New Meme Puts Space Robots in Their Place

@doug_ellison's contribution to the new 'Robot Shaming' Tumblr site.

Oh, those space robots. They don’t always do what we want them to do, but we love them anyway. If you need a fun diversion in your day, a new Tumblr site has arisen to call out the robots who have made mistakes. Called “Shaming Robots” it started innocently with an image posted of the engineering model of the Curiosity rover blaming the engineering Opportunity rover for messing up JPL’s Mars Yard. There’s now pages of shamed robots (both space and Earth-based). Submit your own if you have a robot you’d like to shame. You can also follow the fun discussion on Twitter at the hashtag #robotshaming.

Astronomer Alex Parker stared the 'Robot Shaming' meme with this image of the engineering model of Curiosity at JPL.
Astronomer Alex Parker stared the ‘Robot Shaming’ meme with this image of the engineering model of Curiosity at JPL.

Solar Powered Plane to Fly Across the US

The Solar Impulse, a solar-powered plane, flies over Switzerland. Credit: Solar Impulse.

On May 1, the world’s first solar-powered plane will take off from Moffett Field in Mountain View, California — the home of NASA’s Ames Research Center – and fly across the US to New York. Even though the Solar Impulse plane could probably fly non-stop, day and night with no fuel, instead it will make several stops in US cities such as Phoenix, Dallas, and Washington, D.C. This would be a kind of “get to know you” tour for the US while the founders of Solar Impulse, Swiss pilot Bertrand Piccard and and pilot Andre Borschberg, want to spread their message of sustainability and technology.

“It carries one pilot and zero passengers, but it carries a lot of messages,” Piccard said during a press briefing yesterday. “We want to inspire as many people as possible to have that same spirit: to dare, to innovate, to invent.”

The solar plane made its first intercontinental flight from Spain to Morocco last June, flew continuously through the night in 2010, and by 2015 they hope to fly a similar aircraft around the world.

The Solar Impulse HB-SIA has 12,000 solar cells built into its 64.3-meter (193-foot) wings. That’s longer than an entire Boeing 747 airplane but it weighs just 1,600 kg (3,500 lb), less than a car. It is powered by four electric motors.

Originally built only to prove the possibility of flying day and night, their goal for future flights is to fly for up to five days and five nights, all by one pilot. Such a feat has never been accomplished.

They are using meditation and hypnosis (Bertrand is a psychologist who uses hypnosis) to train the pilots as they prepare to fly on very little sleep, Borschberg said. He added that they are working on an autopilot system would have to be built on the next plane to allow for some rest.

The first stop for the Solar Impulse as it crosses the United States will be Phoenix, followed by Dallas and then one of three cities: Atlanta, Nashville or St. Louis. It will then stop outside Washington D.C. before heading on to New York.

The Solar Impulse team said the stopovers will be a great occasion to spread Solar Impulse’s message meant to inspire people. “Only by challenging common certitudes can there be change and, through conferences on educational themes, Solar Impulse wishes to motivate everybody to become a pioneer in the search for innovative solutions for society’s biggest challenges,” the team said.

You can check on the planned stopovers at the Solar Impulse website.

Don’t Tell Bones: Are We One Step Closer to “Beaming Up?”

It’s a crazy way to travel, spreading a man’s molecules all over the Universe…

While we’re still a very long way off from instantly transporting from ship to planet à la Star Trek, scientists are still relentlessly working on the type of quantum technologies that could one day make this sci-fi staple a possibility. Just recently, researchers at the University of Cambridge in the UK have reported ways to simplify the instantaneous transmission of quantum information using less “entanglement,” thereby making the process more efficient — as well as less error-prone.

(Because nobody wants a transporter mishap.)

In a paper titled Generalized teleportation and entanglement recycling, Cambridge researchers Sergii Strelchuk, Michal Horodecki and Jonathan Oppenheim investigate a couple of previously-developed protocols for quantum teleportation.

“Teleportation lies at the very heart of quantum information theory, being the pivotal primitive in a variety of tasks. Teleportation protocols are a way of sending an unknown quantum state from one party to another using a resource in the form of an entangled state shared between two parties, Alice and Bob, in advance. First, Alice performs a measurement on the state she wants to teleport and her part of the resource state, then she communicates the classical information to Bob. He applies the unitary operation conditioned on that information to obtain the teleported state.” (Strelchuk et al.)

