The folks that are really looking at clinical applications of these devices, we want to look at materials that can degrade in the body, remain in the body, without causing harm to the patient,” Nelson said.
For Pan, the comparisons between his creation and the Terminator’s T-1000 character are understandable — but limited in how far they can be taken. “Our robot still needs an external heater for melting and external magnetic field for controlling the movement and shape changing,” he said. “Terminator is fully autonomous.”
Nelson also argues that the risk of inadvertently creating a real-life cyborg assassin is not something to worry about.
“I don’t see any possibility of injecting something into somebody, and then the microbots swim into their brain and take over their thoughts, or something crazy like that.
“The technology isn’t there, and I don’t see it going there,” Nelson says — adding that were the technology to be tested in clinical settings there would be safeguards in place to protect against such risks.
Naomi Schanen contributed to this report
Stranger tosses scalding liquid at homeless man in NYC: cops
A heartless stranger tossed scalding liquid at a homeless man’s face outside a bank just steps from the Port Authority Bus Terminal early Thursday, cops said.
The 40-year-old victim was outside the Chase Bank on Eighth Avenue near West 40th Street around 4 a.m. when another man walked up to him and threw an unknown liquid in his face without saying a word, police said.
The victim was taken to Weill Cornell Medical Center with burns to his face, cops said.
His injuries are considered non-life-threatening.
The suspect took off after the attack, and cops were still looking for him hours later.
Weird Phenomenon of Liquid Skin Discovered on The Surface of Glass : ScienceAlert
Ice isn’t always ice all the way through. Even at temperatures well below freezing, its surface can be coated in a film of quasi-liquid atoms, with its thickness usually only a few nanometers.
The process of its formation is known as premelting (or ‘surface melting’), and it’s why your ice cubes can stick together even in the freezer.
In addition to ice, we’ve observed a premelted surface layer in a wide range of materials with crystalline structures, those where the atoms inside are arranged in a neatly ordered lattice, like diamonds, quartz, and table salt.
Now, for the first time, scientists have observed surface melting in a substance that’s in internal shambles: glass.
Glass and ice can look very similar, but they’re often very different on the atomic scale. Where crystalline ice is nice and tidy, glass is what we call an amorphous solid: It has no real atomic structure to speak of. Instead, its atoms are just sort of all higgledy-piggledy crammed in, more like you’d expect to see in a liquid.
This, as you might expect, makes it much more difficult to spot a quasi-liquid premelted film on the surface of glass.
The detection of this filmy liquid layer is usually made by experiments involving scattering neutrons or X-rays, which are sensitive to atomic order.
Solid ice is ordered; the surface melting is less so. In glass, it’s all a mess, so scattering wouldn’t be a particularly useful tool.
Physicists Clemens Bechinger and Li Tian of the University of Konstanz in Germany took a different approach. Rather than probing a piece of atomic glass, they created something called colloidal glass – a suspension of microscopic glass spheres suspended in a liquid that behaves like the atoms in atomic glass.
Since the spheres are 10,000 times larger than atoms, their behavior can be seen directly under a microscope and, therefore, be studied in more detail.
Using microscopy and scattering, Bechinger and Tian closely examined their colloidal glass, and they identified the signs of surface melting; namely, the particles at the surface were moving faster than the particles in the bulk glass beneath it.
This was not unexpected. The density of the bulk glass is higher than the density of the surface, meaning that the surface particles literally have more room to move. However, in a layer below the surface, up to 30 particle diameters thick, the particles continue to move more rapidly than the bulk glass, even when they reach bulk glass densities.
“Our results demonstrate that surface melting of glasses is qualitatively different compared to crystals and leads to the formation of a surface glassy layer,” the researchers write in their paper.
“This layer contains cooperative clusters of highly mobile particles which are formed at the surface and which proliferate deep into the material by several tens of particle diameters and well beyond the region where the particle density saturates.”
Since surface melting alters the properties of a material’s surface, the results offer a better understanding of glass, which is extremely useful across a range of applications but also pretty wacky.
For example, high surface mobility could explain why thin polymeric and metallic glassy films have high ionic conductivity compared to thick films. We’re already putting this property to use in batteries, where these films act as ionic conductors.
