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Category: space travel – Page 445

When it comes to the future of space exploration, a number of new technologies are being investigated. Foremost among these are new forms of propulsion that will be able to balance fuel-efficiency with power. Not only would engines that are capable of achieving a great deal of thrust using less fuel be cost-effective, they will be able to ferry astronauts to destinations like Mars and beyond in less time.

This is where engines like the X3 Hall-effect thruster comes into play. This thruster, which is being developed by NASA’s Glenn Research Center in conjunction with the US Air Force and the University of Michigan, is a scaled-up model of the kinds of thrusters used by the Dawn spacecraft. During a recent test, this thruster shattered the previous record for a Hall-effect thruster, achieving higher power and superior thrust.

Hall-effect thrusters have garnered favor with mission planners in recent years because of their extreme efficiency. They function by turning small amounts of propellant (usually inert gases like xenon) into charged plasma with electrical fields, which is then accelerated very quickly using a magnetic field. Compared to chemical rockets, they can achieve top speeds using a tiny fraction of their fuel.

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For all those people wandering around our great Australian cities and spewing they can’t watch a streaming video over 4G because of network access and congestion — we’ve found a place where you can get access to a brand new 4G network that isn’t being hammered. The downside — you’ll need to travel about 384,000km to get there. Nokia and Vodafone are teaming up to put 4G on the moon.

German company PTScientists is planning the first privately-funded Moon landing in 2019, using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. Their plan is is to look at an old roving vehicle left behind back in 1972, when the last Apollo mission left the lunar surface. And, to do that, the new vehicles they’re sending up small, 1kg, base stations to transmit HD images from the moon’s surface back to earth for the first time. Audi is building the vehicles that will be used on the lunar surface.

Nokia said “The 4G network will enable the Audi lunar quattro rovers to communicate and transfer scientific data and HD video while they carefully approach and study NASA’s Apollo 17 lunar roving vehicle that was used by the last astronauts to walk on the Moon”.

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A couple of years ago, researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre discovered a thruster system which actually generates thrust, despite requiring absolutely no propellant. The implications of this discovery are far-reaching; applications for space flight and other technologies which require propulsion could one day become far cheaper, allowing space exploration to expand exponentially.

The existence of this technology also further validates the fact that energy can be derived from tapping into the quantum vacuum, also known as “zero-point.”

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Physicists have confirmed the existence of a new form of atomic nuclei, and the fact that it’s not symmetrical challenges the fundamental theories of physics that explain our Universe.

But that’s not as bad as it sounds, because the 2016 discovery could help scientists solve one of the biggest mysteries in theoretical physics — where is all the dark matter? — and could also explain why travelling backwards in time might actually be impossible.

“We’ve found these nuclei literally point towards a direction in space. This relates to a direction in time, proving there’s a well-defined direction in time and we will always travel from past to present,” Marcus Scheck from the University of the West of Scotland told Kenneth MacDonald at BBC News at the time.

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