Category Archives: Space Travel

To many, the concept of a fully populated Mars colony may seem straight out of a science-fiction novel. But to Elon Musk, colonizing the red planet isnt just some futuristic pipe dream, its the chief ambition of his company, and he plans to do it sooner than a lot of people think.

According to to their website, Space Exploration Technology Corporation, or SpaceX, was started by Musk in 2002 with the goal of revolutionizing space travel.

The South African-born PayPal founder invested $100 million of his own money to get the company off the ground, and over the course of the last 15 years, SpaceX has made unprecedented progress in their quest to make humanity a multi-planetary species.

In this photo provided by NASA, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, launches from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla, Saturday, June 3, 2017. SpaceX launched its first recycled cargo ship to the International Space Station on Saturday, yet another milestone in its bid to drive down flight costs. (Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP)

Between owning the first commercial space company to ever resupply the International Space Station (ISS) and creating the only reusable rocket booster in existence, making history is now somewhat of a routine for Musk, but he hasnt done it alone.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been with him every step of the way, providing both funding and launch support crucial to SpaceXs success.

The relationship isnt simply one-sided, either. Thanks to two key pieces of legislation, The Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984 and The Commercial Space Launch Act Amendment of 2004, NASA and SpaceX have been able to form a symbiotic relationship to help each other overcome the numerous hurdles involved in traveling to space.

We all know and love NASA, and their achievements are legendary, but its a federal agency that inevitably has to abide by certain laws, said Dale Ketcham, the chief of Strategic Alliances for Space Florida. And innovation is not a term you associate with the federal government.

By the time the Apollo program ended in 1972, the excitement of the space race had already subsided and NASA saw their share of the federal budget slowly begin to shrink with every passing year.

Once the Space Shuttle program came to a close in 2011, NASA no longer had a means of achieving low Earth orbit, forcing them to look to the private sector to help subsidize launches and keep their ambitions on track.

It seemed blindingly obvious that getting into low Earth orbit didnt need to be a government exercise anymore because we had been doing it for 50 years, and the Russians had been doing it even longer than that, said Ketcham. It was something that could be turned over to the private sector, which invariably can do almost anything faster and cheaper than the government.

Enter SpaceX. After successfully docking their Dragon Capsule to the ISS in mid-2012, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6-billion, 12-trip contract to resupply the installation on a regular basis. While this funding was undoubtedly crucial to the survival of SpaceX, the deal was also beneficial to NASA as well.

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SpaceX helped NASA in the very beginning by pushing for fixed-price contracts to enable the federal government to change how it does business, Ketcham said. [This let NASA] pay for milestones of achievement, as opposed to the traditional cost-plus model, which helped keep costs down and enabled the private sector to assume substantially greater risk and invest their own capital."

"So, NASA was a big beneficiary of the change in that paradigm. Concurrently, SpaceX was successful in landing NASA contracts that infused federal money into their initiative, so it was a win-win for both parties.

Currently, SpaceX is involved in numerous contracts with both private companies and the federal government. Musk predicts that he will be able to offer a $200,000 ticket to Mars in roughly 10 years. However, as of now, SpaceXs missions mainly consist of cargo resupplies and satellite launches.

NASA has released their own plan to get to the red planet as well. However, their timetable is significantly less ambitious than Musks.

The agencys three-phase initiative hopes to have the first humans orbiting Mars sometime in the early 2030s. Unlike Musk, NASA's plan does not include any colonization efforts as of now.

NASA's plan to get to Mars (NASA)

So, who is going to reach Mars first? Will it be Elon Musk and the private sector, NASA and the federal government, or perhaps some mix of the two?

The more we learn, the more daunting we realize [getting to Mars] is going to be, Ketcham said. I think theres a common recognition that the cost to overcome technological hurdles, and execute once that technology is captured, is going to be significantly more than any one or two or three entities is going to be able to bear independent of the rest of humanity.

But that doesnt mean it wont happen. Like Musk, Ketcham feels that leaving our planet is going to be an inevitability if we want humanity to survive.

