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Category: space

NASA will launch a mission to crash into an asteroid (on purpose) overnight tonight and you can watch it lift off live online.

The agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will travel millions of miles out into the solar stem to smash into an asteroid, altering its orbit around a larger space rock to practice in the event of a rogue Earth-bound asteroid. The mission is set to lift off from Space Launch Complex-4 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California early Wednesday, Nov. 24, at 1:20 a.m. EST (10:20 p.m. PST on Nov. 23/0620 GMT).

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O,.o! Circa 2018

We can produce very little antimatter and what we make is very difficult to store. These have been huge obstacles that have made antimatter propulsion many trillions of times beyond technological capabilities.

Positron Dynamics and Ryan Weed get around these issues by using isotopes of Krypton or sodium which naturally produce positrons (anti-electrons). They can use tiny amounts of Krypton isotopes to generation 100 billion to many trillions of positrons. They can also breed more of Krypton 79 isotopes by exposing Krypton 78 to neutrons.

Using a NASA NIAC study they have worked out more details and produced renderings of what the systems will look like.

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Our galaxy is not alone. Swirling around the Milky Way are several smaller, dwarf galaxies—the biggest of which are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, visible in the night sky of the Southern Hemisphere.

During their dance around the Milky Way over billions of years, the Magellanic Clouds’ gravity has ripped from each of them an enormous arc of gas—the Magellanic Stream. The stream helps tell the history of how the Milky Way and its closest galaxies came to be and what their future looks like.

New astronomical models developed by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Space Telescope Science Institute recreate the birth of the Magellanic Stream over the last 3.5 billion years. Using the latest data on the structure of the gas, the researchers discovered that the stream may be five times closer to Earth than previously thought.

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Nearly 20 years after the Concorde made its final commercial flight, new efforts are underway to make supersonic passenger travel viable again. Bill Whitaker reports.

“60 Minutes” is the most successful television broadcast in history. Offering hard-hitting investigative reports, interviews, feature segments and profiles of people in the news, the broadcast began in 1968 and is still a hit, over 50 seasons later, regularly making Nielsen’s Top 10.

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The Moon awaits. After long decades in which no human being set foot on the lunar surface, we are heading back. And quite soon.

As part of the NASA-led Artemis program, astronauts are returning to the lunar environment as soon as 2024, with a view to ultimately establishing a long-term human presence on the Moon – a place we haven’t seen in person since 1972.

To live and work on the Moon, though, astronauts will need power and plenty of it, and there’s no power grid on the Moon.

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Scientists at the University of Birmingham have succeeded in creating an experimental model of an elusive kind of fundamental particle called a skyrmion in a beam of light.

The breakthrough provides physicists with a real system demonstrating the behavior of skyrmions, first proposed 60 years ago by a University of Birmingham mathematical physicist, Professor Tony Skyrme.

Skyrme’s idea used the structure of spheres in 4-dimensional space to guarantee the indivisible nature of a skyrmion particle in 3 dimensions. 3D particle-like skyrmions are theorized to tell us about the early origins of the Universe, or about the physics of exotic materials or cold atoms. However, despite being investigated for over 50 years, 3D skyrmions have been seen very rarely in experiments. The most current research into skyrmions focuses on 2D analogs, which shows promise for new technologies.

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Humans haven’t set foot on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. By the time they return to our cosmic neighbor by around 2025, the exploration landscape will be very different due to wide-ranging technological advances.

In a bid to further accelerate the technology that will power future lunar missions, NASA, alongside the Department of Energy (DOE) 0, has put out a press statement calling for companies to help it develop nuclear energy solutions.

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