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| CSIRO | SOLVE | Issue 9 | NOV 06 | |
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ARTICLE
PRECISION OPTICS:
Mapping the Milky Way Opens Doors By Rebecca Thyer
Australian-built retro-reflectors will help NASA chart the Milky Way and look for new planetsUsing the most sensitive instruments ever built, NASA plans to accurately map the Milky Way and help astronomers find new planets. Central to this space odyssey are Australian-built retro-reflectors made by the Australian Centre for Precision Optics (ACPO), based at CSIRO Industrial Physics in Lindfield, Sydney. They reflect light back precisely to where it came from – regardless of incidence angle. Dubbed 'double corner cubes', the reflectors have been fitted to a prototype on NASA's PlanetQuest demonstrator spacecraft and may prove central to NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory's 2011 Space Interferometer Mission. The mission aims to detect new planets by accurately mapping the stars and looking for any signs of 'wobble' in their positions. (Wobbling stars often indicate that gravity from orbiting planets is tugging at them.)
The reflectors' geometry – accurate to within five-thousands of a millimetre – will enable precise relative positions of far-off stars to be measured by bouncing lasers between telescopes. Although other corner cubes exist, NASA needed precision and resilience in the harsh operating environments of both deep space and the initial launch. These requirements are where ACPO's skills in precision optics fabrication, coating, measurement and assembly make the difference. ACPO director Manfred Claasz says it was his team's 'intellectual horsepower' that helped to deliver on NASA's demanding requirements: "The value of the group is in its people. They are a considerable asset." It is an asset that Mr Claasz and the centre wish to share a lot more with private industry. Precision optical components, systems and underpinning research services are used in astronomy, space exploration, semiconductors and photolithography, fibre optics and photonics, research, education and instrumentation. Industry alliances would bring the group recognition, help expand its work and allow others to take advantage of its creativity, Mr Claasz says. "We are often perceived as a group in the fabrication industry, rather than a research unit that has consummated the value of its research in the delivery of a product to the client's satisfaction. An industry alliance would boost knowledge of the team's work, especially in the US, Europe and Japan, where precision optical know-how is in high demand. Raising the visibility of what we do would also allow our team's creativity to be more readily perceived and demonstrated." Mr Claasz is actively engaging organisations in Australia, the US and Europe. "We have been building custom-made optical components and systems for the world's most demanding clients for more than 50 years. Our small group has made such an impact on NASA's work that we want to expand our business," he says. ARTICLE
WEB SEARCH:
Software Heralds Searchable Web Videos By Jason Major
Open-source technology will significantly reduce web audio/visual download timeInternet search engines have opened a whole new world of information access, but as rapid as the phenomenon has been, such text-based searching is already not up to the needs of a worldwide web in which video and audio are becoming increasingly predominant. Two of the frustrations users face are the large size of video files and the need to search for and download a whole file, such as a current affairs interview, when they might only want a snippet.
This challenge has been taken up by a team from the CSIRO ICT Centre, which has developed open-source technology that allows indexed searching of video and audio on the web. This means that instead of having to download an entire file, a web user can find and hyperlink to a point of interest within a video or audio file, saving significantly on download time. The ICT Centre team has developed a file format called Annodex, a new mark-up language called CMML and a form of Universal Resource Identifier (URI) that together allow audio and video to be accessed as hyperlinkable and searchable web resources. "The explosion of audio and video in the past five years has created a need for more advanced and efficient tools to search these types of web data," says Conrad Parker, CSIRO lead developer on the project. "Apart from users, others to benefit will be media companies and anyone who owns large archives of audio and video." CSIRO and the Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy (CeNTIE) jointly developed Annodex and are now working to have Annodex and its associated tools accepted as an international standard. Just as HTML has become the international standard code for writing web pages, CMML could easily become the international standard for indexing and annotating continuous media. "One reason HTML became the standard was because it was universally available and people could experiment with it and expand on the creative capability of the code to the benefit of all," says Mr Parker. "Acceptance of Annodex as a standard is a matter of uptake. If uptake is sufficient, standardisation will usually follow." Industry is showing increasing interest in CSIRO's research in this field. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has run a trial with the software to index and annotate its news bulletins. CSIRO is also negotiating with Wikipedia and has conducted trials with US research teams to index US senate proceedings. CSIRO is developing proprietary technologies to capitalise on this open source software. One of these is an interface and browser for smart mobile phones such as those with 3G technology. Phone users with CSIRO's technology can search video and audio the same as any web user, but because they can select and download just the interesting bits, download time is quick and bandwidth use is minimised. For further information contact: |
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