Tech Talk

The U.S. space agency said today it will send a space shuttle crew to repair the malfunctioning Hubble Space Telescope. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin this morning told agency employees at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., that astronauts will make one final house call to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope as part of a mission to extend and improve the observatory's capabilities through 2013.

"We have conducted a detailed analysis of the performance and procedures necessary to carry out a successful Hubble repair mission over the course of the last three shuttle missions," Griffin said. "What we have learned has convinced us that we are able to conduct a safe and effective servicing mission to Hubble. While there is an inherent risk in all spaceflight activities, the desire to preserve a truly international asset like the Hubble Space Telescope makes doing this mission the right course of action."

He also announced the team selected to accomplish the repair mission. They are: Scott D. Altman, commander; Capt. Gregory C. Johnson (USN-Ret.), pilot; and John M. Grunsfeld, Michael J. Massimino, Andrew J. Feustel, Michael T. Good, and K. Megan McArthur, mission specialists.

The fifth, and final, mission to Hubble should take place in mid-2008, the agency said in a statement. It said that mission planners are working to determine which shuttle to use for the mission, while minimizing impact to the ongoing assembly of the International Space Station. The Hubble has been suffering from a faulty gyroscopic sensor that prevents it from properly orienting its position in space. Plans call for the repair crew to install a refurbished Fine Guidance Sensor to replace the degraded unit, one of the three already onboard. They will also attempt to fix the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which failed two years ago. It is used for high resolution studies in visible and ultraviolet light of both nearby star systems and distant galaxies.

In addition, the astronauts will carry upgrade components to the Hubble. According to NASA, the two new instruments are the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). The COS is the most sensitive ultraviolet spectrograph ever flown in space. It will probe the cosmic web, the large-scale structure of the universe whose form is determined by the gravity of dark matter and is traced by the spatial distribution of galaxies and intergalactic gas. The WFC3 is a new camera sensitive across a wide range of wavelengths, including infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light. It will extend the "vision" of the orbiting telescope to the early and distant galaxies beyond Hubble's current reach.

"Hubble has been rewriting astronomy text books for more than 15 years, and all of us are looking forward to the new chapters that will be added with future discoveries and insights about our universe," said Mary Cleave, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate.

>Blake Ross appears on our cover this month. He's the wunderkind who helped to create the immensely popular Mozilla Firefox browser from the ashes of Netscape Communications Corp.'s doomed product—after it was crushed by Microsoft Corp. in the late Nineties. In "The Firefox Kid", contributing editor David Kushner profiles Ross and lets us in on his most-recent project.

Ross told Kushner that, after working on Firefox, he wanted to explore the essential question: What's bad about today's software? The answer, he and his programming partner, Joe Hewitt (one of the original Firefox engineers) decided, resided in the gap between the desktop and the Web. "Right now, people want to shuffle around content, but the world's fused together by a collection of hacks," Ross noted. "Something that should be simple, say, getting photos from a digital camera onto the Web, is a Sisyphean task for most people. Step back and ask, 'What's wrong with this picture?'".

Kushner writes:

The problem, according to Ross, is there's no simple, cohesive tool to help people store and share their creations online. Currently, the steps involved depend on the medium. If you want to upload photos, for example, you have to dump your images into one folder, then transfer them to an image-sharing site such as Flickr. The process for moving videos to YouTube or a similar site is completely different. If you want to make a personal Web page within an online community, you have to join a social network, say, MySpace or Friendster. If you intend to rant about politics or movies, you launch a blog and link up to it from your other pages. The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service providers, and applications.

Ross and Hewitt work now on an effort called Parakey, a "Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do. Parakey is designed to exist on the Web and on the desktop at the same time," according to its creators. "[Parakey] is launching with profit in mind," Kushner writes. "While many of the details remain under wraps, the idea is to roll out initially with a single application, such as the photo system, which will demonstrate how the platform can be exploited. Once all the infrastructure is in place and scalable, they'll make a more concerted play to involve outside developers, probably around January."

Their project has its doubters, but it's hard to argue with the work these young men have done to date. Skeptics should be wary. Anyone who has taken on the Redmond giant has paid in the past. These remarkable young men—with a lot of help—have not been, thus far, victimized. We wish them well in their efforts, without bias.

The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) yesterday repaired one of its principal oxygen production units with new parts delivered over the weekend by an unmanned Progress supply ship. The failure of the onboard Elektron electrolysis machine in mid-September had prompted the American space agency to issue the first Spacecraft Emergency in the eight-year history of the ISS. In this month's news analysis article "Breathing Easy in Space Is Never Easy", our contributing editor on space technology, James Oberg, offers an insightful backgrounder on the nature of the emergency and the implications it posed to both the space station and the space shuttle program.

