Lifeboat Foundation

The chance that ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft will encounter space debris during its upcoming Earth flyby is very, very low. However, the risk is not zero and is greater than any other flyby ESA has performed. That there is this risk at all highlights the mess we’ve made of space – and why we need to take action to clean up after ourselves.

On November 27, after a year and eight months flying through the inner Solar System, Solar Orbiter will swing by home to ‘drop off’ some extra energy. This will line the spacecraft up for its next six flybys of Venus.

Continue reading “ESA’s Solar Orbiter Spacecraft Is Skimming Earth for a Gravity Assist — And It’s One of the Riskiest Planetary Flybys Ever” »

A small team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California has found that battery-powered trains could become economical as soon as 2023. In their paper published in the journal Nature Energy, the group argues that improved battery technology and cheap, renewable energy could soon allow battery power to compete with diesel fuel to power trains. Federico Zenith with NTNU, Trondheim, has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining the reasons for converting trains to battery power and gives an overview of the work done by the team on this new effort.

Trains, as Zenith notes, haul approximately 40 percent of intercity freight in the U.S., and sending things by train is cheaper than using trucks. Most of the freight trains in the U.S. run on diesel fuel, he states, spewing approximately 0.6 percent of total U.S. carbon emissions. In this new effort, the researchers suggest that switching to battery power could prevent these emissions.

Electric trains in the U.S. get their power from overhead lines—a system that is expensive and inefficient. The team suggests that batteries could provide a better option; more specifically, they claim that a single locomotive equipped with a 14-megawatt battery system would be sufficient to replace a train powered by a diesel engine. They further claim that such a locomotive could carry a train approximately 240 kilometers on a single charge. This would consume half the energy of a diesel-powered train. And if the battery is charged using a renewable resource, it would reduce the carbon footprint of an electric train to zero.

Keisha S., a health and energy coach from the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda, just won a free trip to suborbital space with Virgin Galactic.

NASA’s aircraft flight scheduling technology will start rolling out in 2023 to better coordinate aircraft movements at airports across the United States. It follows almost four years of research and testing by NASA and the FAA.

NASA’s surface metering technology is being integrated into the FAA’s airport surface management technology called the Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM) that will get implemented at 27 airports around the US.

The platform aims to improve efficiency, shift departure wait times from the taxiway to the gate, save fuel, reduce emissions, and give airlines and passengers more flexibility in the period before leaving the gate.

In Earth’s crust, tectonic blocks slide and grind past each other like enormous ships loosed from anchor. Earthquakes are generated along these fault zones when enough stress builds for a block to stick, then suddenly slip.

These slips can be aided by several factors that reduce friction within a fault zone, such as hotter temperatures or pressurized gases that can separate blocks like pucks on an air-hockey table. The decreasing friction enables one tectonic block to accelerate against the other until it runs out of energy. Seismologists have long believed this kind of frictional instability can explain how all crustal earthquakes start. But that might not be the whole story.

In a study published today in Nature Communications, scientists Hongyu Sun and Matej Pec, from MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), find that ultra-fine-grained crystals within fault zones can behave like low-viscosity fluids. The finding offers an alternative explanation for the instability that leads to crustal earthquakes. It also suggests a link between quakes in the crust and other types of temblors that occur deep in the Earth.

Circa 2008

What do you get when you cross a bus with a train? A dual-mode vehicle that has the versatility of a bus, the speed of light rail and fuel economy vastly better than either. Toyota and its truck-making subsidiary Hino Motors have signed on with Japan Rail Hokkaido to develop the vehicles, which carry 25 […].

Coal is cheap and we need energy, quick.

This is what ‘they’ claim, but they are lies.

Continue reading “Coal Is Dead. The True Cost Of Coal Will Shock You!!” »

Is it an egg, a blimp or a bullet? Whatever you might want to call the shape of the Otto Celera 500L, it’s one that catches the eye. It looks like no other plane out there, and for a good reason: unique aerodynamics.

The shape of the Celera is designed to drastically reduce drag by allowing air to flow very smoothly over the surface of the plane. That makes the aircraft less power-hungry, which means it burns less fuel.

“This gets us four to five times the efficiency of other turboprop aircraft, and seven to eight times the efficiency of jet aircraft,” says William Otto Jr., CEO of Otto Aviation.

A research team at the University of Wisconsin – Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels.

The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases, rather than requires, energy, was reported on November 8, 2021, in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

“The world currently runs on a carbon fuel economy,” explains Christian Wallen, an author of the paper and a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of UW–Madison chemist John Berry. “It’s not a great economy because we burn hydrocarbons, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We don’t have a way to close the loop for a true carbon cycle, where we could transform carbon dioxide back into a useful fuel.”