As the founder, CEO and lead designer at SpaceX, a private company that makes rockets and spacecraft, Elon Musk envisions a time when his reusable rockets will bring people to the moon and Mars. He’s focused on humans becoming a “multi-planet species,” and on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, he speaks with Jeffrey Kluger (editor-at-large at Time magazine, and the co-author of “Apollo 13”) about his vision for the future.
It will take more than six weeks to travel about 238,600 miles (384,000km) to the moon. The four-tonne spacecraft has a lunar orbiter, a lander named Vikram after the founder of Isro, and a rover. The rover, named Pragyan, which means “wisdom” in Sanskrit, will spend two weeks traversing the moon’s surface. The six-wheeled vehicle, which will be deployed in early September, will collect crucial information about the mineral and chemical composition of the lunar surface, and search for water.
It was, he added, a “fully indigenous” project, using Indian technology.
Chandrayaan-2 aims to become the first mission to conduct a surface landing on the lunar south pole region, where it will collect crucial information about the moon’s composition. It would be India’s first surface landing on the moon – a feat previously achieved by only Russia, the US and China.
The $141m (£113m) mission is a “demonstration of the growing sophistication of India’s space power”, said Dr Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, head of the nuclear and space policy initiative at the Observer Research Foundation thinktank in Delhi.
The incredible power of the GPU! Next gen consoles are gonna be lit! 😍.
Half-a-century has passed since mankind first set its foot on the moon. And while NASA is preparing to send the first woman to the moon, some humans still believe that space exploration done by US-based agency NASA was nothing more than a fake moon mission.
Anyway, July 20 was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon mission. On this occasion, Nvidia — a US-based company which designs graphics for computers — made an effort to debunk conspiracy theories and find out if Neil Amstrong and Buzz Aldrin actually landed on the moon or if it was just a dark film studio.
Posted in robotics/AI, space travel
Countdown to the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing: We’re proud to join NASA’s quest to return to the Moon! We’re contributing Canadarm3, a smart robotic system that will help maintain the Lunar Gateway, a small space station in lunar orbit!
Video: CSA/NASA
X3 is a powerful ion thruster that could one day propel humans beyond Earth. The thruster was successfully tested few months ago, and could be selected by NASA as a crucial component of propulsion system for future Mars missions.
X3 is a Hall-effect thruster—a type of ion thruster in which the propellant (most commonly xenon) is accelerated by electric and magnetic fields. Such thrusters are safer and more fuel efficient than engines used in traditional chemical rockets. However, they currently offer relatively low thrust and acceleration. Therefore, engineers are still working to make them more powerful.
Nearly 31.5 inches (80 centimeters) in diameter and weighing around 507 lbs. (230 kilograms), X3 is a three-channel nested thruster designed to operate at power levels up to 200 kW. The thruster is jointly developed by the University of Michigan (U-M), NASA and the U.S. Air Force. The project is funded through NASA’s Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnership (NextSTEP).
50 years ago today, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. It took 4 days and an incredible mid-flight rotation to accomplish.
50 years after the first Moon landing, humanity is getting ready to go back. Countries and companies are planning dozens of lunar missions—for research, for resources and even for tourism, which begs the question: who, if anyone, owns the Moon?
Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: https://econ.st/2xvTKdy
Who owns this? Is it America — the country that planted a flag on it?
Or this man — who has been selling plots of it for almost 40 years?
Or is it us — and anyone else who bought one and has the certificate to prove it?
Today many believe the Moon could be the next frontier for tourism, space exploration or even the mining of precious natural resources. Which means this question might be about to become a lot more important.
As the world celebrates the landing of American astronauts to the Moon, a crown just landed on the head of a Filipina conquering the Universe! #Apollo11 #Apollo50th #MissUniverse
Spaceflight is hard. Blasting heavy cargo, spacecraft, and maybe people to respectable speeds over interplanetary distances requires an amount of propellant too massive for current rockets to haul into the void. That is, unless you have an engine that can generate thrust without fuel.
It sounds impossible, but scientists at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories have been building and testing just such a thing. Called an EmDrive, the physics-defying contraption ostensibly produces thrust simply by bouncing microwaves around inside a closed, cone-shaped cavity, no fuel required.
The device last made headlines in late 2016 when a leaked study reported the results of the latest round of NASA testing. Now, independent researchers in Germany have built their own EmDrive, with the goal of testing innovative propulsion concepts and determining whether their seeming success is real or an artifact.
It’s been almost 42 years since NASA sent its two Voyager spacecraft on record-breaking missions, and both of the decades-old robots are still alive. Voyager 1 and 2 are 13.5 billion and 11.1 billion miles from Earth, respectively, and it’s up to NASA engineers to ensure they remain up and running for as long as possible.
As the agency reveals in a new update, mission managers recently decided to shut down one of the heaters on Voyager 2 which is designed to keep its cosmic ray subsystem (CRS) instrument at a comfortable temperature. This was done to conserve energy, but the CRS itself miraculously still works, despite dipping well below the temperatures it was tested at over four decades ago.
