Category Archives: Space Travel

Areas of cooperation which could result from the accord are outer space exploration, including astrophysical research and planetary studies; remote observation of Earth from space; satellite communications; and information sharing, the newspaper El Universal reported. Potential areas of cooperation include manned space travel and the shared use of spacecraft launch services, the study of spacial meteorology, space biology and medicine, and the mitigation and reduction of space debris.

The agreement will also provide a platform for academic exchange, with a focus on the use of space technology for social good. Priority areas will be medicine and distance education, the monitoring of climate change, agriculture, and the protection of citizens from natural disasters and fires.

With reports from El Universal

Mexico has made no secret of its space exploration ambitions. In July it joined Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay and Costa Rica in an agreement to form a Latin American regional space agency. The Mexican Space Agencys Landeros said Russias history of space exploration had long inspired Mexico. Russias pioneering activities in space have been an inspiration for the whole world, especially for Mexico, and we remember, for example, the incredible journey of Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space in 1961, who after that achievement made a visit to our country. A year later, the National Commission for Outer Space was created here, the precursor of the current Mexican Space Agency, so we have a long history of good relations, he said.

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Mexico and Russia sign agreement to cooperate in space exploration - Space Bollyinside - BollyInside

A team of 20 women are part of a study to understand the effects of space travel on the female body, tucking themselves in a waterbed for five days as part of a dry immersion. The study will recreate some of the effects of spaceflight on the body.

Space travel will soon become much more commercial and long-lasting compared to what it is today. The boundary beyond the Earth will witness a new race as male and female astronauts jettison from the surface towards Moon and beyond with the Artemis missions planned in the coming years. While male astronauts have ventured to the Moon and returned, the first female astronaut to the Moon will launch with Artemis.

The study began on September 21 with two participants at the MEDES Space Clinic in Toulouse, France. The European Space Agency (ESA) launched the study, called VIVALDI, to address the gender gap in science data. It is the second time a dry immersion study is being conducted with all-female participants, and it is a first for Europe.

A dry immersion study is conducted with volunteers lying down in containers similar to bathtubs covered with waterproof fabric to keep them dry and evenly suspended in water. "As a result, the body experiences supportlessness something close to what astronauts experience while floating on the International Space Station," the Institute of Space Medicine and Physiology said in a statement.

This is the only the second time a dry immersion campaign takes place with all-female participants, and it is a first for Europe. (Photo: ESA)

There is almost no knowledge about the physiological and psychological effects on women in this research area. An all-female dry immersion study will add to previous male campaigns ran in Europe and Russia, said Angelique Van Ombergen, ESAs discipline lead for life sciences.

The dry immersion technique tries to replicate the effects of weightlessness that astronauts experience in space that causes them to lose muscle and bone density, experience visual deterioration. Previous studies have also shown that the absence of gravity leads to fluids shifting towards the brain that can lead to some hearing impairments.

Therefore it becomes crucial to prepare astronauts for such events in advance in order to stay healthy in orbit. "The results from this type of research do not only benefit astronauts but have implications for patients on Earth with similar disorders and elderly people," the institute said.

According to the Institute, the immersion begins when water covers the subject above the thorax, immobilised with legs and trunk covered with a cotton sheet. Only the arms and head remain free outside the tarp.

Graphic: ESA

As part of the study, participants spend 24 hours in the immersion tank, limiting their movements as much as possible. "Each day starts at 7 am with urine and blood samples, and it is filled with scientific protocols and measurements to study how the body adapts," the institute said.

The doctors maintain that all the day-to-day activities are conducted while being immersed and only a small pillow is allowed during meals to ease eating. " Showering and transfer to other experiments are done outside of the tank while lying on their backs and with their head tilted 6 degrees down to minimise fluid shifts," it added.

The study is being hailed as an important event ahead of the larger participation of women in spaceflight operations. It could fill the gaps in data that would help in designing better health and medical strategies for women astronauts going forward.

