Lifeboat Foundation

Last year, a Made In Space-led team achieved something that had never been accomplished. For the first time in history, a commercial in-space manufacturing facility began operation aboard the International Space Station (ISS). While private parties are able to commission objects to be built by Made In Space’s Additive Manufacturing Facility (AMF) on orbit, the hardy device also supports astronauts by manufacturing parts, tools, and supplies that can be used on the ISS.

Made In Space has continued its mission to enable humans to live and work in space by demonstrating several new technologies in microgravity. Testing machines on Earth that are optimized to work in environments which have little or no gravity can be difficult at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well. The Flight Opportunities Program (FOP) at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas utilizes high-tech aircraft to fly in aggressive parabolic arcsa nose dive followed by a sharp ascent. This maneuver creates a gravity-free environment within the plane’s cabin for less than a minute before having to pull up and repeat. After partaking in over 200 of these parabolic flights, MIS has demonstrated several manufacturing techniques in microgravity that will be critical to the success of our journeys to other planets.

China’s Chang’e lunar probe dynasty is already having a great year. The Chang’e 3 lunar lander surpassed all expectations last week to emerge from its 14th hibernation while the Chang’e 5-T1 just completed its transfer from the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 2 into a stable orbit around the Moon. Chang’e 3’s main mission was only to take spectrographic and ground penetrating radar measurements, but the Chang’e 5 missions will bring back the first samples containing the actual prize — fusion-ready helium-3.

One of the main reasons helium-3 is sought as a fusion fuel is because there are no neutrons generated as a reaction product. The protons that do get generated have charge, and can therefore be safely contained using electromagnetic fields. Early dreamers imagined that Saturn or Jupiter would be the ideal places to try and get their hands on some helium-3, but it now appears that the Chinese have set their sights on the Moon.

Continue reading “China is going to mine the Moon for helium-3 fusion fuel” »

Republican members of Congress are now ordering DARPA to end their work on Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites. Why are they ordering them to stop? Because, according to National Space Policy guidelines, DARPA might be conducting operations that are potentially discouraging similar research in the private sector. Hmmmm :-(.

Republican congressmen orders DARPA to stop their work for in-space satellite services; DARPA refuses. — B.J. Murphy for Serious Wonder.

Scientists have long been perplexed by the mystery of how Earth got its water, with many suggesting it formed after icy comets collided with our planet billions of years ago.

But, a new study suggest it may have been born within Earth itself.

New computer simulations show how reactions between liquid hydrogen and quartz in the upper mantle could form water – and the researchers say this could trigger earthquakes deep below the surface.

Continue reading “Earth makes its own water deep in the mantle, study finds” »

Squeezed between two pieces of man-made diamond in the laboratory, hydrogen has finally been transformed into a metallic form that is believed to exist inside planets such as Jupiter, scientists revealed last Thursday.

Metallic hydrogen, deemed the rarest and potentially among the most valuable on Earth, was theorized almost a century ago. If certain theoretical predictions hold true, the hydrogen could turn into a solid metal that can remain solid once crushing pressure is removed. It could also serve as a room-temperature superconductor, conducting electricity sans resistance.

“This is the holy grail of high-pressure physics,” said Harvard physics professor Isaac Silvera, who created the material along with postdoctoral fellow Ranga Dias.

Continue reading “Harvard Physicists Say Hydrogen Finally Turns Into Metal, But Not Everyone Is Convinced” »

Particle physics is an interesting and complicated field of study. Its theoretical framework, the Standard Model, was developed during the second half of the twentieth century and it opened he possibility to explaining the behavior of the basic blocks of the Universe. It also classified all the particles, from the electron (discovered in 1897) to the Higgs Boson (found in 2012). It is not pretentious to claim that it is one of the most successful theories in Science.

Unfortunately, the Standard Model is also a very difficult theory to handle. By using an analytic approach many problems cannot be solved and computational methods require a huge computational power. Most of the simulations about this theory are performed in supercomputers and they have severe limitations. For instance, the mass of the proton can be calculated by the use of a technique called Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (lattice QCD), but even using a supercomputer of the Blue Gene type the error was around 2% . This is a huge achievement that shows the utility of the theory, but it is also a signal about the necessity of developing new numerical tools to handle this kind of calculations.

One potential solution to this problem is to use quantum systems in order to perform the simulations. This idea is at the core of the field of quantum computing and it was first proposed by one of the pioneers in the study of particle physics, Richard Feynman . Feynman’s idea is easy to explain. Quantum systems are very difficult to simulate by the use of ordinary classical computers but by using quantum systems we can simulate different quantum systems. If we have a quantum system that we cannot control but we can mimic its dynamics to a friendly quantum system we have solved the problem. We can just manipulate the second system and infer the results to the first one.

Continue reading “Simulating particle physics in a quantum computer” »

And who decided that space is only for science?

The inner edge of the habitable zone is the dividing line between peaches and cream and all out hell. Venus has likely seen both. The study of exo-solar systems like Wolf 1061 is key to understanding our own Venus.

New observations of the nearby star Wolf 1061, some 14 light years distant in Ophiuchus — already known to harbor three super-earths — should help planetary scientists better understand what went wrong with our own Venus.

Turns out hellishly-hot Venus-like worlds are quite common and early in the history of any given planetary system, such close-in terrestrial mass planets might even sport liquid water. But as their host stars evolve, the perilous inner edge of these extrasolar planetary systems’ habitable zones move decidedly outward.

Continue reading “Planets Around Wolf 1061 Key To Understanding ‘Venus’” »

More than 80 years after it was first predicted, physicists have created metallic hydrogen — a mysterious form of hydrogen that could be capable of superconducting electricity without resistance at room temperature.

Scientists have long suspected that hydrogen could exist as a metal in certain parts of the Universe, but this is the first time metallic hydrogen has ever been created on Earth, and the material is even stranger and more fascinating than scientists imagined.

“This is the holy grail of high-pressure physics,” says lead researcher Isaac F. Silvera from Harvard University. “It’s the first-ever sample of metallic hydrogen on Earth, so when you’re looking at it, you’re looking at something that’s never existed before.”

Continue reading “IT’s Real: Metallic Hydrogen Has Been Created for the First Time” »