Category: Science &Technology

{{Korea has started its countdown for the expected launch of the Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1, also known as the Naro rocket.}}

There is slight chance of rain on the day of its third attempt to shoot it into space, but officials said the launch schedule remains set for Friday at 3:30 p.m.

This will be the first and last launch of Naro using Russian technology including a liquid-fueled rocket engine, should it succeed.

Korea has an agreement with Russia in which the latter will provide three engines taking into account of the possibility of launch failure, not its rocket propulsion technology.

However, Russia has agreed to share design and operational know-how in launch pads with Korea.

The so-called “joint venture” rocket launched purely for scientific purposes has failed to launch twice into space, and everyone ranging from government officials to the public is counting on Naro to make history this Friday.

Experts said that a successful launch will provide a foothold for the country to further develop its proprietary rockets and satellites that can monitor climate change and the environment among other things crucial to the society.

But the country still has a long way to go before it can catch up with other advanced economies ― even China. Korea’s space budget is one-tenth of that of Japan, and one-hundredth of China.

In comparison with automobiles, Korea’s level of space technology is on a par with the Hyundai Pony using foreign engines, said Lee Chang-jin, professor of aerospace engineering at Konkuk University.

“However, Naro would be a stepping stone for Korea to develop indigenous application satellites with our own made-in-Korea rocket engine equivalent to luxury automobiles such as BMW as Korea has sufficiently learned from its past failures,” Lee said.

He added that developing a space program will need time and patience.

Their potential, which may not be noticeable in the near term, should be seen like other industries such as shipbuilding and semiconductors whose success did not happen overnight.

Prof. Chang Young-keun of Korea Aerospace University said that space is all about “trials and errors,” and the next crucial step after the Naro launch is to develop Korea’s domestic rocket propulsion technology.

“That technology will define Korea’s space capability over the next 10 years,” said Chang.

This is the area where South Korea not only lags behind other advanced economies but also North Korea, which already has the know-how in developing liquid rocket engines.

North Korea’s Taepodong missile rockets use liquid engines, which initially pushed South Korea to launch its space and rocket programs.

{{Apple is set to start selling an 8-inch version of the iPad to compete with Amazon.com’s Kindle and other smaller tablets, but it set a higher-than-expected price tag of $329 that Wall Street fears could curb demand.}}

Apple’s pencil-thin, smaller iPad Mini will cost much more than its competitors when it goes on sale on Friday, signalling the company is not going to get into a mini-tablet price war.

The company debuted the iPad Mini on Tuesday, with a screen two-thirds smaller than the full model and half the weight. In a surprise, Apple also revamped its flagship, full-sized iPad just six months after the launch of the latest model.

Apple’s late founder Steve Jobs once ridiculed a small tablet from a competitor as a “tweener” that was neither big enough nor small enough to compete with tablets or smartphones. Now Apple’s own Mini enters a growing small-tablet market dominated by the Kindle Fire.

{{In Japan , an app offering real-time translations is to allow people in Japan to speak to foreigners over the phone with both parties using their native tongue.}}

NTT Docomo – the country’s biggest mobile network – will initially convert Japanese to English, Mandarin and Korean, with other languages to follow.

It is the latest in a series of telephone conversation translators to launch in recent months.

Lexifone and Vocre have developed other products.

Alacatel-Lucent and Microsoft are among those working on other solutions.

The products have the potential to let companies avoid having to use specially trained multilingual staff, helping them cut costs. They could also aid tourism.

However, the software involved cannot offer perfect translations, limiting its use in some situations.

{{This week, reality trumped (science) fiction with an image even more enthralling: two amateur astronomers poring through data from deep, distant skies and discovering a planet with four suns.}}

NASA’s website calls the phenomenon a circumbinary planet, or a planet that orbits two suns.

Rare enough on its own — only six other circumbinary planets are known to exist — this planet is orbited by two more distant stars, making it the first known quadruple sun system.

Researchers presented the finding Monday night at the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nevada.

The discovery of the four-sun planet by amateur scientists takes crowd sourcing to new heights.

The expression, coined by Wired magazine editor Jeff Howe, describes tasks that are outsourced to a disparate group of people to come up with a solution.

In this case, the Planet Hunters group made data from NASA’s $600 million Kepler telescope available to the public through its website and coordinates their findings with Yale astronomers.

In combing through the data, “Citizen scientists” Robert Gagliano and Kian Jek spied anomalies that confirmed the existence of the special planet, now known as PH1 — short for Planet Hunters 1 — the first heavenly body found by the online citizen science project.

The planet is a little bigger than Neptune, with a radius about six times greater than Earth.

“I celebrate this discovery for the wow-factor of a planet in a four-star system,” said Natalie Batalha, a Kepler scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California.

“Most importantly, I celebrate this discovery as the fruit of exemplary human cooperation — cooperation between scientists and citizens who give of themselves for the love of stars, knowledge, and exploration.”