The Swarm-Probe Enabling ATEG Reactor, or SPEAR, is a nuclear electric propulsion spacecraft that uses a new, lightweight reactor moderator and advanced thermoelectric generators (ATEGs) to greatly reduce overall core mass. This will subsequently require a reduction in operating temperatures and reduce the total power levels achievable by the core. However, the reduced mass will …
NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts symposium has a presentation of the 1000 meter Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT). It would cover ultra-long-wavelength radio waves that have not been studied before because of noise on earth. It would be the largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the solar system at 1km in diameter. Arecibo is 300 meters …
Freefall Aerospace is a NASA NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts) success story. The inflatable antenna system enables big data from cubesats and small low-cost spacecraft. The 3-dimensional phased array antenna technology can provide high data rate communication at virtually any frequency at a fraction of the size and cost of any existing solution. They have …
The Giant Magellan Telescope has gotten $17.5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to accelerate the prototyping and testing of some of the most powerful optical and infrared technologies ever engineered. The Giant Magellan Telescope will be three times the size of any ground-based optical telescope built to date. The GMT and the Thirty …
Phosphine Gas is in the atmosphere of Venus at 20 parts per billion and no non-biological path to explain the Phosphine. There are no currently known abiotic production routes in Venus’s atmosphere, clouds, surface and subsurface, or from lightning, volcanic or meteoritic delivery. It is either unknown photochemistry or geochemistry or there is some kind …
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope or WFIRST) is a NASA infrared space observatory that will launch in 2025. The funding for this and all NASA projects is precarious. NASA’s ability to execute on large, multi-year science project has also been less than reliable. Roman uses an existing 2.4-meter wide …
95 brown dwarfs stars have been found and most are within a few dozen light-years of the Sun. Above – n this artist’s rendering, the small white orb represents the white dwarf (a remnant of a long-dead Sun-like star), while the purple foreground object is the newly discovered brown dwarf companion, confirmed by NASA’s Spitzer …
Aguas Zarcas is a meteorite that broke up over Chile in 2019 but it is new meteorite sample that contains nucleobases that are part of RNA. A similar meteorite his fifty years ago but this is the first when humans have sequencing technology to study it. This meteorite provides a window into the origins of …
A new method of computer simulation sheds light on the present structure and past evolution of Ice Giant planets like Uranus and Neptune. Researchers analyzed the conduction of electricity and heat of water under extreme temperature and pressure conditions, such as those that occur inside ice-giant planets as well as in many exo-planets outside of …
Other solar system could have as many as seven Earth-like planets, when those solar systems do not have a gas giant planet like Jupiter. The team created a model system in which they simulated planets of various sizes orbiting their stars. An algorithm accounted for gravitational forces and helped test how the planets interacted with …
Using cutting-edge computational techniques, researchers from the Flatiron Institute in New York City and Cornell University have solved the first robust theoretical model of strange metals. The work reveals that strange metals are a new state of matter. Strange metals share remarkable properties with black holes, opening exciting new directions for theoretical physics. In a …