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Category: space travel – Page 5

A private lunar lander has captured the first high-definition sunset pictures from the moon.

Firefly Aerospace and NASA released the stunning photos Tuesday, taken before the Blue Ghost lander fell silent over the weekend. One shot included Venus in the distance.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost landed on the on March 2, the first private spacecraft to touch down upright and perform its entire mission. It kept taking pictures and collecting science data five hours into the lunar night before it died for lack of solar energy.

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On the heels of Cedar Park-based Firefly Aerospace Inc. successfully putting a lunar lander on the Moon, counties adjacent to Austin are taking a step to grow the Central Texas space industry.

The Williamson County Commissioners Court on March 11 unanimously approved the creation and bylaws of the Central Texas Spaceport Development Corp., an entity being formed in partnership with Burnet County.

Additional steps remain, including the filing of articles of incorporation and the appointment of a seven-member oversight board. Burnet County is scheduled to vote on the plan March 25.

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Plymouth, Mich. – For six days, over 2,050 miles and through different climate zones to the Arctic Circle: On an unusual test drive, a Bosch development team successfully tested the new hydraulic brake-by-wire system from Bosch for the first time on public roads. What sets brake-by-wire apart: This solution completely eliminates the mechanical connection between the brake pedal and the brake system. The driver’s brake request is transmitted to the brake-by-wire system purely as an electrical signal via redundant signal lines. For this fundamentally new approach, Bosch offers a robust and efficient solution with two independent hydraulic brake actuators – a by-wire brake actuator and an ESP®. Today’s brake systems, such as the integrated power brake from Bosch, still ensure the required redundancy in the event of a fault via a mechanical connection to the brake pedal. This coupling via an input rod to the brake pedal is eliminated in the new Bosch brake-by-wire solution.

Advantages of the Bosch brake-by-wire system

New freedom in installation: Due to the omission of the mechanical connection, there is no longer any need to mount the brake system components at the vehicle’s firewall. Instead, the components can now be installed where it is most optimal in terms of crash safety, NVH, and manufacturing. The flexibility in choosing where to install the brake actuators helps to avoid the need for different variants for right-hand and left-hand drive vehicles. By-wire technology enables new pedal concepts with significantly shorter brake pedal travel to create space for new interior designs. The hydraulic brake-by-wire solution from Bosch is based on proven brake system technology and is a combination of a by-wire brake actuator and an ESP®. Its slim design saves installation space and reduces the weight of the brake system. Since both the by-wire brake actuator and the ESP® are assigned to different channels of the redundant electrical system, they can each independently build up the required brake pressure at all four wheel brakes in the event of a fault. Therefore, this Bosch solution is also suitable for highly automated vehicles, meeting the protection of the brake system required for safety reasons.

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Sponsored by World of Warships! Follow this link https://wo.ws/40Q4JZz and use the code IMPACTFORCE to get a cool starter pack! For new players only.

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DELTA-V Calculators: https://www.overvieweffekt.com/tools/brachistochrone-rocket-calculator.

Thanks to ⁠ for the Mass Effect music. Check it out and his channel here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57-xIuu4Vvw.

REFERENCES
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist3.ph…ein_Drive_)
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php#brachistochrone.

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ATTRIBUTION
“SpaceX Starship Ship 24 & Booster 7 V4” (https://skfb.ly/oD9TL) by Clarence365 is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
“MCRN Tachi \[Expanse TV Show]” (https://skfb.ly/o6JGy) by Jakub. Vildomec is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.
“Saturn” (https://skfb.ly/orVqA) by NestaEric is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
“MCRN Donnager (The Expanse)” (https://skfb.ly/6XU7L) by Chris Kun.
“Epstein’s Yacht (The Expanse)” (https://skfb.ly/6XTu7) by Chris Kun.

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Continue reading “The Speed of Constant-Thrust Space Travel” | >

Not long to go now: After more than nine months on the International Space Station, two astronauts are a step closer to returning home following the launch of a crew swap mission on Friday.

A Falcon 9 rocket with a Crew Dragon fixed to its top blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:03 pm (2303 GMT), carrying a four-member team bound for the orbital outpost.

“We celebrate the countless individuals all over the world that have made this journey possible,” said astronaut Nichole Ayers, the designated pilot of the Crew-10 mission, just before launch.

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When we observe distant celestial objects, there is a possible catch: Is that star I am observing really as reddish as it appears? Or does the star merely look reddish, since its light has had to travel through a cloud of cosmic dust to reach our telescope?

For accurate observations, astronomers need to know the amount of dust between them and their distant targets. Not only does dust make objects appear reddish (“reddening”), it also makes them appear fainter than they really are (“extinction”). It’s like we are looking out into space through a dirty window. Now, two astronomers have published a 3D map that documents the properties of dust all around us in unprecedented detail, helping us make sense of what we observe.

The research is published in the journal Science.

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Predicting the lifetime of an electric ion thruster is notoriously difficult. You have to account for the chamber wall effects, which are not present in space environments. Researchers within several different aerospace disciplines in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign worked together to simulate the ion activity, then validate it in a unique experiment that will help predict the lifespan of electric thrusters.

“We can simulate the damage to the engine caused by sputtering, but until now, we could not validate that our simulations were correct,” said Professor Huck Beng Chew.

“Because both the engine and chamber walls are coated with impact-resistant carbon, we didn’t know whether the coating damage was from accelerated ions directly hitting the engine or whether the coating damage was artificially mitigated by the deposition of carbon from ion bombardment off the chamber walls.”

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