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Category: space travel – Page 495

Venus’ ‘Twin Planet’ Could Still Have Oxygen, Scientists Say

# Venus # Oxygen – Venus’ ‘Twin Planet’ Could Still Have Oxygen, Scientists Say : Nine months ago, astronomers announced that they were able to discover a planet that is said to be a twin to Venus. Today, it seems that a new study raises the possibility of the said planet to have oxygen in its atmosphere – don’t mistake it for the next livable planet though – it is said to have hellish temperatures, which automatically rules out the possibility of life.

Dubbed the GJ 1132b, IFL Science noted that it is larger than Earth in size and mass. Temperature-wise, it is considerably hot at 120 to 320 degrees Celsius, but it is still considered cooler than most of the rocky planets previously detected.

The GJ 1132b orbits around 2.2 million kilometers from its star, about 1.5 percent of the Earth-Sun distance. Its parental star, the GJ 1132, is a red dwarf planet just a fifth of the sun’s mass, but is more exposed to light than the earth. While undoubtedly hot, wide estimates of its temperature show that it could reflect a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect.

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A lost spacecraft is talking to NASA again after nearly 2 years in the void

Wild stuff.

Somewhere on the other side of the sun, almost directly opposite to Earth, a NASA spacecraft has drifted aimlessly through the void since Oct. 1, 2014, unable to establish contact with our planet.

At least that was the depressing situation until Sunday night.

In a statement posted Monday (scroll down for the full version), the space agency says it has finally contacted the STEREO-B solar observatory — an identical twin of another sun-monitoring robot, called STEREO-A — after nearly 2 years of effort.

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NASA Funds Plan to Turn Used Rocket Fuel Tanks Into Space Habitats

The first stage launches the rocket off of the pad and continues firing for about four minutes. Once the first stage is out of fuel, it separates, and if it’s a SpaceX Falcon 9, flies back home to be reused. If it’s anything else, including the Atlas V, the first stage crash lands in the ocean and sinks. Meanwhile, the second stage fires up its own engine (or engines) to boost the payload the rest of the way into orbit. On the Atlas V, the second stage is called Centaur. Once Centaur gets its payload where it needs to go, it separates, and then suicides down into Earth’s atmosphere.

Getting a payload into space is so expensive because you have to build up this huge and complicated rocket, with engines and guidance systems and fuel tanks and stuff, and then you basically use it for like 15 minutes and throw it all away. This is why SpaceX is trying so hard to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9. But what about the second stage? You’ve got a whole bunch of hardware that made it to orbit, and when getting stuff to orbit costs something like $2,500 per kilogram, you then tell it to go it burn itself up in the atmosphere, because otherwise it’s just useless space junk.

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Be the first to comment on “Synthetic Biology: We Will Grow Entire Cities Out Of Living Organisms”

Hmmmm.

Technocrat scientists believe they can ‘code’ any kind of future they want, but what about what everyone else wants? These are the overlords of Technocracy who believe that we should just ‘trust them’ to build Utopia. ⁃ TN Editor.

Imagine a future where there is no need to cut down a tree and reshape that raw material into a chair or table. Instead, we could grow our furniture by custom-engineering moss or mushrooms. Perhaps glowing bacteria will light our cities, and we’ll be able to bring back extinct species, or wipe out Lyme disease — or maybe even terraform Mars. Synthetic biology could help us accomplish all that.

That’s the message of the latest video in a new mini-documentary Web series called Explorations, focusing on potentially transformative areas of scientific research: Genomics, artificial intelligence, neurobiology, transportation, space exploration and synthetic biology. It’s a passion project of entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, founder of OS Fund and the payments processing company Braintree.

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How Starshot will get us to Alpha Centauri in 20 years

Travelling into the darkest depths of the universe could soon be as easy as flicking on a switch, or at least a switch for a giant laser system that will fire a spacecraft at 150m kmph to Alpha Centauri.

Back in April 2016, the philanthropic research group Breakthrough Initiatives announced it was putting millions of dollars into developing a spacecraft capable of reaching Alpha Centauri in the next 20 years.

This would be some claim given that, despite it being our nearest neighbouring star, it’s located more than four light years away.

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‘Great Leap Forward’: Chinese Satellite Uses Quantum Teleportation Technology

Hmmm; sure hope others catch up soon.

China has launched a satellite that it claims has teleportation-like quantum communication capabilities.

While humanity may be a long way from “beaming” humans aboard a starship, scientists have made major strides in teleporting information. In March, German physicists made major advances in “quantum teleportation,” transmitting data across physical distance without a time delay.

Robot Ball exhibition

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Beam My DNA Up to Space, Scotty! New Project Aims to ‘Immortalize’ Humanity

A new spin on DNA in space.

A new crowdfunding project could see humanity immortalized in space. Voices of Humanity, has one key goal and that is to help everyone on planet Earth to engage directly in space exploration.

The Voices of Humanity project is led by Professor Philip Lubin from Orlando University has developed the idea in the hope it will help them to develop a first generation laser-driven small spacecraft as part of NASA’s program to explore interstellar flight.

“We wanted to carry part of humanity on these spacecraft,” Professor Lubin told Sputnik.

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Space Robotics Challenge Prepares Robots for the Journey to Mars

NASA, in partnership with Space Center Houston, the Official Visitor Center of NASA Johnson Space Center, and NineSigma, a global innovation consultant organization, has opened registration for a new competition — the Space Robotics Challenge. This event seeks to develop the capabilities of humanoid robots to help astronauts on the journey to Mars.

The Space Robotics Challenge is a $1 million prize competition designed to push the boundaries of robotic dexterity. Teams must program a virtual robot, modeled after NASA’s Robonaut 5 (R5) robot, to complete a series of tasks in a simulation that includes periods of latency to represent communications delay from Earth to Mars.

Though some dexterity has been developed for Earth-based robotics systems using hydraulics, such robots cannot be used in space because of the below-freezing temperatures and the harsh environment of planetary surfaces. The R5 uses elastics technology instead of hydraulics – an innovative way of addressing the problems of operating in space. This technology could also benefit humankind on Earth, as they could operate under dangerous or extreme environments on our home planet.

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