3D printers could use Moon rocks, say scientists Future Moon colonists should be able to use lunar rocks to create tools or spare parts, according to a study. 29 November 2012 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20542496
Meanwhile, on the pure research front, investigators made plenty of intriguing discoveries in 2013. With plenty to choose from, and argue over, here's a top five list of some favorites from the year:
"It is an incredible event, to send the first human object into interstellar space," study lead author Donald Gurnett, of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, told National Geographic.
NASA had long been hoping to announce that the far-flung spacecraft, launched in 1977, had passed the edges of the solar wind. Voyager 1's twin, Voyager 2, is also expected to soon reach interstellar space.
The discovery is seen as vindication of NASA's efforts to look for past habitable conditions on Mars. The $2.5 billion rover next heads for Mount Sharp, in the center of Gale Crater, its original destination after landing. (See also: "Did Life on Earth Come From Mars?")
How The Human Face Might Look In 100,000 Years .. one bit ..
In 100,000 years: The human face is proportioned to the 'golden ratio,' though it features unnervingly large eyes. There is green “eye shine” from the tapetum lucidum, and a more pronounced superciliary arch. A sideways blink of the reintroduced plica semilunaris seen in the light gray areas of the eyes, while miniature bone-conduction devices implanted above the ear work with the communications lenses on the eyes. Image credit: Nickolay Lamm http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2013/06/07/how-the-human-face-might-look-in-100000-years/
hmm, looks the end to calling a loved one 'bright eyes' is nigh .. sod forbid, everyone would have them .. maybe, 'dull eyes' by then might evolve to a complimentary meaning ]
5. Lord of the Rings looking more like a documentary.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF GEORGIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM
This skull's features resemble those of both earlier and later humans.
The human family tree suddenly sprouted some funky-looking shoots after a year of ancient DNA and fossil discoveries.
At the Dmanisi site in the Republic of Georgia, for example, researchers reported that what seemed like a lot of different-looking early human species likely were just one, Homo erectus. They based the claim on the discovery of a 1.8-million-year-old skull blessed with a mixture of more ancient and more recent characteristics. (See "Beautiful Skull Spurs Debate on Human History .. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131017-skull-human-origins-dmanisi-georgia-erectus/ .")
This artist's conception illustrates Kepler-22b, a planet known to comfortably circle in the habitable zone of a sun-like star.
Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
The first true "alien Earth" will likely be discovered in the next two years, a NASA scientist says.
Astronomers have found more than 750 alien planets to date, and NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has flagged 2,300 additional "candidates" awaiting confirmation by follow-up studies. This haul has not yet included an Earth-like exoplanet .. http://www.space.com/13991-alien-planet-discoveries-kepler-earth-twin.html — one that's the size of our planet and orbits at the right distance from its star to support liquid water and, possibly, life as we know it.
But that could change soon, according to Shawn Domagal-Goldman, a researcher at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. who specializes in exoplanet biology.
"I believe Kepler will find a 'Goldilocks planet' within the next two years," Domagal-Goldman said in a statement. "We'll be able to point at a specific star in the night sky and say 'There it is — a planet that could support life!'" [ Video: How to Find Earth's Alien Twin .. http://www.space.com/15105-find-earth-planets-mission-plans-video.html ]
Australian engineers have their eyes on inter-stellar skies, and are about to test the jet engine that may take them there.
Two ANU researchers are laying the foundations for a future bridge to the stars with the development of a ground-breaking new propulsion device dubbed the ‘Helicon Double Layer Thruster [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicon_Double_Layer_Thruster ] (HDLT)’.
The thruster uses a swirling mass of plasma stimulated by electromagnetism to provide a totally new way to get around, one which would be perfect for the conditions and extended periods of time required for space travel.
Over the last few years, the team behind the HDLT has been working with engineers from around the world to build a simulator spacecraft to test the new thrusters – and the test facility named ‘Wombat XL’ is now nearing completion.
Wombat XL resides at the Mount Stromlo Space Simulation Facility. It took six engineers two years to install at a cost of $3.8 million, but will now put Mount Stromlo on the top of the list of places to design, build and test space-bound projects.
The thrusters, about to undergo simulations in the electromagnetic vacuum of Wombat XL, run on a plasma gas.
“Imagine a bottle which is open at one end,” says Professor Christine Charles from the Research School of Physics & Engineering, of her space-bound invention.
“At one end you introduce a gas, and you have an antenna winding around the bottle. When you put power to this antenna, it ionizes the gas and creates plasma.