In order for the teleportation to work, the process relies on entanglement — the remote connection between particles or individual bits of information regardless of the physical space separating them. This was what Einstein referred to as “spooky action at a distance.” But getting particles or information packets entangled is no simple task.

“Teleportation crucially depends on entanglement, which can be thought as a ‘fuel’ powering it,” Strelchuk said in an article on ABC Science. “This fuel… is hard to generate, store and replenish. Finding a way to use it sparingly, or, ideally, recycling it, makes teleportation potentially more usable.”

Read: Beam Me Up, Obama: Conspiracy Theory Claims President Teleported to Mars

Considering the sheer amount of information that makes up the also-difficult-to-determine state of a single object (in the case of a human, even simplistically speaking, about 10^28 kilobytes worth of data) you’re obviously going to want to keep the amount of entanglement fuel needed at a minimum.

Of course, we’re not saying we can teleport red-shirted security officers anywhere yet. But if.

Still, with a more efficient method to reduce — and even recycle — entanglement, Strelchuk and his team are bringing us a little closer to making quantum computing a reality. And it may very well take the power of a quantum computer to even make the physical teleportation of large-scale objects possible… once the technology becomes available.

“We are very excited to show that recycling works in theory, and hope that it will find future applications in areas such as quantum computation,” said Strelchuk. “Building a quantum computer is one of the great challenges of modern physics, and it is hoped that the new teleportation protocol will lead to advances in this area.”

(I’m sure Dr. McCoy would still remain skeptical.)

You can find the team’s full paper here (chock full of maths!) and read the article on ABC Science by Stephen Pincock here.

Transporter room image from TOS “Obsession” episode. © 2013 CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Amazing Map Is Made Up Of Everyone in the U.S. and Canada

 

Zoomable map of the US and Canada pinpoints everyone with a dot. (Credit: Brandon Martin-Anderson/Census Dotmap)

Now this is something different: an interactive and zoomable map of the United States and Canada, made not from political boundaries or geographic landforms but rather of tiny dots — 341,817, 095 of them, to be exact — each one representing an individual person counted in the 2010 (US) and 2011 (Canada) censuses. There’s no other feature on this map except those dots, each randomly placed within the regional blocks used by the census, yet we still end up with a very recognizable structure.

So if you were listed in either of these censuses, you helped to make this map!

The Census Dotmap is a project by Brandon Martin-Anderson, who wanted an image of human settlement patterns that didn’t use political boundaries. He wrote a script that organized all the census data into points that got drawn into the block-level counts… well, you can see more about how he made it here.

(Just how accurate are population counts? According to the US Census Bureau, the 2010 count was “exemplary”… although renters and certain minority groups are traditionally undercounted.)

Screen Shot 2013-01-14 at 5.13.18 PM

 

Dotmap of the Vancouver, BC area

The bottom line is that this is really interesting to explore… if you live in a somewhat remote area, and you see a dot there, most likely that’s you! (It’s a little harder to determine who’s who in the more populated areas… the dots don’t pinpoint specific street addresses.)

And yes, Alaska and Hawaii are on there too… they just didn’t fit in the screenshot above. In fact all of northern Canada is there too, the dots are just very few and widely spaced out. But it’s not blank.

Check it out… you can even buy a print of the entire map, or a particular region or city. Now that’s leaving your mark on the world!

Credit: Brandon Martin-Anderson. Tip of the hat to Inkwell Communications.

Flying, Rolling Robot Might Make a Great Titan Explorer

The HyTAQ (Hybrid Terrestrial and Aerial Quadrotor) robot developed at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT)

Ever since the Huygens probe landed on Titan back in January 2005, sending us our first tantalizing and oh-so-brief glimpses of the moon’s murky, pebbly surface, researchers have been dreaming up ways to explore further… after all, what’s more intriguing than a world in our own Solar System that’s basically a miniature version of an early Earth (even if it’s quite a few orders of magnitude chillier?)

Many concepts have been suggested as to the best way to explore Titan, from Mars-style rovers to boats that would sail its methane seas to powered gliders… and even hot-air balloons have been put on the table. Each of these have their own specific benefits, specially suited to the many environments that are found on Titan, but what if you could have two-in-one; what if you could, say, rove and fly?

That’s what this little robot can do.