This planet wasnt here forever, and it aint going to be here forever, he said.

Whether the sun gets too big in a couple billion years, the Earths molten core cools and we lose our magnetic sphere, or human beings manage to do what theyre very capable of doing, wiping us out on this planet, it would be a good idea to colonize elsewhere.

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The race to the red planet: How NASA, SpaceX are working to get to Mars - AccuWeather.com

Chinas Micius satellite blasts off from Jiuquan in Gansu on 16 August 2016. Photons were beamed from a ground station in Ngari in Tibet to Micius, which is in orbit 300 miles above Earth. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

Chinese scientists have teleported an object from Earth to a satellite orbiting 300 miles away in space, in a demonstration that has echoes of science fiction.

The feat sets a new record for quantum teleportation, an eerie phenomenon in which the complete properties of one particle are instantaneously transferred to another in effect teleporting it to a distant location.

Scientists have hailed the advance as a significant step towards the goal of creating an unhackable quantum internet.

Space-scale teleportation can be realised and is expected to play a key role in the future distributed quantum internet, the authors, led by Professor Chao-Yang Lu from the University of Science and Technology of China, wrote in the paper.

The work may bring to mind Scotty beaming up the Enterprise crew in Star Trek, but there is no prospect of humans being able to materialise instantaneously at remote locations any time soon. The teleportation effect is limited to quantum-scale objects, such as fundamental particles.

In the experiment, photons were beamed from a ground station in Ngari in Tibet to Chinas Micius satellite, which is in orbit 300 miles above Earth.

The research hinged on a bizarre effect known as quantum entanglement, in which pairs of particles are generated simultaneously meaning they inhabit a single, shared quantum state. Counter-intuitively, this twinned existence continues, even when the particles are separated by vast distances: any change in one will still affect the other.

Scientists can exploit this effect to transfer information between the two entangled particles. In quantum teleportation, a third particle is introduced and entangled with one of the original pair, in such a way that its distant partner assumes the exact state of the third particle.

For all intents and purposes, the distant particle takes on the identity of the new particle that its partner has interacted with.

Quantum teleportation could be harnessed to produce a new form of communication network, in which information would be encoded by the quantum states of entangled photons, rather than strings of 0s and 1s. The huge security advantage would be that it would be impossible for an eavesdropper to measure the photons states without disturbing them and revealing their presence.

Ian Walmsley, Hooke professor of experimental physics at Oxford University, said the latest work was an impressive step towards this ambition. This palpably indicates that the field isnt limited to scientists sitting in their labs thinking about weird things. Quantum phenomena actually have a utility and can really deliver some significant new technologies.

Scientists have already succeeded in creating partially quantum networks in which secure messages can be sent over optical fibres. However, entanglement is fragile and is gradually lost as photons travel through optical fibres, meaning that scientists have struggled to get teleportation to work across large enough distances to make a global quantum network viable.

The advantage of using a satellite is that the particles of light travel through space for much of their journey. Last month, the Chinese team demonstrated they could send entangled photons from space to Earth. The latest work does the reverse: they sent photons from the mountaintop base to the satellite as it passed directly overhead.

Transmitting into space is more difficult as turbulence in the Earths atmosphere can cause the particles to deviate, and when this occurs at the start of their journey they can end up further off course.

The latest paper, published on the Arxiv website, describes how, more than 32 days, the scientists sent millions of photons to the satellite and achieved teleportation in 911 cases.

This work establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum internet, the team write.

A number of teams, including the European Space Agency and Canadian scientists, have similar quantum-enabled satellites in development, but the latest results suggest China is leading the way in this field.

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Beam me up, Scotty! Scientists teleport photons 300 miles into space - The Guardian

One of my bags was lost in transit, and I couldnt wait for it so continued the trip without it. I had to buy shampoo and some socks. Other than that, I didnt miss the bag. By the time I headed home, the bag was back in my possession. I set it down in the hallway at home and didnt open it for a week because I couldnt remember what was in it. And if I couldnt remember, then could anything in that bag be so important?

