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Category: space travel – Page 361

Space-time metasurface makes light reflect only in one direction

Light propagation is usually reciprocal, meaning that the trajectory of light travelling in one direction is identical to that of light travelling in the opposite direction. Breaking reciprocity can make light propagate only in one direction. Optical components that support such unidirectional flow of light, for example isolators and circulators, are indispensable building blocks in many modern laser and communication systems. They are currently almost exclusively based on the magneto-optic effect, making the devices bulky and difficult for integration. A magnetic-free route to achieve nonreciprocal light propagation in many optical applications is therefore in great demand.

Recently, scientists developed a new type of optical metasurface with which in both space and time is imposed on the , leading to different paths for the forward and backward light propagation. For the first time, nonreciprocal in was realized experimentally at optical frequencies with an ultrathin component.

“This is the first optical metasurface with controllable ultrafast time-varying properties that is capable of breaking optical reciprocity without a bulky magnet,” said Xingjie Ni, the Charles H. Fetter Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. The results were published this week in Light: Science and Applications.

How We Are Going to the Moon

With Artemis, men and women will sustainably work and live on another world for the first time! Using the Moon as a proving ground for living on Mars, this next chapter in lunar exploration will forever establish our presence in the stars. ✨

We are returning to the Moon – to stay – and this is how we’re going.

A Hyper-Connected World With 25 Times Faster Travel Will Triple the World Economy

Nextbigfuture has looked at the likely future of SpaceX up to 2030 and now recaps the view to 2030 and extends the view to 2050.

The Mars aspect of SpaceX future impact will be less important than how 25X the speed of sound travel transforms our world and has huge economic impacts.

Geoffrey West and the Sante Fe Institute performed a study of cities and found that if the size of a city doubles, then, on average, wages, wealth, the number of patents, and the number of educational and research institutions all increase by approximately the same degree, about 15 percent. They refer to this systematic phenomenon as “superlinear scaling”: produces, and consumes, whether it’s goods, resources, or ideas. Reusable rockets could create a global city of 9–10 billion people by 2050. This would be a “city” with ten-doublings over a ten million person city. This would be a 150% boost in per-person income.

Scientists map Mars’ global wind patterns for the first time

Today, a paper published in Science documents for the first time the global wind circulation patterns in the upper atmosphere of a planet, 120 to 300 kilometers above the surface. The findings are based on local observations, rather than indirect measurements, unlike many prior measurements taken on Earth’s upper atmosphere. But it didn’t happen on Earth: it happened on Mars. On top of that, all the data came from an instrument and a spacecraft that weren’t originally designed to collect wind measurements.

In 2016, Mehdi Benna and his colleagues proposed to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) project team that they remotely reprogram the MAVEN spacecraft and its Natural Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) instrument to do a unique experiment. They wanted to see if parts of the instrument that were normally stationary could “swing back and forth like a windshield wiper fast enough,” to enable the tool to gather a new kind of data.

Initially, the MAVEN project team was reluctant to implement the modifications Benna and his colleagues requested. After all, MAVEN and NGIMS had been orbiting Mars since 2013, and they were working quite well collecting information about the composition of the Mars . Why put all that at risk? Benna and his colleagues argued that this project would collect new kinds of data that could shape our understanding of the upper atmosphere on Mars, inform similar studies on Earth, and help us better understand planetary climate.

SpaceX’s Just Read the Instructions droneship arrives in Florida following upgrades

SpaceX’s drone ship Just Read the Instructions (JRTI) has arrived in Port Canaveral, Fla. after undergoing refurbishment in Louisiana. The droneship joins Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) at the port, bringing SpaceX’s tally of east coast-based droneships to two. The additional droneship will help SpaceX’s execute its busy 2020 manifest.

SpaceX delivers ‘mighty mice,’ worms, robot to space station

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. — SpaceX made an early holiday delivery to the International Space Station on Sunday, bringing muscle-bound “mighty mice,” pest-killing worms and a smart, empathetic robot.

The station commander, Italy’s Luca Parmitano, used a large robot arm to grab onto the Dragon three days after its launch from Cape Canaveral. The two spacecraft soared 260 miles (420 kilometres) above the South Pacific at the time of capture.

“Whenever we welcome a new vehicle on board, we take on board also a little bit of the soul of everybody that contributed to the project, so welcome on board,” Parmitano told Mission Control.

How 3D-printing robots will get Mars home-ready for our arrival

NASA has tentative plans for a manned mission to Mars sometime in the 2030s. Between now and then, there’s still much that needs to be sorted. To start, massive dust storms, high levels of radiation, low temperatures and a lack of water make the Martian surface an unfriendly place for long-term visits. Taming it for human life will likely prove one of the most demanding and complex engineering puzzles in human history. With those extraordinary obstacles in mind, in 2015 NASA announced the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge: an open call asking designers and architects outside the traditional aerospace industry to create plans for Martian living centred around 3D printing. One of 10 finalists announced in 2019, this plan from the design practices HASSELL and Eckersley O’Callaghan envisions teams of 3D-printing robots building a protective shield on the Martian surface several months in advance of a human landing. Upon arrival, astronauts would then work alongside the autonomous robots to piece together an inflatable, modular habitat.

Video by LightField London.

Gamma-ray laser moves a step closer to reality

O.o.

A physicist at the University of California, Riverside, has performed calculations showing hollow spherical bubbles filled with a gas of positronium atoms are stable in liquid helium.

The calculations take scientists a step closer to realizing a , which may have applications in , spacecraft propulsion, and .

Extremely short-lived and only briefly stable, positronium is a hydrogen-like atom and a mixture of matter and antimatter—specifically, bound states of electrons and their antiparticles called positrons. To create a gamma-ray laser beam, positronium needs to be in a state called a Bose-Einstein condensate—a collection of positronium atoms in the same , allowing for more interactions and gamma radiation. Such a condensate is the key ingredient of a gamma-ray laser.

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