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Category: space – Page 1,078

Lunar Palace 1: China’s One-Year Mock Moon Mission in Pictures

China and India are going to build a Lunar base/colony (I’ve heard) and the Japanese (I’ve heard) want to clad the moon in solar cells and microwave the power to Earth. To different places round the globe depending on the time.

In May 2018, China wrapped up a yearlong mission inside “Lunar Palace 1,” a Beijing facility designed to help the nation prepare to but boots on the moon. See images of the experiment here. (Read our full story here.) Here: Four volunteers take the oath in front of Lunar Palace 1, a facility for conducting bio-regenerative life-support systems experiments key to setting up a lunar base, at the Beijing University for Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA) on May 10, 2017. A ceremony was held in the BUAA that day as eight volunteers in two groups started a 365-day experiment in Lunar Palace 1.

Laser emissions discovered emerging from the Ant Nebula

An international team of astronomers has identified a rare laser phenomenon shining from the heart of the planetary nebula Menzel 3, otherwise known as the Ant Nebula. The discovery suggests the presence of an as yet unseen companion star, hiding at the core of the chaotic cosmic structure.

Menzel 3 is located roughly 8,000 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Norma. Discovered by Donald Menzel in the 1920s, it was given the moniker of the Ant Nebula, owing to its apparent similarity to the head and thorax of a garden ant.

The striking object belongs to a specific family of diffuse bodies known as planetary nebula. Despite their suggestive name, the formation of these beautiful structures has nothing to do with planets, and is instead rooted in the demise of middleweight stars similar to our Sun.

European Space Agency receives prototype microgravity 3D printer

After two years in development, Project MELT (Manufacturing of Experimental Layer Technology) has resurfaced with a prototype microgravity 3D printer.

Made for the European Space Agency (ESA) the Additive Layer Manufacturing (ALM) breadboard machine is designed to 3D print high performance polymers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and other off-world locations.

This DeepMind AI Spontaneously Developed Digital Navigation ‘Neurons’ Like Ours

When Google DeepMind researchers trained a neural network to tackle a virtual maze, it spontaneously developed digital equivalents to the specialized neurons called grid cells that mammals use to navigate. Not only did the resulting AI system have superhuman navigation capabilities, the research could provide insight into how our brains work.

Grid cells were the subject of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, alongside other navigation-related neurons. These cells are arranged in a lattice of hexagons, and the brain effectively overlays this pattern onto its environment. Whenever the animal crosses a point in space represented by one of the corners these hexagons, a neuron fires, allowing the animal to track its movement.

Mammalian brains actually have multiple arrays of these cells. These arrays create overlapping grids of different sizes and orientations that together act like an in-built GPS. The system even works in the dark and independently of the animal’s speed or direction.

This ‘singing’ space cloud is where stars and planets are born

Long before our Sun formed it was nothing more than a bunch of material floating listlessly in a large cloud of gas, dust, and debris. These space clouds, called nebulas, are where stars and planets are born, eventually coalescing into larger bodies which become slaves to gravity and form systems such as the one we currently reside in. But what factors affect star and planet formation, and what ultimately determines the type of stars that form? Using observations of one very special nebula, scientists now think have begun to understand.

One of the biggest hurdles in studying these molecular space clouds is that telescopes can only produce a 2D picture of them, making it impossible to model the interior structure and movements of the dust and gasses. Researchers focused on the cloud known as Musca, which lies hundreds of light years away from Earth, but is still close enough to study. The scientists discovered that this particular cloud is “singing.”

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The Flying Tesla is Coming, Sooner or Later

We’ve all dreamed of owning, or at the very least being a passenger of, a flying car. It’s the sci-fi dream that never transpired — until recently, that is. With a growing emphasis of developing flying taxis among several different companies, one wonders if the revolutionary Tesla Motors has plans to join in on this new venture.

Could Elon Musk’s random tweet from late last year be an indicator of Tesla’s interest in flying cars and their joining of this brand new “space race?”

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