A deeper understanding of this property, what causes it, and how it can be induced will help scientists find optimized and even new ways to use it.
The team’s research has been published in Nature Communications.
Abbott recalls several ready-to-feed liquid baby formula
Food Fix founder & editor-and-chief Helena Bottemiller Evich discusses how parents are still struggling to find baby formula on ‘Fox Business Tonight.’
Abbott is voluntarily recalling several of its Similac ready-to-feed liquid baby formula products because of a bottle defect.
The Food and Drug Administration announced the recall on Friday, stating that certain lots of Abbott’s liquid baby formula products are being recalled because less than 1% of the bottles “may not have been sealed completely,” which “could result in spoilage.”
According to the FDA, the impacted products are: Similac® Pro-Total ComfortTM, Similac® 360 Total Care®, Similac 360 Total Care Sensitive, Similac® Special Care® 24, Similac Stage 1, Similac® NeoSure®, Similac Water (Sterilized) and Pedialyte Electrolyte Solution.
If consumed, individuals may experience “gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea and vomiting.”
ABBOTT RECALLS SIMILAC, OTHER BABY FORMULAS AFTER 4 REPORTED ILLNESSES
A general view of the Abbott Healthcare Nutrition plant in Cootehill Co Monaghan. (Photo by Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Several lot numbers for the affected products are being recalled, and were manufactured from the company’s Columbus, Ohio facility.
The FDA says that the recall isn’t expected to effect the “overall U.S. infant formula supply,” and said that the recalled products were mainly distributed to hospitals and some doctors’ offices, distributors, and retailers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
ABBOTT’S TROUBLED BABY FORMULA FACTORY BACK IN BUSINESS
Several lot numbers for the affected products are being recalled, and were manufactured from the company’s Columbus, Ohio facility. (FDA / Fox News)
Production for Similac 2 fluid ounce/59 milliliter Ready-to-Feed liquid formula products given to hospitals and other healthcare providers’ will continue on a different production line, according to the announcement.
The recall doesn’t include other powder or liquid formula brands produced at the Columbus facility or elsewhere.
Abbott’s Executive Vice President for Nutritional Products, Joe Manning, said that the company is addressing the issue and minimizing any inconvenience to customers.
GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE
Several lot numbers for the affected products are being recalled, and were manufactured from the company’s Columbus, Ohio facility. (FDA / Fox News)
“We take our responsibility to deliver high-quality products very seriously,” Manning said. “We internally identified the issue, are addressing it, and will work with our customers to minimize inconvenience and get them the products they need.”
New evidence for liquid water on Mars
Scientists have uncovered further evidence that liquid water exists beneath the ice cap at the southern pole of Mars and it may mean that the planet is geothermally active.
In 2018, the European Mars Express orbiter found that the surface of the ice cap covering the south pole of Mars dips and rises, suggesting liquid water may be lurking underneath. But not all scientists were convinced at that time. Mars is extremely cold, and for subglacial water to exist on the planet in the liquid form, there would have to be a source of heat, such as geothermal energy. At the time of the Mars Express discovery, some scientists therefore thought the strange radar signal measured by the spacecraft might be explained by something else, for example some sort of dry material below the ice caps.
But recently, an international team of scientists led by researchers from the University of Cambridge investigated the ice-sheet-covered region, known as Ultimis Scopili, using a different technique and concluded that the presence of liquid water is, indeed, the likeliest explanation.
Related: Water may have been on Mars much more recently than scientists thought, China’s rover suggests
Using spacecraft laser-altimeter measurements from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor satellite to map the topography, or shape, of the upper surface of the ice cap, the researchers detected subtle patterns of height differences that matched computer model predictions for how a body of water beneath the ice cap would affect its surface.
“The combination of the new topographic evidence, our computer model results, and the radar data make it much more likely that at least one area of subglacial liquid water exists on Mars today,” Neil Arnold, a professor of geography at Cambridge University, said in a statement (opens in new tab).
