≈2 km craters near the lunar poles provide landing sites on permafrost with permanent sunlight low enough to reach with solar arrays on deployable masts. Radiant Gas Dynamic (RGD) mining in small polar craters will allow human exploration of the Moon at vastly reduced cost. RGD mining combines radio frequency, microwave, infrared, and optical radiation with a surface-enclosing cryotrap and instrumentation to enable large scale (1,000s of tons/yr) ISRU without excavation equipment.
Loki, a faraway volcanic feature on Jupiter’s moon Io, is acting up and planetary scientists want to know why.
Loki has always been a troublemaker.
This particular Loki is a bowl of magma on Jupiter’s moon Io. For a while, Loki brightened and faded with surprising regularity, but then it started misbehaving — Loki completely stopped its regular behavior for a decade, then seems to have restarted on a different timescale. Now, planetary scientists are trying to make sense of what’s happening on this faraway volcanic world.
ATTUALITÀ DELLA MOZIONE FINALE DEL 2NDO CONGRESSO NAZIONALE DI SPACE RENAISSANCE ITALIA
La rivoluzione verde è necessaria ma non sufficiente! Non si tratta di “salvare il pianeta”, ma di salvare la civiltà ed il suo sviluppo. L’unico sviluppo sostenibile è quello che punta allo spazio, ad utilizzare le immense risorse del Sistema Solare.
All’agenda dei 17 obiettivi 2030 per lo sviluppo sostenibile dell’ONU deve essere aggiunto il 18mo obiettivo:
Quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity form the bedrock of the current understanding of physics—yet the two theories don’t seem to work together. Physical phenomena rely on relationship of motion between the observed and the observer. Certain rules hold true across types of observed objects and those observing, but those rules tend to break down at the quantum level, where subatomic particles behave in strange ways.
An international team of researchers developed a unified framework that would account for this apparent break down between classical and quantum physics, and they put it to the test using a quantum satellite called Micius. They published their results ruling out one version of their theory on Sept 19th in Science.
Micius is part of a Chinese research project called Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS), in which researchers can examine the relationship with quantum and classical physics using light experiments. In this study, the researchers used the satellite to produce and measure two entangled particles.
An international research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute; AEI) in Hannover has discovered that the radio pulsar J0952-0607 also emits pulsed gamma radiation. J0952-0607 spins 707 times in one second and is second in the list of rapidly rotating neutron stars. By analyzing about 8.5 years worth of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, LOFAR radio observations from the past two years, observations from two large optical telescopes, and gravitational-wave data from the LIGO detectors, the team used a multi-messenger approach to study the binary system of the pulsar and its lightweight companion in detail. Their study published in the Astrophysical Journal shows that extreme pulsar systems are hiding in the Fermi catalogs and motivates further searches. Despite being very extensive, the analysis also raises new unanswered questions about this system.
Pulsars are the compact remnants of stellar explosions which have strong magnetic fields and are rapidly rotating. They emit radiation like a cosmic lighthouse and can be observable as radio pulsars and/or gamma-ray pulsars depending on their orientation towards Earth.
Summary Students are introduced to the historical motivation for space exploration. They learn about the International Space Station as an example of space travel innovation and are introduced to new and futuristic ideas that space engineers are currently working on to propel space research far into the future!