Lifeboat Foundation

Starlink is a global satellite system being deployed by SpaceX to provide high-speed broadband Internet access to locations where it was unreliable, unreasonably expensive or completely inaccessible. All over the world, even in well-developed countries, there are many remote regions that are lagging far behind in the speed of digital development, and Germany is no exception. Nevertheless, good news awaits the residents of the country, because, according to a representative of Starlink, the company will enter the German market this year.

In Frankfurt am Main, the groundwork has been laid for the Starlink universal Internet offering. According to the relevant trade register entry, Starlink Germany GmbH must offer Internet connection services and the sale or rental of the necessary accessories.

“If everything goes according to plan, we will start this year in Germany,” said VP Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX Hans Königsmann to Wirtschaftswoche. “Our mission is to provide fast Internet access to remote corners of the world.”

Prof. Dr. Thomas Kenkmann, geologist from the University of Freiburg’s Institute of Earth and Environmental Sciences, together with mineralogist Prof. Dr. Wolf Uwe Reimold from the University of Brasilia, Brazil, and Dr. Manfred Gottwald from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) published an atlas providing a comprehensive overview of all known impact craters on every continent. The authors present the more than 200 terrestrial impact sites in high-resolution topographic maps and satellite images, complete with detailed geological descriptions and photographs of the crater structures and their rocks. They also explain the essential details of each impact event.

The formation of craters by asteroid and comet impact has always been a fundamental process in the solar system, explains Kenkmann. As the planets developed along with their moons, these impacts played an important part in accreting planetary mass, shaping the surfaces of planetary bodies, and later also influencing their development. And larger meteorite impacts eventually affected the development of life on Earth.

Today, mapping of what can still be seen of the impact structures on the Earth’s surface can be done by satellites in low Earth orbit. From 2010 to 2016, the DLR successfully measured the Earth’s surface with the radar satellites of the TanDEM-X mission. The acquired data allowed, for the first time, to derive a worldwide terrain model with a height accuracy of up to one meter. From this global digital elevation model the authors have been able to produce this complete topographic atlas of 600 pages with information about all terrestrial impact craters known to date.

WASHINGTON — SpaceX was awarded a $29.6 million contract under the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract that allows the U.S. Space Force to monitor and study data from the company’s commercial and civil space missions.

The one-year contract “provides early integration studies and fleet surveillance for non-national security space missions,” said the Space Force contract announcement Nov. 9.

Fleet surveillance includes access to proprietary “tools, systems, processes and launch site activities developed by the launch service provider for non-national security space missions,” said the Space Force.

The glow could help scientists determine if a subsurface ocean on Europa is a good place to look for life.

Intense radiation from the giant planet Jupiter causes the night side of its moon Europa to visibly glow in the dark – a phenomenon that could help scientists learn if it can sustain simple forms of life, according to a new study.

The findings, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, were the result of experiments by NASA scientists to study how Jupiter’s radiation affects the chemistry of Europa, which is thought to harbor a subsurface ocean of water.

Continue reading “Jupiter’s moon Europa glows in the dark, scientists say” »

For almost a century, the anonymous members of Nicolas Bourbaki have written books intended as pure expressions of mathematical thought.

Groundbreaking science is often the result of true collaboration, with researchers in a variety of fields, viewpoints and experiences coming together in a unique way. One such effort by Clemson University researchers has led to a discovery that could change the way the science of thermoelectrics moves forward.

Graduate research assistant Prakash Parajuli; research assistant professor Sriparna Bhattacharya; and Clemson Nanomaterials Institute (CNI) Founding Director Apparao Rao (all members of CNI in the College of Science’s Department of Physics and Astronomy) worked with an international team of scientists to examine a highly efficient thermoelectric material in a new way—by using light.

Their research has been published in the journal Advanced Science and is titled “High zT and its origin in Sb-doped GeTe single crystals.”

In the Nevada desert yesterday, Virgin Hyperloop tested human travel in a hyperloop pod for the first time.

SAN FRANCISCO – L3Harris Technologies will help the U.S. Defense Department extract information and insight from satellite and airborne imagery under a three-year U.S. Army Research Laboratory contract.

L3Harris will develop and demonstrate an artificial intelligence-machine learning interface for Defense Department applications under the multimillion-dollar contract announced Oct. 26.

“L3Harris will assist the Department of Defense with the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities and technologies,” Stacey Casella, general manager for L3Harris’ Geospatial Processing and Analytics business, told SpaceNews. L3Harris will help the Defense Department embed artificial intelligence and machine learning in its workflows “to ultimately accelerate our ability to extract usable intelligence from the pretty expansive set of remotely sensed data that we have available today from spaceborne and airborne assets,” she added.

A Chinese team has demonstrated a prototype of a microwave plasma thruster capable of working in the Earth’s atmosphere and producing thrust with an efficiency comparable to the jet engines you’d find on modern airliners – under laboratory conditions.

Plasma thrusters are already operational on spacecraft as a means of solar-electric locomotion, using xenon plasma, but such things are no use in the Earth’s atmosphere, as accelerated xenon ions lose most of their thrust force to friction against the air. Not to mention, they only make a small amount of thrust in the first place.

Continue reading “Electric microwave plasma thruster could rival traditional jet engines” »