Scientists have been aware that Mars has thick water ice caps at both poles just like Earth. But they believed that, unlike the ice caps of our planet which have water-filled channels and subglacial lakes below them, the Red Planet’s ice caps were frozen all the way down to their base or bed because of the planet’s cold climate. The shape of the Martian ice caps was selected as an independent line of evidence to confirm the radar results because on Earth, scientists have observed that the shape of an overlying ice sheet is influenced by the body of water beneath it.
This is because the water in subglacial lakes lowers the friction between an ice sheet and its bed, allowing the ice to flow faster under the influence of gravity. On the surface of the ice sheet, this change in speed is reflected by a dip in its surface followed by a rise in the ice surface further down the ice flow.
Examining the surface topography from the same area where Mars Express made its radar measurements, the team found a 6.2 mile to 9.3-mile-long (10 to 15 kilometers) surface undulation.
This feature consisted of a depression in the ice surface followed by a corresponding raised area, both deviating from the level of the surrounding ice cap area by several meters. This scale and shape resemble that of undulations in ice sheets above subglacial lakes found on Earth, the researchers said in the statement
To test this correlation and to determine if the surface undulation of the Martian ice cap could be the result of subglacial water, the team ran simulations of ice flow adapted to specific conditions on Mars.
They introduced into their computer model of a Martian ice sheet a patch of reduced bed friction where water would allow the ice flow to speed up. The researchers also adjusted the amount of geothermal heat in the simulation.
These simulations resulted in undulations in the computer-modeled ice surface that were similar in both size and shape to the observed features of the actual southern polar ice cap on Mars.
A combination of the results from this simulation, the new topography observations of the ice cap, and the 2018 radar results point toward the existence of subglacial water beneath the southern polar ice cap, with deeper implications for the geology of the Red Planet.
The team thinks their results indicate that the geothermal heat needed to account for the subglacial water may come from magmatic activity that has occurred relatively recently in the subsurface of Mars.
“Mars must still be geothermally active in order to keep the water beneath the ice cap liquid,” Arnold added. “The quality of data coming back from Mars, from orbital satellites as well as from the landers, is such that we can use it to answer really difficult questions about conditions on, and even under the planet’s surface.
“It’s exciting to use these techniques to find out things about planets other than our own.”
The team’s research is published in the journal Nature Astronomy (opens in new tab).
Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Scientists find new evidence of liquid WATER beneath Mars’ south polar ice cap in major breakthrough
Scientists have discovered new evidence that suggests there could be liquid water on Mars – a breakthrough in our longtime efforts to determine if the Red Planet once hosted life.
The University of Cambridge-led study provides the first independent evidence that uses data other than radar that there’s liquid water beneath Mars’ south polar ice cap.
Dr. Frances Butcher, second author of the study from the University of Sheffield, said in a statement: ‘This study gives the best indication yet that there is liquid water on Mars today because it means that two of the key pieces of evidence we would look for when searching for subglacial lakes on Earth have now been found on Mars.’
Scientists have discovered new evidence that suggests there could be liquid water on Mars – a breakthrough in our longtime efforts to determine if the Red Planet once hosted life
‘Liquid water is an essential ingredient for life, although it does not necessarily mean that life exists on Mars,’ he added in his statement.
‘In order to be liquid at such cold temperatures, the water beneath the south pole might need to be really salty, which would make it difficult for any microbial life to inhabit it.
‘However, it does give hope that there were more habitable environments in the past when the climate was less unforgiving.’
The international research team, which also included scientists from the University of Nantes and University College Dublin, used spacecraft laser-altimeter measurements of the shape of the upper surface of the ice cap to identify subtle patterns in its height.
Dr. Frances Butcher, second author of the study from the University of Sheffield, said in a statement: ‘This study gives the best indication yet that there is liquid water on Mars today because it means that two of the key pieces of evidence we would look for when searching for subglacial lakes on Earth have now been found on Mars’
The international research team, which also included scientists from the University of Nantes and University College Dublin, used spacecraft laser-altimeter measurements of the shape of the upper surface of the ice cap to identify subtle patterns in its height. ABOVE: Mars’ south polar cap is seen in the new study’s topography analysis
They then showed that these patterns match computer model predictions for how a body of water beneath the ice cap would affect the surface.
