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Category: space travel – Page 494

Breakthrough Starshot aims to demonstrate proof of concept for ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts, and lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Along the way, the project could generate important supplementary benefits to astronomy, including solar system exploration and detection of Earth-crossing asteroids.

Breakthrough Starshot is a $100 million research and engineering program aiming to demonstrate proof of concept for light-propelled nanocrafts. These could fly at 20 percent of light speed and capture images of possible planets and other scientific data in our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, just over 20 years after their launch.

Nextbigfuture covered the project last month when it was announced. Here is more information from the Breakthrough Initiative website.

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Besides it not being a true space vehicle, XS-1 will be notable because it’ll be a drone, a robot space ship.

It will launch itself to the edge of space (basically 100 kilometers up there) and release its payload into LEO. It’s being called a plane because it’ll take-off and land like a plane on every mission.

DARPA’s toy will then be refueled and launched again. DARPA wants its space plane to be so reliable it can fly “10 times in 10 days.” DARPA expects the cost of a space plane flight to come to a measly $5 million compared to the $450 million once spent to launch a space shuttle.

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Hydro powered spacecraft to be the first to mine an astroid.

A few months back, Luxembourg—a tiny country better known for world-class pastries— announced its intention to become a leader in asteroid mining. Now, Luxembourg has revealed the first step in its plan to fill the banking vaults with space-grade platinum: a small, water-powered spacecraft.

http://gizmodo.com/luxembourg-wants-to-be-a-world-leader-in-…1756860361

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Still trying to figure out how Luxembourg got a space program.

(AFP) Luxembourg has staked its claim to the final frontier with an ambitious plan to profit from the mining of asteroids, the government said Thursday.

The Grand Duchy has joined forces with American company Deep Space Industries (DSI) to cash in on the wealth of natural resources thought to exist on asteroids.

The two have inked an agreement that will pave the way for Luxembourg to partly fund DSI’s plans to probe nearby asteroids for mineral riches using “nano” spaceships.

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1st P-band radar in space will measure the amount of biomass and carbon locked in the world’s forests and how this changes over time — Biomass satellite will provide support to United Nations treaties, notably the Reduction of Emissions due to Deforestation and Forest Degradation

Airbus Defence and Space, the world’s second largest space company has signed a contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to build its next Earth Explorer mission, the Biomass satellite. Biomass is due to launch in 2021 and will measure forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes for five years.

The spacecraft will carry the first space-borne P-band synthetic aperture radar to deliver exceptionally accurate maps of tropical, temperate and boreal forest biomass that are not obtainable by ground measurement techniques. The mission will collect frequent information on global forests to determine the distribution of above-ground biomass in these forests and measure annual changes. The 5-year mission will see at least eight growth cycles in the worlds’ forests.

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Comets are more complicated than ever imagined and even after ESA’s spectacularly successful mission to 67P, researchers are still debating whether they delivered most of the water to Earth and whether they helped jumpstart life here on terra firma.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission to the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has arguably given planetary scientists the best new cometary data in a generation. Although the mission’s Philae lander has long ceased communication from the comet’s surface, the Rosetta spacecraft will continue operations until September when it makes a final touchdown on 67P’s surface. As I noted here previously, at that point, Rosetta will be so far from the Sun it will be on the verge of exhausting all its power.

But next month, researchers will meet at The Royal Society in London to discuss the data and the direction cometary science should take in this post-Rosetta era.

Here are a few takeaways from the mission.

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