samedi 20 décembre 2014
ISS - International Space Station patch.
With a 3D printer, the astronauts on the International Space Station could make some kind of wrench the design was sent to them from Earth.
Image Above:
samedi 20 décembre 2014
ISS - International Space Station patch.
With a 3D printer, the astronauts on the International Space Station could make some kind of wrench the design was sent to them from Earth.
Image Above: Astronaut Butch Wilmore, commander of the ISS, proudly brandishes his new tool. Image Credit: NASA.
This is the first time that the crew was able to cobble together a tool that was missing with a 3D printer made especially for weightlessness. The spanner was designed by Made in Space, the California-based company that created the printer. The latter had already been used in the space station but only on drawings and uploaded tested first on Earth.
This time, the spanner has been designed and tested on Earth and his drawing emailed to the printer, who made subject to some 4 hours, the company said in a statement. "The spanner was designed with removable parts without need of other materials," said a statement from the company.
Image Above: Made In Space's 3D printer, specially designed for use in microgravity on the International Space Station (ISS). Image Credit: NASA.
A prototype has been printed in a California lab and sent to NASA for her to inspect before the drawing goes to the ISS. The entire process, from design to execution, took less than a week.
The spanner like any other printed objects in the station, will be brought to Earth to be compared with printed objects normally.
For more information about the International Space Station (ISS), visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Orbiter.ch Aerospace.
Best regards, Orbiter.ch
Publié par Orbiter.ch à 18:20
CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.
December 20, 2014
CERN gears up to cool LHC down
Last week the cryogenics team at CERN finished filling the arc sections of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with liquid helium. The helium, which is injected into magnets that steer particle beams around the 27-kilometre accelerator, cools the machine to below 4 degrees kelvin (-269.15°C).
The process of filling the LHC is an important milestone on the road to restarting the accelerator at higher energy, though it will still take many weeks to cool the entire accelerator to its nominal operating temperature of 1.9 K (-271.3°C).
The electromagnets that steer particle beams around the LHC must be kept cold enough to operate in a superconducting state – the temperature at which electricity can pass through a material without losing energy to resistance. The niobium-titanium wires that form the coils of the LHC’s superconducting magnets are therefore maintained at 1.9 K by a closed liquid-helium circuit. This is colder than the average temperature – 2.7 K – in outer space.
Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
Some 1292 dipole magnets will produce a magnetic field of 8.33 tesla to keep particle beams on course around the LHC's 27-kilometre ring. A current of 11,850 amps in the magnet coils is needed to reach magnetic fields of this amplitude. The use of superconducting materials has proved to be the best – and most cost-effective – way to avoid overheating the coils.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the