This makes me wonder how much energy I use up, day in and day out, hauling stuff around that isnt even important. What burdens have I taken upon myself that just take up space and make me tired and anxious?

I dont think we were meant to live this waytoo many bags, and too much weight. I think God wants us to travel light and to enjoy the trip a lot more.

By Vinita Hampton Wright on LoyolaPress.com

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Sacred Space | Your daily prayer online

In a 1980s Kenny Everett sketch, Spider-Man rushes to a urinal only to find that his bodysuit allows no facility to relieve himself making him, in effect, a spider without a fly. Such a scene wouldnt be amiss in Spider-Man: Homecoming, which thrives on the same spirit of nutty irreverence.

The superhero life is anything but slick for the 15-year-old Peter Parker (Tom Holland), who strips down to his boxers in a grungy alley and struggles laboriously into his costume. Swinging through the neighbourhood, he frightens small children, collides with dustbins and accidentally brings a tree house crashing to the ground. Adversaries offer gentle advice even as he apprehends them. You gotta get better at this part of the job, says one.

Even the most accommodating superhero fan will experience arachno-fatigue at the prospect of yet another iteration of theSpider-Man story the fourth in total and the third in 15 years. Do we have to go through all that boy-gets-bitten-by-radioactive-spider palaver again? Well, no. Spider-Man: Homecoming dives straight into Peters life after he is earmarked for membership of the superhero UN that was introduced in Avengers Assemble.

The main threat now comes from a former construction boss who steals a toxic alien chemical (see previous Marvel movies for details), with which he manufactures weapons. Its unclear how this fits with his hobby of wearing clattering steam-punk wings Spider-Man refers to him as Flying Vulture Guy but the casting of Michael Keaton is a double in-joke, allowing the actor, in essence, to reprise the character from his 2014 comedy Birdman, which was in turn an allusion to his baleful Batman.

Spider-Man: Homecoming doesnt overhaul a tired franchise so much as dust off its cobwebs. Peters previously homely Aunt May is played by the sassy Marisa Tomei, though she does little more than get swooned over by the male cast. One smart move was to cast an actual young person as the hero. Tobey Maguire (27 when he first played Spider-Man) and Andrew Garfield (29) were the oldest high-schoolers since Grease. But Holland, who was 19 when he made his debut in the role last year in Captain America: Civil War, has a goody-two-shoes gaucheness. When he opts for the Interrogation Mode setting on his hi-tech suit, the gravelly voice that emerges from his mouth seems like just another unpredictable symptom of adolescence. (As Captain America says in one of the splendidly corny educational videos shown at Peters school: So, your bodys changing. Believe me, I know how that feels . . .)

Spider-Man movies have been here before both Maguire and Garfield were shown losing control of their web-shooters in a sticky metaphor for the adolescent male body. But the new picture extends its curiosity to the other youngsters in Peters orbit, all misfits on the academic decathlon team. The jolly Ned (Jacob Batalon) is bursting with questions: Do you lay eggs? Can you summon a spider army? The peevish Flash (Tony Revolori) leads disparaging chants about Peter while DJ-ing. Richest of all is the laconic, politically clued-up Michelle (Zendaya), who wears a Sylvia Plath T-shirt and attends detention because she likes to sketch people in crisis.

The superhero genre hasnt previously been a hotbed of diversity, but each of these bright sparks has a different ethnic background. What matters more is that they have been invested with a level of detail that leaves the usual conventions of the superhero movie looking superannuated. When Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr) also known as Iron Man shows up for several scenes of smug preening, he doesnt have an ounce of Neds gawky charisma. When Spider-Man has to keep the Staten Island Ferry from sinking, or dodge Flying Vulture Guys laser cannons, its hard not to wonder how Michelle is spending her evening.

Holed up in their corporate headquarters, the Avengers are pass, their concerns and conflicts remote. Its time for a movie about their infinitely more interesting human counterparts Academic Decathlon Team Assemble.

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The real value of space travel is recognising the beauty of our planet - New Statesman

July 7, 2017 by Kerry Sheridan US Vice President Mike Pence vowed to put astronauts on the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970sbut gave no specifics

US Vice President Mike Pence vowed Thursday to usher in a "new era" of American leadership in space, with a return to the Moon and explorers on Mars, but offered few details.

