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Category: space – Page 476

The possibility of space mining in future was thrown into sharp relief this weekend as a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) called 4,660 Nereus passed our planet.

Worth an estimated $5 billion in precious metals and measuring 330 meters across, Nereus at no point came anywhere near being dangerous, getting no closer than 2.4 million miles/3.9 million kilometers at 13:51 UTC on Saturday, December 11, 2021.

That’s about 10 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

So why so much attention on Nereus?

There seemed to be a lot of misunderstanding about how dangerous—or otherwise—Nereus could be to Earth.

Continue reading “Asteroid Nereus Cruised Past Earth Today. In 39 Years It Could Be Mined For Billion In Precious Metals” | >

NASA is about to launch the world’s most powerful space telescope. Webb’s first year of science could rewrite the history of the universe.

Recently, OpenAI opened public access to GPT-3, one of the world’s most sophisticated AI writing tools. It might fool you in a conversation.

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While all atomic nuclei except hydrogen are composed of protons and neutrons, physicists have been searching for a particle consisting of two, three or four neutrons for over half a century. Experiments by a team of physicists of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) at the accelerator laboratory on the Garching research campus now indicate that a particle comprising four bound neutrons may well exist.

While agree that there are no systems in the universe made of only protons, they have been searching for particles comprising two, three or four neutrons for more than 50 years.

Should such a particle exist, parts of the theory of the strong interaction would need to be rethought. In addition, studying these particles in more detail could help us better understand the properties of neutron stars.

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Gen. David Thompson, vice chief of space operations for the US Space Force, said Saturday China is developing its space capabilities at “twice the rate” of the US.

On a panel of US space experts and leaders speaking at the Reagan National Defense Forum in a panel moderated by CNN’s Kristin Fisher, Gen. Thompson warned China could overtake the US in space capabilities by the end of the decade.

“The fact, that in essence, on average, they are building and fielding and updating their space capabilities at twice the rate we are means that very soon, if we don’t start accelerating our development and delivery capabilities, they will exceed us,” Gen. Thompson said, adding, “2030 is not an unreasonable estimate.”

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An international study led by Monash University astronomers focusing on an infamous star in Orion may help to shed light on how the solar system formed.

In 1936, over the course of the year, a previously unremarkable faint star in Orion, FU Ori, became 250 times brighter.

“FU Ori has remained bright ever since,” said Elisabeth Borchert, the lead author of the study to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

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If December 22’s launch goes as planned then the engineers behind the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or “Webb” for short) are in for a nervous Christmas.

Forget that it was originally conceived in the 1990s and was first expected to launch in 2007. Forget also the initial rocket launch—usually viewed as the most nerve-wracking moment. This time it’s not the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 rocket—due to lift Webb into space from the Guiana Space Center, Kourou, French Guiana on December 18, 2021—that’s giving engineers sleepless nights. It’s the 29 days of “space origami” they’ll have to endure after the launch as Webb unfolds from its collapse state into a “giant sunflower.”

You see, the technological marvel that is Webb is fully assembled, but folded into the 5.4 meter/17.7ft. fairing of the Ariane 5 for launch—the largest rocket fairing NASA could find. When it’s in-situ a whopping million miles/1.5 million kilometers from Earth at the second Lagrange point (L2) —almost certainly too far away for astronauts to fix if the worst happens—it will resemble a huge sunflower once unfurled.

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