U.S. Navy’s future unmanned tanker will use the Joint Precision Approach and Landing System developed for F35 and other jet landings on US aircraft carriers. The Navy will use the Joint Precision Approach and Landing System, or JPALS for short, to land the MQ-25 unmanned aircraft onto carriers without a human at the controls. Known …
OneWeb Satellites, a 50-50 joint venture between would-be constellation operator OneWeb and satellite manufacturer Airbus, has inaugurated the first serial-production line for its planned 900 communications satellites for OneWeb’s low Earth orbit constellation. “This facility is a pivotal step toward our mission to build a new global knowledge infrastructure, accessible to everyone,” said OneWeb founder …
For the first time ever, astronomers at The University of New Mexico say they’ve been able to observe and measure the orbital motion between two supermassive black holes hundreds of millions of light years from Earth – a discovery more than a decade in the making. UNM Department of Physics & Astronomy graduate student Karishma …
Spacex had two successful launches this past weekend and successfully recovered the first stages of each launch. New titanium grid fins worked even better than expected. Should be capable of an indefinite number of flights with no service. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 25, 2017 Launch at 1:25 delivering 10 satellites for Iridium. Droneship repositioned …
Stable flight of a laser sail is an essential requirement of beam-driven propulsion. Centauri Dreams talked to James Benford about work towards stable beam flight. It places considerable demand upon the shape of the sail and beam. James Benford takes a hard look at where we are now in the matter of sail stability. He …
Adam Crowl considers spaceships if EM-Drive is verified as a real thing. If the NASA emdrive performance of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt. 8.3 TeraWatts of power would be needed to provide 10 million newtons of thrust to accelerate a 1000 ton space-craft at 1 gee of acceleration. We have no power source that could generate …
A high energy laser mounted on an Apache AH-64 attack helicopter acquired and hit an unmanned target. The test was conducted by Raytheon and the U.S. Army Apache Program Management Office in collaboration with U.S. Special Operations Command at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. It was the first time a fully integrated laser system …
Caltech engineers have developed a new camera design that replaces the lenses with an ultra-thin optical phased array (OPA). The OPA does computationally what lenses do using large pieces of glass: it manipulates incoming light to capture an image. Lenses have a curve that bends the path of incoming light and focuses it onto a …
At the Symposium on Computational Geometry in July, Erik Demaine and Tomohiro Tachi of the University of Tokyo will announce the completion of a quest that began with a 1999 paper: a universal algorithm for folding origami shapes that guarantees a minimum number of seams. “In 1999, we proved that you could fold any polyhedron, …
Nearly 3,500 exoplanets have been confirmed so far. In a new Caltech-led study, researchers have classified these planets in much the same way that biologists identify new animal species and have learned that the majority of exoplanets found to date fall into two distinct size groups: rocky Earth-like planets and larger mini-Neptunes. The team used …
As noted in a Nextbigfuture article in April, the Earth is an unusually dry for a habitable planet. David Brin points out that this is the safest and best “soft landing” to the Fermi Paradox. That the universe is filled with life-rich water worlds, but our Earth, skating the inner edge of the Sun’s CHZ …