Pence, who was recently named to head a government advisory body called the National Space Council, said the group would hold its first meeting "before the summer is out."

He also toured NASA's Kennedy Space Center to see progress in constructing a NASA spaceship destined for deep space and privately built capsules designed to send astronauts to low-Earth orbit in the coming years.

"Our nation will return to the Moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars," Pence told the cheering crowd of about 800 NASA employees, space experts and private contractors, but gave no specifics.

"We did win the race to the Moon," he added, recalling the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s which sent menone of whom, Buzz Aldrin, sat in the audienceto the surface of the Moon.

NASA earlier this year announced it is exploring a project called the Deep Space Gateway, which could send astronauts into the vicinity of the Moon using a massive new rocket, known as the Space Launch System, or SLS, being developed by NASA.

And propelling people to Mars by the 2030s was a key feature of US space policy under the previous administrations of Barack Obama and George W. Bush.

Shuttle era

The United States lost the ability to send astronauts to the International Space Station when the shuttle program was retired in 2011.

Since then, Americans have been forced to hitch rides aboard Russia's Soyuz spacecraft, at a cost of more than $80 million per seat.

SpaceX and Boeing are hard at work on space capsules that will start sending people to low-Earth orbit as early as 2018.

Pence, who spoke in front of a previously flown SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule and a Boeing Starliner spaceship model, said he would continue to foster cooperation with private industry to make space travel cheaper, safer and more accessible than before.

"It was heartening to see him allude to growing public-private partnerships, but the lack of policy details, personnel and budgetary priorities is concerning," Phil Larson, a former White House space advisor under Obama who also worked for SpaceX, told AFP after the speech.

"Usually you have a leader visit, tour and give a speech to roll out a detail-oriented policy after it's been developed. This is backwards."

President Donald Trump's proposed budget, released in March, called for $19.1 billion for NASA, a 0.8 percent decrease from 2017.

It called for NASA to abandon plans to lasso an asteroid and cut several missions to study climate change and Earth science.

But NASA would emerge largely unscathed compared to deep cuts proposed at other agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

Lawmakers are still hammering out their adjustments to the proposed budget, which should be decided on later this year.

Explore further: Japan reveals plans to put a man on moon by 2030

2017 AFP

Japan has revealed ambitious plans to put an astronaut on the Moon around 2030 in new proposals from the country's space agency.

Under US President Donald Trump's proposed budget, NASA's funding would stay largely intact but the space agency would abandon plans to lasso an asteroid, along with four Earth and climate missions.

Dismissed by former US president Barack Obama as a place explorers had already seen, the Moon has once again gained interest as a potential destination under Donald Trump's presidency.

Boeing already has the Dreamliner. Now it also has the Starliner.

NASA will probably delay the first two missions of its Orion deep-space capsule, being developed to send astronauts beyond earth's orbit and eventually to Mars, the US space agency said.

Think you have the right stuff to be an astronaut?

Pitted terrains inside fresh complex craters on Ceres are similar to terrains seen Mars and Vesta, and are likely formed through the rapid evaporation of subsurface H2O, a new paper by Planetary Science Institute Research ...

IC 342 is a challenging cosmic target. Although it is bright, the galaxy sits near the equator of the Milky Way's galactic disk, where the sky is thick with glowing cosmic gas, bright stars, and dark, obscuring dust.

Astronomers have discovered a rare, warm, massive Jupiter-like planet orbiting a star that is rotating extremely quickly. The discovery raises puzzling questions about planet formation neither the planet's comparatively ...

A project that explores whether there is a musical equivalent to the curvature of spacetime will be presented on Thursday 6July by Gavin Starks at the National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Hull.

Yale researchers have identified 60 potential new "hot Jupiters"highly irradiated worlds that glow like coals on a barbecue grill and are found orbiting only 1% of Sun-like stars.

