Two separate teams of researchers have been working on ways to exploit these lava tubes.
They are found in many volcanic areas on Earth, including Lanzarote, Hawaii, Iceland, North Queensland in Australia, Sicily and the Galapagos islands.
Previous research identified the potential for the underground networks of tubes, which can stretch up to 40 miles (65 kilometres), as habitats for future space dwellers.
ARCA Space Corporation has announced its linear aerospike engine is ready to start ground tests as the company moves towards installing the engine in its Demonstrator 3 rocket. Designed to power the world’s first operational Single-Stage-To-Orbit (SSTO) satellite launcher, the engine took only 60 days to complete from when fabrication began.
Over the past 60 years, space launches have become pretty routine. The first stage ignites, the rocket lifts slowly and majestically from the launch pad before picking up speed and vanishing into the blue. Minutes later, the first stage shuts down and separates from the upper stages, which ignite and burn in turn until the payload is delivered into orbit.
This approach was adopted not only because it provides enough fuel to lift the payload while conserving weight, but also because the first-stage engines, which work best at sea level, are very inefficient at higher altitudes or in space, so different engines need to be employed for each stage of flight.
The Global Space Organization plans to utilize lunar regolith as a construction material when we build our GSO Lunar Station One, but lunar regolith also contains many elements that can be utilized to sustain life and human habitation on the lunar surface.
Averages of these elements found:
• Oxygen % 60.9
• Silicon % 16.4
• Aluminum % 9.4
• Calcium % 5.8
• Magnesium % 4.2
• Iron % 2.3
• Sodium % 0.4
• Titanium % 0.3
There are many traces elements found as well that could be used to refine plastics, produce sugars, vitamins and harness gasses such as neon and helium.
California-based SSL, formerly known as Space Systems Loral, says it’ll receive continued funding from NASA for an on-orbit satellite assembly program known as Dragonfly. SSL and its partners, including Bothell, Wash.-based Tethers Unlimited, recently completed a successful ground demonstration of the Dragonfly system, which is designed to assemble pieces of space hardware in orbit robotically. The next step is to move forward with a detailed design for a semi-autonomous assembly system that could be sent into space sometime in the 2020s. Check out this 11-second video clip about the Dragonfly’s ground test:
The sun fired off yet another powerful solar flare yesterday (Sept. 10), its seventh in seven days.
The flare, which peaked at 12:06 EDT (1606 GMT), covered North and South America in high-energy light. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) released a statement that warned of strong, high-frequency radio blackouts and navigation-system disruption, potentially lasting up to an hour.
Like the six other flares observed since Sept. 4, this one came from a sunspot known as Active Region (AR) 2673, which is currently turning away from Earth and will soon be out of sight.
On Thursday, 31 August, 2017, a prototype telescope proposed for the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the SST-1M, recorded its first events while undergoing testing at the Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ-PAN) in Krakow, Poland. The SST-1M is proposed as one of CTA’s Small-Sized Telescopes (SSTs), which will cover the high end of CTA’s energy range, between about 1 and 300 TeV (tera-electronvolts).
A crew in Krakow worked for two days to install the camera on the telescope and spent another two days monitoring it to ensure it could be safely switched on in the high humidity conditions. Watch the camera installation in the video below.