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Category: space – Page 824

New technique could streamline design of intricate fusion device

Stellarators, twisty machines that house fusion reactions, rely on complex magnetic coils that are challenging to design and build. Now, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has developed a mathematical technique to help simplify the design of the coils, making stellarators a potentially more cost-effective facility for producing fusion energy.

“Our main result is that we came up with a new method of identifying the irregular magnetic fields produced by coils,” said physicist Caoxiang Zhu, lead author of a paper reporting the results in Nuclear Fusion. “This technique can let you know in advance which coil shapes and placements could harm the plasma’s magnetic confinement, promising a shorter construction time and reduced costs.”

Fusion, the power that drives the sun and stars, is the fusing of light elements in the form of plasma—the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei—that generates massive amounts of energy. Twisty, cruller-shaped stellarators are an alternative to doughnut-shaped tokamaks that are more commonly used by scientists seeking to replicate on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.

Elon Musk back to promoting bombing Mars with nuclear weapons

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk not only wants to explore Mars, he wants to ‘nuke’ it.

In a tweet this week, Musk reiterated calls to ‘Nuke Mars!’ adding that t-shirts are ‘coming soon.’

Jarring though the idea may be, the tweet is a re-hash of an idea championed by Musk in the past that proposes using a nuclear weapon to terraform the red planet for human habitation.

Electronic Alchemy develops multi-material electronics 3D printer for NASA

3D printer manufacturer Electronic Alchemy has developed a system capable of additive manufacturing fully functional electronics. Named eForge, NASA intends to use the system during planetary space missions to 3D print chemical sensors on demand. Following the launch of eForge, the company is also now designing a device to recycle 3D printed electronics, further reducing NASA’s need for resupply missions.

All the States of Matter You Didn’t Know Existed

Before scientists discovered the new state of matter last week, we were basically all used to just three states of matter. After all, during our daily lives we encounter some variety of solids, liquids and gases. Solids hold a definite shape without a container, liquids conform to the shape of their container, and gases not only conform to a container, but also expand to fill it.

And there’s variety amidst these three: A crystalline solid, for example, has all its atoms lined up in exactly the precise order in perfect symmetry, while a quasicrystal solid fills all its space without the tightly regulated structure. Liquid crystals, which make up the visual components of most electronic displays, have elements of both liquids and crystal structures, as anyone who has ever pushed the screen of their calculator can confirm.

Under standard conditions on Earth, solids, liquids and gasses are the vast majority of what a person will experience in life. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a whole lot more beneath the surface.

Terraforming Mars in 50 Years with Large Orbital Mirrors, Bacteria and Factories

The McKay-Zubrin plan for terraforming Mars in 50 years was cited by Elon Musk.

Orbital mirrors with 100 km radius are required to vaporize the CO2 in the south polar cap. If manufactured of solar sail-like material, such mirrors would have a mass on the order of 200,000 tonnes. If manufactured in space out of asteroidal or Martian moon material, about 120 MWe-years of energy would be needed to produce the required aluminum.

The use of orbiting mirrors is another way for hydrosphere activation. For example, if the 125 km radius reflector discussed earlier for use in vaporizing the pole were to concentrate its power on a smaller region, 27 TW would be available to melt lakes or volatilize nitrate beds. This is triple the power available from the impact of a 10 billion tonne asteroid per year, and in all probability would be far more controllable. A single such mirror could drive vast amounts of water out of the permafrost and into the nascent Martian ecosystem very quickly. Thus while the engineering of such mirrors may be somewhat grandiose, the benefits to terraforming of being able to wield tens of TW of power in a controllable way would be huge.

NASA Robots to Compete in Underground Challenge in Mining Tunnels

Robots are about to go underground — for a competition anyways.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense dedicated to developing new emerging technologies, is holding a challenge intended to develop technology for first responders and the military to map, navigate, and search underground. But the technology developed for the competition could also be used in future NASA missions to caves and lava tubes on other planets.

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Systems Competition will be held August 15 – 22 in mining tunnels under Pittsburgh, and among the robots competing will be an entry from a team led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that features wheeled rovers, drones, and climbing robots that can rise on pinball-flipper-shaped treads to scale obstacles.

NASA will pay you $1M to design a robot to work on the moon

NASA and the Space Center Houston are seeking designs for autonomous robots that can explore the surface of the moon—and the leading one will win up to $1 million to continue research and discovery.

On Monday, the organizations announced Phase 2 of the NASA Space Robotics Challenge, focused on virtually designing autonomous robotic operations that allow the US to expand its ability to explore space and maintain its technological leadership.

SEE: Artificial intelligence: A business leader’s guide (free PDF) (TechRepublic)