Lifeboat Foundation

Previously, scientists from Brown detected trace amounts of water in similar volcanic samples — which are composed of loose material or “glass beads” — brought back to Earth from the Apollo 15 and 17 missions. However, the Apollo samples were not collected from the large pyroclastic deposits mapped using the satellite data in the recent study. This brought into question whether the Apollo samples represent a large portion of the moon’s “wet” interior or if they represent only a small water-rich region within an otherwise “dry” mantle.

Related: Moon Express Reveals Bold New Plan to Explore Solar System

“Our work shows that nearly all of the large pyroclastic deposits also contain water, so this seems to be a common characteristic of magmas that come from the deep lunar interior,” Milliken said. “That is, most of the mantle of the moon may be ‘wet.’”.

Continue reading “Moon’s interior may hold way more water than we thought” »

Designer antibodies, volcano mining, and biomimetic materials. The future is wild.

Sending humans to Mars involves deep space missions that could last months, but shipping material there is costly; the price of transporting 1kg on Earth increases by a factor of 100 on a Martian mission. If the ultimate goal is to establish a long-term base on Mars, we’ll need make use of materials found on humanity’s greatest ever voyage.

Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.” Carl Sagan.

Mars colonization — Wanderers and Gosh by Erik Wernquist.

https://magpieaesthetic.com/erik-wernquist-beautiful-vision-of-whats-beyond/

Continue reading “‘For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled” »

Researchers at UC San Diego have developed a temperature sensor that runs on tiny amounts of power — just 113 picowatts, around 10 billion times less power than a watt. The sensor was described in a study recently published in Scientific Reports. “We’re building systems that have such low power requirements that they could potentially run for years on just a tiny battery,” Hui Wang, an author of the study, said in a statement.

The team created the device by reducing power in two areas. The first was the current source. To do that, they made use of a phenomenon that many researchers in their field are actually trying to get rid of. Transistors often have a gate with which they can stop the flow of electrons in a circuit, but transistors keep getting tinier and tinier. The smaller they get, the thinner the gate material becomes and electrons start to leak through it — a problem called “gate leakage.” Here, the leaked electrons are what’s powering the sensor. “Many researchers are trying to get rid of leakage current, but we are exploiting it to build an ultra-low power current source,” said Hui.

The researchers also reduced power in the way the sensor converts temperature to a digital readout. The result is a temperature sensor that uses 628 times less power than the current state-of-the-art sensors.

Continue reading “Researchers create temperature sensor that runs on almost no power” »

We are a new aerospace start-up company that aims to open up the possibilities and potential of an off-Earth commercial market. We aim to develop ground breaking technologies that will enable the extraction, processing and use of materials derived from the many millions of asteroids known to exist near Earth and further afield.

This 3D-printed chair was made from biodegradable plastic.

Fusion-powered rockets that are only the size of a few refrigerators could one day help propel spacecraft at high speeds to nearby planets or even other stars, a NASA-funded spaceflight company says.

Another use for such fusion rockets is to deflect asteroids that might strike Earth and to build manned bases on the moon and Mars, the researchers say.

Rockets fly by hurling materials known as propellants away from them. Conventional rockets that rely on chemical reactions are not very efficient when it comes to how much thrust they generate, given the amount of propellant they carry, which has led rocket scientists to explore a variety of alternatives over the years. [Superfast Spacecraft Propulsion Concepts (Images)].

Continue reading “Will Mini Fusion Rockets Provide Spaceflight’s Next Big Leap?” »

As computer parts grow tinier — billions of transistors are now packed onto silicon chips the size of a fingernail — silicon’s performance shrinks too, and the material can overheat.