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

[AckSed]

1 hour ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Fuel cells might finally become cost-effective…

Funny story about fuel-cells: the NaFion polymer used as the substrate for the semi-permeable membrane in a lot of experimental fuel-cells (and the nitrogen-extracting cell I posted about a few weeks back) is the most expensive part. It's due to having to use elemental fluorine gas to make the polymer.

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, farmerben said:

Platinum wiffle balls from space.

Wiffle balls have the added advantage of being self-orbiting (maybe?).  You’d just have to collect them from the salt flats or wherever they were targeted.  Would they burn up? Or would they slow enough in the thinner higher altitudes to never get quite hot enough?

[darthgently]

NASA Artemis Logistics Studies

https://spacenews.com/nasa-awards-artemis-logistics-studies/

SLS in flux

https://spacenews.com/sls-in-transition-from-biden-to-trump/

Edited Friday at 03:58 PM by darthgently

[darthgently]

 

[AckSed]

How an engineering camera on Mars Express became a capable science instrument: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02999

tl;dr slap a cheap camera on your probes with the software to send images back, you may just learn something.

[darthgently]

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Glad to see you all here!  Been a weird couple of days. 

At whoever is now hosting... Thank you for keeping the lights on! 

 

On to the 'science':

 

 

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Glad to see you all here!  Been a weird couple of days. 

At whoever is now hosting... Thank you for keeping the lights on! 

 

On to the 'science':

I assumed the ball is to keep the nitrogen in as its not absorbed as well in water as co2. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

8 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

keep the nitrogen

The part I don't get is how they transfer the nitrogen ball to the can with the nitrogen still inside.  It has to be a soluble plug of some kind. 

 

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

The part I don't get is how they transfer the nitrogen ball to the can with the nitrogen still inside.  It has to be a soluble plug of some kind. 

 

The ball could be put in the can and the can sealed within a pressurized area?  Idk.  A soluble plug seems viable.  

[darthgently]

 

[Vanamonde]

I thought No Man's Sky was loading up for a second there. 

[DDE]

On 1/21/2025 at 1:21 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

Cool detail is that it comes from space, but that doesn't have much consequence in how a buyer would look at it.

The problem would be logistics. The reason such a thing as a global economy exists are cheap logistics. Outside a unified economy, demand in one place cannot meet supply in a different place.

This is very relevant when you're talking resource extraction. To give you a local example off the tip of my tongue, Russia both imports and exports soy. The European part of the country imports it from Brazil despite a growing domestic production, while the Far East exports to China (where, you would think, it also competes with Brazil). That's because inland trans-continental shipping is expensive, too expensive for perishable commodities, so you really don't have a Russia-wide soy market. Sorry, I've heard an earful about that within the last half a year. Heck, there;s a worse case: Russia no longer exports copper cathodes because copper cathodes are a container cargo, and refined copper is a bulk cargo, and freight costs talk.

Interplanetary (broadly speaking) shipping will be even worse, and likely lead to a disunified market for everything but compact durables and luxuries.

[darthgently]

15 minutes ago, DDE said:

Interplanetary (broadly speaking) shipping will be even worse, and likely lead to a disunified market for everything but compact durables and luxuries.

Maybe add finished products of high value per kg.  I can imagine, in the medium to long term, finished space industrial modules, habs and space craft being the premier products originating in a space economy primarily for customers in space.  Once out of deep gravity well transport may take time, but costs would be reasonable compared to bringing up out of a deep well

[AckSed]

It's partially about the delta-V for orbits, too. Ballistic capture is slow, but more efficient and does not require a second burn to stabilise. Not sure where I saw it, but there is a way to fire ahead of the Moon with enough precision that it travels slowly for months, then is captured at just the correct time to fall into LLO.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

40 minutes ago, AckSed said:

travels slowly for months, then is captured at just the correct time to fall into LLO

I think one of the two lunar missions SX just launched is on the low energy route. 

[darthgently]

3 hours ago, AckSed said:

It's partially about the delta-V for orbits, too. Ballistic capture is slow, but more efficient and does not require a second burn to stabilise. Not sure where I saw it, but there is a way to fire ahead of the Moon with enough precision that it travels slowly for months, then is captured at just the correct time to fall into LLO.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network

I think what you refer to is a tweaked variation on a free return flyby trajectory with a much narrower window.   I think a retrograde LLO is a given in this case if the starting earth launch and return orbits are prograde.  I’d love to know if this isn’t true as I’d like to try falling into a prograde mun  orbit in kOS/KSP

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Wondering if the KSP2 art team was prescient... 

In our search for liquid water beyond the Solar System, the temperate exoplanet LHS 1140b is the most promising exoplanet in the habitable zone yet discovered. It is 1.7 times the size of planet Earth (right) and could be a world entirely covered in ice (left), like Jupiter's moon Europa, or an icy world with a subsurface liquid ocean and a cloudy atmosphere (centre). © B. Gougeon, UdeM (artist views

https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/james-webb-space-telescope-provides-first-hints-evidence-existence-ocean-exoplanet

File:Puf.png - Kerbal Space Program Wiki

Edited 6 hours ago by JoeSchmuckatelli

[magnemoe]

10 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Wondering if the KSP2 art team was prescient... 

