Blobs left behind from a collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized object may have led to plate tectonics and eventually earthquakes.
Category: space – Page 120
SpaceX’s Starship is coming to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida – and its plan to use the launch facility means the Federal Aviation Administration will probe the potential environmental impact of Elon Musk’s most powerful rockets blasting off the US East Coast.
NASA’s Environmental Assessment (EA) for the whole affair was completed in September 2019. The potential environmental impact of constructing and operating the site for Starship Super Heavy vehicles was considered, and a Finding Of No Significant Impact (FONSI) was made.
However, that was for approximately 24 Starship Super Heavy launches per year. According to the FAA, SpaceX’s latest proposal would involve constructing the necessary infrastructure to support up to 44 launches per year.
Related: Warp drive and ‘Star Trek’: The physics of future space travel
Alcubierre published his idea in Classical and Quantum Gravity. Now, a new paper in the same journal suggests that a warp drive may not require exotic negative energy after all.
“This study changes the conversation about warp drives,” lead author Jared Fuchs, of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and the research think tank Applied Physics, said in a statement. “By demonstrating a first-of-its-kind model, we’ve shown that warp drives might not be relegated to science fiction.”
NASA wants a cheaper Mars Sample Return—Boeing proposes most expensive rocketNASA is looking for a more cost-effective way to conduct a Mars Sample Return mission, and Boeing has proposed a new concept that involves only one launch. This could potentially reduce the complexity and cost of the mission. However, Boeing’s proposed rocket is also the most expensive option, so it remains to be seen if this concept will be chosen by NASA.
Curiosity continues to make progress along the margin of upper Gediz Vallis ridge, investigating the broken bedrock in our workspace and acquiring images of the ridge deposit as the rover drives south.
Today’s 2-sol plan focused on a DRT, contact science, and drive on the first sol, followed by untargeted remote sensing on the second sol. The team had to make some decisions at the start of planning about whether to drive on the first or second sol of this plan, and how that would affect the upcoming weekend activities.
As it turned out, the team was able to fit all of the desired contact science and remote sensing activities on the first sol, in addition to the drive on the first sol, which means we’ll be able to downlink more information about our end-of-drive location to better inform planning for the weekend. Weekend plans provide opportunities for a lot of great contact science, so it will be really helpful to have that additional data down for planning.
The council will delve into the ongoing tug-of-war between military and intelligence agency leaders.
On Truth and Reality — Uniting Metaphysics, Philosophy, Physics and Theology (Science and Art) from One Thing, Absolute Space and the Spherical Standing Wave Structure of Matter. From Matter as ‘Particles’ generating ‘Fields’ in ‘Space-Time’, to Matter as Spherical Standing Waves in Space. The Wave-Center Causes ‘Particle Effect’, Wave Motion of Space Causes ‘Time’, Wave Interactions cause ‘Forces / Fields’
An international research team at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University has successfully created five new isotopes, bringing the stars closer to Earth.
The isotopes — known as thulium-182, thulium-183, ytterbium-186, ytterbium-187, and lutetium-190 — were reported Feb. 15 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
These represent the first batch of new isotopes made at FRIB, a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, supporting the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. The new isotopes show that FRIB is nearing the creation of nuclear specimens that currently only exist when ultradense celestial bodies known as neutron stars crash into each other.
The evidence that the Universe is expanding is overwhelming. But how? By stretching the existing space, or by creating new space itself?