Space is important to us and that’s why we’re working to bring you top coverage of the industry and Florida launches. Journalism like this takes time and resources. Please support it with a subscription here.
Astronauts on the space station may seem distant, but they’re only 248 miles from Earth: a little more than the drive from New York City to Washington DC. Everything they need can be delivered in relatively short order. Astronauts visiting Mars won’t have such easy access. The red planet’s average distance from Earth is 140 million miles.
We can plan supply missions, but taking everything along for the ride would be expensive and impractical. Like Mark Watney in TheMartian, explorers will have to live off the land too.
There’ve been plenty of proposals for how astronauts might produce the essentials, but until recently no technology had been field tested. Now, thanks to a machine called MOXIE, built by MIT and stowed away on NASA’s Perseverance rover, we can definitively say humans will be able to make oxygen on Mars.
In theory, most materials are capable of becoming metallic if put under enough pressure. Atoms or molecules can be squeezed together so tightly that they begin to share their outer electrons, which can then travel and conduct electricity as they do in a chunk of copper or iron. Geophysicists think that the centres of massive planets such as Neptune or Uranus host water in such a metallic state, and that high-pressure metallic hydrogen can even become a superconductor, able to conduct electricity without any resistance.
Turning water into a metal in this way would require an expected 15 million atmospheres of pressure, which is out of reach for current lab techniques, says Jungwirth. But he suspected that water could become conductive in an alternative way: by borrowing electrons from alkali metals. These reactive elements in group 1 of the periodic table, which includes sodium and potassium, tend to donate their outermost electron. Last year, Jungwirth and his colleague Phil Mason — a chemist who is also known for making science videos on YouTube — led a team that demonstrated a similar effect in ammonia2. The fact that ammonia can turn shiny in such conditions was known to the British chemist Humphry Davy in the early nineteenth century, Edwards points out.
Bitcoin/Ethereum to spare? Donate them here to help this channel grow! bc1qnkl3nk0zt7w0xzrgur9pnkcduj7a3xxllcn7d4 or ETH: 0x60f088B10b03115405d313f964BeA93eF0Bd3DbF
Space Engine is available for free here: http://spaceengine.org. Enjoy and please subscribe.
The list of unique architectures in the city keeps growing.
The city has showcased its ability to take on architectural challenges by completing the Palm Jumeirah and keeps unveiling tiny projects along the way, such as the world’s largest Ferris Wheel. So, it is not exactly a moonshot when Dubai thinks of building a Moon styled resort as well.
Moon World Resorts.
The city of Dubai is no stranger to ambitious architectural projects. Last month, we reported how plans were being drawn for a suspended city around the iconic Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest building in the world.
The Sun has been up to some pretty intense shenanigans lately, but a recent eruption on the far side looks to be absolute science gold.
On the evening of September 5 GMT, an enormous coronal mass ejection (CME) was recorded exploding on the far side of the Sun, sending a radiation storm out across the Solar System. It was a type known as a halo CME, in which an expanding halo of hot gas can be seen spewing out around the entire Sun.
Sometimes this means that the CME is headed straight for Earth. However, this eruption was on the far side, so it’s heading away, and we won’t see any of the usual effects of a solar storm here on our home planet.