Category: space travel – Page 151
Upward Bound: Mass Drivers
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Elon Musk has already shaped our world in several different ways, and the debate of whether they’re all beneficial to humanity is ongoing. But apart from putting electric vehicles on top of the automotive world’s agenda and making us dream about outer space travel, there is one somewhat unintentiona…
Almost 75 years ago, U.S. Air Force pilot Chuck Yeager became the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound. Engineers have been pushing the boundaries of ultrafast flight ever since, attaining speeds most of us can only imagine.
Today, military fighter jets like the F-15 routinely surpass Mach 2, which is shorthand for twice the speed of sound. That’s supersonic level. On a hypersonic flight—Mach 5 and beyond—an aircraft travels faster than 3,000 miles per hour. At that rate, you could make it from New York to Los Angeles on a lunch break.
The same propulsion technology that goes into rockets has made hypersonic speeds possible since the 1950s. But to make hypersonic flight more common and far less expensive than a rocket launch, engineers and scientists are working on advanced jet engine designs. These new concepts represent an enormous opportunity for commercial flight, space exploration and national defense: Hypersonic aircraft could serve as reusable launch vehicles for spacecraft, for example.
We all know that Elon Musk is a genius when it comes to technology. He’s the mastermind behind Tesla, SpaceX, and now he’s working on developing futuristic smart cities.
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have agreed to “significant and advantageous changes” to a major part of the conceptual design for its Perseverance mission, NASA associate administrator Thomas Zurburchen states in the recent announcement.
This car-sized rover is the newest member of NASA’s robotic Mars fleet, and reached the Red Planet in February 2021 through an unprecedented landing. Arguably one of its most important responsibilities is the Mars Sample Return campaign. Perseverance’s six wheels leave grooves on the planet’s regolith as it works towards that goal, traversing Mars’ Jezero Crater to gather the telltale sedimentary proof that water — and possibly life — once existed there.
In October, the space agencies will dive into the details of their redesign: rather than having Perseverance leave caches of its pebble collection on Mars’ surface for another yet-to-be-built land-based spacecraft to pick up, the existing Mars rover will be the one to carry the precious parcels to their launch site. In addition, Perseverance’s high-flying robotic companion, the Ingenuity helicopter, has inspired the design of two future rotorcraft that would swerve over the Martian terrain to pick up other samples. This duo would be part of an existing concept, NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander.
Travel to Space
Posted in space travel
NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) prototype recently endured the most realistic tests to-date of its ability to drive through the most difficult terrain during its mission to the Moon’s South Pole.
Quantum computers, devices that exploit quantum phenomena to perform computations, could eventually help tackle complex computational problems faster and more efficiently than classical computers. These devices are commonly based on basic units of information known as quantum bits, or qubits.
New York (AP) — Buzz Aldrin’s jacket worn on his historic first mission to the moon’s surface in 1969 has been auctioned off to a bidder for nearly $2.8 million.
The $2,772,500 paid for the Apollo 11 Inflight Coverall Jacket is the highest for any American space-flown artifact sold at auction, according to Sotheby’s, which handled the sale. The unidentified winning bidder, who participated by phone, outlasted several others in a bidding that spanned almost 10 minutes.