Young K. Bae demonstrated pure photonic propulsion by bouncing 10 Watt lasers between mirrors a few thousand times and generate 35 micronewtons of force. Details on the photonic laser thruster demonstration. Photonic Laser Thruster (PLT) is an innovative photon thruster that amplifies photon thrust by orders of magnitude by exploiting an active resonant optical cavity …
BlackLight Power (BLP) Inc. signed its sixth commercial license agreement and first with Akridge Energy, LLC. UPDATE: Further Rowan University confirmation has been published Akridge Energy may use the technology to produce electric power up to a maximum continuous capacity of 400 megawatts (MW). To date, BLP has licensed the rights to produce approximately 8,000 …
Bob Maddox and one of four rocketsBob Maddox wants to strap himself to a homemade four-engine pulse jet rocket, ride it to around 25,000 feet and then jump off. [via Wired.com and the Medford Mail. Oregon live has a feature on Bob Maddox. Bob’s Contact as per Oregon Live and probably to Donate: 541-779-3800, rrocketmann …
New Scientist reports that the NASA panel appears strongly in favor of orbital fuel depots to lower the cost of space exploration. This site has covered fuel depots before and also is strongly if favor of using orbital fuel depots. Fuel depots would allow NASA to mount moon missions without spending billions of dollars developing …
Power pistons: General Fusion’s reactor is a metal sphere with 220 pneumatic pistons designed to ram its surface simultaneously. The ramming creates an acoustic wave that travels through a lead-lithium liquid and eventually accelerates toward the center into a shock wave. The shock wave compresses a plasma target, called a spheromak, to trigger a fusion …
The figure below shows the architecture of the new VectorWise engine. Theleft part shows the system architecture (“X100” execution engine andColumnBM buffer manager) and how it maps on the computer resources(CPU cache, RAM and disk). The right part shows a query in action, havingbeen decomposed into so-called relational operators (Aggregate, Project,Select and Scan) and execution …
Shown in the image are depictions of (top) a conventionally calcined c-oriented silicalite-1 zeolite membrane and (bottom) an identically oriented membrane that has undergone rapid thermal processing (RTP). Red and green regions in the 3D schematics are indicative of zeolite crystal grains and defects/grain boundaries, respectively. A scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of the membrane …
At a Brazil-based lab, a hypersonic shock tunnel is linked to two pulsed infrared lasers with peak powers reaching the gigawatt range – the highest power laser propulsion experiments performed to date. Leik Myrabo is an aerospace engineering professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who has demonstrated the feasibility of using ground-based lasers to propel objects …
Hydrophilic (water soluble) carbon clusters are being designed by Rice researchers to sense the presence of oil that remains in old wells. The HCCs are sheets of carbon one atom thick and 60 nanometers long, with embedded molecules that will detect oil, sulfur and water and store information about how much of each they encounter …
The Space Elevator Games for 2009 were delayed but there are competitors no site and final preparations are occuring. UPDATE: The space elevator games are delayed at least 4 weeks. See the Space Elevator blog to track events. Power beaming CompetitionAugust 5, 2009 Sept or October 2009NASA Dryden Flight Research Center,Edwards Air Force Base, Mojave, …
Courtesy / Sheng Shen A diagram of the setup, including a cantilever from an atomic force microscope, used to measure the heat transfer between objects separated by nanoscale distances A well-established physical law, Planck’s law, describes the transfer of heat between two objects, but some physicists have long predicted that the law should break down …