.
Return to NIST Tech Beat -- Newsletter Archives from the Physics Laboratory.
Return to Physics Laboratory page.
Repairing and restoring ancient art is an art form itself. The field recently got a small boost from radiation specialists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, working cooperatively with conservation experts from the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The gallery maintains an extensive collection of Chinese, Japanese and Korean artworks painted on silk, many of which are 500 to 1,000 years old. The natural aging process causes deterioration of the silk, producing holes in priceless art works that must be patched as unobtrusively as possible.
With a method first used in Japan, NIST scientists irradiated a number of samples of new silk with gamma rays and electrons to find the right dose to accelerate the silk's aging process. They found that very high doses (50,000 times higher than the mean lethal human dose) weakened the silk to the right strength and flexibility to match closely the ancient silk scrolls in need of patching.
As any trekker knows, Romulan war birds are the U.S.S. Enterprise's greatest threat, but NASA's greatest obstacle to deep space exploration may well be radiation. Near Earth, ionizing radiation can damage electronic devices on communication, scientific and defense satellites. And in deep space, long-term radiation exposure could raise astronauts' cancer risk.
Engineers who design the appropriate shielding and use of radiation-tolerant electronic devices need reliable tools to predict radiation effects. Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have been helping aerospace engineers predict radiation effects for many years. Now NIST and Severn Communications Corp. of Millersville, Md., have entered a cooperative research and development agreement to improve software for modeling space radiation effects. NIST and the company will collaborate to integrate NIST's SHIELDOSE 2 into the SCC's Space Radiation for Windows software.
SHIELDOSE 2 is a computer program for rapidly calculating radiation dose in spacecraft. The company had integrated the original SHIELDOSE code into a user-friendly, comprehensive package for personal computers, which includes modeling of the radiation environment for a generated orbit, radiation penetrating into the spacecraft and dose predictions.
Electric power grids, communications networks, banking systems, and
satellite and guided missile navigation systems rely heavily on NIST's
super-accurate atomic clock for time and frequency signals. Los Angeles
County, for example, saves an estimated 22 million gallons of gasoline
per year and 55,000 hours of driving time each day by synchronizing
traffic lights with NIST's time and frequency services.
.
Return to NIST Tech Beat
-- Newsletter Archives from the Physics Laboratory.
Return to Physics Laboratory page.