Science News Thread (for articles that don't relate to ongoing discussions)

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

3 hours ago, AckSed said:

asteroid

So... We need two sample return missions.  If the sample is as close to Mars chemistry as the moon is to Earth - impactor is correct.  If the sample is not, then capture. 

 

Except - Olympis Mons sticks out of the atmosphere - and could have splattered the moons with Mars stuff - so we will need a follow up mission to DRILL BABY DRILL! 

[darthgently]

The Exploration Company

A European crew service?  Maybe?

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/11/how-real-is-this-european-space-startup-that-aims-to-launch-astronauts/
 

[kerbiloid]

Quote

This vehicle, similar in size to SpaceX's Cargo Dragon vehicle, will have the capacity to dock with the International Space Station, or other space stations, and also be recoverable for reuse. The current timeline for Nyx's debut is 2028

 

Spoiler

[DDE]

On 11/23/2024 at 12:32 AM, darthgently said:

The Exploration Company

A European crew service?  Maybe?

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/11/how-real-is-this-european-space-startup-that-aims-to-launch-astronauts/
 

Quote

The opportunity she saw was to provide an alternative to SpaceX based in Europe. This would yield 100 percent of the market in Europe and offer an option to countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, and other nations interested in going to space.

So, implicitly, they expect an EU-backed monopoly, while at the same time all their plans hinge on launch services from their own competitor. Brilliant.

Quote

As for the vehicle's rocket, the spacecraft is compatible with Europe's Ariane 6 and a host of other boosters, including SpaceX's Falcon 9, Rocket Lab's Neutron, Japan's H3, and India's GSLV.

Oh, I'd love to see the mountains of paperwork certifying that compatibility. No? Oh.

A crew capsule by 2028 would require 1960s NASA levels of funding and focus. Sorry, this is just a sad echo of the private space start-up bubble.

[darthgently]

30 minutes ago, DDE said:

So, implicitly, they expect an EU-backed monopoly, while at the same time all their plans hinge on launch services from their own competitor. Brilliant.

Oh, I'd love to see the mountains of paperwork certifying that compatibility. No? Oh.

A crew capsule by 2028 would require 1960s NASA levels of funding and focus. Sorry, this is just a sad echo of the private space start-up bubble.

I agree overall.  Unless ESA and European space industry culture drastically changes there is not a lot of hope.  They are waking up, but a day late and a dollar short.  Still, I try to be optimistic for the kerbals across the pond 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

4 hours ago, DDE said:

the mountains of paperwork

As long as it's all written in French, there should be no problem. 

[Codraroll]

10 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

As long as it's all written in French, there should be no problem. 

With authenticated and equally valid copies in English, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, Greek, Swedish and a tiny handful of dozens of other languages, of course.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Google researchers... use GPS signal measurements pulled from millions of anonymous Android mobile devices to map the ionosphere. 

Google used millions of Android phones to map the worst enemy of GPS | Popular Science

The blue dots in the graphic above show several regions where the Android ionosphere map exceeded the accuracy of monitoring stations. Credit: Google

 

Researchers ...compared the Android phone map to measurements from a database that includes readings from monitoring stations around the world. The phone method greatly expanded coverage, particularly in areas of India and Eastern Europe where there’s a lack of monitoring stations. In the image above, the blue dots show roughly 100,000 locations around the world where sufficient numbers of phone measurements were available to help map the ionosphere. That’s compared to just 9,000 monitoring stations. 

“In many parts of the world, the performance of our model is equivalent to using the state-of-the-art global ionosphere map fit on measurements from monitoring stations,” the Google blog post reads. 

[kerbiloid]

15 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

As long as it's all written in French, there should be no problem. 

Written in French...

Spoiler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_(tunic)

 

[AckSed]

https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/students-homemade-rocket-soars-faster-and-farther-into-space-than-any-other-amateur-spacecraft-smashing-20-year-records

Students fired off a rocket of their own design (with its own in-house thermal protection paint for hypersonic speed) and it reached 143.3km above Earth's surface.

[darthgently]

Nice progress on lunar PVs

 

[AckSed]

Both this and Blue Alchemist are encouraging, but both use regolith simulant: sorted and graded Earth volcanic tuff and crushed basalt.

Lunar dust has two unique properties. The jagged nature of the particles can be approximated, but the other... can't. Namely, that it melts with a modest amount of microwave energy. I'll just quote the paper "MICROWAVE PROCESSING OF LUNAR SOIL" by Lawrence A. Taylor and Thomas T. Meek:

Quote

Space weathering of lunar regolith has produced myriads of nanophase-sized Fe0 grains set within silicate glass, especially on the surfaces of grains, but also within the abundant agglutinitic glass of the soil. It is possible to melt lunar soil (i.e. 1200-1500 deg. C) in minutes in a normal kitchen-type 2.45 GHz microwave, almost as fast as your tea-water is heated.

Dr. Taylor knows this because Dr. Meek tested it with actual soil gathered by Apollo 17. Putting aside for the fact that you should never, ever, under any circumstances heat water for your tea in a microwave *shudder*, the paper proposes grading a surface like dirt on Earth and sintering either a continuous slab to make a road (apparently a normal magnetron-generated beam penetrates and sinters to half a metre, and melting the top surface completely to glass can be done with a second pass) or using magnets to gather particles with more iron and sintering road slabs out of it. You can even gather the solar-wind particles released: hydrogen, helium (including He3), carbon and nitrogen among others.

If glass can be made that easily, it's probably a good way to make foundations, structures, radiation shielding, glass fibres... even a substrate for a solar cell.

[AckSed]

https://payloadspace.com/ukrainian-small-launcher-finds-refuge-in-the-us/

So this is interesting mostly for Promin's rocket technology - it's autophagic. That is, it burns hybrid solid propellant, gaseous oxidiser and the tanks themselves as fuel, making for a tiny single-stage rocket that can launch a sub-orbital payload of 20kg or 3kg to orbit, and doesn't need to shed mass by staging.

[kerbiloid]

On 12/13/2024 at 11:58 PM, AckSed said:

https://payloadspace.com/ukrainian-small-launcher-finds-refuge-in-the-us/

So this is interesting mostly for Promin's rocket technology - it's autophagic. That is, it burns hybrid solid propellant, gaseous oxidiser and the tanks themselves as fuel, making for a tiny single-stage rocket that can launch a sub-orbital payload of 20kg or 3kg to orbit, and doesn't need to shed mass by staging.

The first launch was planned on 2023, to the altitude of 100 m.

Some people are using caramel and saltpeter for many kilometers long flights...

[AckSed]

Stanford University researchers have created a process for making ammonia from thin air, at ambient temperature and pressure, by utilising an iron-oxide/Nafion catalyst and the properties of water microdroplets: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.ads4443

It goes like this: a fan draws air in through the air filter, through the catalyst, and onto a chilled condenser plate, where the ammonia-enriched water condenses and drips down into a holding tank.

They achieved concentrations of ammonia (120 micro-mol/L) on-site, suitable for some plants. By upscaling a bit, recycling the captured solution and passing it through zeolite filters, then washing it out with a bit of hydrogen chloride, they increased it to 1.4 millimol/L.

The experimental setup is notable for how low-energy and low-tech it is:

Spoiler

 

[darthgently]

20 minutes ago, AckSed said:

Stanford University researchers have created a process for making ammonia from thin air, at ambient temperature and pressure, by utilising an iron-oxide/Nafion catalyst and the properties of water microdroplets: https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.ads4443

It goes like this: a fan draws air in through the air filter, through the catalyst, and onto a chilled condenser plate, where the ammonia-enriched water condenses and drips down into a holding tank.