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A 24-hour-long 'spa': 20 women to immerse in waterbeds to understand effects of space on female body - India Today

Space has been a hot topic in 2021, and from Jeff Bezos launching himself up there to NASA furthering its Mars training, weve seen a lot. As our life on earth seems to align more and more with Interstellar, it looks like space careers are going to be on the rise. If its something youre interested in, youre lucky because you just so happen to be in one of the best cities.

MoveBuddha analyzed the American cities with the best combination of factors to support the rigorous demands of astronauts. The study looked at citys with at least150,000 residents according to 2019 census data and three main factors. The factors include educational opportunities, health and environment, and job opportunities.

Recent Posts:Both Washington state and Seattle just ranked as the most neighborly places in the US35 of the absolute best things to do in & around Seattle this October

So how did Seattle do? Well, it turns out we ranked #4 in the top 25 cities to launch a career in space travel, #15 in space travel job opportunities, and #4 for the best city to raise a future astronaut in. Who wouldve thought? Might just be time for a career switch!

If you wondering what places came out on top, theyll probably be no surprise. Arlington, VA came out on top in both cities to launch a career in space travel and thebest city to raise a future astronaut in. Just think about it, they have a high concentration of prestigious universities, military presence, and tons of job opportunities.

If youd like to check out the full study you can click here. Who knows, maybe Seattle will eventually top the list as one of the best cities for space jobs.

With a curated slate of what matters in your city, Curiocity presents you with the most relevant local food, experiences, news, deals, and adventures. We help you get the most out of your city and focus on the easy-to-miss details so that youre always in the know.

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Want to be an astronaut? Seattle is one of the best cities in America for space jobs - Curiocity

image:The success of the Change-5 mission, due in no small part to its innovative GNC system, paves the way for future space exploration missions such as asteroid landing, as well as humanitys most daring dream crewed space travel. view more

Credit: Space: Science & Technology

The fifth lunar exploration mission of the Chinese space program, Change-5, is the first of Chinas lunar sample-return missions, with a simple objective: to land on the moon surface, collect samples, and bring them home. The first step would set the tone for the rest of the mission, making it crucial to achieve a soft landing (when the spacecraft lands intact) on rocky lunar terrain. The guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system is crucial to this task. A recent studypublished in Space: Science & Technologyby a research team led by Dr.Honghua Zhang of the Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, breaks down the design of the Change-5 GNC system. We hope that the GNC methods presented in this paper will find application in future lunar exploration, crewed space exploration, and other missions, says Dr. Zhang.

The Change-5 spacecraft comprised of an orbiter and return module (ORM), which remained in the lunar orbit in space, and a lander and ascender module (LAM), which proceeded to land on the lunar surface. The ascender part of the LAM later returned to the ORM with lunar samples. The ascender then separated from the ORM and performed a controlled deorbit to land on the lunar surface. While previous Chinese lunar missions, Change-3 and Change-4, had successfully achieved soft landings, Change-5 was the first to plan a return to the ORM, providing a new challenge for redesigning its GNC system. The LAM of Change-5 contained some new components, including a light surface tension tank for the increased quantity of propellant required to relaunch the LAM from the lunar surface.

The LAM has to be released from the ORM in a horizontal orientation but land in a vertical orientation. Designing the right guidance method that allows this process of turning upright, called attitude reorientation, while avoiding sloshing the liquid propellant, which would create an imbalance of the internal forces in the LAM, derailing the descent, was crucial.

The scientists used a three-part reconfigurable attitude control that included a quaternion partition control, a phase and gain stabilization filter, and a dual observer. The former helped control the angle and angular velocity of the LAM, thereby enabling fast and stable attitude reorientation. Sloshing was resolved by the filter, which constrained the pitch, yaw and roll of the LAM, improving the robustness of the control system and helping avoid instability. Finally, the dual observer achieved better control performance by estimating and compensating for disturbances like sloshing disturbance, misalignment of center of mass, and thruster induced disturbance.

