Category Archives: Space Travel

Can't afford space travel? Just send a piece of yourself New York Post Celestis, a company that's been sending cremated remains into space since 1997, recently expanded their services for humans who aren't dead. The Houston-based company is now offering to launch your DNA to infinity and beyond which is a great ... and more »

The rest is here:

Can't afford space travel? Just send a piece of yourself - New York Post

Space has become a literal dumping ground for the aerospace industry and its begun to pose a hazard to astronauts and missions. The exponential increase in space junk in recent years has made a collision of catastrophic proportions increasingly likely.

Experts at the European Conference on Space Debris last week said they feared something called Kessler Syndrome, or an unstoppable domino effect of collisions from space debris, could occur in low Earth orbit soon. More than 500,000 pieces of debris are being tracked as they orbit the Earth, while many millions more are so small they evade tracking technologies, according to NASA.

Read:Aliens Won't 'Treat Us Nicely,' Scientists Warn

Those pieces of space junk travel at speeds of up to 17,500 mph, turning even the smallest fragment into a lethal weapon. Kessler Syndrome, coined by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978, could occur when a piece of space debris disintegrates another spacecraft into a smaller number of fragments, which would then hit another, setting off an unstoppable cascade of impacts. The domino effect would cause a whirling ring of debris that would render even the simplest space travel and satellite launchestoo dangerous.

The greatest risk to space missions comes from non-trackable debris, said Nicholas Johnson, NASAs chief scientist for orbital debris.

This image released by the European Space Agency shows the potentially catastrophic impacts of even the smallest piece of space junk. Photo: European Space Agency

The problem is set to get worse, thanks to advances in technology which have made satellites smaller and easier to launch. Inexpensive, tiny satellites called CubeSats have become increasingly popular, with India alone sending more than 100 into orbit recently. An estimated 12,000 more could make their way into space in the next few years.

Once a satellite makes it to space, it stays there until death and beyond. While international guidelines suggest removing space crafts from low-Earth orbit within 25 years of the end of their mission, only 60 percent of missions typically do so. With many millions of fragments hurtling just outside our atmosphere, a single collision could have catastrophic impacts on space travel and satellite technology.

Read:Astronomers Discover Planet Like Star Wars' Tatooine In Deep Space

The space industry has been surprisingly lucky when it comes to collisions, with few destructive collisions so far. In 2009, an out of commission Russian satellite destroyed a functional U.S. commercial satellite when it collided with it, launching at least 2,000 more pieces of debris into space. Another 3,000 pieces of space junk were added to the skies when China used a missile to destroy an old weather satellite in 2007.

A number of technologies have been proposed to alleviate the escalating space junk problem including a giant space net. None, so far, have been implemented.

Several tiny satellites are shown in a photograph by an Expedition 33 crew member on the International Space Station, Oct. 4, 2012. Photo: NASA

See the original post here:

Space Junk Could Cause Catastrophic Satellite Collisions, Making Space Travel Impossible - International Business Times

Alien: Covenant takes place in the beginning of the 22ndcentury. By then,we won'tstill be around to see if it ended up being an accurate portrayal of our first contact (we hope not). But one of the aspects of the film that's already ringing true is its inclusion of the Lunar Quattro, an Audi rover, in space.

It appears that after the rover finishes its Hollywood debut in Covenant, it has high hopes of leaving the studio and jetting off to the final frontier. Basically,Audi wants to sendits movie rover to the moon. Sneak a peek of the Audi lunar-bound movie starin this short promo:

The Lunar Quattro was developed by both Audi and a German space start-up called Part-Time Scientists, and their goal is for the rover to be used on a mission to the moon in the near future. If we wanted to read into it, there's definitely something to be said about a high-tech piece of equipment being used for a film before an expedition, but maybe they ironed out the kinks on set to make sure it was ready for the next step.

