Lifeboat Foundation

Claudiu Stan of Rutgers University—Newark, New Jersey, and his colleagues were watching moving drops of supercooled water spontaneously freeze when they noticed something unexpected: drops kept suddenly disappearing. Initially they thought that the lost drops had shattered as they froze. But, on closer inspection, they found that the icy drops were still there, they had just moved out of view. The team has now developed a quantitative model for this behavior, attributing it to a rocket-like propulsion mechanism induced by the freezing process [1]. Stan says that the finding could inspire scientists to design self-propelled systems powered by such phase transitions.

The team’s results add to a growing body of work on self-propelled drops. The mechanisms behind such motion vary wildly, but Stan notes that they all involve symmetry breaking. For the freezing drops, this symmetry breaking arises when the ice nucleation starts off-center. When ice nucleates, the change in structure releases latent heat, causing the local evaporation rate to suddenly increase, and if the nucleation is off-center, this enhanced evaporation occurs unevenly over the drop’s surface. Like a rocket ejecting a propellant heated by a chemical reaction, this asymmetrical evaporation increases the drop’s momentum, with the team’s model predicting peak velocities of nearly 1 m/s.

Stan says that this propulsion mechanism has a unique feature that could make it attractive for applications: unlike most self-propelled particles, it requires no surfaces and no surrounding fluid (the experiments were done under vacuum). But, for him, the findings have another bonus: “I am a fan of space exploration, so it was exciting to realize that [we could] draw an analogy between these tiny droplets and rockets,” he says.

What does the inside of a nuclear fusion reactor look like?

“It looks like the future,” Stuart White, head of communications at Tokamak Energy, told Newsweek. “A spaceship. It’s extremely striking, powerful and exciting. You can’t take your eyes off it.”

Nuclear fusion is a technology that creates energy in the same way as the sun: it occurs when two atoms are thrust together with such force that they combine into a single, larger atom and release huge amounts of energy in the process.

This is the first time a nuclear powered engine has been tested in fifty years.

“Success is far from certain, but excitement is guaranteed.”

We may be just one month from seeing SpaceX attempt to fly Starship to orbit. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed the launch attempt is likely just around the corner over the weekend when he wrote on Twitter, “if remaining tests go well, we will attempt a Starship launch next month.”

SpaceX readies for massive Starship milestone.

Continue reading “Starship will likely launch to orbit for the first time in March” »

We could be just a month away from the first-ever Starship orbital launch attempt.

SpaceX will try to send its huge Starship rocket to Earth orbit for the first time in March, provided the vehicle checks a few more boxes successfully, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said over the weekend.

A science instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been switched off and on again by NASA engineers after the spacecraft was struck by galactic rays, according to the space agency.

A blog post reveals that on Jan. 15 the telescope’s Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument was impacted by high-energy radiation from outside our solar system, disrupting its communications equipment.

NIRISS is crucial to JWST because it can analyze the atmospheres of distant exoplanets. So far it’s helped find carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of WASP-39b, a hot gas-giant orbiting a Sun-like star about 700 light-years from Earth.

Elon Musk lost his claim as having the most powerful space-worthy rocket when NASA blasted its own mega rocket to the moon in November.

But the SpaceX founder could win back the title with his company’s next big project. Starship, SpaceX’s skyscraping rocket and spacecraft, will launch on its first mission soon. During the test flight, the colossal booster will separate about three minutes after liftoff and land in the Gulf of Mexico, according to federal filings (Opens in a new window). The ship will fly in space around Earth at an altitude of over 150 miles, then splash down off the Hawaiian coast (Opens in a new window).

Continue reading “Get ready: SpaceX Starship’s first launch is for real” »

Last year, space fans witnessed the long-awaited first test flight of NASA’s moon-bound Space Launch System rocket, but this year could see even more action at the launch pad, as a slate of new rockets look to make their debut.

“There’s a lot to look forward to,” said Colleen Anderson, a historian of technology at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “It’s going to be an interesting time with first flights for a lot of new launch vehicles.”

Continue reading “Bigger, faster, farther: A batch of new rockets is set to blast into space this year” »

Probably not but who knows in a million years?

Whether other universes are membranes floating in space, or a quirk of quantum mechanics, this is how physicists think we’ll traverse the multiverse.