The LAM used various sensors to help navigate its descent and landing. The inclusion of multiple sensors for the same purpose improved system redundancy, which is crucial to space missions where there is no opportunity to repair a faulty sensor. But how did the Change-5 detect faulty sensors and choose alternate ones? This was achieved through a process called intelligent heterogeneous sensor data fusion, where the outputs of many similar-purposed sensors were compared. If the output from one sensor was found to be vastly different, the sensor was deemed faulty and one of the other sensors would be chosen for navigation. According to Dr. Zhang, The data fusion methods described in our work for onboard sensors, such as inertial measurement units (like gyroscopes and accelerometers) and velocimeters, have the potential to improve future aerial vehicles, both terrestrial and cosmic.

The Change-5 spacecraft returned to Earth on December 16, carrying with it the youngest lunar samples (only 1.2 billion years old!) so far ever to be obtained by humankind. The success of the Change-5 mission, due in no small part to its innovative GNC system, paves the way for future space exploration missions such as asteroid landing, as well as humanitys most daring dream crewed space travel.

###

Reference

Authors: Honghua Zhang1,2, Ji Li1,2, Zeguo Wang1, and Yifeng Guan1,2

Title of original paper: Guidance Navigation and Control for ChangE-5 Powered Descent

Journal: Space: Science & Technology

DOI: 10.34133/2021/9823609

Affiliations: 1Beijing Institute of Control Engineering, China

2Science and Technology on Space Intelligent Control Laboratory, China

About Dr. Honghua Zhang

Honghua Zhang is currently a research fellow at Beijing Institute of Control Engineering. He received his B.S. degree from Xidian University in 1983, M.S. degree from Beijing Institute of Control Engineering in 1985, and Ph.D. degree from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1991, China, respectively. His research interest covers the control of flexible spacecraft, guidance, navigation, and control of lander.

Space Science & Technology

News article

Not applicable

Guidance Navigation and Control for ChangE-5 Powered Descent

13-Jul-2021

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.

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How scientists designed the soft lunar landing of the Chang'e-5 module - EurekAlert

Our goal for this section: Take the entirety of business news that happened over the last three months and distill it into the 5 stories that truly mattered. Heres what we came up with.

Its hard to say just yet, but this summer could be considered a Wright brothers moment for commercial space travel. Billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson blasted off to space in homegrown rockets. And while he didnt go to space himself, Elon Musk did something even more impressiveSpaceX sent the first all-civilian crew into orbit on the Inspiration4.

Something the industry still needs to figure out: literally astronomical costs. Tickets for Virgin Galactic space flights start at $450,000 a seat.

Chinas government tightened the screws on numerous industries as it tries to center the countrys culture around an ideal of common prosperity.

In no particular order, Beijing has a) expanded its ban on crypto-related transactions b) limited the amount of time kids can play video games c) stopped ride-hailing giant Didi from signing up new customers d) banned effeminate men from appearing on TV e) blocked tutoring companies from taking profits, and much more.

The new regulations amount to one of Chinas most dramatic attempts to reset the relationship between business and culture in recent memory.

From record-shattering temps in Oregon to Hurricane Ida in the East, weather disasters affected nearly 1 in 3 Americans this summer. These weather events, plus a new UN report that deemed climate change a code red for humanity, sparked more conversation around climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.

Will it lead to action? Democrats cited failures of our current system (like the NYC subway flooding) as justification for the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill theyre hoping to pass this week.

Hot Vax Summer fizzled out as the highly contagious Delta variant sent Covid cases soaring once again. The wave also created more urgency from the government and businesses to get employees vaccinated.

While some large corporations mandated vaccinations early on, the Biden administration turned the volume up to 11 when it said that all companies with 100 or more employees need to ensure their workers are vaccinated, or otherwise present a weekly negative Covid test. Good news is, the Delta wave appears to have peaked in many pockets of the US.

Turns out, the Ever Given being stuck in the Suez Canal was the least of our supply chain worries this year. Factory closures in Asia due to Covid-19 have prolonged bottlenecks, driving inflation higher and delaying your new couch from arriving.

