We’re eagerly awaiting the next step in human exploration — which involves putting feet on Mars instead of things with…
Browsing: space
Last year was an excellent year for space exploration, with the icing on the cake the first ever image acquired of a black hole by the Event Horizon Telescope. This year, 2020, is set to be interesting too. Here’s what to look out for.
Satellites are becoming increasingly important in our lives, as they help us meet a demand for more data, exchanged at…
At an upcoming summit in early December, NATO is expected to declare space as a “warfighting domain”, partly in response to new developments in technology. If it does declare space a war zone, NATO could start using space weapons that can destroy satellites or incoming enemy missiles. But what is this technology and how could it enable a war?
But building a moon base and actually living on the moon will require careful planning. First, we need to identify and map available lunar resources, including hydrogen and water ice. Such compounds are crucial if we are to create breathable air and rocket fuel, whether for an observatory or a launchpad to go to the outer planets in our solar system.
Recycling satellites could provide not just raw materials for more construction in space, but a revenue stream to fund it. My research showed that an orbit 150 km further out that GEO Gateway Earth would have access to the whole of GEO. From there whole satellites could be taken by space drones into the floating recycling centre for a tune-up if needed.
A sustainable space program requires reliable, fully autonomous robotic systems both for maintaining the existing space infrastructures and for building new ones beyond low Earth orbits. Autonomy is particularly essential to near-future space robotic systems as they must operate in harsh and partially understood environments.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing. This was possible thanks to an extraordinary acceleration of…
The Apollo computer was state-of-the-art in its time, but what would have been different if the moon landing had the state-of-the-art computers that are available today?
I suspect that the software development time would have been a lot faster, due to the software development tools that are available today. It would have been a lot quicker to write, debug and test the complex code required to deliver a man to the moon.
A blue moon, if you’re being technically correct (the best kind of correct), is the second full moon to appear in a single calendar month. A Blue Moon, though, is the lunar lander unveiled by Amazon head and Blue Origin founder, Jeff Bezos.