Laser “license plate” could improve identification of cubesats
Cubesat, NASA image.A technology using a tiny laser tracker could help resolve one of the major challenges involved with the launching of cubesats: identifying individual satellites after their deployment.
“Cubesats are being launched in larger and larger groups, and, for most cubesat operators, they have no way of telling which object is theirs immediately after launch,” said Rebecca Holmes of Los Alamos National Laboratory. She noted there are other cases where it can be difficult to identify an individual cubesat, such as a lapse in tracking or an unexpected orbital change. (Full Story)
New approach yields high-purity radium for medical applications
Isotope production facility at Los Alamos, LANL photo.Producing radium isotopes to treat cancer could get easier. Researchers developed a method to recover medical radium isotopes. The process begins with the dissolved proton-irradiated thorium target solution. The process then takes the solution through a series of columns. In each column, different isotopes bind to the different substrates the column contains. With the anticipated scale-up to large thorium targets, dozens of patient treatment doses would be available for recovery from a single production process. Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Isotope Team devised the method with collaborators from Brookhaven National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Full Story)
LANL researchers show how computers can predict spread of HIV
HIV attacks a T-Cell.In a recently published study in the journal Nature Microbiology, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory show that computer simulations can accurately predict the transmission of HIV across populations, which could aid in preventing the disease.
The simulations were consistent with actual DNA data obtained from a global public HIV database, developed and maintained by Los Alamos. The archive has more than 840,000 published HIV sequences for scientific research. (Full Story)
Also from the Monitor this week:
Directors talk of past, future of lab
LANL directors who attended the discussion included Kerr, Browne, Kuckuck, Anastasio, and McMillan. LANL photo.In 1942, America’s scientists and military leaders were locked in a race with the Axis Powers to create an atomic weapon, a weapon that in theory would be the most powerful and destructive weapon ever conceived by man.
Seventy-five years later, a panel of the lab’s five out of 10 past lab directors and the lab’s 11th Director Dr. Terry Wallace Jr. met for a public discussion at LANL’s campus, at the Pete V. Domenici Auditorium, July 31 to discuss the unique concept of a national laboratory, a once untried concept that has become the norm. (Full Story)
Lab directors worried about info-wars, education
Current Lab director Terry Wallace, LANL photo.Get six people who have run Los Alamos National Laboratory together for a chat and ask them about today’s national security threats, and they don’t talk much about the lab’s central subject – nuclear weapons.
Collectively, the current lab director and five men who have been in charge of the nation’s pre-eminent weapons lab in the past say they’re most afraid of economic, cyber or information warfare, or problems in education. (Full Story)
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