Some stats that illustrate the brokenness of the global supply chain:

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The Top 5 Business Stories From the Third Quarter - Morning Brew

The U.S. Air Force and emergingSpace Force are venturing into previously uncharted territory. The two branches areexploring the conceptual and technological parameters of more fully weaponizing space with offensive attack technologies.

Space travel has of course long been crucial to Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) flight and Missile Defense efforts to track and destroy incoming ICBMs in the mid-course phase of flight.Now,the prospect of sending new technologies into space to operate offensively as attack weapons is now very much under exploration by the Pentagon.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall confirmed that the possibilities were indeed being explored as what he referred to as global strikes from space. Kendall did not go into much detail,whichis not surprising given the obvious security sensitivities surrounding the issues.Buthe did articulate a few significant parameters regarding how space weapons might operate in the future.

There is potential to put weapons in space and potential for a weapon to be launched into space as a system that goes into orbit, then de-orbits to hit a target, Kendall said.

This latter possibility, Kendall further explained, might prove to be a more survivablemethod of attackas newly engineered space-traveling weapons might be able to operate with an ability to adjust trajectory to avoid a more traditional ICBM flight path. This could enable an offensive weapon to potentially avoid missile warning systems and function with a greater likelihood of traveling through to hit a target.

While Kendall himself did not elaborate much beyond those few remarks, the possibility of further weaponizing space certainly inspires the imagination in several key respects. Technologies such as Ground-Based Interceptors, ground-launched anti-satellite weapons, kill vehicles for missile defense, decoys and countermeasures, and of course, ICBMs have been well known as space weapons systems for many years. What could be new? Couldarmed dronestravel beyond the earths atmosphere to track and destroy enemy ICBMs, hypersonic missiles, or even spacecraft and satellites? What about laser weapons, as they are widely known to be well suited for space operations given that beam attenuation is much less of a factor beyond the earths atmosphere? What about arming satellites themselves with interceptors able to launch from space? Orperhaps integratinglong-range missiles and launch systems into satellites to destroy enemy satellites, spacecraft or even ground-based targets should the range and precision accuracy be sufficient. This kind of possibility seems entirely realistic given how close existing space-based sensors can zoom in on the earths surface. The Missile Defense Agency, for example, is already working on power scaling to assess the feasibility of using space or even surface-ship-fired lasers for ICBM defense and attack operations beyond the earths atmosphere.

Interestingly, one of Kendalls most significant and telling remarks was that he said when it comes to possibilities for space weapons, there is no question about the technical feasibility.

Kendalls remarks on space war were closely mirrored by U.S. Space Force Commander Gen. John Raymond, who made it clear that space is a warzone.

If you look at what China is doing and what Russia is doing. They will not take us on in the air, because they know we will kick their butt, so the only way they think they can challenge us is to take out our space assets. They are developing capabilities to rival us in space, Raymond said at the Air Force Associationsymposium.

Kris Osborn is the defense editor for theNational Interest. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the ArmyAcquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: Flickr

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The U.S. Air and Space Forces Are Ready to "Fully" Weaponize Space - The National Interest

Think about what VR actually is. In the literal sense VR, of course, stands for virtual reality. Lets examine that phrase for a moment, shall we? Without getting too philosophical, we can all agree on what reality is. But, its worth remembering that virtual has a double meaning. While it means existing digitally, not physically, it also means almost. Nearly. Very close. We promise this is going somewhere, and youve actually landed on Space.com and not Dictionary.com.

The idea of doing in an alternate almost reality what you cannot in the real world is very appealing. Thats why people seek out VR headsets like the PlayStation VR or Oculus Quest 2. Were not talking about things like soaring through the sky as a bird or going on an adventure on an alien planet with futuristic weapons (although VR does allow you to do these things). Rather, were thinking about things that you theoretically could do in the real world, but for various reasons may never get the chance to. Mountain climbing, visiting a rainforest, racing at extreme speeds, going into space things like that.

