Lifeboat Foundation

Two years after it left Earth, Mercury probe BepiColombo has completed the first of its first flybys of Venus. The manoeuvre is designed to give the spacecraft a boost on its journey — but it’s also too good an opportunity to pass up for a little science.

As it swung around the planet on a curved trajectory, BepiColombo gave its instruments a workout, testing their functionality for a taste of what the spacecraft will do in Mercury orbit and collecting some data on Venus – recently in the news for the discovery of phosphine gas in its atmosphere.

And the joint European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) probe took a whole lot of images, which the ESA compiled into a video of the flyby.

In the 2013 science fiction film “Elysium” starring Matt Damon, Earth’s wealthiest 0.01% move to the ultimate gated community, a luxurious orbiting space colony, leaving a poverty-stricken humanity to fend for themselves on a ravaged planet.

Interestingly, it is indeed some of today’s 0.1% who are leading the way into space to build communities beyond Earth. However, quite the opposite of the movie, their goals are of the highest order, from democratizing access to space by lowering costs, to creating new products and ideas, to helping save the planet and opening space to future generations.

Yet, given the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, social justice and green movements, even as entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson spend billions to support a human breakout into space, there is a backlash building that holds these projects as icons of extravagance — even as their work may help save the Earth. This is the “Elysium effect.”

Only a possibilty.

Researchers detect a large lake and several ponds deep under the ice of the Martian South Pole.

TIME featured SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell as one of the ‘100 Most Influential People of 2020’. SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 to make life multiplanetary. Shotwell is responsible for day-to-day operations at the aerospace company that aims to colonize Mars before the year 2050. She has a vital role in company growth. Under her leadership, SpaceX has accomplished launching the first NASA astronauts to the International Space Station aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft this year.

General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS) and Boeing have entered into a partnership to develop a scalable 100 kW to 250 kW-class High Energy Laser (HEL) weapon system for air and missile defenses.

Laser weapons have been high on the wish lists of major military powers ever since the first laser was invented by Theodore Maiman at the Hughes Research Lab, Malibu, California in 1960. With enough concentrated power to burn through steel, enough range to cover literally astronomical distances, an operating cost of a dollar a shot, and an unlimited number of shots so long as there’s power available, the laser looked like the so-called ultimate weapon – if it could be made practical.

Of the problems that have hampered laser weapon development over the past six decades, one of the biggest is how to properly cool a laser generator. This is important because weapon-grade lasers have an efficiency between 50 and 70 percent, with the leftover percentages being lost as heat that could shut down or damage the device.

NASA reports that it’s got a robust sample from the surface of the asteroid Bennu. There is one snafu; gaps in the collecting lid is causing some loss of the pristine material.

“We’re not moving heat from the surface to the atmosphere. We’re just dumping it all out into the universe, which is an infinite heat sink,” said Xiangyu Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who worked on this project as a Ph.D. student in Ruan’s lab.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — What if paint could cool off a building enough to not need air conditioning?

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This could be a problem if you want to live in a space station. 😃

Space is not the place to put waste, as it turns pretty much anything into a high-velocity projectile capable of causing incredible damage.

Astronomers observing Earth’s sun caught the moon photobombing their footage. The moon passed between NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory and the giant ball of gas during its lunar transit.