“It also has other [metallic coils] to create a magnetic field which accelerates the plasma out the back of the spacecraft, producing thrust.”
“It will work forever as long as you have propellant gas,” she said.
Plasma engines offer a range of benefits not found in conventional chemical rockets currently used for space travel.
They are more efficient for longer periods of time, potentially extending the range of human and robotic exploration of the stellar neighbourhood.
The HDLT is all built for speed.
“The velocity of a plasma thruster increases with time and they can also get to very high velocities,” explains Dr Charles.
“The HDLT is also really cheap. It can use all sorts of propellants and it doesn’t use much of these. We’ve tested ten types of propellants and it’s worked for all of them.
“The HDLT can also work with carbon dioxide. So with planets like Mars and Venus where you mostly have carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you could refuel as you go. This is a great advantage because at the moment all missions require that you carry the propellants from Earth.
“There are also no major issues with parts or erosion. As long as you provide the power and the propellant you can go forever. So with the right development this technology might get us very, very far… and hopefully back again.”
The following are a short description of different plasma engines and the links to where you can find out much more about them. As I am not a scientist I will not try to say that I understand everything being said in these articles, but I am will to read them and hope that they are describing the beginning of those things that we will need to propel us to our nearest planets and later further into space.
Engage! Warp Drive Could Become Reality with Quantum-Thruster Physics
.. the diagram, as in yours, shows one, yet the body mentions two rings about the 'speedy' vehicle .. maybe i missed a mention of two rings somewhere in yours, anyway, there is a video, and more ..
by Miriam Kramer, Staff Writer | August 21, 2013 05:46am ET
A ring-shaped warp drive device could transport a football-shape starship (center) to effective speeds faster than light. [Pin It] A ring-shaped warp drive device could transport a football-shape starship (center) to effective speeds faster than light. The concept was first proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre. .. Credit: Harold White
DALLAS — Warp-drive technology, a form of "faster than light" travel popularized by TV's "Star Trek," could be bolstered by the physics of quantum thrusters — another science-fiction idea made plausible by modern science.
A warp-drive-enabled spacecraft would look like a football with two large rings fully encircling it. The rings would utilize an exotic form of matter to cause space-time to contract in front of and expand behind them. Harold "Sonny" White, a NASA physicist, is experimenting with these concepts on a smaller scale using a light-measuring device in the lab. [Warp Drives and Transporters: How 'Star Trek' Tech Works (Infographic) .. http://www.space.com/21201-star-trek-technology-explained-infographic.html ]
"We're looking for a change in path length of the photon on the interferometer, because that would be potential evidence that we're generating the effect we're looking for," White told SPACE.com. "We've seen, in a couple different experiments with several different analytic techniques, a change in optical-path length. We're making one leg of the interferometer seem a little shorter because of this device being on, versus the device being off. That doesn't mean that it's what we're looking for."
While these results are intriguing, they are in no way definitive proof that warp drive could work .. http://www.space.com/21140-star-trek-warp-drive-possible.html , White said. The scaled-down experiments are just a first step toward understanding if these concepts can be taken out of the realm of theory and applied practically.
[ INSERT YOUTUBE which looks as the embedded - Star Trek's Warp Drive: Are We There Yet?
VideoFromSpace·2,226 videos Published on Jul 3, 2012
Marc Millis, former head of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, explains how physicists approach the intriguing possibility of faster-than-light travel.
Marc Millis didn't show in a search so i've included his name there .. ]
Quantum thrust through space-time
Quantum-thruster physics, another technology White is looking into at NASA, could be the key to creating the fuel needed for a warp drive.
These electric "q-thrusters" work as a submarine does underwater, except they're in the vacuum of space, White told the crowd here at Starship Congress .. http://www.space.com/22362-starship-congress-technology-webcasts.html .. on Aug. 17. The spacecraft is theoretically propelled through space by stirring up the cosmic soup, causing quantum-level perturbations. The resulting thrust is similar to that created by a submersible moving through water.
The technology produces negative vacuum energy, a key ingredient for an exotic-matter-powered warp-drive engine.
"The physics models that tell us how to construct a q-thruster are the same models we'll use to generate, design and build a negative vacuum generator," White said. "The quantum thrusters might be a propulsion manifestation of the physics, like the big ring around the spacecraft. If you looked in there, there might be 10,000 of these little cans that are the negative vacuum generators."
