Lifeboat Foundation

Washington | Australian resources industry giants such as BHP and Rio Tinto could soon play a crucial role in NASA’s Mars mission, building and operating mines on the moon to extract rocket fuel for interplanetary travel.

In an interview with The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), NASA’s top boss, administrator Jim Bridenstine, urged Australian mining companies to grasp the opportunity and challenge of applying the industry’s expertise in remote resource extraction to the moon.

Known inside NASA as Artemis (the twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology) the lunar missions will rely on turning hundreds of millions of tons of mined water ice recently discovered on the moon into liquid forms of hydrogen and oxygen to power spacecraft.

Palm oil is in almost everything, and it’s responsible for huge amounts of deforestation across the globe. These guys have found a way to replace it, using nothing more than a cup of coffee. #YEARSproject

This is an algae “biocurtain” and it’s cleaning up the air. 💚.

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American scientist and best-selling #scifi author David Brin predicts what our world would like in the year 2050. Read it on our #Earth2050 platform:

By 2040, the international community has concluded that using nonrenewable resources is irrational. The first kind of asteroid to be mined was of the carbonaceous variety, to get water that can keep astronauts alive, or be used to create rocket fuel. Later, explorers prospected dozens of other varieties of asteroids with suitable iron, nickel, cobalt, platinoid, and rare-earth element deposits. Odyssey is the first ever space base focused on mining these minerals.

The station was launched in 2049. Because of magnetic storms and drastic changes in temperature, the main part of the base had to be built several meters below the asteroid’s surface. Almost all work on the base was automated. Small teams of engineers and technicians needed for station management stay for 6-month shifts. Using solar mirrors, they melt and refine precious metal ores and blow them into gleaming bubbles that can safely descend through Earth’s atmosphere to float in the ocean, for collection. The iron is used for construction in space.

Continue reading “An asteroid base” »

10 best 3D map photogrammetry software reviewed. Top drone mapping and modelling solutions from DroneDeploy, Open Drone Map, Pix4D, PhotoScan, Precision Mapper, AutoDesk plus more.

An epic lunar laser experiment is still going strong, five decades after the Apollo astronauts set it up on the surface.

The moonwalking crew of Apollo 11, which landed on the moon 50 years ago this month, put special retroreflectors on the lunar surface, as did the later crews of Apollo 14 and 15, in 1971. (Another retroreflector, built by the French, sits on the Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover that landed without a crew in 1973.)

Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, to the future.^[1][2][3] Time is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience.^[4][5][6][7] Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions.^[8]

Time has long been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars.^{[2][6][7][9][10][11]} Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems.^[12][13][14]

Time in physics is unambiguously operationally defined as “what a clock reads”.^[6][15][16] See Units of Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units and International System of Quantities. Time is used to define other quantities – such as velocity – so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition.^[17] An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life.