"The crew has replaced several parts of Elektron and put it back to work," Russian Federal Space Agency spokesman Valery Lyndin told the Associated Press. "Elektron has been working smoothly since Tuesday." The Elektron is the main producer of oxygen on the ISS. It uses electrolysis to turn surplus water into oxygen, dumping the useless hydrogen into space. It was shut down on 18 September after a visit by the crew of Space Shuttle Atlantis (see "The Popular ISS Motel"). When the crew reactivated the system the next day, just prior to the docking of a Soyuz transport carrying replacement crew members and an American space tourist, they smelled a noxious odor and turned it off again.

According to Oberg, they were smelling gas, potassium hydroxide, from the overheating of the chemicals used in the purification process the Elektron uses, which caused the system's rubber seals to begin melting, as well. Initially, the gases were interpreted by ground controllers to indicate a fire was occurring. Onboard inspection, however, confirmed a subsequent analysis of an overheating problem. Oberg writes:

The re-supply ship brought new sensors and a new valve—the old one is believed to have a burned-out solenoid, probably as a result of the overheating—and on Monday the crew members put them in, but to no avail. [A cosmonaut] told Moscow Mission Control that the unit appeared jammed with free-floating air bubbles much larger than desired, a problem encountered often in the past. He will spend the rest of the week trying to remedy it, and then he will activate the unit, coaxing it along as gently as possible. Success will be achieved not when the unit starts up, but when it continues to run for more than a few hours before its control system shuts it down.

Oberg notes that the overarching problem with the oxygen generators for NASA is its impact on future space shuttle flights. If the new crew—Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, American astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, and German astronaut Thomas Reiter—can not sustain operation of the Elektron, then the resumption of shuttle flights will either have to be postponed from its scheduled start in December or the "safe-haven rule"—which dictates that that the ISS must be able to support a crew of as many as ten for up to a month in the event of potentially catastrophic damage to a shuttle requiring a complicated rescue scenario—will have to be adapted. Oberg explains that there are various other units onboard the ISS that could be hooked up, including the U.S. Oxygen Generation System delivered on a shuttle flight last summer, which still needs its water supply lines to be delivered. He observes:

The Catch-22 is that only a shuttle flight can reliably restore enough oxygen capacity for the station to host a stranded shuttle crew, yet without that capacity, no shuttle can safely fly.

For the time being, though, according to Moscow, the problem of keeping the oxygen flowing routinely is beginning to be addressed. We'll see, in the next few days, whether repair work on the vital unit will result in reliably sustainable operation. As Oberg writes, "Success will be achieved not when the unit starts up, but when it continues to run for more than a few hours before its control system shuts it down."

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has proceeded for the last few decades as a noble experiment among professional scientists and ardent amateurs—the latter even donating spare cycles on their desktop PCs to participate. It hypothesizes that it may take quite a long time to identify an intelligent signal from the cosmos; but if that should ever transpire, it would mark one of the greatest moments in the history of civilization, which would certainly justify all the tedious effort. In this month's feature "The New Search for E.T.", author Monte Ross updates us on the work of SETI scientists who are using new technology to search for signals from intelligent extraterrestrials who may have chosen to send their message via laser.

Ross , an IEEE Fellow and a pioneer in the use of laser communications, writes that using Frank Drake's famous equation for the probability of some intelligent beings existing in our galaxy we can deduce that the number is quite small, but it is not zero. (This is the very point comedians used to exaggerate when parodying the late astronomer Carl Sagan's use of the phrase "billions and billions of stars...".) In the Milky Way, if we were to assume that only one in a hundred million stars could be home to a planet with intelligent beings capable of advanced technology similar to our own, that would result in a prediction that there are about 1000 other civilizations that could be trying to contact us. He notes:

To date, though, radio astronomers have heard nothing. It's too soon to conclude that nobody's out there: maybe SETI researchers are just looking in the wrong place or in the wrong way. I believe they've made the latter mistake. No intelligent society would attempt to communicate with us over hundreds of light-years using radio waves when physics suggests other wavelengths would be the more intelligent choice.

Ross thinks the better tool for the job is a telescope known as a photon bucket. These lens-less devices search the heavens for optical signals using mirrors to scoop up raw photons, the way a wooden barrel collects rainwater. They also use multipixel photomultiplier tubes that convert the incoming photons into electrons, which then get amplified into an electrical signal that is fed into microprocessors for computer analysis. Such devices are now coming on line—sponsored by institutions such as Harvard University—in the hunt for the elusive signal from a real E.T. out there somewhere.

