Could Solar-powered Desalination Solve California's Water Supply Problem?

California is suffering through its worst drought in decades, and it has gotten so bad that officials announced that 17 communities across the state are in danger of running out of water within 60 to 120 days. But what if the solution to California’s water crisis is as simple as sunlight – a resource the state has in abundance? That’s exactly what California-based startup WaterFX is proposing with its solar-powered desalination system. Renewable desalination could solve water scarcity issues not just in California but in other drought-stricken and desertified areas across the world.

WaterFX‘s system cleans water with a Concentrated Solar Still (CSS), which collects the sun’s thermal energy and transfers it through pipes filled with heat transfer fluid to a heat pump. The heat is then used for the distillation process, which evaporates freshwater out of the saltwater source. The condensate is then recovered as pure, fresh H2O. A thermal storage system holds excess heat for the times when the sun isn’t shining.

“If we roll out the technology … we could produce 8% of all the water used in California, with just the land that was fallowed during the last drought,” WaterFX Founder and Chairman Aaron Mandell recently told Forbes Magazine. “That’s enough water for over 7M acres of irrigated farmland. You would begin to change the economics and change the course of how water is used. The whole idea is to wean the State off of the Central Aqueduct and become water independent. The current system is unsustainable and unreliable.”

However solar desalination systems are not without their challenges – it takes a lot of energy to suck up large quantities of ocean water, and the process can capture local marine life as well. There’s also the issue of solar desalination’s byproduct – a salty sludge that can harm ecosystems if it’s pumped back into the ocean.

Other parts of the world working on renewable desalination include
South Australia, where Sundrop Farms has installed a desalination plant near Port Augusta;
Qatar, where the Sahara Forest Project is experimenting with a pilot system; and
Saudi Arabia, where there are plans to build a solar-powered plant in Al-Khafji. Saudi Arabia currently uses the equivalent of around 300,000 barrels of crude oil a day for its desalination plants, so switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy could have a huge positive impact on climate change and sustainability.

“What we are trying to do is to develop a model that can be replicated. The problems in California are identical to those in many parts of the world. China is depending on delicate river systems to provide water for all types of economic growth that will not be sustainable. We could also do this in Saudi Arabia – they use an enormous amount of oil for water consumption, to evaporate or move water around the country,” said Mandell.

+ WaterFX

Via The Guardian

Images via WaterFX

ORIGINAL: Inhabitat

by Josh Marks, 

02/27/14

Big Picture on Mars: NASA Rover Snaps Amazing Red Planet View

ORIGINAL: Space

by SPACE.com Staff

Date: 05 July 2012 Time: 04:00 PM ET

817 component images taken between Dec. 21, 2011, and May 8, 2012, taken by Mars Rover Opportunity combine in this image. Image released July 5, 2012. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.

A long-lived NASA rover on Mars has beamed home a stunning panoramic view of the Red Planet, a spectacular panorama that a space agency description billed as the "next best thing to being there."

The new Martian panorama was snapped by NASA's Mars rover Opportunity, a six-wheeled robot that has spent more than eight years exploring the Red Planet. The image shows a full-circle view of Mars near a spot called "Greeley Haven," where Opportunity hunkered down during its last Martian winter.

"The view provides rich geologic context for the detailed chemical and mineral work that the team did at Greeley Haven over the rover's fifth Martian winter, as well as a spectacularly detailed view of the largest impact crater that we've driven to yet with either rover over the course of the mission," said Jim Bell of Arizona State University in Tempe, the lead scientists for Opportunity's Pancam imaging system, in a statement today (July 5).

Opportunity's new Mars panorama is actually a mosaic of 817 different images combined like a giant puzzle to make one huge image. It shows a stark landscape broken only by the Opportunity rover's own tracks and the robot's solar array.

While there are varying shades of red (and even some blue) in the Mars panorama, the image is actually a false-color view. Its colors were added artificially to "enhance the differences between materials in the scene," NASA officials explained in an image description. [More Mars Photos by Opportunity Rover]

Opportunity created the Mars panorama between Dec. 21, 2011, and May 8, 2012, while it was stationed at Greeley Haven, an outcrop of rock located on the rim of the giant Endeavour crater that has been the rover's main object of study since August 2011.

Rover mission managers named the outcrop as a tribute to Mars scientist Ronald Greeley (1939-2011), who served as a mission team member and taught planetary science at Arizona State University.

"Ron Greeley was a valued colleague and friend, and this scene, with its beautiful wind-blown drifts and dunes, captures much of what Ron loved about Mars," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for Opportunity and Spirit.

NASA launched Opportunity and its sister rover Spirit toward Mars on a mission that was originally slated to last 90 days. The two rovers far outlasted their warranties, with Spirit exploring its Gusev Crater landing site until getting stuck in deep Martian sand. NASA declared Spirit's mission over in May 2011.

Opportunity, meanwhile, keeps on trucking across the Martian surface.

On Monday (July 2), Opportunity logged its 3,000th Martian day, which mission scientists call "sols." The rover has driven a total distance of 21.4 miles (34.4 km) since landing on Mars, according to mission managers.

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Out of this world, quite literally: The beautiful and mysterious Fukang meteorite

ORIGINAL: Daily Mail

Lyle Brennan
14 April 2012

When it slammed into the surface of Earth, there was little sign of the beauty that lay inside.

But cutting the Fukang meteorite open yielded a breathtaking sight.

Within the rock, translucent golden crystals of a mineral called olivine gleamed among a silvery honeycomb of nickel-iron.

Cosmic wonder: Marvin Killgore of the Arizona Meteorite Laboratory lets the sun shine through a polished slice of the Fukang rock

The rare meteorite weighed about the same as a hatchback when it was discovered in 2000, in the Gobi Desert in China's Xinjiang Province.

It has since been divided into slices which give the effect of stained glass when the sun shines through them.

An anonymous collector holds the largest portion, which weighs 925lb. in 2008, this piece was expected to fetch $2million (£1.26million) at auction at Bonham's in New York - but it remained unsold.

It is so valuable that even tiny chunks sell in the region of £20-30 per gram.

Arizona's Southwest Meteorite Laboratory, which holds about 70lb of the rock, says the remarkable find will turn out to be 'one of the greatest meteorite discoveries of the 21st century'.

It says the Fukang specimen outshines all other known examples of the pallasite class, which makes up just one per cent of all meteorites. However, it is not the biggest - in 2005 space rock hunter Steve Arnold dug up a 1,400lb sample in Kansas.

Valuable: The main mass of the Fukang meteorite, which failed to sell after being valued at $2million. The intact space rock weighed as much as a small car

The Arizona lab's experts say pallasites, whose make-up of half nickel-iron, half olivine gives them their mosaic-like appearance, are 'thought to be relics of forming planets'.

They are believed to originate from deep inside intact meteors created during the formation of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago and very few specimens are thought to have survived their descent through Earth's atmosphere.

February 2005 saw the Chinese space rock transported all the way to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show, in Tucson, Arizona.

The U.S. lab claims their polished slice of the original meteorite is the world's biggest pallasite cross section, measuring 36in by 19in.

4.5 billion years in the making: Golden olivine meets silvery nickel-iron to create a stunningly beautiful mosaic effect