Cozy Dark emerging technology began work in 2010 as a skunkworks-style engineering firm and is registered with CCR and NSPIRES.
Our early engineering & design efforts have focused on orbital debris solutions and electrodynamic tether technology.
Zach Urbina founded Cozy Dark with the cooperation of technical, research, and academic colleagues in the Southern California AeroAstro community.
We also have a growing library of space science talks featuring Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, astrophysicist Sean Carroll and more.
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9 posts tagged berkeley
| Now that NASA’s Kepler space telescope has identified 1,235 possible planets around stars in our galaxy, astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, are aiming a radio telescope at the most Earth-like of these worlds to see if they can detect signals from an advanced civilization.
The search began on May 8, when the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope — the largest steerable radio telescope in the world — dedicated an hour to eight stars with possible planets. Once UC Berkeley astronomers acquire 24 hours of data on a total of 86 Earth-like planets, they’ll initiate a coarse analysis and then, in about two months, ask an estimated 1 million SETI@home users to conduct a more detailed analysis on their home computers. “It’s not absolutely certain that all of these stars have habitable planetary systems, but they’re very good places to look for ET,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Andrew Siemion. read moreNew SETI Survey Focuses on Kepler’s Top Earth-Like Planets
Cosmic Explosion Is New Candidate for Most Distant Object in the Universe
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A gamma-ray burst detected by NASA’s Swift satellite in April 2009 has been newly unveiled as a candidate for the most distant object in the universe. At an estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years, the burst lies far beyond any known quasar and could be more distant than any previously known galaxy or gamma-ray burst. Multiple lines of evidence in favor of a record-breaking distance for this burst, known as GRB 090429B for the 29 April 2009 date when it was discovered, are presented in a paper by an international team of astronomers led by former Penn State University graduate student Antonino Cucchiara, now at the University of California, Berkeley. read more
// Scientists have found that calcium, aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs), some of the oldest objects in the solar system, formed far away from our sun and then later fell back into the mid-plane of the solar system. The findings may lead to a greater understanding of how our solar system and possibly other solar systems formed and evolved.
CAIs, roughly millimeter- to centimeter in size, are believed to have formed very early in the evolution of the solar system and had contact with nebular gas, either as solid condensates or as molten droplets. Relative to planetary materials, CAIs are enriched with the lightest oxygen isotope and are believed to record the oxygen composition of solar nebular gas where they grew. CAIs, at 4.57 billion years old, are millions of years older than more modern objects in the solar system, such as planets, which formed about 10-50 million years after CAIs. Using Lawrence Livermore’s NanoSIMS (nanometer-scale secondary-ion mass spectrometer) — an instrument that can analyze samples with nanometer-scale spatial resolution — LLNL scientists in conjunction with NASA Johnson Space Center, University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago measured the concentrations of oxygen isotopes found in the CAIs. read moreOldest Objects in Solar System Indicate a Turbulent Beginning
// University of California, Berkeley, astronomers may have found the missing link between gas-filled, star-forming galaxies and older, gas-depleted galaxies typically characterized as “red and dead.”
In a poster to be presented this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, UC Berkeley astronomers report that a long-known “early-type” galaxy, NGC 1266, is expelling molecular gas, mostly hydrogen, from its core. Astronomers have long recognized the distinction between early-type red and dead galaxies, thought to be largely devoid of gas and dust and thus not forming stars, and galaxies that are currently forming stars from the raw material molecular hydrogen. One of the outstanding problems in astronomy is how galaxies evolve from being star-forming spirals to red and dead. read moreMissing Link Between Young, Old Galaxies? Gas Jet Galaxy Could Explain How Starforming Galaxies Become Red and Dead
// Solar cells are made from semiconductors whose ability to respond to light is determined by their band gaps (energy gaps). Different colors have different energies, and no single semiconductor has a band gap that can respond to sunlight’s full range, from low-energy infrared through visible light to high-energy ultraviolet.
Although full-spectrum solar cells have been made, none yet have been suitable for manufacture at a consumer-friendly price. Now Wladek Walukiewicz, who leads the Solar Energy Materials Research Group in the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and his colleagues have demonstrated a solar cell that not only responds to virtually the entire solar spectrum, it can also readily be made using one of the semiconductor industry’s most common manufacturing techniques. The new design promises highly efficient solar cells that are practical to produce. The results are reported in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. read morePractical Full-Spectrum Solar Cell Comes Closer
// Planet X, an often-sought 10th planet, is so far a no-show, but Sukanya Chakrabarti has high hopes for finding what might be called Galaxy X — a dwarf galaxy that she predicts orbits our Milky Way Galaxy. Many large galaxies, such as the Milky Way, are thought to have lots of satellite galaxies too dim to see. They are dominated by “dark matter,” which astronomers say makes up 85 percent of all matter in the universe but so far remains undetected.
Chakrabarti, a post-doctoral fellow and theoretical astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a way to find “dark” satellite galaxies by analyzing the ripples in the hydrogen gas distribution in spiral galaxies. Planet X was predicted — erroneously — more than 100 years ago based on perturbations in the orbit of Neptune. Earlier this year, Chakrabarti used her mathematical method to predict that a dwarf galaxy sits on the opposite side of the Milky Way from Earth, and that it has been unseen to date because it is obscured by the intervening gas and dust in the galaxy’s disk. One astronomer has already applied for time on the Spitzer Space Telescope to look in infrared wavelengths for this hypothetical Galaxy X. “My hope is that this method can serve as a probe of mass distribution and of dark matter in galaxies, in the way that gravitational lensing today has become a probe for distant galaxies,” Chakrabarti said. read moreNew Technique Could Pinpoint ‘Galaxy X’: Satellite Galaxies Located Based on the Ripples They Create in the Hydrogen Gas
// Sunlight represents the cleanest, greenest and far and away most abundant of all energy sources, and yet its potential remains woefully under-utilized. High costs have been a major deterrant to the large-scale applications of silicon-based solar cells. Nanopillars — densely packed nanoscale arrays of optically active semiconductors — have shown potential for providing a next generation of relatively cheap and scalable solar cells, but have been hampered by efficiency issues. The nanopillar story, however, has taken a new twist and the future for these materials now looks brighter than ever. “By tuning the shape and geometry of highly ordered nanopillar arrays of germanium or cadmium sulfide, we have been able to drastically enhance the optical absorption properties of our nanopillars,” says Ali Javey, a chemist who holds joint appointments with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) at Berkeley. read moreA New Twist for Nanopillar Light Collectors
// Two micro-satellites originally launched into Earth’s orbit in 2007 by NASA have been redirected by University of California, Berkeley, scientists toward new orbits around the moon, extending study of the Earth and moon’s interaction with the solar wind.
The second of the two probes settled into a temporary “Lagrange-point” orbit on Oct. 22, inaugurating science operations for a new mission dubbed ARTEMIS — Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun. Lagrange points are places where the gravity of Earth and the moon balance, creating a sort of gravitational parking lot for spacecraft. The two probes will remain there for six months before transitioning to their final, lunar orbits. read moreOut of THEMIS, ARTEMIS: Earth’s Loss Is Moon’s Gain
