Lifeboat Foundation

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, is most famous for its particle collider, but it also has facilities that can test for other high-energy environments similar to those found in space. Now those facilities are being used to test future spacecraft to see if they are radiation-proof.

The European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, mission in 2022. Before then, ESA scientists wanted to know what kinds of environmental stresses the explorer will be subjected to when it braves Jupiter’s massive magnetic field. The magnetic field has a volume of a million times that of Earth’s magnetosphere, and trapped within the field are energetic charged particles. These particles form radiation belts which bombard visiting craft with high levels of radiation, which can be harmful to electronics.

To see how the JUICE hardware will handle this radiation, the ESA has borrowed the world’s most intense radiation beam — one located at a CERN facility called VESPER (Very energetic Electron facility for Space Planetary Exploration missions in harsh Radiative environments). Now it is working alongside CERN to develop the testing protocol for other future missions too, such as the proposed Ice Giants mission to Neptune and Uranus.

Space historian Robert Zimmerman came across images, with the labels “Candidate Landing Site for SpaceX Starship,” in data from the NASA orbiter.

The images of the Martian surface were taken by a high-res camera system called HiRISE onboard the orbiter, and uploaded to the University of Arizona’s website, the institution responsible for operating the camera.

SpaceX’s search for a landing site dates back to 2017, according to Teslarati. Over the past two years, the company has narrowed its search to a massive plains region called Arcadia Planitia. Five of the six potential landing sites shown in the new images are inside this zone.

Former NASA engineer and Bitcoin advocate Beth Moses says she got a birds-eye view of humanity from outer space when she became the world’s first woman commercial astronaut earlier this year. Part of a three-person flight team, Moses soared 55.87 miles (89.9 kilometers) into orbit as a “test passenger” aboard Virgin Galactic’s second spaceflight on February 22.

An early proponent of Bitcoin, she began mining BTC after she read Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper in 2013. As Virgin Galactic’s chief astronaut instructor and interiors program manager, Moses believes global tools can solve critical problems.

Says Moses, in a recent report by Forbes.

The greatest space program spinoff? Human collaboration.

NASA didn’t set out to confirm the feasibility of a seemingly impossible fuel-less thruster design, but it seems they did exactly that.

An Egyptain teenager has patented a next-generation propulsion system that could send spacecraft to other solar systems—without using a single drop of fuel. While it is not quite warp-drive technology, young physicist Aisha Mustafa’s system is based on quantum physics and could see mankind boldly go where no man has gone before.

A team of scientists has discovered a new possible pathway toward forming carbon structures in space using a specialized chemical exploration technique at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

The team’s research has now identified several avenues by which ringed molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, can form in space. The latest study is a part of an ongoing effort to retrace the chemical steps leading to the formation of complex carbon-containing molecules in deep space.

PAHs—which also occur on Earth in emissions and soot from the combustion of fossil fuels—could provide clues to the formation of life’s chemistry in space as precursors to interstellar nanoparticles. They are estimated to account for about 20 percent of all carbon in our galaxy, and they have the chemical building blocks needed to form 2-D and 3D carbon structures.

X conducted a static-fire test Thursday (Aug. 29) of the Falcon 9 rocket that will send two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in the near future.

“Over decades, both military and space programs all around the world have known the negative impact of radiation on semiconductor-based electronics,” says Meyya Meyyappan, Chief Scientist for Exploration Technology at the Center for Nanotechnology, at NASA’s Ames Research Center. What has changed with the push towards nanoscale feature sizes is that terrestrial levels of radiation can now also cause problems that had previously primarily concerned applications in space and defence. Packaging contaminants can cause alpha radiation that create rogue electron-hole pairs, and even the ambient terrestrial neutron flux at sea level – around 20 cm⁻² h⁻¹ – can have adverse implications for nanoscale devices.

Fortunately work to produce radiation-hardy electronics has been underway for some time at NASA, where space mission electronics are particularly prone to radiation exposure and cumbersome radiation shielding comes with a particularly costly load penalty. Vacuum electronics systems, the precursors to today’s silicon world, are actually immune to radiation damage. Alongside Jin-Woo Han and colleagues Myeong-Lok Seol, Dong-Il Moon and Gary Hunter at Ames and NASA’s Glenn Research Centre, Meyyappan has been working towards a renaissance of the old technology with a nano makeover.

In a recent Nature Electronics article, they report how with device structure innovations and a new material platform they can demonstrate nanoscale vacuum channel transistors that compete with solid-state system responses while proving impervious to radiation exposure.