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Category: space – Page 647

Producing highly efficient LEDs based on 2D perovskite films

Energy efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have been used in our everyday life for many decades. But the quest for better LEDs, offering both lower costs and brighter colors, has recently drawn scientists to a material called perovskite. A recent joint-research project co-led by the scientist from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has now developed a 2-D perovskite material for the most efficient LEDs.

From household lighting to mobile phone displays, from pinpoint lighting needed for endoscopy procedures, to light source to grow vegetables in Space, LEDs are everywhere. Yet current high-quality LEDs still need to be processed at high temperatures and using elaborated deposition technologies—which makes their production cost expensive.

Scientists have recently realized that —semiconductor materials with the same structure as calcium titanate mineral, but with another elemental composition—are extremely promising candidate for next generation LEDs. These perovskites can be processed into LEDs from solution at room temperature, thus largely reducing their production cost. Yet the electro-luminescence performance of perovskites in LEDs still has a room for improvements.

Team creates new ultralightweight, crush-resistant tensegrity metamaterials

Catastrophic collapse of materials and structures is the inevitable consequence of a chain reaction of locally confined damage—from solid ceramics that snap after the development of a small crack to metal space trusses that give way after the warping of a single strut.

In a study published this week in Advanced Materials, engineers at the University of California, Irvine and the Georgia Institute of Technology describe the creation of a new class of mechanical metamaterials that delocalize deformations to prevent failure. They did so by turning to tensegrity, a century-old design principle in which isolated rigid bars are integrated into a flexible mesh of tethers to produce very lightweight, self-tensioning truss structures.

Starting with 950 nanometer-diameter members, the team used a sophisticated direct laser writing technique to generate elementary cells sized between 10 and 20 microns. These were built up into eight-unit supercells that could be assembled with others to make a continuous structure. The researchers then conducted computational modeling and laboratory experiments and observed that the constructs exhibited uniquely homogenous deformation behavior free from localized overstress or underuse.

Yes, The James Webb Space Telescope Really Should Launch In 2021

NASA now is targeting Oct. 312021, for the launch of the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana.

Webb is designed to discover and study the first stars and galaxies that formed in the early Universe. To see these faint objects, it must be able to detect things that are ten billion times as faint as the faintest stars visible without a telescope. This is 10 to 100 times fainter than Hubble can see.

The successor to Hubble is almost ready for launch. It’s really coming this year, too!

Perseverance’s first image of Helicopter Ingenuity on Mars under rover’s belly

On March 122021 NASA’s Perseverance Rover continues to find safe place to deploy Mars Helicopter Ingenuity and collect Mars Samples. Rover’s latest pics from Mars show Helicopter’s shield attached to bottom of the rover. Perseverance will gather samples from Martian rocks and soil using its drill. The rover will then store the sample cores in tubes on the Martian surface. This entire process is called “sample caching”. Mars 2021 is the first mission to demonstrate sample collection on Mars. It could potentially pave the way for future missions that could collect the samples and return them to Earth for intensive laboratory analysis.

For the first flight, the helicopter will take off a few feet from the ground, hover in the air for about 20 to 30 seconds, and land. That will be a major milestone: the very first powered flight in the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars. After that, the team will attempt additional experimental flights of incrementally farther distance and greater altitude. After the helicopter completes its technology demonstration, Perseverance will continue its scientific mission.

Credit: nasa.gov, NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Source for NASA’s Mars Helicopter page: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/#Deployment.

#mars #perseverance #helicopter

‘Liftoff’ Offers Inside Look Into SpaceX’s Desperate Early Days

Half a century after the last astronauts left the Moon, the idea of sending crews to Mars still seems like some sort of vague space policy notion. After all, crews have yet to revisit the Moon. So, even today, talk of getting astronauts to Mars seems largely confined to PowerPoint presentations.

Thus, it was precisely that sense of inexactitude that prompted a young South African-born entrepreneur named Elon Musk to begin his quest to make the dream of boots on Mars a reality.

It’s a notion that is chronicled with alacrity in Eric Berger’s page-turning new book “Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX.” Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, writes with the kind of hard-won insider authority that only comes through covering the nuts and bolts of the commercial space industry for the past twenty years.

NASA shares first recording of Perseverance firing its laser on Mars

The sounds of 30 impacts are heard, some slightly louder than others, said NASA in its press release. SuperCam, equipped with a microphone, is using the laser to interrogate the composition of rock on the red planet. The variations in the zapping sound picked up the equipment would help the scientists in understanding the physical structure of the rocks and is a key component in probing the signs of ancient life.

“Variation in the intensity of the zapping sounds will provide information on the physical structure of the targets, such as its relative hardness or the presence of weathering coatings,” said NASA.

“If we tap on a surface that is hard, we will not hear the same sound as when we fire on a surface that is soft,” explained Naomi Murdoch, from the National Higher French Institute of Aeronautics and Space, in Toulouse. “Take for example chalk and marble. These two materials have an identical chemical composition (calcium carbonate), but very different physical properties.”