Researchers in growing numbers are starting to enlist do-it-yourself 3D printers, cheap electronics, sensors and more to advance their work
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More on China’s race on Space. Last Tuesday, China launched the 1st Quantum Satellite. In 2017, China is planning to be the dominant force in mining of Space. First stop — mining the dark side of the moon. Given China’s own history with environmental pollution plus mining’s damaging effects to the environment when not properly managed; etc. one must ponder how will space and Earth itself be impacted by such mining.
Before this decade is out, humanity will go where it’s never gone before: the far side of the moon. This dark side — forever facing away from us — has long been a mystery. No human-made object has ever touched its surface. The mission will be a marvel of engineering. It will involve a rocket that weighs hundreds of tons (traveling almost 250,000 miles), a robot lander, and an unmanned lunar rover that will use sensors, cameras, and an infrared spectrometer to uncover billion-year-old secrets from the soil. The mission also might scout the moon’s supply of helium-3 — a promising material for fusion energy. And the nation planting its starry flag on this historic trip will be the People’s Republic of China.
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# Venus # Oxygen – Venus’ ‘Twin Planet’ Could Still Have Oxygen, Scientists Say : Nine months ago, astronomers announced that they were able to discover a planet that is said to be a twin to Venus. Today, it seems that a new study raises the possibility of the said planet to have oxygen in its atmosphere – don’t mistake it for the next livable planet though – it is said to have hellish temperatures, which automatically rules out the possibility of life.
Dubbed the GJ 1132b, IFL Science noted that it is larger than Earth in size and mass. Temperature-wise, it is considerably hot at 120 to 320 degrees Celsius, but it is still considered cooler than most of the rocky planets previously detected.
The GJ 1132b orbits around 2.2 million kilometers from its star, about 1.5 percent of the Earth-Sun distance. Its parental star, the GJ 1132, is a red dwarf planet just a fifth of the sun’s mass, but is more exposed to light than the earth. While undoubtedly hot, wide estimates of its temperature show that it could reflect a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect.
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Wild stuff.
Somewhere on the other side of the sun, almost directly opposite to Earth, a NASA spacecraft has drifted aimlessly through the void since Oct. 1, 2014, unable to establish contact with our planet.
At least that was the depressing situation until Sunday night.
In a statement posted Monday (scroll down for the full version), the space agency says it has finally contacted the STEREO-B solar observatory — an identical twin of another sun-monitoring robot, called STEREO-A — after nearly 2 years of effort.
And, a few words from Ray.
According to Ray Kurzweil, we’re approaching a time when humans will begin to radically extend their lifespans. This sounds good on the surface, but will we have enough resources to support everyone? And won’t living indefinitely get boring eventually? Not so much, Kurzweil says.
Kurzweil suggests that by the time we’ve significantly extended our average lifespan, we’ll no longer be in a scarcity-driven world competing for finite resources. Take energy, for example. Kurzweil notes solar is on an exponential curve and has been doubling every two years.
The first stage launches the rocket off of the pad and continues firing for about four minutes. Once the first stage is out of fuel, it separates, and if it’s a SpaceX Falcon 9, flies back home to be reused. If it’s anything else, including the Atlas V, the first stage crash lands in the ocean and sinks. Meanwhile, the second stage fires up its own engine (or engines) to boost the payload the rest of the way into orbit. On the Atlas V, the second stage is called Centaur. Once Centaur gets its payload where it needs to go, it separates, and then suicides down into Earth’s atmosphere.
Getting a payload into space is so expensive because you have to build up this huge and complicated rocket, with engines and guidance systems and fuel tanks and stuff, and then you basically use it for like 15 minutes and throw it all away. This is why SpaceX is trying so hard to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9. But what about the second stage? You’ve got a whole bunch of hardware that made it to orbit, and when getting stuff to orbit costs something like $2,500 per kilogram, you then tell it to go it burn itself up in the atmosphere, because otherwise it’s just useless space junk.
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A first step in establishing repair standards on satellite in space; wonder could we eventually see a version of the EPA or in space.
SAN FRANCISCO — The U.S. Defense Research Projects Agency plans to establish a consortium to discuss standards and practices for on-orbit satellite servicing as a corollary to Robotic Servicing of Geostationary Satellites (RSGS), an effort to develop robotic spacecraft to inspect, repair and move other satellites.
“Our fear was that we would create a robotic servicing capability through RSGS and when our industry partner went to Lloyds of London for insurance, someone would say, ‘You have no authority to conduct that mission,’” said Brad Tousley, director of DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office.
Through the construction and operation of the International Space Station, the international community has established laws and regulations concerning government spacecraft conducting rendezvous and proximity operations with other government spacecraft as well as government spacecraft conducting rendezvous and proximity operations with commercial spacecraft.
Another discovery from a rocket launch.
A sensitive quantum device, designed to operate on a nanosatellite, was recovered from explosion debris and displays no degradation in quality.
Quantum key distribution (QKD), i.e., using quantum signals to generate secure symmetric key material at distant sites, is of much interest for quantum communications because of its high level of privacy (underpinned by quantum mechanics). In particular, entanglement-based QKD1 is a powerful technique in which quantum correlations between photons are leveraged. In this process, the entangled photons can be distributed with the use of optical fibers or ground-level free-space links. Current QKD networks, however, suffer from a distance limit because of fiber losses2, 3 and the lack of quantum repeaters.4