"We have measured a force in several test devices which is a consequence of perturbing the state of the quantum vacuum," White said. The effect has been small but significant in his experimentation. Going forward, White hopes to do more robust testing to possibly magnify those claims.
[Pin It] Star Trek's faster-than-light warp drive is an idea that even serious scientists don't want to let go of.
Do the time warp
The warp-drive ship itself would never be going faster than the speed of light, but the warped space-time around it could help the spacecraft achieve an effective speed of 10 times the speed of light .. http://www.space.com/15830-light-speed.html .. within the confines of White's concept.
When first proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994, the warp drive would have required huge, unreasonable amounts of energy, but White's work brought those numbers down. Previous studies extrapolated that the drive would need energy equal to the mass energy of Jupiter.
"In the early epoch of the universe, there was a very short period known as inflation," said Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar. "We believe that during that inflationary period, space-time itself expanded at many times the speed of light, so there are tantalizing questions when you look at nature as a teacher. Is this something that can be duplicated around the vicinity of a spacecraft?"
The Nearest Earth-Like Planet Outside Our Solar System Could Be a Water World
George Dvorsky | Gawker Media Oct 8, 2016, 12.55 AM IST
Is Proxima b like the water world featured in Interstellar?
At a distance of 4.2 light years, Proxima b is the closest potentially habitable Earth-like planet outside our solar system. New research suggests this distant orb could be completely covered in water. So when do we go?
This past August, scientists with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) confirmed the discovery of a rocky planet .. http://gizmodo.com/new-earth-like-exoplanet-could-be-discovery-of-the-cent-1785614793#_ga=1.246836996.1084941878.1475162213 .. in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri-our nearest neighboring star. Little is known about this distant planet and whether it has what it takes to foster alien life, but a new study .. https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09757 .. accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal posits the suggestion that Proxima b is covered with oceans, and possibly even a single massive ocean that envelops the entire planet.
Proxima b is a fascinating target for study, and not just because it's an Earth-like planet in the star system nearest to our sun. The planet has a mass around 1.3 times that of Earth, and it sits in a tight orbit approximately a tenth the distance of Mercury to the sun. That's not necessarily a problem because Proxima b's host star, Proxima Centauri, is about 1,000 times weaker than our sun. That places it within the habitable zone, where liquid water can reside at the surface.
Observations of Proxima b are few and far between, so Bastien Brugger and his colleagues from Marseille University in France ran a series of simulations to get a better sense of the planet's composition and radius. Their estimates show that Proxima b's radius ranges somewhere between 0.94 and 1.4 times that of Earth, which is about 3,900 miles (6,300 km) on average.
Artist's rendering of the planet Proxima orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri. (Image: ESO/M. Kornmesser
If the planet's radius is closer to the lower bound of the estimate, it should be very dense, with a metallic core making up a whopping two-thirds of the planet's entire mass, and surrounded by a rocky mantle. Any surface water on this planet would contribute to about 0.05 percent of the planet's total mass, which is comparable to Earth's 0.02 percent. Vast ocean ranges could very well exist on Proxima b.
But if the planet's radius is closer to the higher estimate, around 5,540 miles (8,920 km), things get even more interesting. In this scenario, the planet's mass would be split evenly between a rocky center and surrounding water.
"In this case, Proxima b would be covered by a single, liquid ocean 200 km deep [124 miles]," noted the researchers in an AFP article .. https://www.yahoo.com/news/planet-star-system-nearest-sun-may-oceans-000856687.html . "In both cases, a thin, gassy atmosphere could surround the planet, like on Earth, rendering Proxima b potentially habitable."
It's easy to get excited about this result, but we need to learn a lot more about this planet before we jump to conclusions. The researchers based their models on the assumption that Proxima b harbors a thin atmosphere-but we actually don't know what kind of atmosphere this planet has, or if it even has one.
For all we know, it's a frigid and airless chunk of rock-and not anything that would remotely resemble a habitable planet. But one thing's for sure, Proxima b is turning out to be the most interesting-and alluring-planet outside of our solar system.
Project Blue: Private Space Telescope to Hunt for Alien Earth at Alpha Centauri
By Sarah Lewin, Staff Writer | October 11, 2016 07:02am ET
An exoplanet could orbit in the habitable zone of our neighboring binary star system, Alpha Centauri, as depicted in this illustration. Alpha Centauri A is the larger star, and B is the smaller one.
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/Nick Risinger
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[The Search for Earth Proxima .. highly recommended]
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