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Category: space travel

Scientists have taken a major step towards creating an aircraft of the future, one powered by an ion drive rather than using moving parts and fuel like conventional aircraft.

In a paper published today in Nature, a team led by Steven Barrett from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) described how they created a so-called electroaerodynamic-powered plane, one that uses solid-state propulsion, meaning no propellers or jet engines with expendable fuel.

“The future of flight shouldn’t be things with propellers and turbines,” Barrett says in the video below. “[It] should be more like what you see in Star Trek, with a kind of blue glow and something that silently glides through the air.”

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If Beresheet succeeds, Israel will become just the fourth nation to land a spacecraft softly on the moon, following the Soviet Union, the United States and China.

Beresheet is currently orbiting the moon and remains on an “excellent” track, said its operators, the nonprofit group SpaceIL and the company Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).

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Japan’s space agency wants to create a moon base with the help of robots that can work autonomously, with little human supervision.

The project, which has racked up three years of research so far, is a collaboration between the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the construction company Kajima Corp., and three Japanese universities: Shibaura Institute of Technology, The University of Electro-Communications and Kyoto University.

Recently, the collaboration did an experiment on automated construction at the Kajima Seisho Experiment Site in Odawara (central Japan).

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Next month, however, a team of MIT researchers will be presenting a so-called “Proxyless neural architecture search” algorithm that can speed up the AI-optimized AI design process by 240 times or more. That would put faster and more accurate AI within practical reach for a broad class of image recognition algorithms and other related applications.

“There are all kinds of tradeoffs between model size, inference latency, accuracy, and model capacity,” says Song Han, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Han adds that:

“[These] all add up to a giant design space. Previously people had designed neural networks based on heuristics. Neural architecture search tried to free this labor intensive, human heuristic-based exploration [by turning it] into a learning-based, AI-based design space exploration. Just like AI can [learn to] play a Go game, AI can [learn how to] design a neural network.”

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“This is the first clear demonstration of controlling the speed of a pulse light in free space,” Abouraddy said in the statement. “And it opens up doors for many applications, an optical buffer being just one of them, but most importantly it’s done in a simple way, that’s repeatable and reliable.”

READ MORE: Researchers develop way to control speed of light, send it backward [Phys.org]

More on light: New NASA Animations Show How Slowly Light Travels Through Space.

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A University of California Irvine student may have stumbled upon an invention to end your phone-charging woes for good. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of where that could take us as a society. Forget about your phone; the world would be a different place without ever having to worry about replacing car batteries, and imagine the uses that it could have in space exploration. Technology is the ultimate wildcard.

A battery that lasts a whole lifetime is now one step closer to becoming a reality thanks to Mya Le Thai, a PhD student who’s been researching how to make better nanowire rechargeable batteries. In theory, her discovery could lead to a battery that lasts centuries—as long as 400 years.

She made the discovery while studying the properties of gold nanowire for commercial batteries. Typically, the gold filaments lose their integrity (and the battery dies) after 5,000 to 6,000 recharge cycles—“seven thousand at the most,” adds Reginald Penner, head of the chemistry department, who called Thai’s discovery “crazy.”

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