Every Mars citizen gets 1miion Teslacoins.
Elon Musk is not only the world’s richest person, he lays claim to the biggest net worth ever recorded: $208 billion as of Friday. What he does with it will be closely watched.
Category: space – Page 660
JOHANNESBURG — The European Space Agency (ESA) signed a nearly €296 million ($362 million) contract with Thales Alenia Space Jan. 7 to build a European module for NASA’s lunar Gateway space station.
The European System Providing Refueling, Infrastructure and Telecommunications (ESPRIT) module will provide communications and refueling capabilities to Gateway, a planned space station in orbit around the moon intended to support crewed missions to the lunar surface.
Thales Alenia Space announced Oct. 14 that it had been selected to build the ESPRIT Gateway module. On Jan. 7, the contract was finalized and signed by both parties. The project will be led by Thales Alenia Space in Cannes, France, with support from Thales Alenia Space in Italy and the United Kingdom.
D. MBA) MalaysiaPresident, World Talent Economy Forum (WTEF)
Topic: Space policy.
Moderator-Sharif Uddin Ahmed Rana (Ph. D. MBA) Malaysia.
President, World Talent Economy Forum (WTEF)
How will future astronauts get back home to Earth from Mars? According to a new study, they could make rocket fuel from the methane that’s already on the Red Planet.
Would you like to live on a space station? 😃
If that sounds familiar to fans of the popular sci-fi book and TV series “The Expanse,” that’s because in that fictional universe, Ceres Station plays a pivotal role as one of humanity’s first human off-world colonies. In the series, however, the space rock itself was spun up to create a crewed habitat on its surface with artificial gravity.
In a paper uploaded to the prewrite repository arXiv this week, the team argues that Ceres would be prime real estate because it has nitrogen, which could enable the creation of an Earth-like atmosphere.
In fact, they argue that the environment could even be “better than Earth,” since there’s no adverse weather or natural disasters, and plenty of living space to grow into.
To celebrate a new year, the NASA /ESA Hubble Space Telescope has published a montage of six beautiful galaxy mergers. Each of these merging systems was studied as part of the recent HiPEEC survey to investigate the rate of new star formation within such systems. These interactions are a key aspect of galaxy evolution and are among the most spectacular events in the lifetime of a galaxy.
It is during rare merging events that galaxies undergo dramatic changes in their appearance and in their stellar content. These systems are excellent laboratories to trace the formation of star clusters under extreme physical conditions.
The Milky Way typically forms star clusters with masses that are 10 thousand times the mass of our Sun. This doesn’t compare to the masses of the star clusters forming in colliding galaxies, which can reach millions of times the mass of our Sun.
During its two-year mission, SphereX will map the entire sky four times, creating an enormous database of stars, galaxies, nebulas and other celestial objects.
The space telescope will be NASA’s first to build a full-sky spectroscopy map in near-infrared, and it will observe a total of 102 near-infrared colours.
Allen Farrington, the SphereX project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said: ‘That’s like going from black-and-white images to colour; it’s like going from Kansas to Oz.’
The Giant Magellan Telescope will be one of the few super giant earth-based telescopes that promises to revolutionize our view and understanding of the universe. It will be constructed at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Commissioning of the telescope is scheduled to begin in 2021.
The GMT is a segmented mirror telescope that employs seven of today’s largest stiff monolithic mirrors as segments. Six off-axis 8.4 meter segments surround a central on-axis segment, forming a single optical surface 24.5 meters in diameter, with a total collecting area of 368 square meters. Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution are both members of the GMT project, which also includes Astronomy Australia Ltd., the Australian National University, the Carnegie Institution for Science, the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, the São Paulo Research Foundation, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Chicago.
“The process of creating methane-based fuel has been theorized before, initially by Elon Musk and Space X. It utilized a solar infrastructure to generate electricity, resulting in the electrolysis of carbon dioxide, which, when mixed with water from the ice found on Mars, produces methane. This process, known as the Sabatier process, is used on the International Space Station to produce breathable oxygen from water. One of the main issues with the Sabatier process is that it is a two-stage procedure requiring large faculties to operate efficiently. The method developed by Xin and his team will use anatomically dispersed zinc to act as a synthetic enzyme, catalyzing the carbon dioxide and initializing the process. This will require much less space and can efficiently produce methane using materials and under conditions similar to those found on the surface of Mars.”
Among the many challenges with a Mars voyage, one of the most pressing is: How can you get enough fuel for the spacecraft to fly back to Earth?
Houlin Xin, an assistant professor in physics & astronomy, may have found a solution.
He and his team have discovered a more efficient way of creating methane-based rocket fuel theoretically on the surface of Mars, which can make the return trip all more feasible.
Ultra-impulsive acoustic emission from a solar flare recently detected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) indicated submersion of its source beneath the active region that hosted the flare.