Designed by Arash Kalantari and Matthew Spenko at the Robotics Lab at Illinois Institute of Technology, this rolling birdcage is actually a quadrotor flying craft that’s wrapped in a protective framework, allowing it to move freely along the ground and then take off when needed, maneuvering around obstacles easily.

A design like this, fitted with scientific instruments and given adequate power supply, might make a fantastic robotic explorer for Titan, where the atmosphere is thick and the terrain may range from rough and rocky to sandy and slushy. (And what safer way to ford a freezing-cold Titanic stream than fly over it?)

Also, the robot’s cage design may make it better suited to travel across the frozen crust of Titan’s flood plains, which have been found to have a consistency like damp sand with a layer of frozen snow on top. Where wheels could break through and get permanently stuck (a la Spirit) a rolling cage might remain on top. And if it does break through… well, fire up the engines and take off.

The robot (as it’s designed now) is also very energy-efficient, compared to quadrotors that only fly.

“During terrestrial locomotion, the robot only needs to overcome rolling resistance and consumes much less energy compared to the aerial mode,” the IIT website notes. “This solves one of the most vexing problems of quadrotors and rotorcraft in general — their short operation time. Experimental results show that the hybrid robot can travel a distance 4 times greater and operate almost 6 times longer than an aerial only system.”

Of course this is all just excited speculation at this point. No NASA or ESA contracts have been awarded to IIT to build the next Titan explorer, and who knows if the idea is on anyone else’s plate. But innovations like this, from schools and the private sector, are just the sorts of exciting things that set imaginations rolling (and flying!)

PIA08115_n

Color view of Titan’s surface, captured by the Huygens probe after landing in January 2005. (NASA/JPL/ESA/University of Arizona)

Video by RoboticsIIT

White House Petition: Could we Build the Starship Enterprise?

Could we build a version of the Starship Enterprise over the next 20 years? Credit: BuildTheEnterprise.org

Earlier this year, an engineer who goes by the name of BTE Dan proposed building a full-sized, ion-powered version of a Constitution-Class Enterprise – from the original Star Trek – saying it could be built with current technology and could be completed within 20 years. Now, BTE Dan has started a White House petition — not to build the Enterprise but to just do a feasibility study and conceptual design of the USS Enterprise interplanetary spaceship. As of this writing, the petition has 1,414 signatures of the 25,000 needed by January 21, 2013 to be considered by the Obama administration.

The petition reads:

We have within our technological reach the ability to build the 1st generation of the USS Enterprise. It ends up that this ship’s inspiring form is quite functional. This will be Earth’s first gigawatt-class interplanetary spaceship with artificial gravity. The ship can serve as a spaceship, space station, and space port all in one. In total, one thousand crew members & visitors can be on board at once. Few things could collectively inspire people on Earth more than seeing the Enterprise being built in space. And the ship could go on amazing missions, like taking the first humans to Mars while taking along a large load of base-building equipment for constructing the first permanent base there.

See the petition and sign it here.

BTE Dan told Universe Today earlier this year that what he really is hoping for is to find a segment of scientists and engineers in the space industry to take an active interest and contribute to the ideas on his website, BuildTheEnterprise.org to help move the concept forward.

“I have been getting many offers of help from engineers outside the space industry, and that’s great,” he said via email. “But also what is needed are some experienced space engineers who adopt a can-do attitude about the concept of the Gen1 Enterprise.”

BTE Dan prefers to remain anonymous at this point, and his biggest concern has been that the scientists and engineers at NASA and their space contractors were going to be hostile about the idea, as his first brush with them did not go well.

Diagram of a proposed current generation of a Starship Enterprise. Credit: BuildTheEnterprise.org

“I am an outsider poking around in their sandbox, and human nature is that people don’t like that,” he said, noting that he knows his design may have fatal flaws, but that is why he is looking for assistance.

“There is a lot of waste heat to get rid of, today’s ion propulsions engines need major advances, and perhaps stability problems will be found with the gravity wheel,” he said.

When Universe Today broke the story of the BuildTheEnterprise concept in May of this year, it went viral and BTE Dan’s website crashed under the traffic.

“I really did not expect this at all,” he said at the time. “I did not plan for this level of web traffic!” He has since made upgrades to handle more traffic.

His website is complete with conceptual designs, ship specs, a funding schedule, and almost every other imaginable detail of how the Enterprise could be built. It would be built entirely in space, have a rotating gravity section inside of the saucer, and be similar in size with the same look as the USS Enterprise that we know from Star Trek.