When it comes to the distant universe, even the keen vision of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope can only go so far. Teasing out finer details requires clever thinking and a little help from a cosmic alignment with a gravitational ...

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Pence vows 'new era' in US space exploration, but few details - Phys.Org

1) Space Flights Could Launch Next Year

Pack your bags. Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group, says his goal is to get commercial passenger flights into space by the end of 2018. Branson told Bloomberg News that hes gearing up again towardgettingnon-astronauts like you and meinto space. Afatal crash in 2014 killed co-pilot Michael Alsburyand put the mission on hold. That hasnt scaredpeople off, Bransonsays. Far from it. We will never be able to build enough spaceships, he said. The demand is enormous. Hes competing with fellow billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, both of whom have their own rocket companies. There is definitely the demand for all three, Branson said.

And maybe thatsjust fine with President Donald Trump, who ran on isolationismand has since championed the need tothinkabout America before anyone else. (Pittsburgh, not Paris!) Such rhetoric pushed China and Germany closer together at the Group of 20 meeting, which is taking place over the next two days in Hamburg. Diplomats and officials involved in the massive affair say the two countries are working closely on the meetings agenda. The two most important leaders in the world are President Xi [Jinping]and Chancellor [Angela] Merkel at the moment,said Diego Ramiro Guelar, ambassador to Beijing for G-20 member Argentina. Even former President Barack Obama took a jab at Trump on leadership. While in Indonesia, he described the Paris climate deal as an agreement that even with the temporary absence of American leadership will still give our children a fighting chance.

Motorcycle makers are giving up the whole hog. Companies are throwing their efforts into bikes designed for new riders who arent enamored with classic, massive Harleys. Sales plummeted after the 2008 financial crisis and havent recovered. The industry is trying to pivot to a younger audience, because most of its current customers are agingfast. Theyre doing that by focusing on smaller, lighter bikes. For example, Harley-Davidsons Street 500 costs about $7,000, has an engine thats around 500ccroughly half the size of some of Harleys most popular models. Kawasakis Ninja 300 is about $5,000 and is smaller than its well-known standard model. If all goes as planned, these little rigs will help companies like Harley-Davidson coast for another 50 years,Bloombergs Kyle Stock reports.

Motorcycle Industry Council

Women dont make as much as men in the Trump White House, according to salary data released by the administration. But a White House official said thats because they are doing different jobs; more men have been hired in senior positions. Sixteen men and six women in the White House earn the top salary of $179,700. In comparison, men in the Obama administration made up 56 percentof the top-paid roles. Comparing like-for-like positions, the numbers go back and forth, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Female assistants to the president make an average of $664 more than male ones. Male deputy assistants, the second-highest rank, earn $4,603 more than their female counterparts.

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Especially Europeans. A group of gastroenterology experts issued a warning this week that were ignoring the cancer risks that come fromeven moderate consumption, considered about two drinks a day. Worldwide, the heaviest boozersare Europeans, who have from one to four drinks a day, according to a report from United European Gastroenterology, a nonprofit coalition of specialists. That increases the risk ofcolorectal and esophageal cancers, the group said. This epidemiological evidence is clear about the association, said Professor Helena Cortez-Pinto, a gastroenterologist at Hospital Universitrio de Santa Maria in Lisbon.

WHO Global Information System on Alcohol and Health, 2010

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Demand for Space Travel Is Out of This World - Bloomberg

KREM 2's Taylor VIydo goes to the University of Idaho to see how the researchers are looking at NASA's astronauts and their eye problems.

Taylor Viydo , KREM 7:31 PM. PDT July 06, 2017

LATAH COUNTY, Idaho --- The University of Idaho is researching the negative effects of space travel on the eyes and brains of astronauts.

Astronauts have to be able to see where they are going and what they are doing. So researchers from the U of I are studying the effects of space travel on human vision.

Spending over half a year is not easy on your body, or your mind, it turns out that by the time some astronauts get back to Earth they have vision problems.

They have optic nerve head distention. They have something called cotton wool spots. Theyre kind of like partially blind areas, said UI research assistant professor, Bryn Martin.

