Our robot is a 2 wheel drive. It is operated by 2 motors one on the left and the right side of the robot. It has 4 wheels 2 on the left and the right side of the robot. It has a touch sensor and an ultrasonic range finder.
Friday, May 28, 2010
The Moon
It is hypothesized that the moon was created by when a rock the size of Mars slammed in to Earth. The moon has many craters.The Moon's heavily cratered surface is the result of intense pummeling by space rocks between 4.1 billion and 3.8 billion years ago.These craters have not eroded much for two main reasons: The Moon is not geologically very active, so earthquakes, volcanoes and mountain-building don't destroy the landscape as they do on Earth; and with virtually no atmosphere there is no wind or rain, so very little surface erosion occurs. The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. There is a light and dark side to the moon. The moon is made up of dirt, rocks, and craters.
Our Trip To The Lego Store!
Last week on May 22,2010 some of my team members and I went on a field trip to the Lego store. The first Lego store we visited was down town, but unfortunately they didn't have the correct pieces we were looking for. After the first we store didn't have the pieces we needed, we visited another store in a suburban mall. With the help of an employee we found the pieces we needed. He also gave us plenty of helpful information.We took plenty of pictures. Afterwards, we were able to go to a Chicago Sky basketball game. We all could agree that it was a wonderful time.
- Ayanna
On our trip last weekend, we visited two Lego Stores and Lego Land. It was fun and I learned alot. The first store we visited had nothing we were looking for. Then we went to Lego Land, which had a gift shop, but they also didn't have the correct pieces. The last store we visited was very helpful, and the employees gave us information we could use for moonbots. I had lots of fun and I also built a huge tower out of Legos.
- Antowane
Research Information- May 28th
- PRESIDENT OBAMA'S SPACE PLAN
President Obama laid out his timeline and destinations for manned space exploration during a speech Thursday, a blueprint that includes a trip to Mars orbit and back in the 2030s. At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Obama pledged his commitment to the space agency and to manned exploration of the solar system, at a time when his controversial budget proposal for NASA awaits approval from Congress.
"As president, I believe that space exploration is not a luxury, it is not an afterthought," Obama said. "I am 100 percent committed to the mission of NASA and its future," he added later.
In a budget request released in February for fiscal year 2011, Obama asked for an additional $6 billion for NASA over five years, but he also introduced plans to cancel the Constellation Program, a family of rockets in the works to replace the space shuttle and return humans to the moon and to other targets in deep space. He proposed that commercial firms instead would launch astronauts to orbit after the shuttle is retired this year or in early 2011. The plan drew criticism from several members of Congress, particularly those representing districts where NASA is a major economic force, and left many experts concerned that exploration would be hamstrung without the kinds of definite goals on which Constellation had been built—notably returning humans to the moon by 2020.
Obama sought to neutralize both lines of criticism in his remarks Thursday, claiming that his plan would bring 2,500 extra jobs to Florida's Space Coast compared to the Constellation Program. He added that the administration was developing a $40-million plan for economic growth and job creation in the region, where layoffs from the shuttle program's phaseout are expected to hit hard. Obama also softened his proposal to eliminate Constellation entirely, saying that he had directed NASA Administrator Charles Bolden to begin work on an escape craft for the International Space Station that would be based on Constellation's Orion crew capsule.
Bolden had vowed in prior weeks that NASA's overarching long-term goal remained a manned mission to Mars, and Obama made that official by announcing his proposed timeline for human spaceflight in a series of what he called "specific and achievable milestones." Obama said that a heavy-lift rocket to enable astronauts' return to deep space would be fast-tracked. "We will finalize a rocket design no later than 2015 and then begin to build it," he said. On April 8 Bolden had announced that NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., would receive $3.1 billion over five years under Obama's budget to develop new heavy-lift rockets.
By 2025, Obama said, the U.S. would develop a new spacecraft that can take astronauts beyond the moon and into deep space. "We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history," Obama said. By the 2030s, he continued, it will be possible to send humans on a two-way voyage to Mars, a mission that would be akin to the Apollo 8 mission of 1968 that set the stage for Apollo 11 the following year. "A landing on Mars will follow, and I expect to be around to see it," Obama said.