The White House takes petitions on many topics at the “We the People” website and will consider them if they receive 25,000 signatures. Earlier this year, a petition to build a Death Star space station by 2016 received over 32,000 signatures, but so far there has not been an official response about it from the White House.

NASA’s Version of Mr. Fusion

Researcher Stephen Anthony works with the new reactor prototype that could turn trash into gas. Image credit: NASA/Dmitri Gerondidakis

It probably won’t be able to fuel Doc Brown’s flux capacitor on his DeLorean time machine, but NASA researchers are hoping a new device that will be tested on the International Space Station can turn trash into power. The Trash to Gas Reactor is a miniature version of large waste incineration facilities on Earth that generate electricity or fuel. This could help with the accumulating trash on the ISS and be used on future missions beyond Earth orbit, as well as help the trash problem in areas of the world where there are neither large power plants nor garbage processing facilities.

“Not only will the effort on this help space missions but also on Earth because we have enough problems dealing with our own trash,” said Anne Caraccio, a chemical engineer working on the project.

The prototype of the Trash to Gas Reactor is a meter-long (3 foot-long) device that looks strikingly similar to the “Mr. Fusion” reactor in the second “Back to the Future” movie. Just like Doc Brown and Marty, astronauts can throw in things like food wrappers, used clothing, food scraps, tape, packaging and other garbage accumulated by the crew and the reactor will turn it into potential power, such as methane gas, or even oxygen or water.

The team developing the reactor is hoping to have their prototype ready to fly on the ISS by 2018 – which unfortunately doesn’t fit into the “Back to the Future” timeline: Emmett Brown travels to 2015 where he gets his Mr. Fusion and changes the future. But perhaps its Earth-bound counterpart could be ready in two years, in time for the Doc’s arrival from 1985.

“Back to the Future’s” Mr. Fusion. Via Theme Park Review.

OK, back to reality now, even though this does have a science fiction element to it…

A team led by Paul Hintze at the Kennedy Space Center has built an 80-pound small reactor to test theories about incinerating a variety of trash ranging from used clothes to uneaten food. The reactor holds more than three quarts of material and burns at about 1,000 degrees F, about twice the maximum temperature of an average household oven. It’s expected to take astronauts four hours to burn a day’s worth of trash from a crew of four.

The team estimates that during the course of a year in space – one half the length of time a mission to Mars is expected to take – trash processing for a crew of four would create about 2,200 pounds of methane fuel, enough to power a launch from the lunar surface, Hintze said.

“The longer the mission, the more applicable this technology is,” Hintze said. “If you’re just doing a two-week mission, you wouldn’t want to take along something like this because you wouldn’t get anything out of it.”

Converting garbage into fuel also would keep astronauts from turning their cramped space capsule into an orbiting landfill.

Paul Hintze is the researcher leading the trash-to-gas project at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Image credit: NASA/Dmitri Gerondidakis

The experimental version of the reactor is made of steel, but the team expects to employ a different alloy for future versions, something that might be lighter but just as strong in order to withstand the high temperatures needed to break down the materials and destroy potential microbes.

One of the issues the team is working on is making sure that no smell or potential hazardous gases are created as a by-product in the closed environment of the space station or a spacecraft on its way to deep space.

“On Earth, a little bit of an odor is not a problem, but in space a bad smell is a deal breaker,” Hintze said.

Right now trash in the ISS is stuffed into the Progress resupply ship, which burns up in the atmosphere during re-entry. This new reactor could turn the trash into something valuable in space.

Source: NASA

Google Honors Canadarm’s 31st Anniversary

Canada’s most famous robot is on the front page of Google.ca today. The Google doodle honors the 31st anniversary of the first use of Canadarm in space.

Canadarm is a robotic arm that flew on virtually every shuttle mission. The technology is still being used today in space.

According to the 1992 book A Heritage of Excellence, Canada was first invited to work in the shuttle program in 1969. Toronto engineering firm DSMA-Atcon Ltd. initially pitched a Canadian-built space telescope, but NASA was more interested in DSMA’s other work.

“The Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland expressed interest in another of DSMA’s gadgets – a robot the company had developed for loading fuel into Candu nuclear reactors,” wrote Lydia Dotto in the book, which Spar commissioned to celebrate its 25th anniversary.