It might sound like looking for an atom from a needle in a mountain of haystacks, but the true believers remain undaunted. The greater the challenge, the more determination they muster to tackle it. And now, at least, they have an intriguing new tool in their hands to help them do the looking.

Three years from now, television transmission in the United States and many other developed countries will switch from analog to digital. This will create a massive overhaul at the retail level as consumers scramble to upgrade to sets able to take advantage of the new service. In this month's feature "Goodbye, CRT", author Paul O'Donovan looks at the technologies competing to win your dollars in the race to replace the aging warhorse that is the cathode ray tube TV.

O'Donovan is a principal research analyst for Gartner Dataquest, in Egham, U.K., who covers semiconductors and consumer electronics. He begins by looking at the two early frontrunners in the race: plasma and liquid-crystal-display (LCD) televisions. Plasma TVs are what consumers want these days, but they are expensive, making LCD sets the more popular of the two now. O'Donovan notes that a 42-inch-diagonal plasma set with a tuner sells for about US $2000 today, while a 37-inch LCD set goes for about $1200. This year, nearly 8 million plasma TVs will be manufactured worldwide, contrasted to 42 million LCD units.

Each technology, though, has its shortcomings in the long run to TV technology dominance, O'Donovan explains. Because of their gas-based imaging technology, plasma sets have limited longevity, they're power hungry, and they're heavy, for starters. Plus, they suffer from issues such as burn-in and, of all things, problems at high altitude. LCD displays, unfortunately, use a technology that intrinsically produces images with a relatively poor contrast ratio, the difference between the brightest white and the darkest black on screen. Moreover, their fluorescent tubes age over time. After about five years of normal home use, the tubes start to dim and their colors begin to drift.

This is the point where a third horse enters the race. O'Donovan points to the emergence of the surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) over the next few years. He writes:

In an SED, every single pixel of the display is, effectively, a cathode-ray tube. The cathode is a thin film of palladium oxide, chosen because it is electrically conductive and also extremely durable, resisting oxidation and corrosion even at high temperatures. As in a CRT, electrons emitted from the cathode hit phosphors—tiny dots of metals or rare-earth compounds that glow red, green, or blue when energized.... The result is a flat-panel display that uses less energy than a plasma screen does and yet has image quality close to that of the CRT, still the benchmark of all displays. Power consumption is low, relative to that of plasma, for the same reason as it is for the CRT: it takes a lot less energy to create an electron beam than it does to excite photons in a gas.

Manufacturers such as Toshiba and Canon have begun trial production of SED TVs in the 40- to 50-inch range. When the first units ship in about a year, they are expected to cost about 50 percent more at retail than comparable plasma sets. O'Donovan says that it is too early to tell if SEDs will suffer from problems similar to the long-term reliability or performance issues of plasmas and LCDs.

So which TV technology will take the prize in the aftermath of the 2009 switchover? O'Donovan foresees two types of winners in two different categories. At the smaller end, for sets with displays less than 50 inches, LCDs and SEDs should dominate, with plasma technology gradually dying off, killed by economics rather than technical faults. At the bigger end, for sets larger than 50 inches, the ultimate champ, in his analysis, will be a dark horse, a new generation of projection TVs. Yes, that's right, a technology from the past that it is even now being digitally re-engineered to provide the big screen experience of your dream home entertainment system of the future. To find out how this dramatic turnaround is shifting the television landscape, you'll have to read his article.

>Three years from now, television transmission in the United States and many other developed countries will switch from analog to digital. This will create a massive overhaul at the retail level as consumers scramble to upgrade to sets able to take advantage of the new service. In this month's feature "Goodbye, CRT", author Paul O'Donovan looks at the technologies competing to win your dollars in the race to replace the aging warhorse that is the cathode ray tube TV.

O'Donovan is a principal research analyst for Gartner Dataquest, in Egham, U.K., who covers semiconductors and consumer electronics. He begins by looking at the two early frontrunners in the race: plasma and liquid-crystal-display (LCD) televisions. Plasma TVs are what consumers want these days, but they are expensive, making LCD sets the more popular of the two now. O'Donovan notes that a 42-inch-diagonal plasma set with a tuner sells for about US $2000 today, while a 37-inch LCD set goes for about $1200. This year, nearly 8 million plasma TVs will be manufactured worldwide, contrasted to 42 million LCD units.