Martin and her team are trying to find the cause of this phenomena.

We really dont understand why. Some astronauts have these problems and some dont, said Martin.

They have some NASA grants to help fund the research. They also have access to the MRIs of astronauts from before and after they are in space.

Its definitely super cool to have this data, because its very rare, said UI grad student, Jesse Rohr.

Looking at the changes in the eyes could provide clues as to how space travel affects vision in some astronauts. NASA hopes to get people to Mars one day, and it would be sad to potentially have astronauts arrive on the red planet in the dark.

The idea then is if you take a year or even two years to go to Mars, then during that time, you have a bunch of damage to your eye and get to Mars and might be totally blind, said Rohr.

Martins research hopes to be able to predict which astronauts are more vulnerable to eye damage, or perhaps develop some kind of therapy in space that can ease the problem.

To have a chance to actually affect peoples lives in your research is really valuable. I think the students get a lot out of that also, said Martin.

Martin hopes that one day this research might translate to solving vision issues down here on Earth.

2017 KREM-TV

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Research shows astronauts' vision can get worse in space - KREM.com

WYFF Greenville

Elon Musk shares future plans for space travel with Airbnbmag WYFF Greenville A new magazine launched by WYFF4's parent company Hearst features an interview with Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX. SpaceX has launched three rockets in the past two weeks. Advertisement. Magnificent Whale Shark Takes Fishermen's Breath Away ... and more »

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Elon Musk shares future plans for space travel with Airbnbmag - WYFF Greenville

Nasas Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or Nicer, is an X-ray telescope that was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in early June. Installed on the International Space Station, by mid-July it will commence its scientific work to study the exotic astrophysical objects known as neutron stars and examine whether they could be used as deep-space navigation beacons for future generations of spacecraft.

What are neutron stars? When stars at least eight times more massive than the sun exhaust all the fuel in their core through thermonuclear fusion reactions, the pressure of gravity causes them to collapse. The supernova explosion that results ejects most of the stars material into the far reaches of space. What remains forms either a neutron star or a black hole.

I study neutron stars because of their rich range of astrophysical phenomena and the many areas of physics to which they are connected. What makes neutron stars extremely interesting is that each star is about 1.5 times the mass of the sun, but only about 25km in diameter the size of a single city. When you cram that much mass into such a small volume, the matter is more densely packed than that of an atomic nucleus. So, for example, while the nucleus of a helium atom has just two neutrons and two protons, a neutron star is essentially a single nucleus made up of 1057 neutrons and 1056 protons.

We can use neutron stars to probe properties of nuclear physics that cannot be investigated in laboratories on Earth. For example, some current theories predict that exotic particles of matter, such as hyperons and deconfined quarks, can appear at the high densities that are present in neutron stars. Theories also indicate that at temperatures of a billion degrees Celsius, protons in the neutron star become superconducting and neutrons, without charge, become superfluid.

The magnetic field of neutron stars is extreme as well, possibly the strongest in the universe, and billions of times stronger than anything created in laboratories. While the gravity at the surface of a neutron star may not be as strong as that near a black hole, neutron stars still create major distortions in spacetime and can be sources of gravitational waves, which were inferred from research into neutron stars in the 1970s, and confirmed from black holes by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatoryrecently.

The main focus of Niceris to accurately measure the mass and radius of several neutron stars and, although the telescope will observe other types of astronomical objects, those of us studying neutron stars hope Nicerwill provide us with unique insights into these fascinating objects and their physics. Nicerwill measure how the brightness of a neutron star changes according to its energy, and how it changes as the star rotates, revealing different parts of the surface. These observations will be compared to theoretical models based on properties of the star such as mass and radius. Accurate determinations of mass and radius will provide a vital test of nuclear theory.

Another aspect of neutron stars that could prove important for future space travel is their rotation and this will also be tested by Nicer. Rotating neutron stars, known as pulsars, emit beams of radiation like a lighthouse and are seen to spin as fast as 716 times per second. This rotation rate in some neutron stars is more stable than the best atomic clocks we have on Earth. In fact, it is this characteristic of neutron stars that led to the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system in 1992 three Earth-sized planets revolving around a neutron star.

