Dr. John Callas, NASA/JPL provides an update on NASA Exoplanet work. This was at the 21st Annual International Mars Society Convention, held at the Pasadena Convention Center in Southern California from Aug 23-26, 2018. There is work on improving internal occulters and then external starshades to block light from stars so that exoplanets can be …
Dr. Jeff Volosin, NASA Goddard describes the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). The first month of orbiting space telescope data has just been dumped. 1500 transit events have been detected. 115 gigabytes of data was downloaded. The expectations is that there will be 100-200 confirmed exoplanets in this first batch of data. They are also …
Planets that are twice as far away as Earth appear 16 times dimmer since the intensity of sunlight weakens by a factor of four going out and by another four times coming back. If Planet 9 is at an orbital distance of 600 astronomical units (AU) then it would be 160,000 dimmer than Neptune, which …
Craig Davidson gave a talk in 2017 about Improving the SpaceX Mars Colonization Plans. Make a moon and Mars capable bulldozer. Replace steel with titanium-aluminum alloy. Use electric battery technology and solar panels. Astrobotic developed Polaris as an excavation vehicle that could serve as a robotic precursor to future human planetary colonization efforts by preparing …
Nuclear bomb powered spaceships are technically feasible and could be built. The mass of the spaceships would have been like the submarines, destroyers and aircraft carriers of today. 200-1000 ton spaceships would have been the small versions and 1,500 to 100,000-ton military nuclear ships would have been possible. Propulsion would have used shaped nuclear explosions. …
The second SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch will be in December, 2018 or January 2019. The next Falcon Heavy will be using the upgraded Block 5 boosters. There are 8 to 10 launches remaining on SpaceX’s 2018 manifest and there will need to be extensive reuse of Block 5 boosters to prevent or mitigate delays. Brian …
Here are three papers about going hundreds to millions of times beyond radiative heat transfer beyond the blackbody limit. Nanoletters – Giant Enhancement in Radiative Heat Transfer in Sub-30 nm Gaps of Plane Parallel Surfaces Radiative heat transfer rates that exceed the blackbody limit by several orders of magnitude are expected when the gap size …
The Koenigsegg Agera RS currently is one of the fastest cars in the world after it reached speeds of 278 mph. The Koenigsegg One:1, named for its equal power-to-weight ratio, also packs 1,341 horsepower, or the equivalent of one megawatt of power. The new Tesla Roadster will be able to accelerate from 0-60mph in 1.9 …
The Delaware Aqueduct is the longest tunnel that is currently in use. It was completed in 1945 and is 85 miles (135 kilometers) long. Metro rail and rail tunnels in Asia and Europe have reached 37.5 miles long. The Channel tunnels is 31.3 miles long and has the longest underwater section. China is already building …
Carbon nanotube bundles are becoming a feasible and economically convenient solution for the realization in our time of super bridges, such as those required across the Straits of Bab al Mandab, Messina or Gibraltar (main spans ∼2.7, 3.3 or 3.5 km, respectively). The Straits of Bab al Mandab bridge would be intercontinental bridges between the …
Shizuoka University and contractor Obayashi aim to launch two small (10 sq cm) satellites connected by a 10-meter steel cable from the International Space Station. This small cube sat space tether step is a tiny step towards a larger vision of a space elevator. However, is mostly unrelated. It is in space but the tether …