Each technology, though, has its shortcomings in the long run to TV technology dominance, O'Donovan explains. Because of their gas-based imaging technology, plasma sets have limited longevity, they're power hungry, and they're heavy, for starters. Plus, they suffer from issues such as burn-in and, of all things, problems at high altitude. LCD displays, unfortunately, use a technology that intrinsically produces images with a relatively poor contrast ratio, the difference between the brightest white and the darkest black on screen. Moreover, their fluorescent tubes age over time. After about five years of normal home use, the tubes start to dim and their colors begin to drift.

This is the point where a third horse enters the race. O'Donovan points to the emergence of the surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) over the next few years. He writes:

In an SED, every single pixel of the display is, effectively, a cathode-ray tube. The cathode is a thin film of palladium oxide, chosen because it is electrically conductive and also extremely durable, resisting oxidation and corrosion even at high temperatures. As in a CRT, electrons emitted from the cathode hit phosphors—tiny dots of metals or rare-earth compounds that glow red, green, or blue when energized.... The result is a flat-panel display that uses less energy than a plasma screen does and yet has image quality close to that of the CRT, still the benchmark of all displays. Power consumption is low, relative to that of plasma, for the same reason as it is for the CRT: it takes a lot less energy to create an electron beam than it does to excite photons in a gas.

Manufacturers such as Toshiba and Canon have begun trial production of SED TVs in the 40- to 50-inch range. When the first units ship in about a year, they are expected to cost about 50 percent more at retail than comparable plasma sets. O'Donovan says that it is too early to tell if SEDs will suffer from problems similar to the long-term reliability or performance issues of plasmas and LCDs.

So which TV technology will take the prize in the aftermath of the 2009 switchover? O'Donovan foresees two types of winners in two different categories. At the smaller end, for sets with displays less than 50 inches, LCDs and SEDs should dominate, with plasma technology gradually dying off, killed by economics rather than technical faults. At the bigger end, for sets larger than 50 inches, the ultimate champ, in his analysis, will be a dark horse, a new generation of projection TVs. Yes, that's right, a technology from the past that it is even now being digitally re-engineered to provide the big screen experience of your dream home entertainment system of the future. To find out how this dramatic turnaround is shifting the television landscape, you'll have to read his article.

Technology patents are big business. So much so that some firms these days exist only to leverage their patents. Yesterday, the most famous of these, Virginia-based NTP Inc., filed suit against PDA-maker Palm Inc. for infringing on its wireless patents. To keep you briefed on the realm of high-technology patents, we've inaugurated a new annual ranking of the leaders in intellectual innovation. In this month's feature "Patent Power", Senior Editor Harry Goldstein guides us through the results of IEEE Spectrum's first patent portfolio survey. And you'll be surprised to find out who came out on top.

We hired research firm 1790 Analytics, of Mount Laurel, N.J., whose specialty is analyzing patent citations, to review the portfolios of over 1000 enterprises and weigh their significance. Their data, broken into technology industry sectors, is listed in our Patent Portfolio Survey table. In determining the overall strength of an organization's portfolio, 1790 Analytics' methodology went beyond just counting patents granted in the past year to examine how frequently a company's patents are cited by other patents and what they have in the pipeline. The analysts used their findings to create a bottom-line Pipeline Power score to determine the leaders.

The Pipeline Power determination was based on the following criteria:

• Pipeline Growth: shows the trend in an organization's patent activity by dividing the number of patents obtained in 2005 by the annual average for the years 2000 through 2004.

• Pipeline Impact: shows how frequently patents issued in 2005 cite a company's patents issued from 2000 through 2004.

• Pipeline Generality: measures the variety of technologies that build upon an organization's patents.

• Pipeline Originality: measures the variety of technologies upon which an organization's patents build.

So, without further ado, here are the all-sector Top Ten finishers in our first ranking of patent portfolios:

1. Micron Technology Inc. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1569; Pipeline Power: 3396.

2. IBM Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 2972; Pipeline Power: 3084.

3. Hewlett-Packard Co. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1810; Pipeline Power: 2756.

4. Intel Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1553; Pipeline Power: 2364.

5. Broadcom Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 419; Pipeline Power: 1856.

6. Applied Materials Inc. 2005 U.S. Patents: 371; Pipeline Power: 1832.

7. Microsoft Corp. 2005 U.S. Patents: 780; Pipeline Power: 1699.

8. Delphi Technologies Inc. 2005 U.S. Patents: 413; Pipeline Power: 1603.

9. ASM International NV. 2005 U.S. Patents: 109; Pipeline Power: 1492.

10. Hitachi Ltd. 2005 U.S. Patents: 1941; Pipeline Power: 1369.

We said you'd be surprised to see which enterprise finished first.

