Lifeboat Foundation

Recent advances in lasers suggest that we may see rockets propelled by light earlier than we had imagined. NASA scientist Philip Lubin and his team are working on a system that would use Earth-based lasers to allow space travel to far-away places in just a fraction of the time needed with current technology.

Using earth based lasers to push along a spacecraft instead of on board hydrocarbon-based fuel could dramatically reduce travel time to Mars, within our lifetime. Currently, it takes five months for a space craft to reach Mars. But, with photonic propulsion, it is likely that small crafts filled with experiments will reach Mars in just 3 days. Large spaceships with astronauts and life support systems will take only one month, which is about 20% of the duration of a current trip.

What’s next? Lubin believes that we may be able to send small crafts with scientific experiments to exoplanets as fast as 5% light speed in, perhaps, 30 years. Eventually, he claims that the technology will carry humans at speeds up to 20% light speed.

Read about it here.

I am not an astronomer or astrophysicist. I have never worked for NASA or JPL. But, during my graduate year at Cornell University, I was short on cross-discipline credits, and so I signed up for Carl Sagan’s popular introductory course, Astronomy 101. I was also an amateur photographer, occasionally freelancing for local media—and so the photos shown here, are my own.

Carl Sagan is aware of my camera as he talks to a student in the front row of Uris Hall

By the end of the 70’s, Sagan’s star was high and continuing to rise. He was a staple on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, producer and host of the PBS TV series, Cosmos, and he had just written Dragons of Eden, which won him a Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote Contact, which became a blockbuster movie, starring Jodie Foster.

Sagan died in 1996, after three bone marrow transplants to compensate for an inability to produce blood cells. Two years earlier, Sagan wrote a book and narrated a film based on a photo taken from space.

Continue reading “What has changed since ‘Pale Blue Dot’?” »

Antimatter propulsion is a lot closer than most aerospace engineers would ever imagine and these guys looking for cash for the next phase of their own research deserve kudos for trying to take this to the next level.

Dreams of antimatter space propulsion are closer to reality than most rocket scientists could ever imagine, says former Fermilab physicist Gerald Jackson. In fact, if money were no object, he says an antimatter-driven spacecraft prototype could be tested within a decade.

Satellites and spacecraft are generally complex to build on the ground, expensive to launch and obsolete in a decade or less.

These objects end up floating in orbit around the planet contributing to the pollution surrounding the Earth. But what if there was an alternative?

That’s the question David Barnhart, director of USC’s Space Engineering Research Center and lead for the Space Systems and Technology group for the USC Information Sciences Institute, is contemplating. What if we could just “grow” spacecraft, repurpose a hybrid of inorganic and organic materials and even allow food to grow in space?

MOFFETT FIELD, California — Within five years, companies could begin in-orbit manufacturing and assembly of communications satellite reflectors or other large structures, according to Made in Space, the Silicon Valley startup that sent the first 3D printer to the International Space Station in 2014.

As Made in Space prepares to send a second 3D printer into orbit, the company is beginning work with Northrop Grumman and Oceaneering Space Systems on Archinaut, an ambitious effort to build a 3D printer equipped with a robotic arm that the team plans to install in an external space station pod, under a two-year, $20 million NASA contract. The project will culminate in 2018 with an on-orbit demonstration of Archinaut’s ability to additively manufacture and assemble a large, complex structure, said Andrew Rush, Made in Space president.

NASA’s selected the Archinaut project, officially known as Versatile In-Space Robotic Precision Manufacturing and Assembly System, as part of its Tipping Points campaign, which funds demonstrations of space-related technologies on the verge of offering significant payoffs for government and commercial applications. Archinaut was one of three projects NASA selected in November that focus on robotic manufacturing and assembly of spacecraft and structures in orbit.

Continue reading “NASA, Made in Space think big with Archinaut, a robotic 3D printing demo bound for ISS” »

New technology could take us to Mars in as fast as 3 days.

Interstellar space travel is still a matter of science fiction. With our current propulsion systems, it would take millennia to really travel on an interstellar level. However, science is now looking towards new propulsion systems to make interstellar reach possible in significantly less time.

One such system is called Photonic Propulsion, and it’s an insanely interesting idea. The video you see above is a quick summary of a talk given by Philip Lubin of University of California Santa Barbara. It’s a two minute selected sampling of a much larger talk, which you can watch in the source link below.

Continue reading “Could we get to Mars in 3 days? Nasa’s considering Photonic Propulsion tech” »

The art gallary of space.

Are you tired looking for a gallery space to exhibit your artwork? Well, now you have a chance to show off your work in an asteroid art gallery, thanks to NASA.

According to CNN, the space agency is inviting people to send their artworks to an asteroid on its new spacecraft: the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx. The mission, led by the University of Arizona, will also collect a sample of the asteroid Bennu and return it to Earth for study for the first time in history.

Continue reading “Asteroid Art Gallery: NASA To Open Art Gallery On The Asteroid Bennu” »

Love on a Subatomic Scale.

When talking about love and romance, people often bring up unseen and mystical connections. Such connections exist in the subatomic world as well, thanks to a bizarre and counterintuitive phenomenon called quantum entanglement. The basic idea of quantum entanglement is that two particles can be intimately linked to each other even if separated by billions of light-years of space; a change induced in one will affect the other. In 1964, physicist John Bell posited that such changes can occur instantaneously, even if the particles are very far apart. Bell’s Theorem is regarded as an important idea in modern physics, but it seems to make little sense. After all, Albert Einstein had proven years before that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Indeed, Einstein famously described the entanglement phenomenon as “spooky action at a distance.” In the last half-century, many researchers have run experiments that aimed to test Bell’s Theorem. But they have tended to come up short because it’s tough to design and build equipment with the needed sensitivity and performance, NASA officials said. Last year, however, three different research groups were able to perform substantive tests of Bell’s Theorem, and all of them found support for the basic idea. One of those studies was led by Krister Shalm, a physicist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado. Shalm and his colleagues used special metal strips cooled to cryogenic temperatures, which makes them superconducting — they have no electrical resistance. A photon hits the metal and turns it back into a normal electrical conductor for a split second, and scientists can see that happen. This technique allowed the researchers to see how, if at all, their measurements of one photon affected the other photon in an entangled pair. The results, which were published in the journal Physical Review Letters, strongly backed Bell’s Theorem. “Our paper and the other two published last year show that Bell was right: any model of the world that contains hidden variables must also allow for entangled particles to influence one another at a distance,” co-author Francesco Marsili, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. There are practical applications to this work as well. The “superconducting nanowire single photon detectors” (SNSPDs) used in the Shalm group’s experiment, which were built at NIST and JPL, could be used in cryptography and in deep-space communications, NASA officials said. NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere Dust and Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission, which orbited the moon from October 2013 to April 2014, helped demonstrate some of this communications potential. LADEE’s Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration used components on the spacecraft and a ground-based receiver similar to SNSPDs. The experiment showed that it might be possible to build sensitive laser communications arrays that would enable much more data to be up- and downloaded to faraway space probes, NASA officials said.

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