“It was just the thing for putting a satellite they were building into space.”

Dozens of astronauts have used the Canadarms during spacewalks, including Michael L. Gernhardt on STS-104. Credit: NASA

The Canadian government and NASA signed a memorandum of understanding in 1975 to build the arm. Legislation allowing the project to move forward passed the next year. Canadian company Spar became the prime contractor, with DSMA, CAE and RCA as subcontractors.

Engineers had to face several challenges when constructing the Canadarm, including how to grapple satellites. The solution was an “end effector“, a snare on the end of the Canadarm to grasp satellites designed to be hoisted into space.

Several NASA astronauts, including Sally Ride, gave feedback on the arm’s development. Canadarm flew for the first time on STS-2, which launched Nov. 12, 1981. (Ride herself used the arm on STS-7 when she became the first American woman to fly in space.)

Marc Garneau, the first Canadian astronaut in space, has said the arm’s success led to the establishment of the Canadian astronaut program. He flew in 1984, three years after Canadarm’s first flight.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield during an EVA in 2001. Also in the image is the Canadarm2 robotic arm on the ISS. Credit: NASA

Some of the arm’s notable achievements:

– Launching space probes, including the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, as well as short-term experiments that ran during shuttle missions;

– Retrieving satellites for servicing. One prominent example was the rescue of the INTELSAT VI satellite on STS-49, which required the first three-astronaut spacewalk;

Launching the Hubble Space Telescope, then retrieving and relaunching it during each repair mission;

– Helping to build the International Space Station along with Canadarm2, its younger sibling;

– Scanning for broken tiles on the bottom of the shuttle. Astronauts used a procedure developed after Columbia, carrying seven astronauts, was destroyed during re-entry in 2003. A Canadarm was modified into an extension boom; another Canadarm grasped that boom to reach underneath the shuttle.

The arm was so successful that MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (which acquired Spar) built a robotic arm for the International Space Station, called Canadarm2. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield helped install the arm during his first spacewalk in 2001.

Canadarm2’s most nail-biting moment was in 2007, when astronauts used it to hoist astronaut Steve Parazynski (who was balancing on the extension boom) for a tricky solar panel repair on the station.

November 3, 2007 – Canadarm2 played a big role in helping astronauts fix a torn solar array. Here, Scott Parazynski analyses the solar panel while anchored to the boom. Credit: NASA

More recently, Canadarm2 was used to grapple the Dragon spacecraft when SpaceX’s demonstration and resupply missions arrived at the International Space Station this year.

MDA recently unveiled several next-generation Canadarm prototypes that could, in part, be used to refuel satellites. The Canadian Space Agency funded the projects with $53 million (CDN $53.1 million) in stimulus money. MDA hopes to attract more money to get the arms ready for space.

You can read more about the Canadarm’s history on the Canadian Space Agency website.

Huge New ESA Tracking Station is Ready for Duty

Caption: ESA’s giant Malargüe tracking station Credits: ESA/S. Marti

To keep in contact with an ever growing armada of spacecraft ESA has developed a tracking station network called ESTRACK. This is a worldwide system of ground stations providing links between satellites in orbit and ESA’s Operations Control Centre (ESOC) located in Darmstadt, Germany. The core ESTRACK network comprises 10 stations in seven countries. Major construction has now been completed on the final piece of this cosmic jigsaw, one of the world’s most sophisticated satellite tracking stations at Malargüe, Argentina, 1000 km west of Buenos Aires.

ESA’s Core Network comprises 10 ESTRACK stations: Kourou (French Guiana), Maspalomas, Villafranca (Spain), Redu (Belgium), Santa Maria (Portugal), Kiruna (Sweden), Perth (Australia) which host 5.5-, 13-, 13.5- or 15-metre antennas. The new tracking station (DSA3) at Malargüe in Argentina, joins two other 35-metre deep-space antennas at New Norcia (DSA1) in Australia (completed in 2002) and Cebreros (DSA2) in Spain, (completed in 2005) to form the European Deep Space Network.

The essential task of ESTRACK stations is to communicate with missions, up-linking commands and down-linking scientific data and spacecraft status information. The tracking stations also gather radiometric data to tell mission controllers the location, trajectory and velocity of their spacecraft, to search for and acquire newly launched spacecraft, in addition to auto-tracking, frequency and timing control using atomic clocks and gathering atmospheric and weather data.

