The country’s space agency aims to overtake NASA with its ongoing Chang’e lunar program and future crewed missions to Mars.
China announced its plans to launch three new uncrewed missions to the Moon after the discovery of a new lunar mineral that could be harvested as an energy source in the future, a report from Bloomberg.
China’s National Space Administration announced on Saturday, September 10, that it was given the green light to start planning the launch of three new orbiters to the Moon over the next decade. The new missions will form a part of the country’s ongoing Chang’e lunar program.
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Astronauts on the space station may seem distant, but they’re only 248 miles from Earth: a little more than the drive from New York City to Washington DC. Everything they need can be delivered in relatively short order. Astronauts visiting Mars won’t have such easy access. The red planet’s average distance from Earth is 140 million miles.
We can plan supply missions, but taking everything along for the ride would be expensive and impractical. Like Mark Watney in TheMartian, explorers will have to live off the land too.
There’ve been plenty of proposals for how astronauts might produce the essentials, but until recently no technology had been field tested. Now, thanks to a machine called MOXIE, built by MIT and stowed away on NASA’s Perseverance rover, we can definitively say humans will be able to make oxygen on Mars.
In theory, most materials are capable of becoming metallic if put under enough pressure. Atoms or molecules can be squeezed together so tightly that they begin to share their outer electrons, which can then travel and conduct electricity as they do in a chunk of copper or iron. Geophysicists think that the centres of massive planets such as Neptune or Uranus host water in such a metallic state, and that high-pressure metallic hydrogen can even become a superconductor, able to conduct electricity without any resistance.
Turning water into a metal in this way would require an expected 15 million atmospheres of pressure, which is out of reach for current lab techniques, says Jungwirth. But he suspected that water could become conductive in an alternative way: by borrowing electrons from alkali metals. These reactive elements in group 1 of the periodic table, which includes sodium and potassium, tend to donate their outermost electron. Last year, Jungwirth and his colleague Phil Mason — a chemist who is also known for making science videos on YouTube — led a team that demonstrated a similar effect in ammonia2. The fact that ammonia can turn shiny in such conditions was known to the British chemist Humphry Davy in the early nineteenth century, Edwards points out.
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