Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at Caltech have designed a way to levitate and propel objects using only light, by creating specific nanoscale patterning on the objects’ surfaces.

Though still theoretical, the work is a step toward developing a spacecraft that could reach the nearest planet outside of our solar system in 20 years, powered and accelerated only by light.

A paper describing the research appears online in the March 18 issue of the journal Nature Photonics. The research was done in the laboratory of Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science.

A new report by Swiss investment bank UBS predicts that soon high speed travel through the near reaches of space will come to compete with long-haul airline flights.

UBS analysts estimate that space tourism alone will become a $3 billion market by 2030, while the space industry as a whole will double in worth from $400 billion today to $805 billion over the same period. And once we can spend a week of vacation in space, they ask, why not use the technology for Earth-bound long-distance travel?

“Space tourism could be the stepping stone for the development of long-haul travel on earth serviced by space,” wrote UBS analysts Jarrod Castle and Myles Walton in the report, as quoted by CNBC.

Scientists with the New Horizons mission gathered together in Texas yesterday to discuss the latest findings about MU69. This distant Kuiper Belt object—which bears a striking resemblance to a flattened snowman—is turning out to be even weirder than we imagined.

After NASA’s New Horizons zipped past Pluto on July 14, 2015, mission planners sent the spacecraft on a trajectory towards 2014 MU69, a distant trans-Neptunian object (TNO). Aside from its location in the Kuiper Belt and a distinctly reddish hue, virtually nothing was known about the object, which was first spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope just five years ago.

Space Solar Power Initiative (SSPI) is a multi-year research in the field of Space Solar Power Initiative conducted by Caltech team in collaboration with Northrop Grumman (NG) Aerospace and Mission Systems division.

SSPI approach: • Enabling technologies developed at Caltech • Ultra-light deployable space structures • High efficiency ultra-light photovoltaic (PV) • Phased Array and Power Transmission • Integration of concentrating PV, radiators, MW power conversion and antennas in single cell unit • Localized electronics and control for system robustness, electronic beam steering • Identical spacecraft flying in formation • Target is specific power over 2000 Watts per kilogram. This would cost competitive with ground-based power.

Continue reading “Latest Space Based Solar Power Concepts and Experiments at Caltech” »

One step closer to Mars.

Following SpaceX’s successful debut launch, rendezvous, and recovery of Crew Dragon, NASA has published official photos documenting the scorched spacecraft’s Atlantic Ocean splashdown, GO Searcher’s recovery, and the duo’s return to Port Canaveral shortly thereafter.

Aside from offering a number of spectacularly detailed views of Crew Dragon after its inaugural orbital reentry, NASA’s photos also provide an exceptionally rare glimpse of the spacecraft’s PICA-X v3 heat shield, revealing a tiled layout that is quite a bit different from Cargo Dragon’s own shield. A step further, CEO Elon Musk offered updates on March 17th about progress being made towards a new, metallic heat shield technology meant to make ablative shields like those on Dragon outdated, serving as a striking bit of contrast to SpaceX’s newest spacecraft, potentially just a dozen or two months away from already becoming anachronistic.

They could start this week!

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study is published in Scientific Reports.

“This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time from the past to the future,” said the study’s lead author Gordey Lesovik, who heads the Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information Technology at MIPT.

“We began by describing a so-called local perpetual motion machine of the second kind. Then, in December, we published a paper that discusses the violation of the second law via a device called a Maxwell’s demon,” Lesovik said. “The most recent paper approaches the same problem from a third angle: We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time.”

There are certainly a whole host of technological hurdles to overcome before humans successfully travel to Mars, or beyond, but research is also pointing to a growing assortment of fundamental health challenges that astronauts may face from long stretches of time in space. A recent NASA-funded study has found dormant viruses can reactivate in the human body during spaceflight, presenting yet another physiological problem for scientists to solve before we journey out into deep space.