NASA Calls for New Commercial Crew Proposals
News from Sacramento Bee:
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2012 – /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – As part of NASA’s ongoing efforts to foster development of a U.S. commercial crew space transportation capability to and from low Earth orbit and the International Space Station, NASA has issued a call for industry to submit proposals for the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability Initiative.
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It’s expected that proposals will lead to Space Act Agreements that will help NASA and the U.S. achieve safe, reliable, and cost effective human access to space. NASA expects to make multiple awards this summer, with values ranging from $ 300 – $ 500 million.
To provide industry a better understanding of this initiative so that they may provide more comprehensive proposals, NASA plans a pre-proposal conference on Feb. 14, at the Courtyard Marriott in Cocoa Beach, Fla. Proposals are due March 23.
“President Obama is working hard to create an American economy built to last,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. “NASA’s support of commercial innovation to reach low Earth orbit is helping to support these efforts by spurring new technological development and creating jobs and economic benefits for years to come.”
NASA’s announcement asks industry to propose a base period of approximately 21 months, running……………. continues on Sacramento Bee
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Researchers devise a way to store data on magnetic media using heat
News from SlashGear:
Much research has been performed working on ways to improve the speed and power efficiency of data storage devices such as hard drives. A group of researchers from York University are working as part of an international team and the team has found that they can store information using heat instead of a magnetic field on a magnetic medium. The results is much faster and more power efficient storage of data than any traditional hard drive offers today.
According to a team member the new process allows the recording of terabytes of information each second, which is hundreds of times faster than the storage technology in use today. In a conventional hard drive an external magnetic field is applied to magnetic medium such as a spinning disc inside a traditional HDD. With the new method, the researchers use a short pulse of heat.
That heat pulse is sufficient to invert the magnetic poles on magnetic medium. Tha……………. continues on SlashGear
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