The Nicermission, using a part of the telescope called sextant, will test whether the extraordinary regularity and stability of neutron star rotation could be used as a network of navigation beacons in deep space. Neutron stars could thus serve as natural satellites contributing to agalactic (rather than global) positioning system and could be relied upon by future manned and unmanned spacecraft to navigate among the stars.

Nicer will operate for 18 months, but it is hoped that Nasawill continue to support its operation afterwards, especially if it can deliver on its ambitious scientific goals. I hope so too, because Nicer combines and greatly improves upon the invaluable capabilities of previous X-ray spacecraft RXTE, Chandra, and XMM-Newton that are used to uncover neutron stars mysteries and reveal properties of fundamental physics.

The first neutron star, a pulsar, was discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell Burnell. It would be fitting to obtain a breakthrough on neutron stars in this 50th anniversary year.

Wynn Ho is an associate professor at the University of Southampton. This article was originally published on The Conversation (www.theconversation.com)

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Neutron stars could be our GPS for deep-space travel - The Independent

[Image: NASA]

Before astronauts go to Mars, they can go to M.A.R.S. the Modular Analog Research Station, a project which simulates a mission to the moon or Mars. Located in Poland, the M.A.R.S. habitat consists of four underground modules plus a central office that includes a kitchen and social room. The first module consists of a bedroom, gym and hygiene room, while the second will contain bioreactors and research instruments. The third module will be for storage of food, equipment, etc. while the fourth will serve as a laboratory.

The six participants in the two-week experiment will live in the base and travel from module to module on foot or in a small two-person vehicle, wearing space suits that measure oxygen levels, carbon dioxide, pressure and temperature. They will collect research samples via a Mars rover that was created by students atRzeszw University of Technology. Meanwhile, they will receive notifications such as sandstorm warnings and energy level notifications from nuclear reactor simulators.

One of the first questions that springs to mind regarding long-term space missions is: what will the astronauts eat? That question will be addressed in the simulation, of course: the participants will receive vitamins, microelements and proteins from produced in bioreactors, and they will also cultivate edible plants through hydroponics. Thats where 3D printing comes in to this particular mission. Verashape, creator of theVSHAPER3D printer line, will be 3D printing the equipment that the participants will use to cultivate the plants.

We decided to combine hydroponics with 3D Printing and create a modern hydroponic cultivation dedicated to space solutions. Containers that will be included in its composition will be printed using 3D Printing technology in cooperation with the VSHAPER Printer manufacturer, said Olga Grabiwoda of the Design Institute in Kielce.

Other nutrition will come from insects and algae, via the bioreactors. Thats obviously going to take some getting used to, as is everything involved in a mission to the moon or Mars, and the goal of the simulation is to see how well astronauts can adapt to the conditions of such a mission. Sociological and psychological examinations will be performed, in addition to the gathering of data such as sleep quality, hormones, pulse and sugar levels. The results of the experiment will be made available to the public in the form of scientific and popular science publications.

Several Polish companies are involved in the simulation, providing technology such as a lock through which the participants will enter the habitat, bioreactors and a microgravity simulation machine. The Verashape team, for its part, is thrilled to be participating in such an experiment.

We could not be indifferent to such an interesting initiative, said Jacek Wach, Marketing Manager at Verashape. There are only a few places like this one in the world in China, Hawaii and the Deserts of Utah. We are very willing to engage in research projects. Participating in the M.A.R.S. project weindirectly contribute to the development of the space industry in Poland.

The M.A.R.S. initiative was developed by Dr. Agata Kolodziejczyk, a neuroscientist from the European Space Agency. She is also involved with plans to build a moon village, or base, on the moon a project that will depend heavily on 3D printing. The hope is that the M.A.R.S. simulation will be the first of many, depending on funding from sponsors. Discuss in the 3D Printed Hydroponics forum at 3DPB.com.

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3D Printed Hydroponics Part of Large-Scale Space Travel Simulation - 3DPrint.com