Virtual reality presents an opportunity to experience a wide range of otherwise unobtainable experiences quickly, easily, safely, and often for free. Its not the real thing, of course, but its much closer than you could otherwise get.

One thing that the vast majority of people will never get the chance to do, but that a significant percentage of those same people would love to do, is become an astronaut and visit space. Without the years of mental and physical training necessary (or just being a billionaire), the next best thing we have is virtual reality. For example, Mission: ISS offers a tantalizing taste of astronaut life, and its free. You can get it from the Oculus store for the Oculus Quest 2 system.

Made with help from NASA, Mission: ISS gives you a little corner of the International Space Station to explore. Youre able to navigate tight spaces in zero gravity, look outside to see the Earth hanging below, and gently bat floating items out of your way the full astronaut experience!

Theres an educational component to the experience, most explicitly in terms of the optional pop-ups to be found. If something is highlighted in yellow when you point at it a spacesuit, say, or a control console you can hold the trigger to reveal text and a photo or sometimes a video. Here, a NASA astronaut will talk briefly about their experiences. Its not all dry technical stuff, either. Have you ever wondered how an astronaut washes their hair in zero gravity? Well, if you havent before, you certainly are now. Thats one mystery that Mission: ISS can clear up for you.

Nonetheless, youre free to completely ignore these if you wish, and concentrate on playing astronaut yourself. As we mentioned, this is a zero-gravity experience. You can use the left stick to push yourself forwards and backwards to make things a little easier, but you can (and will) also need to grab onto handholds to push and pull yourself along in every direction. It can take a little while to master moving around in this way. But then, of course it can, this isnt something most people are accustomed to.

You can even go on a simulated spacewalk. Typing this, we can still remember gingerly using our propulsion unit in conjunction with the hand-led navigation wed practiced using while inside. With the Earth looming large below us, we carefully made our way to the area we were asked to check and back, noticing a release of tension once wed reached the airlock. Its alarmingly easy to drift off course or to go too far, and the tether attached to an astronauts spacesuit isnt indestructible

Theres another, safer, but equally tricky mission. From the safety of the inside of the ISS, youll be able to operate the Canadarm 2 which is a giant robotic arm. Its not nearly as simple as you might expect. Operating the arm involves using two sticks while observing it on two separate monitors. Its slow, demanding, and really makes you feel like youre doing proper astronaut work.

Simulating some of the work done on the ISS is very cool, but theres a simple joy to be had just making your way around. The interior is packed full of detail. While its a shame that you cant open up the labeled boxes of astronaut food, youll love taking in the fine detail added to screens, and rewarding yourself with a tricky zero-g journey through the entirety of the available area.

There are plenty of other apps and games that emulate space travel or take place in space (like these best PSVR space games), as well as a huge variety of other bucket list experiences. Many cost money, albeit not that much. However, if youre on a tight budget now that youve got your VR headset, another option is VR video. Again, some of these need to be paid for, but there are a huge number of free ones on YouTube (such as this spacewalk, this skydive experience, or the David Blaine balloon stunt) and within certain apps and VR storefronts.

When it comes to 360 degree VR videos, downloading is always the best option, as streaming them tends to provide a fairly low resolution. Thanks to free streaming VR videos we have (virtually) skydived, ridden a motorbike at terrifying speed, accompanied a solo explorer to the South Pole, flown above world-famous cities, traveled deep below the surface of the ocean, and much more all this without ever having to leave your house (well, once youve learnt how to set up your room for VR). While VR videos arent strictly speaking interactive, they do allow you to look all around you while enjoying the extra immersion that VR offers by default.

VR cant give you the money, knowledge, physique, or equipment that you may be missing for your dream experience. However, it can instantly bypass all those requirements to bring you very, very close. Why wouldnt you take advantage of that? Things will, after all, be virtually the same.

Today's best VR headset deals

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This International Space Station VR experience lets you explore the ISS and its as amazing as it sounds - Space.com

Very few things in life are as predictable as sunsets. No matter what the day brings- you can always count on it to end. Likewise, you can always count on the sun to be there in our sky.