Deep-space missions can be over 2 million kilometres away from the Earth. Communicating at such distances requires highly accurate mechanical pointing and calibration systems. The 35m stations provide the improved range, radio technology and data rates required to send commands, receive data and perform radiometric measurements for current and next-generation exploratory missions such as Mars Express, Venus Express, Rosetta, Herschel, Planck, Gaia, BepiColombo, ExoMars, Solar Orbiter and Juice.

DSA3 is located at 1500m altitude in the clear Argentinian desert air, this and ultra-low-temperature amplifiers installed at the station, have meant that performance has exceeded expectations. The first test signals were received in June 2012 from Mars Express, over a distance of about 193 million km, proving that the station’s technology is ready for duty.

“Initial in-service testing with the Malargüe station shows excellent results.” “Our initial in-service testing with the Malargüe station shows excellent results,” says Roberto Maddè, ESA’s project manager for DSA 3 construction. “We have been able to quickly and accurately acquire signals from ESA and NASA spacecraft, and our station is performing better than specified.”

All three tracking stations are also equipped for radio science, which studies how matter, such as planetary atmospheres, affects the radio waves as they pass through. This can provide important information on the atmospheric composition of Mars, Venus or the Sun.

The tracking capability of all three ESA deep space stations also work in cooperation with partner agencies such as NASA and Japan’s JAXA, helping to boost science data return for all. The three Deep Space Antenna can be linked to the 7 stations comprising the Core Network as well as five other stations making up the larger Augmented Network and eleven additional stations that make up a global Cooperative Network with other space agencies from around the world.

Now that major construction is complete, teams are preparing DSA 3 for hand-over to operations, formal inauguration late this year and entry in routine service early in 2013.

Find out more about Malargüe and the Deep Space Antenna here and the other ESTRACK tracking stations here

Could Plasma Jet Thrusters Kickstart Interplanetary Travel?

A great offshoot from commercial space companies getting a foothold in real missions to orbit is that the old entrepreneurial space spirit seems to have been revived. People are attempting to develop and build what could be breakout space technologies, sometimes in their garages or basements. A new Kickstarter project is especially exciting, as it is looking to build a prototype electric pulsed plasma jet thruster, and the engineers behind the project say this could be used for reliable, high performance, low cost interplanetary space transportation.

UPDATE: HyperV has reached its Kickstarter goal and will be funded.

A group plasma physics researchers started a company about 8 years ago called HyperV, and they have come up with a new design for basic pulsed plasma jet technology. It runs on superheated ionized particles, and the engineers envision it could be used for orbital maneuvering, asteroid/comet rendezvous, orbital debris cleanup and interplanetary transportation.

They say that using this kind of electric propulsion would significantly reduce the mass and weight of spacecraft, resulting in more affordable missions. Although there are other types of electric propulsion systems that have been used for space travel – with mixed results — the HyperV team believes their new design offers solutions to problems in previous designs, and will ultimately provide cheaper and more robust space travel.

The team describes their project:

We believe our thruster technology has the potential to be just as efficient as existing electric thrusters (such as ion and Hall effect thrusters) and with similar specific impulse. But our advantages will be derived from a thruster that is less complex (and much more robust), which can use a variety of propellants including gases, inert plastics, and propellants derived from asteroids, Mars, the Moon, etc., It will also be far cheaper to build, and can be more readily scaled to larger sizes and very high power levels than current electric propulsion systems. Our plasma thruster technology should be scalable from a few kilowatts all the way up to megawatts of average power. The electricity which is needed to power electric thrusters would most likely come from new high performance solar panels, but could also utilize other compact energy sources. From a practical viewpoint for satellite design, our thruster will have much higher thrust per unit area than ion or Hall thrusters, thus taking up less room on the rear of the spacecraft.

They predict their prototype could produce a specific impulse (Isp) of 2000 sec, which is an equivalent to an exhaust velocity of 20,000 m/s.

They are looking to raise $69,000 by November 3, 2012 to get their project started. At the time of this writing, the team has just over $54,000.

Here’s a video from HyperV:

“We invite you, the citizens of Earth, to join with us as we design, construct, test, and execute this demonstration,” the team wrote on their Kickstarter page. “The culmination of this project will be an all-up, laboratory demonstration of our prototype thruster.”