Lifeboat Foundation

Long-term human colonization of Mars is feasible, as long as Red Planet pioneers “live off the land,” a recent NASA report concludes.

“There are massive resources on Mars obtainable from the atmosphere and extracted from the regolith which are capable of supporting human colonization,” write the authors of the report, which is called “Frontier In-Situ Resource Utilization for Enabling Sustained Human Presence on Mars.”

Using Martian resources, existing technologies could supply water, oxygen, fuel and building materials, the report adds, “to relax the dependence on Earth during the buildup of a colony on Mars.” [Red Planet or Bust: 5 Crewed Mars Mission Ideas].

Other NASA officials have said they have plans to speak with Congressional staffers about ARM and assuage concerns the agency is wasting valuable time and resources on something impractical.

A successful ARM mission would be the craziest thing NASA has ever done, but would also hit on pretty much every big agency objective. ARM would basically kill a dozen space birds with one space rock.

Photos via Screenshot from NASA webcast., NASA.

Continue reading “NASA’s Weird Asteroid Redirect Mission Is Actually Making Progress” »

Nice.

Who’s calling the shots now? After nearly four years on the job, NASA’s Curiosity rover is finally making certain scientific decisions on its own. The Martian explorer now picks some of the rock targets to blast with the laser on its ChemCam instrument.

A software upgrade known as AEGIS allows the rover to make key decisions when Mars is out of sync with Curiosity’s handlers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, delivering more data in less time. It’s the first time a robot has been able to choose such science targets autonomously on any planetary mission.

Continue reading “AI: NASA’s Curiosity rover can now choose its own laser targets on Mars” »

Want to build stuff for Space; well you may need to move from earth to a spacelab. I can see the job ads “want to see and experience other planetary worlds; live for adventure, see space; sleep near Mars, etc.”

Any robust future in space will almost certainly require a way to build there — and that future might not be as far out as you think!

The idea of a space elevator to lift us into orbit is one of the oldest concepts in sci-fi, but thanks to the efforts of scientists in Japan, we might soon be seeing this fantastic feat of engineering become a reality at last.

A mini satellite called STARS-C (Space Tethered Autonomous Robotic Satellite-Cube) is heading to the International Space Station in the coming months and is a prototype design that could form the basis of a future space elevator.

Once STARS-C has been delivered – on some to-be-determined date after the Northern Hemisphere’s summer – its makers at Shizuoka University will put it to the test: the orbiter will split into two 10-cm (3.94-inch) cubes and spool out a thin 100-metre tether made of Kevlar between them.

Continue reading “Japan is about to test out plans for a real-life space elevator” »

X literally marks the spot in the center of the Milky Way, a phenomenon that offers clues about the galaxy’s formation.

Bryan Nelson

“Computational design tool transforms flat materials into 3D shapes” — I could use this many times over.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL) have developed a new computational design tool can turn a flat sheet of plastic or metal into complex 3D shapes. They say the tool enables designers to fully and creatively exploit an unusual quality of certain materials — the ability to expand uniformly in two dimensions.

In this case, the researchers were making hexagonal cuts into flexible, but not normally stretchable plastic and metal sheets to give them the ability to expand uniformly, up to a point. But the design tool could be useful for a variety of synthetic materials, known as auxetic materials that share this same distinctive quality.

Continue reading “Computational design tool transforms flat materials into 3D shapes” »

“Virgin Spaceship Unity, set to begin test flights next month, includes a very special nod to the theoretical physicist.”

Read more

“The UK Space Agency is investing £4.12m in a National Propulsion Test Facility, giving the UK a new facility for space technology testing.”

Read more