Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space – Page 871

In the early 1990s, I was lucky enough to get some time on a 60 MeV linear accelerator as part of an undergraduate lab course. Having had this experience, I can feel for the scientists at CERN who have had to make do with their current 13 TeV accelerator, which only manages energies some 200,000 times larger. So, I read with great interest when they announced the publication of the initial design concept for the Future Circular Collider (FCC), which promises collisions nearly an order of magnitude more energetic. The plan, which has been in the works since 2014, includes three proposals for accelerators which would succeed CERN’s current big iron, the LHC.

Want to know what’s on the horizon in high-energy physics?

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How have stars and planets developed from the clouds of dust and gas that once filled the cosmos? A novel experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has demonstrated the validity of a widespread theory known as “magnetorotational instability,” or MRI, that seeks to explain the formation of heavenly bodies.

The theory holds that MRI allows , clouds of dust, gas, and plasma that swirl around growing stars and as well as black holes, to collapse into them. According to the theory, this collapse happens because turbulent swirling plasma, technically known as “Keplerian flows,” gradually grows unstable within a disk. The instability causes angular —the process that keeps orbiting planets from being drawn into the sun—to decrease in inner sections of the disk, which then fall into celestial bodies.

Unlike orbiting planets, the matter in dense and crowded accretion disks may experience forces such as friction that cause the disks to lose angular momentum and be drawn into the objects they swirl around. However, such forces cannot fully explain how quickly matter must fall into larger objects for planets and stars to form on a reasonable timescale.

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Michael Griffin, the undersecretary for research and engineering, expects future budgets to provide funds for lasers that the missile defense agency can more rapidly develop and field. Space-control needs to have megawatt-class lasers.

Hypersonic weapons’ low signature in flight and high degree of maneuverability upon final approach to targets make the weapons difficult to defend against.

The last time the US really invested in transformative capabilities that overwhelmed adversaries [in Desert Storm] was the Reagan era.

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Space rocks come crashing down to Earth with somewhat startling regularity, and when they do they often create a big boom. When a meteorite detonates in Earth’s atmosphere it produces an explosion which researchers call bolides, or simply “fireballs.”

Most of the time, a fireball appears and disappears before anyone is quick enough to grab their smartphone and record it, so we’re left with dash cam videos and still images from stationary cameras to give us a glimpse of the event. Last week, a fireball came crashing down in Cuba and, in a rare treat, we actually get to hear it.

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One small step for man. One giant leap for…

Russian media is reporting that the American toilet on the International Space Station (ISS) burst late last week, spilling gallons of fluid that astronauts had to catch with towels.

Sure, it sounds like a story about an exceptionally bad roommate — but it might also be the latest escalation in the deterioration of relations between Russia and the U.S. in space, lending grim gravitas to the plumbing snafu.

Pee Tape

A source told Sputnik News, which is closely affiliated with the Russian government, that the toilet in the U.S. section of the ISS malfunctioned on Friday, spilling water into the microgravity environment. Water is a precious resource on the ISS, where filtration systems recycle shower water, sweat, and urine.

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Musk has yet to make a definite announcement about a Moon base. He has said we may need one just to get people fired up about Mars, and he is going to shoot someone around the Moon and back. I point this out because the first part of this article makes it seem like Musk has drawn up plans and announced them.

How can astronauts build a lunar base if traditional building materials are too heavy to load into a rocket?

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An excellent article on Hackaday addresses the lifetime of LED bulbs. To a certain degree, it also addresses the lifetime of LED’s themselves. However, the majority of the article investigates the various parts of the LED bulb, such as electronics and housings, and how they last. The article also addresses the issues of lumen depreciation and color change.

These issues are all important when thinking about long-term use in space applications.

Early adopters of LED lighting will remember 50,000 hour or even 100,000 hour lifetime ratings printed on the box. But during a recent trip to the hardware store the longest advertised lifetime I found was 25,000 hours. Others claimed only 7,500 or 15,000 hours. And yes, these are brand-name bulbs from Cree and GE.

So, what happened to those 100,000 hour residential LED bulbs? Were the initial estimates just over-optimistic? Was it all marketing hype? Or, did we not know enough about LED aging to predict the true useful life of a bulb?

I put these questions to the test. Join me after the break for some background on the light bulb cartel from the days of incandescent bulbs (not a joke, a cartel controlled the life of your bulbs), and for the destruction of some modern LED bulbs to see why the lifetimes are clocking in a lot lower than the original wave of LED replacements.

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