Mars has thick water ice caps at both of its poles, like Earth, which are roughly equivalent in combined volume to the Greenland Ice Sheet.
However, unlike Earth’s ice sheets, which have large subglacial lakes and water channels beneath them, Mars’ polar ice caps have been thought to be frozen solid all the way to their bedrock due to the Red Planet’s frigid climate.
Temperatures on Mars average a bone-chilling -81 degrees Fahrenheit but can drop as low as -220 degrees Fahrenheit in winter at the poles.
The researchers’ results, reported today in the journal Nature Astronomy, agree with earlier ice-penetrating radar measurements that were originally interpreted to show a potential area of liquid water beneath the ice.
Unlike Earth’s ice sheets, which have large subglacial lakes and water channels beneath them, Mars’ polar ice caps have been thought to be frozen solid all the way to their bedrock due to the Red Planet’s frigid climate. Temperatures on Mars average a bone-chilling -81 degrees Fahrenheit but can drop as low as -220 degrees Fahrenheit in winter at the poles
‘It does give hope that there were more habitable environments in the past when the climate was less unforgiving’ ABOVE: Scatter plots of residuals from the trend surface shown in Fig. 1d against modelled elevation changes within 20 kilometer radius of the center of the Mars region containing the inferred water
‘The combination of the new topographic evidence, our computer model results and the radar data make it much more likely that at least one area of subglacial liquid water exists on Mars today, and that Mars must still be geothermally active in order to keep the water beneath the ice cap liquid,’ professor Neil Arnold, from Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute, who led the research, explained.
The team used a wide variety of techniques to examine data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor satellite of the surface topography of the part of Mars’ south polar ice cap where the radar signal was identified.
Their analysis revealed a 10-15 kilometer-long surface undulation comprising a depression and a corresponding raised area, both of which deviate from the surrounding ice surface by several meters.
This is similar in scale to undulations over subglacial lakes here on Earth.
Scientists then tested if the observed undulation on the ice’s surface could be explained by liquid water at the bed.
They then ran computer simulations of ice flow that were adapted to the specific conditions of Mars.
Next, they inserted a patch of reduced bed friction in the simulated ice sheet bed where water, if present, would allow the ice to slide and speed up.
Their experiments generated undulations on the simulated ice surface that were similar in size and shape to those the team observed on the real ice cap surface.
The similarity between the computer model produced undulation and the actual spacecraft observations, along with earlier ice-penetrating radar evidence, suggest that there’s an accumulation of liquid water underneath Mars’ south polar ice cap.
The findings also suggest that magnetic activity occurred relatively recently in the planet’s subsurface to enable enhanced geothermal heating needed to keep the water in a liquid state.
‘The quality of data coming back from Mars, from orbital satellites as well as from the landers, is such that we can use it answer really difficult questions about conditions on, and even under the planet’s surface, using the same techniques we also use on Earth,’ said Arnold.
‘It’s exciting to use these techniques to find out things about planets other than our own.’
Years after shuttle, NASA rediscovers the perils of liquid hydrogen
Enlarge / NASA’s Space Launch System rocket at LC-39B on September 1st, 2022.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—America’s space agency on Saturday sought to launch a rocket largely cobbled together from the space shuttle, which itself was designed and built more than four decades ago.
As the space shuttle often was delayed due to technical problems, it therefore comes as scant surprise that the debut launch of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket scrubbed a few hours before its launch window opened. The showstopper was an 8-inch diameter line carrying liquid hydrogen into the rocket. It sprung a persistent leak at the inlet, known as a quick-disconnect, leading on board the vehicle.
Valiantly, the launch team at Kennedy Space Center tried three different times to staunch the leak, all to no avail. Finally at 11:17 am ET, hours behind on their timeline to fuel the rocket, launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson called a halt.
What comes next depends on what engineers and technicians find on Monday when they inspect the vehicle at the launch pad. If the launch team decides it can replace the quick-disconnect hardware at the pad, it may be an option to perform a partial fueling test to determine the integrity of the fix. This may allow NASA to keep the vehicle on the pad ahead of the next launch. Alternatively, the engineers may decide the repairs are best performed inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, and roll the rocket back inside.
