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A laser light shone through the dark could power robotic exploration of the most tantalising locations in our Solar System: the permanently-shadowed craters around the Moon’s poles, believed to be rich in water ice and other valuable materials.

ESA’s Discovery & Preparation programme funded the design of a laser system to keep a rover supplied with power from up to 15 km away while it explores some of these dark craters.

At the highest lunar latitudes, the Sun stays low on the horizon all year round, casting long shadows that keep sunken craters mired in permanent shadow, potentially on a timescale of billions of years. Data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, India’s Chandrayaan-1 and ESA’s SMART-1 orbiters show these ‘permanently shadowed regions’ are rich in hydrogen, strongly suggesting water ice can be found there.

#Roobert33 In this experiment it’s noted that one half of an aluminum anodized copper globe is connected to an electrical wire in a DC current pole. At the center of the container there is an electrically isolated brass bolt from the container and connected to another pole of the DC current. At the base of the wooden support there is a large loudspeaker magnet that generates a magnetic attraction. Inside the container liquid mercury is poured in a weight of just over 1 Kg. When current flows through the two conductors, it generates a strong magnetic field that supports the system. This favorable condition rotates the liquid mercury as it’s an electric conductive metal. This experiment is known as the “Lorentz Force”. The operating voltage is 2V DC controlled by a DC inverter. The speed of rotation of mercury depends on the voltage being given. Increasing the tension the mercury takes off outside the bowl. *The system doesn’t work in alternating current. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au4hbUm4mMo

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrgd8qJ7CE97PSaPJySR6wA

The remains of a giant segment of a Chinese rocket crash-landed in the Atlantic Ocean this week, representing the most significant uncontrolled descent of a piece of human-made space debris in decades.

The core stage of a Chinese Long March 5B (CZ–5B) rocket, which was successfully launched on May 5, spent several days in orbit as part of its mission, before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere and falling to Earth, splashing down in ocean waters off the west coast of Mauritania in northwest Africa.

The descent, which was eventually confirmed by the 18th Space Control Squadron, a unit of the US Air Force, was notable not just for its huge mass, but also for the extent of the window of uncontrolled descent, which had space-object trackers guessing just where and when the out-of-control rocket would eventually land.