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Category: space – Page 819

Researchers at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and Technische Universit\xE4t Dresden have recently designed a new type of inflatable robot for space navigation. These robots, presented in a paper published in SPIE Digital Library, were created using dielectric elastomer transducers (DETs), which are essentially electrical capacitors made from soft rubbery materials.

“Current technology is limited by its mass and volume. It takes thousands of dollars to launch even a single kilogram into orbit,” Joseph Ashby, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Our research aims to replace or augment current technology with lighter smart-material replacements combined with inflatable structures.”

If they are integrated with inflatable structures, DETs could aid the development of soft and low-mass robots, which have high packaging efficiency and are easy to deploy. In fact, DETs deform when a voltage is applied to them, due to the Maxwell stress generated by the electric field.

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Georgia is immensely proud of its ancient wine-making tradition, claiming to have been the first nation to make wine. Now it wants to be the first to grow grapes on Mars.

Nestling between the Great Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea, Georgia has a mild climate that is perfect for vineyards and has developed a thriving wine tourism industry.

Now Nikoloz Doborjginidze has co-founded a project to develop grape varieties that can be grown on Mars.

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Plants are naturally amazing little machines – so giving them a bionic leg-up could unlock a whole new range of abilities. Now a team of researchers from the University of Melbourne has developed a new way to turn plants into nanomaterial factories, which could allow them to act as chemical sensors or even allow them to survive in harsh environments, such as in space or on Mars.

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One persistent illusion is that physical objects only interact with other objects they are close to. This is called the principle of locality. We can express this more precisely by the law that the strengths of forces between any two objects falls off quickly—at least by some power of the distance between them. This can be explained by positing that the bodies do not interact directly, but only through the mediation of a field, such as an electromagnetic field, which propagat…

The intuitive idea that objects influence each other because they’re in physical proximity is soon to become another of those beliefs that turn out to be wrong when we look deeper.

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A resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) has made record time, traveling from Earth to the space station in just three hours and 21 minutes. The Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket with a Progress MS-11 cargo spaceship was launched from the Russian space Agency Roscosmos’ Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 7:01 a.m. on Thursday, April 4.

The super speedy travel time was possible due to a change in how resupply craft approach the ISS. Before, the resupply craft would have to orbit around the Earth dozens of times in order to catch up with the speed of the space station. But now there is a “fast-track” launch which allows the craft to catch up to the station in just two rotations. The resupply craft is launched less than a minute before the space station passes overhead of the launch site, so the craft can catch up to the station more quickly.

Nick Hague, an astronaut aboard the ISS, tweeted his approval of the achievement. “The progress resupply vehicle made record timing as it launched and docked to the station in under three and a half hours,” he said. “Pretty impressive!” The people of Twitter were impressed too. “…quicker than JFK-LAX!” one person commented.


It’s one of the most enduring mysteries of the Sun: why the superheated surface of this great ball of glowing plasma is actually cooler than its outer atmosphere, called the corona.

Scientists now have a new explanation for this hotly debated topic, and the answer was hidden in a strange solar phenomenon that’s never been observed quite like this before: a deluge of plasma rain falling within newly discovered magnetic structures called Raining Null Point Topologies.

On Earth, when it gets hot, water evaporates, turning into steam that lifts into the atmosphere, before cooling effectively reverses the process: water molecules condense inside clouds, which later drop rainfall over the land, oceans, and rivers below.

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