P4_3 - It's a Mad Lego World

In this paper, we investigate what would happen to the orbital radius of the Moon if the Earth was made of Lego. We found that for an Earth of equal radius and therefore equal volume, and not considering orbital velocity, the orbital radius of the Moon would increase from 384,000km to 1.98*10^6km

P4_6 Horses make the world go round

The aim of this paper was to determine the feasibility of some factors of the Helios mythology, and to find the force that would be required to accelerate Earth from rest to its current angular velocity. We found that the force required to achieve this in a single day, is 1.39 × 1022 N which is extremely large considering Helios is only using four winged horses. This combined with there being no practical way to apply this force to the Earth, led to us concluding that it was not feasible

P4_1 Sunday Roast the 'Easy' Way.

This paper investigates the difference in time it would take to cook multiple common food items from a roast meal in an ’Easy Bake’ Oven, opposed to a standard kitchen oven. We found that when cooking a 1.00kg chicken and 1.00kg of roast potatoes it saved the chef 31.0mins and 5.60mins, respectively. However, due to the size of an Easy Bake Oven and the practicality of this, the standard kitchen oven continues to be the ’Easy’ way to cook a Sunday roast

P4_5 A Rogue Earth

The Earth decides a giant mirror would be the best defence against the Death Star’s laser. Due to the conservation of momentum, when the mirror reflects the laser the mirror’s velocity and hence the Earth’s velocity must increase to 0.9998617325c. This will result in the Earth escaping from the Sun’s gravitational pull and becoming a rogue planet.As a result, this strategy would be infeasible as the destruction of everyone on planet Earth would still be guaranteed

The Habitable-Zone Planet Finder: A Stabilized Fiber-Fed NIR Spectrograph for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope

We present the scientific motivation and conceptual design for the recently funded Habitable-zone Planet Finder (HPF), a stabilized fiber-fed near-infrared (NIR) spectrograph for the 10 meter class Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) that will be capable of discovering low mass planets around M dwarfs. The HPF will cover the NIR Y & J bands to enable precise radial velocities to be obtained on mid M dwarfs, and enable the detection of low mass planets around these stars. The conceptual design is comprised of a cryostat cooled to 200K, a dual fiber-feed with a science and calibration fiber, a gold coated mosaic echelle grating, and a Teledyne Hawaii-2RG (H2RG) NIR detector with a 1.7$\mu$m cutoff. A uranium-neon hollow-cathode lamp is the baseline wavelength calibration source, and we are actively testing laser frequency combs to enable even higher radial velocity precision. We will present the overall instrument system design and integration with the HET, and discuss major system challenges, key choices, and ongoing research and development projects to mitigate risk. We also discuss the ongoing process of target selection for the HPF survey.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures. To appear in the proceedings of the SPIE 2012 Astronomical Instrumentation and Telescopes conferenc

Mounting and Alignment of IXO Mirror Segments

A suspension-mounting scheme is developed for the IXO (International X-ray Observatory) mirror segments in which the figure of the mirror segment is preserved in each stage of mounting. The mirror, first fixed on a thermally compatible strongback, is subsequently transported, aligned and transferred onto its mirror housing. In this paper, we shall outline the requirement, approaches, and recent progress of the suspension mount processes