To us its bright, never changing. But 93 million miles away, its actually so much more dynamic. Its seething, says Alex Young, Dr. Alex Young, the Associate Director for Science in the Heliophysics Science Division atNASAsGoddard Space Flight Center.

Its constantly changing, theres huge amounts of energy moving out, creating these huge blasts of energy called solar flares. And it can also burp these huge blobs of billions of tons of solar material and magnetic fields. We call these coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

Heliophysists, or sun scientists, like Young monitor these solar flares and coronal mass ejections through the eyes of numerous spacecraft, watching in various filters which paint the sun in a myriad of colors- searching for any significant expulsions of electromagnetic radiation that could cause trouble here on Earth.

These solar storms have caused widespread power outages, communication blackouts, and in the worst cases we can even lose a satellite. And its happened in a few extreme cases

The good news is that were protected here on Earth, the atmosphere is very thick, says Young. So a lot of the things like x rays and gamma rays, the things that would be really bad for us, dont make it through the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, thats not the case everywhere.

Astronauts heading to the moon, mars, and beyond travel dont have this protection we have on the Earths surface and could be hit with a lethal dose of radiation traveling at the speed of light. Thankfully for future space travel, and our current technologically connected world, scientists with the Space Weather Prediction Center continuously watch for solar storm activity, just like how their counterparts within NOAA watch tropical storms!

Im just scratching the surface of this incredibly complicated but fascinating branch of science that often results in more questions than you started off with, but thats really the exciting part of science in general. Its not just answering questions, its getting new questions which takes us another step forward.

Storm Team 2 Meteorologist David Dickson

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Solar flares & more- an introduction to space weather - WCBD News 2

Over 150 participants from Romania have registered for NASA Space Apps Challenge, the largest space and science hackathon in the world, which will take place on October 2-3., online. The grand award of the global competition is the chance to participate in the launch of a space shuttle in 2022.

Those who want to register can complete the application available on the pages dedicated to the virtual event organized in Romania in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, Timioara and Iai.

The teams will have to solve one of the 28 proposed challenges in areas such as Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning, Apps, Data Organization, Game, Hardware, Knowledge, Lunar Surface Operations, Risk, Science Applications, Space Travel.

Participants can create their own challenge, but it will not enter the final jury.

The two winning teams from each city will qualify for the global stage and enter the competition for the grand award: the chance to witness a space shuttle launch in 2022. In addition, NASA offers ten other awards. The winning teams will upload their solutions on Sunday, October 3, to the global platform for the next stage.

During the hackathon in Romania, the competitors will receive help and advice from dedicated mentorsand a team of experts from Romania will judge the projects. The teams will be assisted during the 48 hours of competition by representatives of Vodafone Romania, Bosch, Google, Thales, Profi, Endava, Tradesilvania and Cloud Software Development.

NASA Awards for the winners

The winning teams from Romania will be evaluated together with the other winning projects globally by the experts of the space agency.

The ten global awards are: Best Use of Science, Best Use of Data, Best Use of Technology, Galactic Impact, Best Mission Concept, Most Inspirational, Best Storytelling Award (new), Global Connection Award (new), Art & Technology Award (new), Local Impact Award (new).

In 2020, Space Apps enjoyed internationally approximately 26,000 participants who created 2,303 projects. The full list of 2020 hackathon finalists can be accessed here. Last year, four teams from Romania qualified for the international judging stage of the competition.

The NASA Space Apps Challenge International Hackathon is an innovative NASA incubation program organized annually. The program gathers thousands of people worldwide who work with NASAs open data in a 48-hour sprint. Since its launch in 2012, NASA Space Apps Challenge has engaged over 150,000 people from over 150 countries and territories.

The Space Apps concept relies on collaboration, creativity and critical thinking, stimulates interest in science and space and Earth exploration, and encourages growth and diversity among the next generation of scientists, technologists, designers and engineers. Space Apps is managed by the Division of Earth Sciences, Science Mission Directorate, at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

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Over 150 participants from Romania enter the NASA Space Apps Challenge competition, the largest space and science hackathon in the world - Business...