Audi explains the Quattro's role in the movie some more, although this doesn't say much - it sounds like the crew in Covenant will use the rover for very standard rover things, regardless of whether it survives the eventual xenomorphs:

This plan isalso significant because, as Audi claims, it'd be among the first space vehicles created by private corporations instead of national space agencies. So if Audi has dreams of being likeWeyland-Yutani someday, this is an important first step. Although the film's inclusion of the Lunar Quattro will no doubt be incredibly outdated by the time the real 2104 rolls around, the crossover between fact and fiction is pretty neat for now. That paired with Audi taking product placement to the next level makes Alien: Covenant a vehicle in itself for entertainment firsts.

Alien: Covenant, starring Katherine Waterston (Fantastic Beasts), Michael Fassbender (Prometheus), and a high-tech space roverhits theaters May 19, 2017.

Via: io9

Read the original:

The Rover from 'Alien: Covenant' is Actually Preparing for Space Travel - Outer Places

In the final months of Europes LISA Pathfinder mission, scientists have found an unexpected use for the trailblazing testbed for a future gravitational wave observatory by tracking the tiny dings made by microscopic particles that strike the spacecraft in deep space, exploiting the impacts to learn about the population of dust grains cast off by comets and asteroids across the solar system.

Launched in December 2015 aboard a European Vega rocket, LISA Pathfinder spent more than a year in orbit around the L1 Lagrange point, a gravitationally-stable location nearly a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth in the direction of the sun.

The $630 million missions primary purposewas to test the major advancements required in laser ranging, metrology and other fields to make a space-based gravitational wave observatory possible.

Developed by the European Space Agency with assistance from NASA, LISA Pathfinder contains two identical solid gold-platinum cubes, each about the size of a golf ball, suspended inside separate vacuum enclosures. The spacecrafts computer receives data from accelerometers, which measure forces and movements acting on the platform, and issues commands to two sets of micro-thrusters to continuously correct its orientation, keeping the two test cubes in suspension inside their cages.

The remarkable precision required for such maneuvering, called drag-free flight, means LISA Pathfinder essentially flies around the test cubes buried inside the spacecraft.

Astronomers can measure gravitational waves by tracking the distance between two masses that are cocooned from other influences, such as solar light pressure, debris impacts and the gravitational pull from the planets.

Scientists are now using LISA Pathfinder, which ESA estimatesis 10,000 times more stable than any satellite flown on a previous science mission, to catalog the impacts of tiny grains of dust shed by comets and asteroids transiting the inner solar system.

NASA says the study will help scientists better understand the physics of planet formation, and aid engineers designing spacecraft, helping future missions carrying astronauts better withstand collisions of minuscule dust particles in deep space.

Grains that hit a spacecraft at high speed, sometimes greater than 22,000 mph (36,000 kilometers per hour), can cause major damage.

Weve shown we have a novel technique and that it works, said Ira Thorpe, a U.S. scientist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland who works on the European-led mission. The next step is to carefully apply this technique to our whole data set and interpret the results.

When something strikes the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft, the micro-thrusters swing into action to maintain position and prevent the probe from spinning, keeping its twin test masses in free fall.

At maximum power, the European-developed cold gas nitrogen thrusters produce the energy equivalent to around four mosquitos landing on the probe. A set ofelectrospray jets made by the Massachusetts-based company Busek and funded by NASA were also demonstrated in space for the first time aboard LISA Pathfinder, proving they could keep the craft pointed with an accuracy equal to the diameter of a DNA helix.

Every time microscopic dust strikes LISA Pathfinder, its thrusters null out the small amount of momentum transferred to the spacecraft, said Diego Janches, a Goddard co-investigator. We can turn that around and use the thruster firings to learn more about the impacting particles. One teams noise becomes another teams data.

Scientists hope the LISA Pathfinder data will yield insights into the interplanetary dust environment, similar to the way NASAs Long Duration Exposure Facility, a satellite launched by a space shuttle in 1984 and retrieved by a different shuttle in 1990, helped researchers understand the micrometeoroid and debris several hundred miles above Earth.

Microscopic dust grains stream off comets and asteroids as they orbit the sun, producing clouds moving in different directions at various speeds, according to scientists. The dust population in low Earth orbit, where LDEF flew, likely favors smaller and slower particles.

Small, slow particles near a planet are most susceptible to the planets gravitational pull, which we call gravitational focusing, Janches said in a NASA press release. This means the micrometeoroid flux near Earth should be much higher than that experienced by LISA Pathfinder, located about 930,000 miles closer to the sun.

Scientists adapted a software algorithm to help cull data on the spacecrafts thruster firings to pinpoint the exact location and force of a dust grain impact, allowing experts to reconstruct its trajectory and try to tie the particle to known asteroids and comets, NASA said.

Weve demonstrated the dust experiments with both sets of thrusters, although most of the data weve looked at to date has been from the European thrusters, Thorpe said. The reason is that much of the time in the U.S. mission phase is taken up by experiments to test the thrusters themselves which introduces (deliberate) disturbances on the spacecraft.

This is a very nice collaboration, said Paul McNamara, the LISA Pathfinder project scientist at ESA.This is data we use for doing our science measurements, and as an offshoot of that, Ira and his team can tell us about micro-particles hitting the spacecraft.

LISA Pathfinder recently departed its Lissajous-type orbit around the L1 Lagrange point, using its cold gas nitrogen micro-thrusters to nudge the spacecraft away from L1 and into a heliocentric orbit centered on the sun, according to Thorpe.

This was accomplished using the cold gas micro-propulsion system, which meant that achieving 1 meter per second (2.2 mph) of delta-v (velocity change) took nearly a week of continuous thrusting! The benefit is that for the rest of the mission, we no longer have to maintain the Lissajous orbit so we get round-the-clock science operations for a few more months, Thorpe wrote in an email to Spaceflight Now.

Gravitational waves are vibrations in the fabric of spacetime, ripples of cataclysmic events billions of light-years away that can only be detected by finely-tuned instruments on the ground or in space. Movements of massive objects in space, such as supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, generate gravitational waves that spread throughout the universe, giving astronomers a new way to probe the cosmos without relying on conventional telescopes sensitive to light waves.

A ground-based array called theLaser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, made the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015, finding a signal from the merger of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years away.

The faint waves travel through space at low frequencies, so an observatory needs multiple detectors spread over thousands or millions of miles to feel them.

LISA Pathfinder is smaller than a compact car too small to detect gravitational waves but it carries sensors similar to the detectors needed for a future space-based observatory, tentatively named LISA, that will include three spacecraft flying in formation about 3 million miles (5 million kilometers) apart

LISA will extend the precision demonstrated by LISA Pathfinder within a single spacecraft over millions of miles.

Within the first day of LISA Pathfinders science mission in early 2016, the ground team confirmed the crafts high-tech suite of detectors, lasers, accelerometers and thrusters met the requirements for the LISA gravitational wave observatory.

Scientists have spent the last year refining the sensitivity of LISA Pathfinders instrumentation, exceeding the performance needed by the LISA triplets, which will be capable of detecting gravitational waves at frequencies a hundred to a million times lower than the ground-based LIGO array.

ESA is planning to lead the design, construction and operation of the LISA observatory, which could launch in the early 2030s. The agencys science program committee is expected to meet in June to formally select a design for the LISA mission.

NASA aims to be a junior partner on the LISA mission, responsible for about 20 percent of the program cost, according to Paul Hertz, director of NASAs astrophysics division.

But our 20 percent includes involvement in the mission architecture and systems engineering aspects of the mission, as well as contributions of technology both to the consortium for inclusion in the payload, and to ESA for inclusion in the spacecraft, Hertz said Monday at a meeting of NASAs Astrophysics Advisory Committee.

NASA might contribute phasemeters, micro-thrusters, lasers, telescopes or components of the missions charge management system, according to Hertz.

The U.S. space agency is funding technology development efforts in several areas, including micro-thrusters and lasers, that could be employed on LISA.

ESAs operations team is scheduled to switch off LISA Pathfinder around July once its final demonstrations are complete.

Email the author.

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

See more here:

[ April 26, 2017 ] Gravitational wave testbed repurposed as comet dust detector News - Spaceflight Now

Peggy Whitson and fellow astronaut Jack Fischer.

The American astronaut whos spent the most time in space is now an Iowa native.

Peggy Whitson, who was named the stations commander earlier this month, has spent a total of 535 days in orbit during her three missions. The previous record-holder was astronaut Jeff Williams with 534 days.

President Trump made a congratulatory call to Whitson this morning. Thats an incredible record to break and on behalf of our nation and frankly, on behalf of the world, Id like to congratulate you, Trump said. That is really something.

Astronaut Kate Rubins, President Trump, First Daughter Ivanka Trump.

First Daughter Ivanka Trump and astronaut Kate Rubins were also on the call. Whitson, a native of Beaconsfield, is scheduled to be aloft another five months. In a Radio Iowa interview from orbit in December, Whitson was very upbeat about sharing the station with four other astronauts.

Since I flew the last time, weve probably increased the internal volume by almost 30%, so its actually not really feeling very crowded at all up here, Whitson says. Theres still many days where I work by myself in a module on a task and the guys are in their own modules and maybe one of the Russians will come down and ask, Hey, wheres Shane? and Im like, I dont know, have to go look.'

Several of the new laboratories are the size of school buses and the station overall is roughly as big as a football field. Plus, the famed cupola has been added since Whitson was last there, a large circular porthole through which astronauts can watch the clouds and continents drift past.

We dont really feel too crowded here, its actually very nice to be able to have an opportunity at mealtimes, usually lunch but always at dinnertime, to get together and talk and share what weve been doing over the day, what was hard, what was funny, Whitson says. Its fun to get together at the end of the day.

During her missions to the station in 2002 and 2007, Whitson said one of her biggest challenges was coping with the monotony of the food. Thats improved, she says, as she shares the truly-international station with one other American, a Frenchman and two Russians.

Takuya Onishi, a Japanese guy, was up here before and he didnt get to eat all of his bonus food, so weve been tasting on that as well as Thomas Pesquets French food, Whitson says. Were having a good time with a little bit more variety than normal. I dont know how long the leftover Japanese food will last, but hopefully well be able to share more of Thomas French food.

Whitson turned 57 in February and is the oldest woman ever to fly in space. She also has the record for most spacewalks (eight) by a woman. NASA chose to add three months to her current mission and shes now scheduled to return to Earth in September.

Even with the extra time, Whitson wont beat the all-time space duration record held by Russian cosmonaut Gannady Padalka at 879 days over five missions.

View post:

Peggy Whitson breaks space travel record, gets call from the president - Radio Iowa

Astronaut and Iowa native Peggy Whitson has set a U.S. record for space travel. Today is her 535th cumulative day in space, one day longer than the record previously held by astronaut Jeff Williams. Whitson is currently commanding the International Space Station, and this morning took a congratulatory phone call from President Donald Trump.

Thats an incredible record to break, Trump said via a video link from the Oval Office. On behalf of our nation and, frankly, on behalf of the world, Id like to congratulate you. That is really something.

Whitson grew up on a farm in Mt. Ayr in southwest Iowa. She says it was the Apollo missions to the moon that first got her interested in becoming an astronaut.

But I dont really think it became a goal until I graduated from high school and the first female astronauts were selected, she said. Seeing those role models and with the encouragement of my parents and various mentors in college and graduate school and when I started working at Rice [University], thats what made it possible, I think, to become an astronaut.

Whitson has worked for NASA since 1989 and took her first space flight in 2002. Shes on her third mission aboard the International Space Station, and is commanding it for the second time. Shes scheduled to return to earth in September.

Follow this link:

Iowan Breaks U.S. Space Travel Record - Iowa Public Radio

A starship drive, a vacuum airship, solar surfing. NASA has awarded funding to 22 new projects as part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. This is where the organisation awards the most innovative, and sometimes wacky, ideas for new technologies aiding humanitys future exploration of space

The newly published description of far-out projects reads like the contents of a sci-fi anthology.

