For decades, scientists believed the Moon was completely dry. This video explores how Apollo samples, Clementine, Lunar Prospector, Chandrayaan-1, LCROSS, LRO, and SOFIA gradually revealed the presence of water on the Moon and transformed our understanding of lunar science.
I just found a set of new essays from a very recent conference at Carnegie Mellon University sponsored by the European Astrobiology Institute and the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology.
“As the economic barriers to outer space shrink and opportunities for access expand, concerns about humans thriving in extraterrestrial environments and the impacts of humankind on those environments become less theoretical and more urgent. This conference endeavors to bring together scholars, technologists, policy specialists, artists, and other stakeholders to explore the ethical, legal, economic, cultural, biological, psychological, and environmental issues associated with the New Space era.”
These were the essays that stood out to me, and there were a few others from the same magazine, all published in free access:
Radio Astronomy National Historic Park
Rethinking Human Responsibility in a Cosmic Context
‘Leave the Moon to be the Moon’
Prime Directive in Extraplanetary Medical Ethics
Should We Be a Multiplanetary Species?
Reimagining Habitability in Space
I thought this was a really interesting set of different views on human interaction with space. I wonder what people here will not like and also like. Enjoy.
The Apollo missions were each within a couple months of each other, whereas Artemis 2 was **four years** after Artemis 1, Artemis 3 will be a year after Artemis 2, Artemis 4 will be a year after Artemis 3 and so on.
There was a tiny rover named Sojourner that changed space exploration forever.
On This Day, July 4, 1997, NASA's Mars Pathfinder successfully landed on the Red Planet, becoming the first mission to deploy a rover that successfully explored another planet beyond the Earth–Moon system.
Originally expected to last just 30 days, the mission continued for 83 days, sending back more than 16,500 images and revealing valuable clues about Mars' atmosphere, rocks, and ancient history.
Its success paved the way for every Mars rover that followed, bringing humanity one step closer to understanding, and perhaps one day living on, the Red Planet.
During the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union launched a mission to what was officially called a scientific space station...
But there was a secret.
On This Day, July 3, 1974, Soyuz 14 carried cosmonauts Pavel Popovich and Yuri Artyukhin to Salyut 3, a space station that was actually part of the Soviet Union's secret Almaz military space program.
For 15 days, the crew conducted scientific experiments, Earth observation, and military reconnaissance in orbit, proving that humans could successfully live and work aboard a military space station.
The mission became a significant milestone in the Soviet space program and highlighted the intense competition of the Space Race.
There is a moon rover prototype from NASA in Times Square right now, moon nerds.
As per sketch if Each copper strip will work to dissipate the heat from spacecraft.
The design will work in this Way that only one strip will work to absorb the heat at a time and once absorbing heat by this single one strip,it will remove and cooled down and next strip will work to absorb the heat.
In this way each strip will work to absorb the heat one by one cooling itself.
(1) Far better than single heavy mass radiator
(2)Each strip will have enough time to cool down after absorbing the heat.
Made a blueprint-style poster of Skylab, NASA's first space station
Always thought Skylab deserved more love. 2,249 days in orbit worth of history.
I hope you like it! Any suggestions are welcome.
We are adapted to our homeworld pulling down on us, to the point that lack of that pull causes trouble for us.
A solution is artificial gravity, and that takes the form of centrifugal force, from spinning all or part of a spacecraft or space station.
But can we do anything similar on the surface of a celestial body? There is an amusement-park ride that demonstrates a solution:
Gravitron - Wikipedia with a variety of names.
It has a cone segment that its riders get inside of with their backs against that segment, and this segment is made to rotate. When it rotates fast enough, the riders feel pulled directly downward relative to the nearby segment surface, from centrifugal force being strong enough for that.
The math:
One needs a slope relative to horizontal of c/g or relative to vertical of g/c.
One can calculate the ideal shape of a Gravitron with some calculus and geometry:
(1/2)*r^2*w^2 = g*h for height h -- a paraboloid, a parabola rotated around its symmetry axis
The acceleration at each surface point is sqrt(g^2 + c^2).
One can make approximately constant acceleration by using a tower of multiple segments, and connecting them with ladders or staircases.
One will have to keep it safe for if the tower stops rotating, like have bulkheads.
Has anyone else thought of this idea?
Let's look at some numbers: Gravitational acceleration - Wikipedia relative to the Earth at 9.80665 m/s^2 (nominal value):
The * is for cloud tops of places that are not very feasible for us to visit: the four outer planets.
On most of the worlds other than the outer planets, this stack of cone or paraboloid segments would be close to a cylinder. The exceptions: