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Category: space – Page 375

Today it only takes one and a half hours to make a superconducting particle accelerator at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory colder than outer space.

“Now you click a button and the machine gets from 4.5 Kelvin down to 2 Kelvin,” said Eric Fauve, director of the Cryogenic team at SLAC.

While the process is fully automated now, getting this accelerator, called LCLS-II, to 2 Kelvin, or minus 456 degrees Fahrenheit, took six years of designing, building, installing, and starting up an intricate system.

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Astronomers’ beliefs are already being challenged by the telescope’s discoveries.

The famed James Webb Space Telescope, launched eight months ago and orbiting the sun a million miles from Earth, has started bringing up a number of questions for astronomers as its striking images flood in.

Unsurprisingly, the telescope has delivered some intriguing and exciting observations of the very distant universe. Surprisingly, these observations are not what astronomers thought they would be, as was first reported in the Washington Post.

Webb telescope sees surprisingly massive distant galaxies, raising questions about early galaxy formation.

Continue reading “Webb telescope is already challenging what astronomers thought they knew” | >

A private space company called Redwire Corporation has announced plans for what it’s calling the “first-ever commercially owned greenhouse” in space.

Redwire is hoping to install the facility on the International Space Station no earlier than spring 2023. The startup was awarded a contract with the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which manages US lab operations on board the ISS.

The greenhouse is meant to serve as a testing bed for growing sustenance in a microgravity environment, which will be important as humans start to embark on longer trips through deep space.

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Circa 2020

The idea of humans living underwater may not be as crazy as you think. An idea once reserved for video games or science fiction, underwater cities may be a viable solution for humanity in the distant future.

Would you pack up your bags, clear out your apartment, and move to an underwater paradise? Perhaps you might even dream of living like the fictional city of Atlantis. If i t makes sense to go out and colonize Mars, the ocean is just as livable and is far closer to home. As you probably already know, the earth is 71% water. This could be prime real estate for future generations.

Continue reading “7 Things You Should Know About the Future of Underwater Cities” | >

face_with_colon_three circa 2018.

Gold is amazingly weird. For one thing, it’s now thought that much of it came from aftermaths of the collisions of two super-dense neutron stars. Some of this atomic gold, sprayed across the cosmos, managed to coalesce under gravity, get trapped in a newly-formed Earth, undergo a suite of geological processes, and ultimately pop up at the surface.

Its considerably epic cosmic journey is certainly something to marvel at, as is the fact that it’s useful for so many things besides jewelry. Now, as spotted by New Scientist, we’ve made a new form of gold that’s golder than ever before, and it’s bonkers. Related StoriesCosmic Tug-Of-War Leaves Merging Galaxies Gasping For Fuel “How Do You Handle Menstruation In Space?”: An Astronaut ExplainsEinstein Is Right Again – Gravity Has Not Changed Across The Universe.

Continue reading “New Form Of Lab-Made Gold Is Better And Golder Than Nature’s Pathetic Version” | >

No more dark side of the Moon?

An international research team headed by ETH Zurich has investigated the permanently shadowed regions of the Moon with the use of artificial intelligence. Future lunar missions will be able to find acceptable spots thanks to the knowledge they have gained about the region’s physical properties.

The research was published in Geophysical Research Letters on August 26.

We produce the first high-signal-to-noise ratio and-resolution orbital images over 44 shadowed regions within the Artemis exploration zone using an AI tool.

Continue reading “Cryogeomorphic Characterization of Shadowed Regions in the Artemis Exploration Zone” | >

Proposals for beaming solar power down from space have been around since the 1970s, but the idea has long been seen as little more than science fiction. Now, though, Europe seems to be getting serious about making it a reality.

Space-based solar power (SBSP) involves building massive arrays of solar panels in orbit to collect sunlight and then beaming the collected energy back down to Earth via microwaves or high-powered lasers. The approach has several advantages over terrestrial solar power, including the absence of night and inclement weather and the lack of an atmosphere to attenuate the light from the sun.

But the engineering challenge involved in building such large structures in space, and the complexities of the technologies involved, have meant the idea has remained on the drawing board so far. The director general of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, wants to change that.

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Russia’s national space agency Roskosmos presented a model of the planned space station, dubbed “ROSS” by Russian state media, on Monday at “Army-2022”, a military-industrial exhibition outside Moscow.

Yuri Borisov, whom President Vladimir Putin appointed last month to head Roskosmos, has said Russia will quit the ISS after 2024 and is working to develop its own orbital station.

Launched in 1998, the ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2000 under a U.S.-Russian-led partnership that also includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

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