The grants program has two tiers: Phase I for initial concepts; and Phase II for graduating the most promising ideas from previous Phase I grants. All of the final candidates were outstanding, says Jason Derleth, NIAC program executive. We look forward to seeing how each new study will expand how we explore the universe.

Here is a round-up of some of the most exciting projects.

First the Phase I projects. These each receive about $125,000, for nine months, to help define and analyse their concepts.

Top: Artists conception of the final spacecraft. Lower left: Illustration of the concept device. Lower right: Prototype device.

Mark Rademaker / Nolan van Rossum / Heidi Fern

This project proposes to develop a futuristic thruster, based on the so-called Mach effect, that could be capable of sending a spacecraft to an exoplanet 5 light years away in as little as 20 years.

The thruster is based on the ideas of James Woodward, who hypothesised the new kind of propulsion system in 1990.

The core of the device is a huge capacitor moving up and down on a piston, being continually charged and discharged as it moves. Woodward hypothesised the simultaneous change in energy and acceleration, would cause the capacitors mass to briefly change raising the possibility it could push and pull a craft through space.

It would be a bit like standing on an ice rink with a bowling ball in your hands, and pushing the ball back and forth to shuffle yourself along.

Like the electromagnetic (EM) drive is claimed to do, the Mach Effect Thruster (MET) is predicted to produce thrust without ejecting any propellant. In fact, some physicists are trying to explain the EM drive by applying the physics of the Mach effect.

The project is led by Heidi Fearn at the Space Studies Institute, a non-profit based in California. Using the grant, she plans to improve lab prototypes of the device, and figure out what it would take to send a 1.2 tonne spacecraft a distance of 8 light years.

The physics community has always been highly sceptical of Woodwards idea, since it seems to violate Newtons third law of motion, but if it works wed enter a new era of space exploration. So NASA obviously reckon its worth a shot.

A schematic of the laser-powered spacecraft.

John Brophy

Another breakthrough propulsion project is based on the relatively conventional idea of using a laser to remotely power a spacecraft. Rather than using the lights momentum to push the craft, as with solar sail technology and Breakthrough Starshot, the idea here is to remotely send electrical energy that can then power a thruster.

John Brophy at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory plans to use laser beams generated by a 10-km diameter array of satellites to power a spacecraft equipped with giant solar panels. The panels would convert the laser beam energy to electricity, which would in turn be used to accelerate lithium ions through a thruster. Brophy estimates the project could deliver a drive system 20 times as powerful as the current state-of-the-art ion drive on the Dawn space probe orbiting Ceres.

A balloon or airship works by filling a huge bag with very light air (helium, hot air, or, in the case of the ill-fated Hindenburg, hydrogen). An airship filled with nothing (i.e. a vacuum) would theoretically provide even greater lift. On Earth such a design could never work with currently known materials, as atmospheric pressure would crush the ship. But Mars is a different story. Its lower gravity and sparser atmosphere mean a vacuum airship just might work. This project, by John Paul Clarke at Georgia Institute of Technology, aims to nut out the details.

Robert Youngquist at NASAs Kennedy Space Center plans to develop a coating that could reflect 99.9% of sunlight, making it 80 times more reflective than current materials. A bit like in the 2007 movie Sunshine, such a reflector would allow probes to get much closer to the Sun than currently possible as close as one solar radius to the Sun, Youngquist thinks. Thats less than 1 million kilometres. (For comparison, on its closest approach Mercury is still 57 times further away from the Sun.)

Other Phase I projects include a mission to use the Suns gravity as a lens to directly image an exoplanet with megapixel resolution, a turbolift artificial gravity device for deep space missions, and a project to render Martian soil useful for agriculture with synthetic biology.

The Phase II program awards up to $500,000 for the most promising projects from the Phase I program.

Gary Hughes and California Polytechnic State University plan to reveal what asteroids are made of by blasting them with a laser (from Earth orbit) and detecting the light given off by the atoms discharged. Since each element has a unique spectral fingerprint, this light can be used to identify the atomic makeup of the asteroid and perhaps figure out which ones could be worth mining.

The optical mining plan.