Due to the orbital dynamics of the Artemis I mission to fly an uncrewed Orion spacecraft to the Moon, NASA will next have an opportunity to launch from September 19 to October 4. However, making that window would necessitate fixing the rocket at the pad, and then getting a waiver from the US Space Force, which operates the launch range along the Florida coast.
At issue is the flight termination system, which is powered independently of the rocket, with batteries rated for 25 days. NASA would need to extend that battery rating to about 40 days. The space agency is expected to have those discussions with range officials soon.
If the rocket is rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building, which would be necessary service the flight termination system or perform more than cursory work at the launch pad, NASA has another Artemis I launch opportunity from October 17 to October 31.
A tiny, tiny element
The space shuttle was an extremely complex vehicle, mingling the use of solid-rocket boosters—which are something akin to very, very powerful firecrackers—along with exquisitely built main engines powered by the combustion of liquid hydrogen propellant and liquid oxygen to serve as an oxidizer.
Over its lifetime, due to this complexity, the shuttle on average scrubbed nearly once every launch attempt. Some shuttle flights scrubbed as many as five times before finally lifting off. For launch controllers, it never really got a whole lot easier to manage the space shuttle’s complex fueling process, and hydrogen was frequently a culprit.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it is also the lightest. It takes 600 sextillion hydrogen atoms to reach the mass of a single gram. Because it is so tiny, hydrogen can squeeze through the smallest of gaps. This is not so great a problem at ambient temperatures and pressures, but at super-chilled temperatures and high pressures, hydrogen easily oozes out of any available opening.
To keep a rocket’s fuel tanks topped off, propellant lines leading from ground-based systems must remain attached to the booster until the very moment of launch. In the final second, the “quick-disconnects” at the end of these lines break away from the rocket. The difficulty is that, in order to be fail-safes in disconnecting from the rocket, this equipment cannot be bolted together tightly enough to entirely preclude the passage of hydrogen atoms—it is extremely difficult to seal these connections under high pressure, and low temperatures.
NASA, therefore, has a tolerance for a small amount of hydrogen leakage. Anything above a 4 percent concentration of hydrogen in the purge area near the quick disconnect, however, is considered a flammability hazard. “We were seeing in excess of that by two or three times that,” said Mike Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis I Mission Manager. “It was pretty clear we weren’t going to be able to work our way through it. Every time we saw a leak, it pretty quickly exceeded our flammability limits.”
Twice, launch controllers stopped the flow of hydrogen into the vehicle, in hopes that the quick-disconnect would warm a little bit. They hoped that, when they restarted slowly flowing cryogenic hydrogen on board the rocket, the quick-disconnect would find a tighter fit with the booster. It did not. Another time they tried applying a significant amount of pressure to re-seat the quick disconnect.
NASA officials are still assessing the cause of the leak, but they believe it may have been due to an errant valve being opened. This occurred during the process of chilling down the rocket prior to loading liquid hydrogen propellant. Amid a sequence of about a dozen commands being sent to the rocket, a command was sent to a wrong valve to open. This was rectified within 3 or 4 seconds, Sarafin said. However, during this time, the hydrogen line that would develop a problematic quick-disconnect was briefly over-pressurized.
Deferring to the experts
So why does NASA use liquid hydrogen as a fuel for its rockets, if it is so difficult to work with, and there are easier to handle alternatives such as methane or kerosene? One reason is that hydrogen is a very efficient fuel, meaning that it provides better “gas mileage” when used in rocket engines. However, the real answer is that Congress mandated that NASA continue to use space shuttle main engines as part of the SLS rocket program.
In 2010, when Congress wrote the authorization bill for NASA that led to creation of the Space Launch System, it directed the agency to “utilize existing contracts, investments, workforce, industrial base, and capabilities from the Space Shuttle and Orion and Ares 1 projects, including … existing United States propulsion systems, including liquid fuel engines, external tank or tank related capability, and solid rocket motor engines.”
