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Category: space travel

SpaceX is closing out the year with an achievement that should help it keep on track to fly astronauts on board one of its spacecraft next year. The Elon Musk-led space company finished its tenth consecutive successful parachute system test yesterday, an important safety system milestone that should be a good indication that the latest design is just about ready for use with astronauts on board.

The parachute system is what’s used to slow the descent of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon commercial astronaut spacecraft on its return trip to Earth, once it enters the atmosphere. The current design is the third major iteration of SpaceX’s parachute for Crew Dragon, featuring upgraded materials and improved stitching for the best possible reliability and durability during flight.

Yesterday the team completed the 10th successful multi-chute test in a row of Crew Dragon’s upgraded Mark 3 parachute design – one step closer to safely launching and landing @NASA astronauts pic.twitter.com/nfFjnKygB4

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What if astronauts could take a spacecraft to Mars or some other alien planet and, without ever flying through a toxic atmosphere or landing on an inhospitable surface, control drones and rovers to unearth things that would be otherwise impossible to get up close to?

This is the thinking behind the Ntention smart glove. Ntention is an ambitious futuretech startup that was the brainchild of Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) students who wanted to push the limits of space exploration. They designed this glove, equipped with sensors, as a human-machine interface that lets you mind-control a robot with hand gestures. Now NASA’s Haughton Mars project (HMP) has field tested the glove and found it to be many levels of awesome.

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Light propagation is usually reciprocal, meaning that the trajectory of light travelling in one direction is identical to that of light travelling in the opposite direction. Breaking reciprocity can make light propagate only in one direction. Optical components that support such unidirectional flow of light, for example isolators and circulators, are indispensable building blocks in many modern laser and communication systems. They are currently almost exclusively based on the magneto-optic effect, making the devices bulky and difficult for integration. A magnetic-free route to achieve nonreciprocal light propagation in many optical applications is therefore in great demand.

Recently, scientists developed a new type of optical metasurface with which in both space and time is imposed on the , leading to different paths for the forward and backward light propagation. For the first time, nonreciprocal in was realized experimentally at optical frequencies with an ultrathin component.

“This is the first optical metasurface with controllable ultrafast time-varying properties that is capable of breaking optical reciprocity without a bulky magnet,” said Xingjie Ni, the Charles H. Fetter Assistant Professor in Department of Electrical Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University. The results were published this week in Light: Science and Applications.

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NASA new directive to get to the Moon by 2024 certainly needs international partnerships to become reality. Representatives from NASA, JAXA, ESA and DLR speak on it importance. -
NASA Taps Maxar to Build Lunar Gateway Power Module for Artemis Moon Plahttps://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-moon-gateway-power-propulsion-module.html

NASA Chief’s Special Assistant Leaves After Exploration Reorganization Scrapped: https://www.space.com/nasa-exec-departure-moon-exploration-reorganization.html

Credit: NASA

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Nextbigfuture has looked at the likely future of SpaceX up to 2030 and now recaps the view to 2030 and extends the view to 2050.

The Mars aspect of SpaceX future impact will be less important than how 25X the speed of sound travel transforms our world and has huge economic impacts.

Geoffrey West and the Sante Fe Institute performed a study of cities and found that if the size of a city doubles, then, on average, wages, wealth, the number of patents, and the number of educational and research institutions all increase by approximately the same degree, about 15 percent. They refer to this systematic phenomenon as “superlinear scaling”: produces, and consumes, whether it’s goods, resources, or ideas. Reusable rockets could create a global city of 9–10 billion people by 2050. This would be a “city” with ten-doublings over a ten million person city. This would be a 150% boost in per-person income.

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Today, a paper published in Science documents for the first time the global wind circulation patterns in the upper atmosphere of a planet, 120 to 300 kilometers above the surface. The findings are based on local observations, rather than indirect measurements, unlike many prior measurements taken on Earth’s upper atmosphere. But it didn’t happen on Earth: it happened on Mars. On top of that, all the data came from an instrument and a spacecraft that weren’t originally designed to collect wind measurements.

In 2016, Mehdi Benna and his colleagues proposed to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) project team that they remotely reprogram the MAVEN spacecraft and its Natural Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS) instrument to do a unique experiment. They wanted to see if parts of the instrument that were normally stationary could “swing back and forth like a windshield wiper fast enough,” to enable the tool to gather a new kind of data.

Initially, the MAVEN project team was reluctant to implement the modifications Benna and his colleagues requested. After all, MAVEN and NGIMS had been orbiting Mars since 2013, and they were working quite well collecting information about the composition of the Mars . Why put all that at risk? Benna and his colleagues argued that this project would collect new kinds of data that could shape our understanding of the upper atmosphere on Mars, inform similar studies on Earth, and help us better understand planetary climate.

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SpaceX’s drone ship Just Read the Instructions (JRTI) has arrived in Port Canaveral, Fla. after undergoing refurbishment in Louisiana. The droneship joins Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) at the port, bringing SpaceX’s tally of east coast-based droneships to two. The additional droneship will help SpaceX’s execute its busy 2020 manifest.

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