- LIFE IN MULTIUNIVERSE
Key Concepts
- Multiple other universes—each with its own laws of physics—may have emerged from the same primordial vacuum that gave rise to ours.
- Assuming they exist, many of those universes may contain intricate structures and perhaps even some forms of life.
- These findings suggest that our universe may not be as “finely tuned” for the emergence of life as previously thought.
The typical Hollywood action hero skirts death for a living. Time and again, scores of bad guys shoot at him from multiple directions but miss by a hair. Cars explode just a fraction of a second too late for the fireball to catch him before he finds cover. And friends come to the rescue just before a villain’s knife slits his throat. If any one of those things happened just a little differently, the hero would be hasta la vista, baby. Yet even if we have not seen the movie before, something tells us that he will make it to the end in one piece.
In some respects, the story of our universe resembles a Hollywood action movie. Several physicists have argued that a slight change to one of the laws of physics would cause some disaster that would disrupt the normal evolution of the universe and make our existence impossible. For example, if the strong nuclear force that binds together atomic nuclei had been slightly stronger or weaker, stars would have forged very little of the carbon and other elements that seem necessary to form planets, let alone life. If the proton were just 0.2 percent heavier than it is, all primordial hydrogen would have decayed almost immediately into neutrons, and no atoms would have formed. The list goes on.
- LIFE CHANGING DISCOVERIES
Key Concepts
- Several events, both natural and man-made, can happen suddenly and at any time, completely transforming societies.
- Many of these events will not unfold the way popular conceptions have imagined they will.
The best science transforms our conception of the universe and our place in it and helps us to understand and cope with changes beyond our control. Relativity, natural selection, germ theory, heliocentrism and other explanations of natural phenomena have remade our intellectual and cultural landscapes. The same holds true for inventions as diverse as the Internet, formal logic, agriculture and the wheel.
What dramatic new events are in store for humanity? Here we contemplate 12 possibilities and rate their likelihood of happening by 2050. Some will no doubt bring to mind long-standing dystopian visions: extinction-causing asteroid collisions, war-waging intelligent machines, Frankenstein’s monster. Yet the best thinking today suggests that many events will not unfold as expected. In fact, a scenario could be seen as sobering and disappointing to one person and curious and uplifting to another. One thing is certain: they all have the power to forever reshape how we think about ourselves and how we live our lives.
- EARTH-LIKE PLANET
Apparently, Planet X (a.k.a. Nibiru) was spotted by astronomers in the early 1980's in the outermost reaches of the Solar System. It has been tracked by infrared observatories; seen lurking around in the Kuiper Belt and now it is speeding right toward us and will enter the inner Solar System in 2012. So what does this mean to us? Well, the effects of the approach of Planet X on our planet will be biblical, and what's more the effects are being felt right now. Millions, even billions of people will die, global warming will increase; earthquakes, drought, famine, wars, social collapse, even killer solar flares will be caused by Nibiru blasting through the core of the Solar System. All of this will happen in 2012, and we must begin preparing for our demise right now…
As investigated in my previous article "No Doomsday in 2012", a lot of weight had been placed on the end of an ancient Mayan calendar, the "Long Count". According to this calendar and Mayan myth, something is going to happen on December 21st, 2012. Now the world's Planet X supporters seem to have calculated that this hypothetical, deadly planet will arrive from a highly eccentric orbit to wreak gravitational havoc on Earth, sparking geological, social, economic and environmental damage, killing a high proportion of life… in 2012.
n 1843, John Couch Adams (a British mathematician and astronomer) studied the orbital perturbations of Uranus and deduced that through gravitational interactions, there must be an eighth planet, tugging at the gas giant. This led to the discovery of Neptune, orbiting at a distance of 30AU from the Sun. There have been numerous occasions where this method has been used to deduce the existence of other bodies in the Solar System before they were directly observed.
