Tech News 1/27/10

NASA ends effort to free rover from Martian sand

stuck-rover-bye

The Mars rover Spirit has logged nearly five miles during six years of rolling around the red planet. It has driven forward, backward and uphill over plains, plateaus, and even a mountain as tall as the Statue of Liberty.

No more.

NASA on Tuesday declared an end to Spirit's roving career after repeated attempts to free it from a sand pit where it's been stuck for nine months. With Martian winter approaching, the focus instead will turn to improving Spirit's tilt so its solar panels can receive maximum sunlight.

YAHOO NEWS

A Hydrogen Highway For The East Coast

hydrogen_fueling_station

One of the big issues facing hydrogen is just where we’re supposed to fill the cars that might run on the stuff. A Connecticut company is answering that question on the East Coast with plans for a “hydrogen highway” that will extend from Portland, Maine to southern Florida.

California historically has been a hotbed of hydrogen research and development, but SunHydro wants to put the East Coast on the H2 map with eleven solar refueling stations. The self-contained stations use electrolysis technology from Proton Energy that uses electricity from solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The process results in considerably fewer emissions than the traditional methods of shipping hydrogen to fueling stations by truck or reforming it from natural gas.

WIRED AUTOPIA

Researchers propose using undersea internet cables to detect tsunamis

1-11-08-underwater_cable

We've heard of a few inventive ideas for detecting tsunamis, and it looks like a group of researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA) have now come up with another: put all those undersea internet cables to a second use. While they haven't moved beyond computer models just yet, the group has apparently found that voltmeters attached to the end of an undersea cable are able to detect the small electric field stirred up by tsunamis, which measure around 500 millivolts. As New Scientist reports, however, the idea does have some considerable limitations, including that it wouldn't be able to pinpoint the exact location or direction of a tsunami, and that any such system would first need to filter out noise caused by other natural events and even the cable itself. Other researchers also caution that it's just as important to develop a system to quickly pass on a warning to potentially affected areas once a tsunami has been detected.

ENGADGET

Last Updated (Wednesday, 27 January 2010 09:00)