During a news conference on Saturday, Ars asked NASA Administrator Bill Nelson whether it was the right decision for NASA to continue working with hydrogen after the agency’s experience with the space shuttle. In 2010, Nelson was a US Senator from Florida, and ringleader of the space authorization bill alongside US Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, of Texas. “We deferred to the experts,” Nelson said.
By this Nelson meant that the Senate worked alongside some officials at NASA, and within industry, to design the SLS rocket. These industry officials, who would continue to win lucrative contracts from NASA work their work on shuttle-related hardware, were only too happy to support the new rocket design.
Among the idea’s opponents was Lori Garver, who served as NASA’s deputy administrator at the time. She said the decision to use space shuttle components for the agency’s next generation rocket seemed like a terrible idea, given the challenges of working with hydrogen demonstrated over the previous three decades.
“They took finicky, expensive programs that couldn’t fly very often, stacked them together differently, and said now, all of a sudden, it’s going to be cheap and easy,” she said. “Yeah, we’ve flown them before, but they’ve proven to be problematic and challenging. This is one of the things that boggled my mind. What about it was going to change? I attribute it to this sort of group think, the contractors and the self-licking ice cream cone.”
Now, NASA faces the challenge of managing this finicky hardware through more inspections and tests after so many already. The rocket’s core stage, manufactured by Boeing, was shipped from its factory in Louisiana more than two and a half years ago. It underwent nearly a year of testing in Mississippi before arriving at Kennedy Space Center in April 2021. Since then, NASA and its contractors have been assembling the complete rocket and testing it on the launch pad.
Effectively, Saturday’s “launch” attempt was the sixth time NASA has tried to completely fuel the first and second stages of the rocket, and then get deep into the countdown. To date, it has not succeeded with any of these fueling tests, known as wet dress rehearsals. On Saturday, the core stage’s massive liquid hydrogen tank, with a capacity of more than 500,000 gallons, was only 11 percent full when the scrub was called.
Perhaps the seventh time will be a charm.
India’s Liquid Mirror Telescope Ready to Observe Night Sky
High in the Himalayas, a new telescope is set to observe the night sky. The contraption has a 4-meter (13-foot) lens, but here’s the kicker: it’s made of liquid mercury, a material seldom used for astronomical imaging.
Called the International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT for short), the device’s main component is a layer of liquid mercury that floats on a very thin layer of compressed air. The quicksilver rotates, taking on a parabolic shape in the process—useful for focusing light from the night sky. By placing a camera at the focal point of the paraboloid, astronomers will then be able to image objects in the sky.
At first glance, the telescope’s mirror appears to be an ordinary reflective surface. But, in actuality, it’s made of liquid that was meticulously shipped up the mountain by a company that specializes in hazardous materials. As long as no one tries to drink the telescope’s mirror, though, it’s perfectly safe—and according to the ILMT team, an affordable alternative to other telescope mirror materials.
“The main advantage is the relatively low cost of a large liquid mirror compared to a large conventional telescope mirror,” said Paul Hickson, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia who works on liquid mirror technologies, in an email to Gizmodo. “As an example, the cost of the ILMT is about one tenth that of the 3.6 metre [11.8-foot] Devasthal Optical Telescope — a conventional telescope of about the same size and located at the same place.”
And that place is pretty lofty. The telescope sits over 8,000 feet above sea level on India’s side of the Himalayas. It will scrutinize a strip of sky directly overhead that contains hundreds of thousands of galaxies and several thousand quasars, Hickson said. (Quasars are very active galactic cores, which are bright in the night sky.)
By imaging the sky nightly—directly overhead, where there is the least atmospheric noise—astronomers can deduce what objects are changing in the sky over time, whether they be new supernovae, asteroids passing in front of luminous objects, or even transiting black holes bending the light from sources behind them.
“We have estimated that 50 new cases of multiply imaged quasars should be detected in the field of view of the ILMT,” said Jean Surdej, an astrophysicist at the University of Liège in Belgium and the project director, in an email to Gizmodo.
The telescope saw its first light in April, but scientific observations won’t begin until later this year. When fully operational, the telescope will collect 10 gigabytes of data nightly. Given the mercurial nature of supernovae and gravitational lenses, it’s fitting that the ILMT will captured those events with quicksilver.