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Category: space – Page 158

Vast releases design of Haven-2 commercial space station

MILAN — Vast Space unveiled the design of the space station it plans to propose to NASA in the next phase of the agency’s program to develop commercial successors to the International Space Station.

The company outlined its plans for the Haven-2 station in a release timed to the opening of the International Astronautical Congress here Oct. 14, describing how it will deploy the station in segments starting in the late 2020s.

Vast has to date focused on Haven-1, the single-module station it plans to launch in the second half of 2025 to be visited by up to four missions for short stays. However, the company has made clear its intent is to compete for the second phase of NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations, or CLD, program as part of the agency’s ISS transition efforts.

Distant planet may host volcanic moon like Jupiter’s Io

New research done at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reveals potential signs of a rocky, volcanic moon orbiting an exoplanet 635 light-years from Earth. The biggest clue is a sodium cloud that the findings suggest is close to but slightly out of sync with the exoplanet, a Saturn-size gas giant named WASP-49 b, although additional research is needed to confirm the cloud’s behavior. Within our solar system, gas emissions from Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io create a similar phenomenon.

Twenty years after its discovery, graphene is finally living up to the hype

Manchester, England— On a rare sunny day in northern England, the National Graphene Institute (NGI) here gleams like a five-story block of obsidian. Squeezed into the University of Manchester’s sprawling downtown campus, the research center is clad in almost 2000 lustrous black panels with small hexagonal perforations—an architectural nod to the structure of the atom-thin sheet of carbon that gives the building its name.

NGI exists because graphene was first isolated a short walk away in a University of Manchester lab. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov presented it to the world 20 years ago this month and later won a Nobel Prize for the work. Since its unveiling, billions of dollars of R&D funding have flowed to graphene, in a global race to exploit its peerless properties. It is better at carrying electricity than any metal, a superb heat conductor, and hundreds of times stronger than steel—selling points trumpeted in the marketing materials of universities and companies alike.

Early on, researchers were not shy about promising graphene breakthroughs, with predictions that it would enable superthin rollable TVs and space elevators, and even supplant silicon in computer chips. “Expectations were very, very high,” Geim says. “The companies I was involved in were mostly based on hype.”

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