The Worldwide Internet | #FutureGadgets

At the moment, internet coverage can be so good, yet, occasionally - AWFUL! Organisations including SpaceX want to launch satellites into Earth's orbit to vastly improve our internet, with any luck we should have perfect internet worldwide by 2020.

Space Drones | #FutureGadgets

Amazon are currently trialing the idea of delivering your parcels in record time with the help of drones, but NASA think they have potential in space. Some might say that actually anything unmanned in space is a drone but NASA want them to work on the space station. This might seem like a waste but it may well speed up the process of experiments on board the ISS - improving our lives on Earth a lot quicker than it would otherwise do! This could mean that we get quicker experimental results and faster scientific advancements, meaning revolutionary technology could be hitting your home very soon!

Future Gadgets

Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting a series of posts based on the revolutionary gadgets which might be an every day sight for us in a few years time, check back here to keep up to date, or follow me on twitter @Sci_Sparks or search the hashtag #FutureGadgets so you don't miss anything.

Britain: The Isle of Wonder

The British population makes up just one per cent of the world’s population. Yet our small collection of rocks poking out of the Northern Atlantic has thrown up beaters in virtually every field of human endeavour.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Science and Engineering. Edward Jenner came up with vaccines, Sir Charles Darwin came up with the Origin of Species, Sir Isaac Newton pioneered the basic laws of motion, Sir Tim Berners-Lee who pioneered the world-wide web, Michael Faraday and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the list is gloriously long.

Why do so many great minds emerge and flourish from Britain? This is an extremely important question to ask ourselves, not only our past, but our future economy hangs on further technical advances being made and developed. Our successes can be traced back almost 800 years ago when The University of Oxford and Cambridge were founded.

In 1660 The ‘Royal Society’ was formed, backed by Sir Christopher Wren who was a Professor of Astronomy and an architect at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. The aim was to pursue a radical idea for the time, that the workings of nature can be best understood by observations and experiment. So any theory about the world should be tested and if it disagrees with the observations, then it is wrong. Even today that is radical the theories of powerful and important people could end up being undermined by science. So central to science is this idea that it is enshrined in the Royal Society’s motto: “Take nobody’s word for it”

Shortly after the Royal Society was formed, Sir Isaac Newton developed this approach in his work of “The Principia” which contains of his laws of gravity and the foundations of what we now call classical mechanics, the tools you need to calculate things from the forces on bridges and buildings to the paths of artillery shells, arguably the first modern work of physics. 

The ISS: "Making the Invisible, Visible"

Currently we are using the equivalent of 1 and a half planets worth of resources in order to survive on earth. With the advancement of medical technology and discoveries, we have an ever increasing population. In the near future we will need to find another planet to live on.   

Previous Expedition 34 of the ISS

The ISS is carrying out investigations, testing out the conditions that humans would have to withstand to live on a planet such as Mars to solve this problem, without having to risk money and human health by sending shuttles to Mars or other prospective planets. Other experiments that the ISS carries out are in various fields, for example biology, human biology, physics, astronomy and meteorology (which is the study of the weather)

The ISS may be circling the earth at 7,706.6m/s at 370km, but the International Space Station does a lot more than that. The ISS was sent into orbit on the 20^th November 1998.The ISS has spent a staggering 5243 days in orbit, 4530 of them have been spent occupied, that’s nearly 12 and a half years.

The cost of construction of the ISS mounted up to a massive 150 billion US dollars. The size of the ISS is approximately the size of an American football field and it is the largest man made machinery that orbits the earth.  The ISS has been visited by astronauts and cosmonauts from 15 different nations

View of a spiral cloud from the ISS (@Cmdr_Hadfield 

The technology onboard the ISS allows pioneering research to be carried out, most of which could very well be put to good use within our lifetime. One of the many experiments is tissue culture. This is where living cells can be grown in an environment where the results are not distorted by the force of gravity. These results could be used to test for treatments of deadly diseases and illnesses like cancer, without risking harm to patients whilst the treatment is still in the production stages. NASA has already developed a Bioreactor device on earth that can be used to simulate these effects that happen in space.  Every so often the ISS needs to be serviced, like a car, to do this a Soyuz space shuttle is sent out to service the ISS and deliver any essential equipment or materials to the station. Recently on the 29^th March the Soyuz shuttle managed to reach the ISS in less than 6 hours, compared to the usual 2 days. This brings forward new prospects of space travel, potentially making journeys to planets such as Mars possibly achievable in a reasonable timespan.

The crew on board the ISS changes regularly. On-board the ISS currently is Commander Chris Hadfield and Flight Engineers Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko who began their stay when they docked their Soyuz TMA-07M which transported the crew to the ISS on Dec. 21, 2012.The crew on Expedition 35 is scheduled to remain on-board until May 2013.

You can see when the ISS passes are online here for June http://www.meteorwatch.org/iss-international-space-station-uk-passes-june-2013/

. Follow @VirtualAstro on twitter for more information on astronomy or  @Cmdr_Hadfield for amazing photos from the ISS