If you have ever put a floppy disc drive through a baggage x-ray machine and found all your data corrupted, you would be aware of the major damage that radiation can do to a computer. Of course nowadays the equipment is constructed with special protection for the levels of radiation that a computer or other hardware devices may encounter in a baggage check.

What about radiation in outer space? Won’t that affect the computers on board the space crafts? Yes it will, and that’s why electronics need to be protected in space. For this reason extra shielding which prevents the harmful rays from reaching the computer chips are every important.

In addition there is also a backup for just about every component possible so that it the first one fails, the redundant one takes over. Special radiation hardened or RedHard electronics are used from Silicon on Insulator or Silicon on Sapphire rather than the regular semiconductor  wafers. This protects the electronics a thousand times better against possible harmful radiation.

They also make the electronics reconfigurable, so that if some thing does get corrupted, the device can be shut down and rebooted. You may lose some data, but at least the electronics will begin functioning again. And new science projects constantly come up with new ways to protect the computers.

With Mars being the focus of the next manned mission that NASA wants to field, a considerable amount of data is being examined about the red planet. Many science projects are studying just what it will take to build a human colony that is self sustaining on the planet’s surface.

While the NASA land rovers such as Curiosity and Opportunity have been providing invaluable details about the planet’s geography and chemical composition, there are a number of space crafts orbiting the planet as well. These include:

MAVEN: Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission is essentially trying to discover how Mars lost it’s atmosphere. MAVEN is also looking into the possibility of liquid water on Mars.

MOM: Mars Orbiter Mission was essentially the baby step of the Indian Space Research Organization in demonstrating what they can do for the technological future of an Indian Mars Mission.

MRO: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been monitoring the Martian climate and mapping future landing sites for subsequent missions to the planet.

Exomars Trace Gas Orbiter: This particular space craft is the latest to join the Martian orbit in October 2016. It will investigate the methane present in the Martian atmosphere.

As the days go by Mars can ready itself for a number of more visitors from it’s neighboring planet.

In 1957 Roscosmos, the Russian space exploration agency, launched Sputnik 1 into outer space heralding the beginning of a new era in human existence. Since that time thousands of spacecrafts have been launched into space. Some were spectacular successes, other not so much.

Today there are an estimated 50 active space crafts floating around our solar system. The majority of them are involved in research activities. Here are some of the more prominent names and a description of what they are doing.

The Hubble Space Telescope is orbiting Earth. It has spent the last 26 years observing the visible universe. The images form this telescope have been responsible for considerable understanding of the formation process and the current state of our solar system and galaxy.

The SOHO or Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is studying the Sun’s outer layers as well as solar wind storms. It has provided invaluable data on the magnetic activity of the Sun and discovered 3000 sungrazer comets as they went past.

Kepler is perhaps the most famous space craft for discovering Earth like planets outside out Soalr system. Since it was launched in 2009 it has detected more than 2300 alien worlds that may be akin to Earth.

Needless to say science projects are continuously being conducted on these space crafts by their handler back in control rooms on Earth.

NASA sent out the spacecraft Juno on 5 August 2011 from Cape Canaveral on an Atlas V rocket towards the largest planet of the solar system, Jupiter. It arrived at the gas giant on 4 July 2016. Now Juno’s in the process of probing the many mysteries that Jupiter hides in it’s thick layers of hydrogen and helium rich atmosphere.

Juno will fly past the planet for 37 times using instruments on board to take measurements of the gravitational and magnetic structure of Jupiter. The JunoCam is going to take the first color photographs of the planet on it’s elliptical orbits over the poles of the planet.

Scientists hope to find out more about the core of the planet and the atmosphere from the observations that Juno sends back. This data will be invaluable in figuring out just how the planet was formed and held together.

The knowledge will contribute to our understanding of the formation of the rest of the solar system as well. Eventually Juno will de-orbit in 2018 and burn up in Jupiter’s atmosphere so as not to contaminate any of Jupiter’s moons.

Considering that in Greek mythology Juno was Jupiter’s wife, it makes interesting reading that in this science project Juno is probing Jupiter’s unknown secrets. Just like how a nosy wife wants to meddle in her husband’s business!

Parrots have been trained to speak human words, but is it really the humans training them or is it the parrot’s need to fit in? Next time you hear a parrot saying, “Polly wants a cracker”, you may like to think about the work that biologist Timothy Wright and his team are doing at the New Mexico State University.

Wright’s team has been comparing sonograms of parrot vocalizations of Amazon parrots residing in Costa Rica. They have found that all birds use a specific call to keep in touch with other members of the group. However the acoustic structure of the call differs from region to region creating different dialects.

When a parrot hears a new dialect, it will try to modify it’s own call to match the vocalization that it has heard. Wright says that learning to sound like the others is very important to parrots because when you sound like them it means that you are a member of that group.

It is perhaps this need to feel like a member of the group that has parrots in captivity trying to imitate their human families. They are trying to recreate a feeling of belonging by trying to sound like the humans when they speak with them. Now that is an interesting science project.

Ever think about all those amazing photographs that you get to see on covers of National Geographic magazine? There is a whole department set up to engineer that perfect shot. Kenji Yamaguchi is in charge of taking photography that one step forward to capture that never before done shot.

His work includes using robotic motors, modifying lenses to zoom in closer than standard, building contraptions which can be fitted on to animals without hurting them and a whole lot more. Kenji has used drones to get images of Chinese cliff faces, and crittercams to get the view from the perspective of a shark, a hyena and a housecat.

Kenji and his team of five engineers build and operate cameras that are used to document  National Geographic funded explorations around the world. They may not be the actual photographers in the field, but it is the efforts of this team that ensure that the images you see are from a fresh perspective.

Wouldn’t it be a fun science project to use a camera to capture an image like one you have never taken before? Maybe fix it to the collar of your pet or attach it to a ten foot pole to capture a bird’s nest in the tree. What would your never taken before photograph look like?