Lifeboat Foundation

NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy will seek proposals from industry to build a nuclear power plant on the moon and Mars to support its long-term exploration plans. The proposal is for a fission surface power system, and the goal is to have a flight system, lander and reactor in place by 2026.

Anthony Calomino, NASA’s nuclear technology portfolio lead within the Space Technology Mission Directorate, said that the plan is to develop a 10-kilowatt class fission surface power system for demonstration on the moon by the late 2020s. The facility will be fully manufactured and assembled on Earth, then tested for safety and to make sure it operates correctly.

Afterwards, it will be integrated with a lunar lander, and a launch vehicle will transport it to an orbit around the moon. A lander will lower it to the surface, and once it arrives, it will be ready for operation with no additional assembly or construction required. The demonstration is expected to last for one year, and could ultimately lead to extended missions on the moon, Mars, and beyond.

“This competition gives students an unparalleled opportunity as members of the Artemis generation to help overcome the historically challenging technical obstacles of mitigating lunar dust,” Niki Werkheiser, NASA’s Game Changing Development program executive, said in a statement.

Since the Apollo missions, we’ve known that lunar dust is extremely clingy. Early NASA astronauts ended their spacewalks on the Moon covered in the stuff, likely caused by electrical charges built up by the moving around the lunar surface.

“The more time you spend there, the more you get covered from helmet to boots with lunar dust,” Buzz Aldrin was quoted in early NASA reports after completing the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Aldrin also called lunar dust “one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the Moon.”

The green light is given to the near-billion-euro space observatory that will study far-off worlds.

With each new crew launch from the U.S. comes the inevitable questions: Why all the weather rules? What are the vehicle’s abort modes and how will it perform a launch abort and aim itself to a predetermined location in the Atlantic Ocean stretching from the Kennedy Space Center across to the western Irish coast?

The Crew-1 mission of SpaceX’s Dragon 2 capsule is contending with these questions, with its launch already delayed from Saturday because of weather. The mission is currently set to launch at 19:27 EST (00:27 UTC) on Sunday, 15 November (Monday, 16 November UTC) from LC-39A in Florida to bring Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Soichi Noguchi to the International Space Station.

Why do NASA, the 45th Space Wing of the Space Force, their safety officers, and all launch providers make such a big deal about the weather? Who cares if it’s raining 18 km from the pad when the safety rules say rain cannot be closer than 18.5 km? Isn’t that close enough?

It seems the weather on Mars is a bit more windy than expected.

Martian winds could be strong enough after all to move giant waves of sand on the Red Planet.

Solar power stations in space that beam ‘emission-free electricity’ down to Earth could soon be a reality thanks to a UK government funded project.

Above the Earth there are no clouds and no day or night that could obstruct the sun’s ray – making a space solar station a constant zero carbon power source.

Continue reading “Space solar power station a step closer thanks to government project” »

Sophomore math major Xzavier Herbert was never much into science fiction or the space program, but his skills in pure mathematics seem to keep drawing him into NASA’s orbit.

With an interest in representation theory, Herbert spent the summer virtually at NASA, studying connections between classical information theory and quantum information theory, each of which corresponds to a different set of laws: classical physics and quantum mechanics.

“What I’m doing involves how representation theory allows us to draw a direct analog from classical information theory to quantum information theory,” Herbert says. “It turns out that there is a mathematical way of justifying how these are related.”

HSC J023336-053022, a massive galaxy cluster located approximately 4 billion light-years away from Earth, is heating the material within it to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius — over 25 times hotter than the core of the Sun.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and CEO Bioquark interviews Dr. Michelle Francl the Frank B. Mallory Professor of Chemistry, at Bryn Mawr College, and an adjunct scholar of the Vatican Observatory.

Ira Pastor comments:

Continue reading “Tripping Over the Mysteries of the Universe: Molecules, Particles and People” »