TransAstra

This advanced asteroid mining project is based on using focused sunlight as a mining drill. Joel Sercel at TransAstra Corp is leading this project, which envisions a huge solar reflector to direct sunlight onto an asteroid. The oxygen, water vapour and other materials given off would then be captured and stored to fuel other missions exploring the solar system.

Other Phase II projects include developing a new way to identify exoplanets by detecting starlight reflected from distant worlds, and a fusion-powered probe for visiting Pluto.

NASA cautions that all projects are still in the early stages of development, most requiring more than a decade of before theyll ever see use on a NASA mission. Still, Derleth is upbeat:

Hopefully, they will all go on to do what NIAC does best change the possible.

Continued here:

Reaching for the stars: the top ideas in space travel - Cosmos

Other day upon returning from New York to Mumbai, dusky beauty Priyanka Chopra enjoyed a huge warm welcome at the airport though fans have mobbed her. And then here is a big news about her impending space travel.

Though Priyanka is here to promote her latest movie Baywatch, where she got a minuscular role as an antagonist, here's the stunning update. Couple of years ago, a debutante director Priya Mishra, who has headed an entertainment channel earlier, has offered a chance to Priyanka to star in the biopic being made on India's first woman astronaut in space, Kalpana Chawla. There seems to be some movement on this project now.

It's heard that our hottie is preparing for the role as the pre-production of the biopic is going on at a full swing. Probably after acting as Mary Kom in one biopic, this will be second such thing for Priyanka. Kalpana Chawla hails from Haryana and flew into space shuttle Columbia in 1997. She died on her second expedition along with six other crew members in 2003, in a space shuttle disaster.

Priyanka's biopic on Kalpana will feature the life and times of the astronaut including her journey all the was to NASA, USA and her final hours in the space shuttle.

View original post here:

Dusky Beauty Preparing For Space Travel - Gulte

In BriefThe Unruh effect has been heavily debated for the past fortyyears. Canadian researchers believe that they can prove the theoryusing currently available particle accelerators and electromagnets.

Forty years ago, Canadian physicist Bill Unruh made a surprising prediction regarding quantum field theory. Known as the Unruh effect, his theory predicted that an accelerating observer would be bathed in blackbody radiation, whereas an inertial observer would be exposed to none. What better way to mark the 40th anniversary of this theory than to consider how it could affect human beings attempting relativistic space travel?

Such was the intent behind a new study by a team of researchers from Sao Paulo, Brazil. In essence, they consider how the Unruh effect could be confirmed using a simple experiment that relies on existing technology. Not only would this experiment prove once and for all if the Unruh effect is real, it could also help us plan for the day when interstellar travel becomes a reality.

To put it in laymans terms, Einsteins Theory of Relativity states that time and space are dependent upon the inertial reference frame of the observer. Consistent with this is the theory that if an observer is traveling at a constant speed through empty vacuum, they will find that the temperature of said vacuum is absolute zero. But if they were to begin to accelerate, the temperature of the empty space would become hotter.

This is what William Unruh a theorist from the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver asserted in 1976. According to his theory, an observer accelerating through space would be subject to a thermal bath i.e. photons and other particles which would intensify the more they accelerated. Unfortunately, no one has ever been able to measure this effect, since no spacecraft exists that can achieve the kind of speeds necessary.

For the sake of their study which was recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters under the title Virtual observation of the Unruh effect the research team proposed a simple experiment to test for the Unruh effect. Led by Gabriel Cozzella of the Institute of Theoretical Physics (IFT) at Sao Paulo State University, they claim that this experiment would settle the issue by measuring an already-understood electromagnetic phenomenon.

Essentially, they argue that it would be possible to detect the Unruh effect by measuring what is known as Larmor radiation. This refers to the electromagnetic energy that is radiated away from charged particles (such as electrons, protons or ions) when they accelerate. As they state in their study:A more promising strategy consists of seeking for fingerprints of the Unruh effect in the radiation emitted by accelerated charges. Accelerated charges should back react due to radiation emission, quivering accordingly. Such a quivering would be naturally interpreted by Rindler observers as a consequence of the charge interaction with the photons of the Unruh thermal bath.

