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Category: space – Page 880

Unbelievable VIDEO of International Space Station racing across moon caught by amateur astronomer

The stars aligned for a London based amateur astronomer, who managed to catch a shot of the International Space Station passing in front of the moon under the perfect conditions, with epic results.

Spotting ISS’s lunar crossings is extremely rare, making the close-up footage of the vessel’s swift passage particularly remarkable. While other amateurs have captured similar crossings, Szabolcs Nagy’s clip is incredibly close and clear, showing the manned satellite streaking through the center of the frame.

Exotic spiraling electrons discovered

Rutgers and other physicists have discovered an exotic form of electrons that spin like planets and could lead to advances in lighting, solar cells, lasers and electronic displays.

It’s called a “chiral surface ,” and it consists of particles and anti-particles bound together and swirling around each other on the surface of solids, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Chiral refers to entities, like your right and left hands, that match but are asymmetrical and can’t be superimposed on their mirror image.

Here’s a Simple Thing We Can Do to Cancel Out Years of CO2 Emissions

An ambitious new analysis of the world’s forests found that there’s space to plant 1.2 trillion new trees — a number that would absorb more carbon than human emissions.

According to the new data, ETH Zurich researcher Thomas Crowther told The Independent, trees are “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change.”

Crowther told The Independent that the new analysis, which he presented at a conference this weekend, suggests that a worldwide tree-planting spree would have a greater impact on the planet’s environment than building wind turbines or vegetarian diets — an effort, he says, that could cancel a decade of greenhouse emissions.

Watch a Harpoon Attached to a Satellite Spear a Piece of Space Debris

The test is actually the RemoveDEBRIS satellite’s second trick: in September, it successfully deployed a spider-like web that was meant to grab space junk out of the sky.

The team at the University of Surrey is now preparing for its third and final test: RemoveDEBRIS will inflate a sail that will slowly drag it into Earth’s atmosphere where it will burn up and be destroyed.

READ MORE: Space junk harpooned like whale in orbit-cleanup test [Associated Press].

Biggest supermoon of the year is here this week

Stargazers will get a close-up look at Earth’s natural satellite this week thanks to the brightest supermoon event of the year.

A supermoon phenomenon occurs when a full moon, on its oval-shaped orbit, is at its closest to us, known as perigee, which is about 356,000 kilometres as measured from the centre of the Earth to the centre of the moon.

It takes place when the moon’s orbit brings it to the closest point to Earth while at the same time bathed in sunlight, giving the moon its bright appearance.

Plans for first Chinese solar power station in space revealed

Electric cars could be charged at any time and any place.

It could reliably supply energy 99 per cent of the time, at six-times the intensity of solar farms on earth, he said.

Chinese scientists first plan to build and launch small to medium-sized solar power stations to be launched into the stratosphere to generate electricity, between 2021 and 2025.

NASA posts image of ghostly blue objects, deep in the cosmos

When a star is born, a chaotic light show ensues.

NASA’s long-lived Hubble Space Telescope captured vivid bright clumps moving through the cosmos at some 1,000 light years from Earth. The space agency called these objects clear “smoking gun” evidence of a newly formed star — as new stars blast colossal amounts of energy-rich matter into space, known as plasma.

Seen as the vivid blue, ephemeral clumps in the top center of the new image below, these are telltale signs of an energy-rich gas, or plasma, colliding with a huge collection of dust and gas in deep space.

Ultra-light ceramic aerogel stands up to intense temperature swings

Ceramic aerogels have been protecting industrial equipment and space-bound scientific instruments for decades, thanks to their incredible lightness and ability to withstand intense heat. The problem is they can be pretty brittle. Now, a team led by researchers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) has developed a new ceramic aerogel that’s far hardier and more flexible, even after repeated exposure to wild temperature swings.

China Is Building a Solar Power Station in Space

Beam Me Down

Needless to say, the biggest problem for a floating power plant is figuring out how to get the energy back down to Earth.

The scientists behind the project are still sorting that part out. But right now, the plan is to have solar arrays in space capture light from the sun and then beam electricity down to a facility on Earth in the form of a microwave or a laser, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.