Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: space – Page 874

Scientists Just Used The Cosmos to Measure The Mass of a Ghost Particle

How do you weigh a ghost? If you’re a cosmologist, you could use… the Universe. Combine vast cosmological data with info from particle accelerators, and, it turns out, you have a pretty good scale for measuring the mass of a neutrino — also known as the ‘ghost particle’.

This is how a team of scientists, for the first time, have set an upper limit on the mass of the lightest of the three different types of neutrino.

Neutrinos are peculiar little things. They are among the most abundant subatomic particles in the Universe, similar to electrons, but without a charge and almost massless. This means they interact very rarely with normal matter; in fact, billions are passing through your body right now.

New Tech Puts NASA One Step Closer to Fueling Spacecraft in Space

NASA just successfully demonstrated the first of three tools designed to refuel spacecraft in space, right outside of the International Space Station.

The space agency’s Robotic Refuelling Mission 3 was able to unstow a special adapter that can hold super-cold methane, oxygen or hydrogen, and insert it into a special coupler on a different fuel tank.

Future iterations of the system could one day allow us to gas up spacecraft with resources from distant worlds, such as liquid methane as fuel. And that’s a big deal, since future space explorations to far away destinations such as the Moon and Mars will rely on our ability to refuel after leaving Earth’s gravity.

Giving Mars a Magnetosphere

Any future colonization efforts directed at the Mars all share one problem in common; their reliance on a non-existent magnetic field. Mars’ magnetosphere went dark about 4 billion years ago when it’s core solidified due to its inability to retain heat because of its small mass. We now know that Mars was quite Earth-like in its history. Deep oceans once filled the now arid Martian valleys and a thick atmosphere once retained gasses which may have allowed for the development of simple life. This was all shielded by Mars’ prehistoric magnetic field.

When Mars’ magnetic line of defense fell, much of its atmosphere was ripped away into space, its oceans froze deep into the red regolith, and any chance for life to thrive there was suffocated. The reduction of greenhouse gasses caused Mars’ temperature to plummet, freezing any remaining atmosphere to the poles. Today, Mars is all but dead. Without a magnetic field, a lethal array of charged particles from the Sun bombards Mars’ surface every day threatening the potential of hosting electronic systems as well as biological life. The lack of a magnetic field also makes it impossible for Mars to retain an atmosphere or an ozone layer, which are detrimental in filtering out UV and high energy light. This would seem to make the basic principles behind terraforming the planet completely obsolete.

I’ve read a lot of articles about the potential of supplying Mars with an artificial magnetic field. By placing a satellite equipped with technology to produce a powerful magnetic field at Mars L1 (a far orbit around Mars where gravity from the Sun balances gravity from Mars, so that the satellite always remains between Mars and the Sun), we could encompass Mars in the resulting magnetic sheath. However, even though the idea is well understood and written about, I couldn’t find a solid mathematical proof of the concept to study for actual feasibility. So I made one!

New technique could streamline design of intricate fusion device

Stellarators, twisty machines that house fusion reactions, rely on complex magnetic coils that are challenging to design and build. Now, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has developed a mathematical technique to help simplify the design of the coils, making stellarators a potentially more cost-effective facility for producing fusion energy.

“Our main result is that we came up with a new method of identifying the irregular magnetic fields produced by coils,” said physicist Caoxiang Zhu, lead author of a paper reporting the results in Nuclear Fusion. “This technique can let you know in advance which coil shapes and placements could harm the plasma’s magnetic confinement, promising a shorter construction time and reduced costs.”

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, is the fusing of light elements in the form of plasma—the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei—that generates massive amounts of energy. Twisty, cruller-shaped stellarators are an alternative to doughnut-shaped tokamaks that are more commonly used by scientists seeking to replicate on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.

Elon Musk back to promoting bombing Mars with nuclear weapons

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk not only wants to explore Mars, he wants to ‘nuke’ it.

In a tweet this week, Musk reiterated calls to ‘Nuke Mars!’ adding that t-shirts are ‘coming soon.’

Jarring though the idea may be, the tweet is a re-hash of an idea championed by Musk in the past that proposes using a nuclear weapon to terraform the red planet for human habitation.

Electronic Alchemy develops multi-material electronics 3D printer for NASA

3D printer manufacturer Electronic Alchemy has developed a system capable of additive manufacturing fully functional electronics. Named eForge, NASA intends to use the system during planetary space missions to 3D print chemical sensors on demand. Following the launch of eForge, the company is also now designing a device to recycle 3D printed electronics, further reducing NASA’s need for resupply missions.

All the States of Matter You Didn’t Know Existed

Before scientists discovered the new state of matter last week, we were basically all used to just three states of matter. After all, during our daily lives we encounter some variety of solids, liquids and gases. Solids hold a definite shape without a container, liquids conform to the shape of their container, and gases not only conform to a container, but also expand to fill it.

And there’s variety amidst these three: A crystalline solid, for example, has all its atoms lined up in exactly the precise order in perfect symmetry, while a quasicrystal solid fills all its space without the tightly regulated structure. Liquid crystals, which make up the visual components of most electronic displays, have elements of both liquids and crystal structures, as anyone who has ever pushed the screen of their calculator can confirm.

Under standard conditions on Earth, solids, liquids and gasses are the vast majority of what a person will experience in life. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a whole lot more beneath the surface.

Terraforming Mars in 50 Years with Large Orbital Mirrors, Bacteria and Factories

The McKay-Zubrin plan for terraforming Mars in 50 years was cited by Elon Musk.

Orbital mirrors with 100 km radius are required to vaporize the CO2 in the south polar cap. If manufactured of solar sail-like material, such mirrors would have a mass on the order of 200,000 tonnes. If manufactured in space out of asteroidal or Martian moon material, about 120 MWe-years of energy would be needed to produce the required aluminum.

The use of orbiting mirrors is another way for hydrosphere activation. For example, if the 125 km radius reflector discussed earlier for use in vaporizing the pole were to concentrate its power on a smaller region, 27 TW would be available to melt lakes or volatilize nitrate beds. This is triple the power available from the impact of a 10 billion tonne asteroid per year, and in all probability would be far more controllable. A single such mirror could drive vast amounts of water out of the permafrost and into the nascent Martian ecosystem very quickly. Thus while the engineering of such mirrors may be somewhat grandiose, the benefits to terraforming of being able to wield tens of TW of power in a controllable way would be huge.

/* */