Paul M. Sutteris an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of "Ask a Spaceman" and "Space Radio," and author of "How to Die in Space."

The universe is pretty good at smashing things together. All kinds of stuff collides stars, black holes and ultradense objects called neutron stars.

And when neutron stars do it, the collisions release a flood of elements necessary for life.

Let's explore how astronomers used subtle ripples in the fabric of space-time to confirm that colliding neutron stars make life as we know it possible.

Related: When neutron stars collide: Scientists spot kilonova explosion from epic 2016 crash

Just about everything has collided at one point or another in the history of the universe, so astronomers had long figured that neutron stars superdense objects born in the explosive deaths of large stars smashed together, too. But starting about a decade ago, astronomers realized that the collision of neutron stars would be particularly interesting.

For one, a neutron star collision would go out with a flash. It wouldn't be as bright as a typical supernova, which happens when large stars explode. But astronomers predicted that an explosion generated from a neutron star collision would be roughly a thousand times brighter than a typical nova, so they dubbed it a kilonova and the name stuck.

As the name suggests, neutron stars are made of a lot of neutrons. And when you put a bunch of neutrons in a high-energy environment, they start to combine, transform, splinter off and do all sorts of other wild nuclear reaction things.

With all the neutrons flying around and combining with each other, and all the energy needed to power the nuclear reactions, kilonovas are responsible for producing enormous amounts of heavy elements, including gold, silver and xenon. Together with their cousins, supernovas, kilonovas fill out the periodic table and generate all the elements necessary to make rocky planets ready to host living organisms.

In 2017, astronomers witnessed their first kilonova. The event occurred about 140 million light-years from Earth and was first heralded by the appearance of a certain pattern of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time, washing over Earth.

These gravitational waves were detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo observatory, which immediately notified the astronomical community that they had seen the distinct ripple in space-time that could only mean that two neutron stars had collided. Less than 2 seconds later, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a gamma-ray burst a brief, bright flash of gamma-rays.

A flurry of scientific interest followed, as astronomers around the world trained their telescopes, antennas and orbiting observatories at the kilonova event, scanning it in every wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. All told, about one-third of the entire astronomical community around the globe participated in the effort. It was perhaps the most widely described astronomical event in human history, with over 100 papers on the subject appearing within the first two months.

Kilonovas had long been predicted, but with an occurrence rate of 1 every 100,000 years per galaxy, astronomers weren't really expecting to see one so soon. (In comparison, supernovas occur once every few decades in each galaxy.)

And the addition of gravitational wave signals provided an unprecedented glimpse inside the event itself. Between gravitational waves and traditional electromagnetic observations, astronomers got a complete picture from the moment the merger began.

That kilonova alone produced more than 100 Earths' worth of pure, solid precious metals, confirming that these explosions are fantastic at creating heavy elements.

In short, the gold in your jewelry was forged from two neutron stars that collided long before the birth of the solar system.

But that wasn't the only reason the kilonova observations were so fascinating. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light. But astronomers have long been trying to develop extensions and modifications to general relativity, and the vast majority of those extensions and modifications predicted different speeds for gravitational waves.

With that single kilonova event, the universe gave us the perfect place to test this. The gravitational wave signal and the gamma-ray burst signal from the kilonova arrived within 1.7 seconds of each other. But that was after traveling over 140 million miles (225 million kilometers). To arrive at Earth that close to each other over such a long journey, the gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves would have had to travel at the same speed to one part in a million billion.

That single measurement was a billion times more precise than any previous observation, and thus wiped out the vast majority of modified theories of gravity.

No wonder a third of astronomers worldwide found it interesting.

Learn more by listening to the episode "What's so groovy about gravitational waves? (Part 2)" on the "Ask A Spaceman" podcast, available oniTunesand askaspaceman.com. Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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How neutron star collisions flooded Earth with gold and other precious metals - Space.com