In our search for liquid water beyond the Solar System, the temperate exoplanet LHS 1140b is the most promising exoplanet in the habitable zone yet discovered. It is 1.7 times the size of planet Earth (right) and could be a world entirely covered in ice (left), like Jupiter's moon Europa, or an icy world with a subsurface liquid ocean and a cloudy atmosphere (centre). © B. Gougeon, UdeM (artist views

https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/james-webb-space-telescope-provides-first-hints-evidence-existence-ocean-exoplanet

Think most bodies out past the ice belt will have lots of water, I would not call that in the temperate however. Its also pretty easy to get too much water as with very high pressure like over 10.000 bar who is easier on an high gravity planet than an icy moon you will get exotic ice types who is heavier than water and can handle high temperatures so if ocean is 200 km deep most of it would be bottom ice. So no thermal vents and little minerals in the ocean. 

[darthgently]

12 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Think most bodies out past the ice belt will have lots of water, I would not call that in the temperate however. Its also pretty easy to get too much water as with very high pressure like over 10.000 bar who is easier on an high gravity planet than an icy moon you will get exotic ice types who is heavier than water and can handle high temperatures so if ocean is 200 km deep most of it would be bottom ice. So no thermal vents and little minerals in the ocean. 

Yes, the crystalline ice that forms on Earth given the temperature range and presumably the atmospheric pressure and gravity combo is rare off Earth where most ice is amorphous.   As you note amorphous ice sinks instead of floats and if ice behaved like that on Earth it would have been far more challenging for life to have survived the ice ages and glacial eras as iced over bodies of water act like glass covered solar collectors raising the minimum temperature of the water and melting it sooner in the day or season via convection.

So the Goldilocks zone isn’t just about some liquid water, but also crystalline water ice that is less dense than liquid water instead of amorphous water ice

[magnemoe]

3 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Yes, the crystalline ice that forms on Earth given the temperature range and presumably the atmospheric pressure and gravity combo is rare off Earth where most ice is amorphous.   As you note amorphous ice sinks instead of floats and if ice behaved like that on Earth it would have been far more challenging for life to have survived the ice ages and glacial eras as iced over bodies of water act like glass covered solar collectors raising the minimum temperature of the water and melting it sooner in the day or season via convection.

So the Goldilocks zone isn’t just about some liquid water, but also crystalline water ice that is less dense than liquid water instead of amorphous water ice

Think ice who sink only exist under very high pressure as in 5.000 bar as an starting point so you will get surface ice even in vacuum if cold enough. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_ice#/media/File:Phase_diagram_of_water.svg
And if say the deep ocean trenches would freeze it would probably not matter that much but if ocean is deep its an problem, they believe some of Jupiter's moons like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callisto_(moon) has this issue while Europa's gravity is weak enough to avoid it. 
Note that an deep ocean world will still get this bottom ice with an +100 km deep ocean even if planet is in the habitable zone, here you can use photosynthesis but water will likely be mineral poor. 

 

[darthgently]

3 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Think ice who sink only exist under very high pressure as in 5.000 bar as an starting point so you will get surface ice even in vacuum if cold enough. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_ice#/media/File:Phase_diagram_of_water.svg
And if say the deep ocean trenches would freeze it would probably not matter that much but if ocean is deep its an problem, they believe some of Jupiter's moons like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callisto_(moon) has this issue while Europa's gravity is weak enough to avoid it. 
Note that an deep ocean world will still get this bottom ice with an +100 km deep ocean even if planet is in the habitable zone, here you can use photosynthesis but water will likely be mineral poor. 

 

Thanks for the link and additional info.  Yeah, it is the turnover that occurs as the cold ice on top melts and sinks which pushes lower water up into the sun that is key to better oxygenating deeper water and bringing fallen minerals and nutrients toward the surface.

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

and if ice behaved like that on Earth it would have been far more challenging for life to have survived the ice ages and glacial eras as iced over bodies of water act like glass covered solar collectors raising the minimum temperature of the water and melting it sooner in the day or season via convection.

In the specific case of Earth, hydrothermal vents would likely keep bottom ice from forming in those areas, creating warm upwelling plumes…

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, StrandedonEarth said:

In the specific case of Earth, hydrothermal vents would likely keep bottom ice from forming in those areas, creating warm upwelling plumes…

Given that we are finding a big planet like Jupiter or Saturn has a tendency to 'flex' the near moons, some form of geothermal energy could be expected.  I know it hasn't been proven - but I'm convinced that our outsized moon is flexing the earth and contributing to the mantle churn that creates continental drift & vulcanism on Earth. 

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-pull-of-the-sun-and-moon-could-be-affecting-plate-motion

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

FWIW - I remember getting in to a rather snit filled 'discussion' a while back* with someone about the moon and earthquakes, plate tectonics and volcanoes.  The gist was, "If you cannot prove it to be true (accepted by everyone) then you must assume it to be false".

Thing is - he had some good points.  Like - earthquakes & eruptions aren't necessarily any more frequent at any particular orientation of the sun, moon and Earth.  My point was fairly generic - as in 'the moon creates the churn, but the other processes are part of a rather dynamic and slow moving system with complicated processes'.

 

* years ago, now that I think upon it. 

He was also one of those who said "you cannot assume there are planets around any other stars, because we have not yet proven there to be planets around any other stars".