Aerospace

A novel asteroid discovery algorithm, HelioLinc3D, spotted its first potentially harmful asteroid (PHA), a 600-foot (183 meters)-long asteroid that has been named 2022 SF289 and that had been previously overlooked. The algorithm was developed by a team from the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute and will be used with data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the Chilean Andes, during its decade-long survey of the night sky. This new asteroid was observed during testing during the ATLAS survey in Hawaii, and hints at the wealth of data that the research team expects to collect over…

DART, NASA’s successful double asteroid redirection test in September 2022, had an impact greater than engineers expected - and that means the ability to more accurately move asteroids on a collision course will be greater in the future. An analysis of the results found the momentum was significantly enhanced by the recoil created from streams of particles produced by the impact. The team of scientists calculated the momentum transferred to Dimorphos, the smaller asteroid of the binary Didymos, as a result of the impact, the Beta factor, to learn its displacement with respect to its primary…

NASA are planning to return its Mars samples of rock and some dust / soil to biosafety level 4 facilities. That was fine in 2009. But the problem is that it doesn’t contain the very small microbes we now know exist called ultramicrobacteria which can get through a very tiny 0.1 micron nanopore and still be viable. The samples are in tubes on Mars. They want to return them some time around 2033. The chance of returning life on those mainly geological samples is low. The chance it is dangerous if returned is also likely low. To give an idea of the order of risk I use Margaret Race's analogy of…

A launch window – the period during which a rocket must be launched to reach its destination – opens on August 29 for the first flight to the Moon since 1972 by a spacecraft designed to carry humans there. If all goes well, the Artemis project will be on track to meet its goal of putting humans back on the Moon in 2025. Project Artemis, the namesake of the sister of Apollo and daughter of Zeus in ancient Greek mythology, is designed to establish a long-term human presence on our nearest celestial neighbor, and to ultimately explore even further afield. Artemis 1 is the first of several…

Astronomers have been assuming that real new knowledge of black holes might have to wait until 2030, when/if NASA’s gravitational wave detector, LISA, launches into space. The Event Horizon Telescope may have something else in mind. They have called a press conference for Thursday and speculation is rampant about what it might mean. The Event Horizon Telescope is a global network of synchronized radio dishes acting as one giant telescope to improve the study of general relativity in the strong field regime and three years ago they produced the first ever image of a black hole - nothingness…

In the United States, flying cars have been almost here since the 1980s but, like Tubesat for personal satellites, it's basically involved a lot of money raised and no actual delivery.  In Slovakia, a 1.6L BMW engine in a two-seat prototype has changed all that. After a successful demonstration last year, AirCar has performed 70 hours of flight testing compatible with European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) standards, including over 200 takeoffs and landings. They even did it on autopilot. It can go from ground driving to air travel in under 3 minutes.  All of that work has been…

If you believe solar power is ready for mass usage, you are likely an activist, in the industry, or one of the customers who really believes they are selling electricity back to the utility at the same price they are paying when they need it and it isn't being paid for by people in the apartments that we get told are better for the environment than single-family homes. Without mandates and subsidies, plus fees tacked onto every non-solar-using customer, the industry would go back to the niche it was prior to 2010. Since 2010, the share of conventional energy needed has not moved while the…

Virgin Galactic has been working on Spaceship 2 for over a decade. It is a descendant of the Scaled composites Spaceship 1, a design by the legendary Burt Rutan which won the Ansari X prize in the early 2000’s. It will be carried to a height of 50,000 feet above mean sea level, then released for launch. This approach has many advantages over a launch from the ground as it requires a much smaller rocket booster and makes the climb out of Earth’s gravity well gentler. It will then change shape into a form that Rutan called “feathered” and return like a badminton shuttle cock. The blunted side…

The Mars Curiosity rover has been on the job since the summer of 2012, exploring Gale Crater on the red planet. It's slow going, it has driven only 25 kilometers to date.   But it can be fun to watch, like its ascent of Mount Mercou, a broad outcrop of rocks on the northern flank of Mount Sharp near the center of the crater, on April 18th 2021. Mt. Sharp is over 2 miles high and Curiosity is the size of a small car. In the picture, it is above a 20-foot-high cliff where it examined the exposed rocks. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona If the picture looks a little grainy - though not…

NASA has told us that the James Webb Space Telescope, first funded in 1996 as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, will miss its launch date again. An astronomy site worries it's been delayed since 2014. It's worse than that. It started getting delayed in 2002. It was in 2002 that the NASA that routinely over-promises and under-delivers when it comes to big programs (cute robots on Mars they do just fine) first said that 11 years - three years longer than it took for the Apollo Program to put man on the moon from scratch - would not be enough time to put a telescope outside our…