They achieved concentrations of ammonia (120 micro-mol/L) on-site, suitable for some plants. By upscaling a bit, recycling the captured solution and passing it through zeolite filters, then washing it out with a bit of hydrogen chloride, they increased it to 1.4 millimol/L.

The experimental setup is notable for how low-energy and low-tech it is:

  Hide contents

 

Holy smokes.  This could be amazing depending on energy requirements

[AckSed]

It actually works slightly better in warmer and drier areas, too. And the power requirements are minimal compared to the Haber-Bosch process; if you wanted, you could use ambient wind instead of a fan or spray, and maybe passive cooling to condense the enriched water.

[magnemoe]

17 minutes ago, AckSed said:

It actually works slightly better in warmer and drier areas, too. And the power requirements are minimal compared to the Haber-Bosch process; if you wanted, you could use ambient wind instead of a fan or spray, and maybe passive cooling to condense the enriched water.

yes now an fan don't use much power and refrigerators are very inefficient compared to more efficient ways. It depend on the cost of the catalyst. 
Now the ammonia concentration is low. Is recycling vaporizing the water with ammonia and running it trough the catalyst multiple times? 
one moll of ammonia is just 17 gram.  
Now this might be low tech enough that you can just have this on a farm and add this to the irrigated water, in this case the low concentration is not an issue. Or if its an easy way to get it out of the water? 

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

yes now an fan don't use much power and refrigerators are very inefficient compared to more efficient ways. It depend on the cost of the catalyst. 
Now the ammonia concentration is low. Is recycling vaporizing the water with ammonia and running it trough the catalyst multiple times? 
one moll of ammonia is just 17 gram.  
Now this might be low tech enough that you can just have this on a farm and add this to the irrigated water, in this case the low concentration is not an issue. Or if its an easy way to get it out of the water? 

You’d still need a nitrogen source in addition to water unless ground water has a lot more nitrogen than I’m guessing.  Ag runoff would probably have plenty of nitrogen

[RKunze]

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

You’d still need a nitrogen source in addition to water unless ground water has a lot more nitrogen than I’m guessing

You are literally breathing that nitrogen source :-)

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

You’d still need a nitrogen source in addition to water unless ground water has a lot more nitrogen than I’m guessing.  Ag runoff would probably have plenty of nitrogen

The talked about generator is the nitrogen source. 
My issue is the the water has little ammonia in it so hard to use to make fertilizer to sell but if used to add nitrogen to the water on the farm this is less of an problem. 

[darthgently]

50 minutes ago, RKunze said:

You are literally breathing that nitrogen source :-)

Language barrier parsing issues. I thought he was talking about getting ammonia from water instead of air (as the OP described).  But thanks for your studious attention.  That nitrogen makes up the vast majority of our atmosphere is an amazing science fact for sure

41 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

The talked about generator is the nitrogen source. 
My issue is the the water has little ammonia in it so hard to use to make fertilizer to sell but if used to add nitrogen to the water on the farm this is less of an problem. 

Yeah, sorry, was lost in parsing.

[AckSed]

The water collected after passing through the catalyst has enough ammonia to add to the plants to supply the nitrogen they need.

So if you had a drip-feeder or hydroponics mister for the plant's roots, this could be added to the apparatus.

The Nafion polymer is, surprisingly, the pricey part due to its production cost.

[darthgently]

For those who’ve wondered, no, the current iteration of LIGO could not detect aliens using an Alcubierre drive

 

[magnemoe]

16 hours ago, AckSed said:

The water collected after passing through the catalyst has enough ammonia to add to the plants to supply the nitrogen they need.

So if you had a drip-feeder or hydroponics mister for the plant's roots, this could be added to the apparatus.

The Nafion polymer is, surprisingly, the pricey part due to its production cost.

Yes was thinking this, its not something I think works well for producing concentrated ammonia for fertilizer pellets but something added to integration or perhaps using an tank trailer with an sprayer a bit like how liquid manure is used. 
Well its smell better