Neptune was also experiencing orbital perturbations, and on the discovery of Pluto in 1930, it was thought that the aptly named "Planet X" had been discovered. Alas, Pluto's mass was tiny, and once the orbit of Charon (Pluto's moon) was analysed it was found that the mass of the Pluto-Charon system was far too small to affect the orbit of Neptune. The hunt for Planet X continued…
After years of speculation and historic research, it was believed that a huge body astronomers were looking for was a huge planet or a small star, possibly a companion to our Sun (making the Solar System a binary system). The name "Nibiru" was unearthed by the author Zecharia Sitchin, on researching the possible intervention of extraterrestrials in the early history of mankind. Nibiru is a hypothetical planet as taught in ancient Sumerian culture (the Sumerians existed from around 6,000BC to 3,000BC, predating Babylon, in the current geographic location of Iraq). There is very little archaeological evidence to suggest this mythical planet has anything to do with Planet X. But since this dubious connection, Planet X and Nibiru are now thought by doomsayers to be the same thing, an ancient astronomical body that has returned after a long orbit beyond the Solar System.
robably the most glaring inconsistency in the Planet X hypothesis is the Planet X advocates assertion that the 1984 IRAS object and the 1992 body are one of the same thing. As announced on many websites and online videos about Planet X, the 1984 IRAS observation saw Planet X at 50 billion miles from Earth. The 1992 NASA "announcement" put Planet X at a distance of about 7 billion miles from Earth. Therefore, the logic goes, Planet X had travelled 43 billion miles in the course of only eight years (from 1984 to 1992). After some dubious mathematics, Planet X is therefore expected to reach the core of the Solar System in 2012. (Although many believed it should arrive in 2003… they were obviously wrong about that prediction.)
Well, I think we might be clutching at straws here. For starters, for the 1984 object to be the same as the 1992 object, surely they should be the same mass? If Planet X was a brown dwarf (as we are led to believe in the IRAS observations), how can it possibly weigh in at only 4 to 8 Earth masses eight years later? Brown dwarfs have a mass of around 15-80 Jupiter masses. As Jupiter is about 318 Earth masses, surely the object hurtling toward us should have a mass of somewhere between 4,770 and 25,440 Earth masses? So I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I reckon the 1984 object and the 1992 object (if either object actually existed that is) are not the same thing. Not by a very long shot.
If there is no evidence supporting Planet X, it must be a conspiracy
If it can be this easy to cast the fundamental "scientific" theory behind Planet X into doubt, I see little point in discussing the historical reasons (mass extinctions, volcanic activity, earthquakes etc.) as to why the doomsayers believe Planet X should exist. If there is no renegade planet out there of significant mass, how can Nibiru be a threat to us in 2012?
They will have us believe there is a global conspiracy of international governments hiding the facts from us. NASA is involved in the cover-up, hence the lack of evidence. In my opinion, simply because there is no evidence, doesn't mean there is a conspiracy to hide the truth from the public. So why would governments want to hide a "discovery" as historic as a doomsday planet approaching the inner Solar System anyway? To avoid mass panic and pursue their own, greedy agendas (obviously).
As it turns out, this is the only strength behind the Planet X myth. When confronted with scientific facts, the Planet X advocates reply with "…governments are sending out disinformation and covering up the true observations of Nibiru." Although I enjoy a good conspiracy theory, I will not support anything in the name of Planet X. If the basic science behind what we are led to believe are the foundation of Planet X existing is wrong, it seems a poor argument to say "the government did it".
Therefore, the story that Planet X will arrive in 2012 is, in my view, total bunkum (but it helps to sell doomsday books and DVDs by scaring people). Nibiru will remain in the realms of Sumerian myth.
Friday, May 7, 2010
Hello we are Team Infinity, Part of Chicago's Octagon Robotics Team. Welcome to our blog for the Lego Lunar X Prize MoonBots Challenge. We hope you follow us through our journey as we research, brainstorm, plan and design a planetary rover for lunar exploration.
Today we joined forces as a team and began discussing our team roles and research strategy. Hopefully, in this first week our team can focus on the games rules and focus on goals that will guide us to completing our tasks.
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