As they describe in their paper, this would consist of monitoring the light emitted by electrons within two separate reference frames. In the first, known as the accelerating frame, electrons are fired laterally across a magnetic field, which would cause the electrons to move in a circular pattern. In the second, the laboratory frame, a vertical field is applied to accelerate the electrons upwards, causing them to follow a corkscrew-like path.

In the accelerating frame, Cozzella and his colleagues assume that the electrons would encounter the fog of photons, where they both radiate and emit them. In the laboratory frame, the electrons would heat up once vertical acceleration was applied, causing them to show an excess of long-wavelength photons. However, this would be dependent on the fog existing in the accelerated frame to begin with.

In short, this experiment offers a simple test which could determine whether or not the Unruh effect exists, which is something that has been in dispute ever since it was proposed. One of the beauties of the proposed experiment is that it could be conducted using particle accelerators and electromagnets that are currently available.

On the other side of the debate are those who claim that the Unruh effect is due to a mathematical error made by Unruh and his colleagues. For those individuals, this experiment is useful because it would effectively debunk this theory. Regardless, Cozzella and his team are confident their proposed experiment will yield positive results.

We have proposed a simple experiment where the presence of the Unruh thermal bath is codified in the Larmor radiation emitted from an accelerated charge, they state. Then, we carried out a straightforward classical-electrodynamics calculation (checked by a quantum-field-theory one) to confirm it by ourselves. Unless one challenges classical electrodynamics, our results must be virtually considered as an observation of the Unruh effect.

Excerpt from:

We May Finally Find out If Deep Space Travel Would Melt Astronauts - Futurism

Who doesnt knows Steve Wozniak? Apples co-founder and tech wizard Wozniak is one of the most revered personalities of the Silicon Valley. Thoughhe is not directly associated with Apple any more, he keeps inspiring the inventors with his words and presence at various events. This Friday, he will appear at the upcoming Silicon Valley Comic Con event for the sake of enjoying the nerd side of things. While speaking with Fortune, Wozniak discussed his views on a variety of subjects like his former companys behavior, influence of money on the Silicon Valley and his introvert side.

In response to the question regarding the changing landscape of the Silicon Valley, Wozniak said that things have changed indeed. Businesses now, have no interest in making the world a better place, because they are being started by business people, and not engineers. These business people enter the Valley for the sake of money making along with a quick exit plan like selling the business for quick money. When he began his career with Steve Jobs, all he thought was that once the company turns profitable, it stays with the owner forever.

He also said that he does not invest because he is not fond of money. He believes that money could corrupt ones values. He also said that he has never longed for being into the more than you could ever need category.

Speaking on the success of software giants like Facebook, Wozniak said that Microsoft has always been a successful software entity therefore the success of other software companies is not baffling anymore. Even Apple, which always believed in building hardware and software all together, is now building just the software part of self-driving cars.

Steve Wozniak also quoted Amazons and SpaceXs dream of materializing commercial space travel by saying that all the breathtaking milestones, which completely changed the world, such as iPhone, Google or Facebook, have been the product of someones thought. SpaceX and Blue Origins are another such ideas emerging from the minds of individuals who are planning something very risky.

Steve Wozniak believes thatspace exploration comes down to engineering and scientific knowledge. Such ventures do require a lot of funding, but still, recalling the achievements of NASA with such a brief funding, the strides of such big private players(Musk and Bezos) does not surprise him anymore.

When he was asked whether Google Apple would become even bigger by the year 20175, he said he doesnt know. He also mentioned that everyone should only do what they are best at. Apple is good at making products but this doesnt mean it should try and build every single product in existence.

Talking about himself and his Twitter feed, Wozniak said that he has never been a pro in socializing, and doesnt find himself fitting for social networks. Therefore, he skips Facebook and Twitter despite of having 5000 friends on Facebook. But he does prefer Foursquare for some reasons. Oh and he also mentioned having a street in San Jose after him. Sweet, right?

Here is the original post:

Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak speaks about Microsoft, space ... - The Tech Portal