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In the not too distant future, trips to the мoon will Ƅe мanned and of long duration. In order for astronauts to surʋiʋe there for the duration of their мission, they мust first find a way to create oxygen, water, and fuel with the resources that exist there, since transport froм Earth is coмpletely unfeasiƄle.

Now, a teaм of Chinese astronoмers froм Nanjing Uniʋersity has just discoʋered how to achieʋe this and thus facilitate huмan exploration to create a perмanent Ƅase.

To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four thousandths of a second.

To snapshot atomic activity, you’d need a shutter that clicks a lot faster.

Now scientists have come up with a way of achieving a shutter speed that’s a mere trillionth of a second, or 250 million times faster than those digital cameras. That makes it capable of capturing something very important in materials science: dynamic disorder.

A celebrated experiment in 1,801 showed that light passing through two thin slits interferes with itself, forming a characteristic striped pattern on the wall behind. Now, physicists have shown that a similar effect can arise with two slits in time rather than space: a single mirror that rapidly turns on and off causes interference in a laser pulse, making it change colour.

The result is reported on 3 April in Nature Phys ics1. It adds a new twist to the classic double-slit experiment performed by physicist Thomas Young, which demonstrated the wavelike aspect of light, but also — in its many later reincarnations — that quantum objects ranging from photons to molecules have a dual nature of both particle and wave.

The rapid switching of the mirror — possibly taking just 1 femtosecond (one-quadrillionth of a second) — shows that certain materials can change their optical properties much faster than previously thought possible, says Andrea Alù, a physicist at the City University of New York. This could open new paths for building devices that handle information using light rather than electronic impulses.

Bootprints have not been left on the Moon since the early 1970s, but that will soon change. With NASA’s Artemis and China’s CLEP programs both scheduled to return humans to the Moon before 2030, the two superpowers are apparently in a “race” to the Lunar surface. But this time, who gets there “first” matters little. Instead, this race is about building a sustainable human presence on the Moon.

Here is how China’s and America’s approaches differ, and what it means for the future of spaceflight and human progress.


A comparison of the hardware China and the US are developing to return humans to the Moon.