As nationwide voting began yesterday in the United States, the early reports in the media mostly concerned problems with electronic voting machines—with glitches affecting early balloting from Florida to New Mexico. Yet by the time most of the votes had been tallied, the consensus seemed to be that e-voting had not caused much of a bother with national and local elections.

"Overall, it looks like all the predictions of disaster turned out wrong," Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, a nonpartisan organization of state election officials, told the Associated Press.

Others cautioned that the extent of e-voting misbehavior may not be known until the results of the various elections and ballot initiatives could be examined and thoroughly studied. "I don't think we're in the clear," Michael Alvarez, a political science professor at the California Institute of Technology, said yesterday. "Even 24 months from now, many of these states and counties will continue struggling with these issues."

Some notable electronic glitches did cause a stir. For example:

• In Denver, hundreds of voters waited long past the 7 p.m. deadline at polling centers straining to overcome problems with new voting machines.

• In Texas, officials recounted ballots after a computer showed a long-shot Constitution Party candidate ahead by a big margin in a race for Congress.

• In Cook County, Ill., cartridges with the tabulated vote totals had to be taken to the county clerk's office in Chicago, because officials could not digitally transmit them.

So the specter of corrupted techno-balloting on a large scale seems, for the time being at least, to have passed into the night as Election Day concluded—and democracy effectively prevailed against yet another challenge.

Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry reports on her experience at a California election precinct on how new electronic voting machines are personally affecting average Americans seeking to exercise the franchise—and it's not a pretty picture.

Tekla S. Perry

You'd think if e-voting would work anywhere, that place would be in the heart of Silicon Valley. Not this year. I voted "touchscreen" Tuesday night, and it was anything but easy. I got in line at my polling place near downtown Palo Alto at 7 p.m. Okay, I probably should have voted earlier, but I've never seen more than three or four people in line no matter what time I'd voted; so I didn't worry too much about squeezing a trip to the polls into an already busy day. Big mistake.

About 40 people stood in a line that circled a large conference room and straggled out the door and down the sidewalk; the line was growing quickly. Explanations and rumors spread down the line.

"There were seven machines, all are down except two."

"If you ask for paper ballots, you can move up."

"They're out of paper ballots."

"No, they're out of English language ballots. If you want to vote in Chinese or Tagalog, you can use a paper ballot."

"Anybody know what's yes and no in Tagalog?"

"Forget it, now they're out of ballot envelopes."

At 7:25, the poll supervisor came out and said that, at this point, the wait would be at least an hour and that anyone still in line at 8 p.m. was legally entitled to vote. However, he continued, we might consider getting in line somewhere else, because he expected the last two electronic voting machines to fail at any minute and wasn't sure at that point what he could do.

The two senior citizens waiting patiently in front of me left. I offered to hold their places while they sat down somewhere, but they declined. "We just don't have the stamina," one said.

More paper ballots and envelopes arrived. People broke from the line and started filling them out. Some stuffed their ballots directly into the ballot box without getting back in line to sign in. The poll supervisor warned that such votes wouldn't be counted; given there didn't seem to be markings on the ballot envelopes indicating whether or not the voter had signed in, those of us in line weren't sure what he meant. What will happen when the number of ballots in the box is higher than the number of official voters? At this point, those with paper ballots didn't seem to be moving any faster in the chaos, so I decided to fill out a paper ballot but hope a touchscreen machine would free up.

In the center of the table, an old stylus, previously used in punch-card voting, still anchored one of the how-to-vote displays. Those of us in line talked wistfully of the short lines back in the days of punch-card voting and reasoned that, in hindsight, hanging chads weren't so bad after all. The poll supervisor watched the two remaining voting machines nervously. He said that around 5 p.m. the printers on the seven original machines had run out of paper. Since the devices are locked, the paper can't be changed. He had two back-up printers he had been able to swap in, hence the two functioning machines. But after those printers ran out of paper, there was nothing left to do. The line continued to grow.

Shortly before 8:00 p.m., the line longer than ever, an election worker arrived with a carload of printers. He installed two; the others were needed elsewhere. Now, four of the seven machines functioned.

At 8:00 p.m., the election supervisor asked the dozens of people standing in the relatively orderly line to crowd into the room. He locked the door. There were only five or six people ahead of me.

At 8:20 p.m., I voted touchscreen.