Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 6881

A fundamental decision on a new station would be made by the end of this year, he said.

Rogozin said that current negotiations with NASA on the future of the ISS were “shallow”. He speculated that ISS’s life cycle would be repeatedly prolonged not by several years, but by one year. Also, he said it might be possible to extend the service life not of the whole station, but of its individual modules.

“On the sidelines of the April 9 launch we plan to hold technical consultations with NASA,” Rogozin said, adding there was a possibility of configuring the Lunar orbital platform Gateway for its possible docking with Russia’s new generation spacecraft Oryol.

Read more | >

Hungarian mathematician László Lovász and Israeli computer scientist Avi Wigderson will share the prize, worth 7.5 million Norwegian kroner (US$886000), “for their foundational contributions to theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, and their leading role in shaping them into central fields of modern mathematics”, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced on 17 March.

The work of winners László Lovász and Avi Wigderson underpins applications from Internet security to the study of networks.

Read more | >

Restructuring the way perovskite solar cells are designed can boost their efficiency and increase their deployment in buildings and beyond, according to researchers with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Perovskite photovoltaic (PV) cells are made of layers of materials sandwiched together, with the top and bottom layers key to converting sunlight to electricity. The new for the cells increases the area exposed to the sun by putting the metal contact layers side-by-side on the back of the cell.

“Taking the materials on top away means you are going to have a higher theoretical efficiency because your perovskite is absorbing more of the sun,” said Lance Wheeler, a NREL scientist and lead author of a new paper, “Complementary interface formation toward high-efficiency all-back-contact .”

Read more | >

A new AI model that harnesses the power of the world’s fastest supercomputer, Fugaku, can rapidly predict tsunami flooding in coastal areas before the tsunami reaches land.

The development of the new technology was announced as part of a joint project between the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IREDeS) at Tohoku University, the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, and Fujitsu Laboratories.

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and subsequent tsunami highlighted the shortcomings in disaster mitigation and the need to utilize information for efficient and safe evacuations.

Read more | >

5 january 2020.

This paper proposes the use of Flower Constellation (FC) theory to facilitate the design of a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) slotting system to avoid collisions between compliant satellites and optimize the available space. Specifically, it proposes the use of concentric orbital shells of admissible “slots” with stacked intersecting orbits that preserve a minimum separation distance between satellites at all times. The problem is formulated in mathematical terms and three approaches are explored: random constellations, single 2D Lattice Flower Constellations (2D-LFCs), and unions of 2D-LFCs. Each approach is evaluated in terms of several metrics including capacity, Earth coverage, orbits per shell, and symmetries. In particular, capacity is evaluated for various inclinations and other parameters. Next, a rough estimate for the capacity of LEO is generated subject to certain minimum separation and station-keeping assumptions and several trade-offs are identified to guide policy-makers interested in the adoption of a LEO slotting scheme for space traffic management.

Previous chapter Next chapter.

Read more | >