Two new interesting news items, both discovered via Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) scanning by orbital space-vehicles. First target is the Moon… Water Ice Found on Moon’s North Pole …some 600 million tons of the stuff, found as ice a couple of metres thick lining the floors of 40 or so small craters around the Moon’s
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Happy Valentine’s Day to all you loveable Blog-ghosts who read this page. I’ve been working on the dynamics of laser pushed reflectors – i.e. super-reflectors which can ‘reuse’ the beam thousands of times before it is absorbed and lost as heat. The concept was AFAIK originally discussed by Robert Metzger & Geoff Landis, but Young
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Nick Lane is a prolific writer and has some very interesting pieces available at “New Scientist” as well as his own web-pages. Very readable work from a biochemist. Here’s a sampler from “New Scientist”… The Big O …not orgasm, but Oxygen and its variations through geological time. During the Carboniferous it was 35% of the
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Marc Buie, Pluto guru, has spent several years of computer time – or scrapings of time over several years – to process observations of Pluto done with the HST… Unusually Rapid Changes on Pluto …reported with panache, by Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams and all over the web. Pluto has rather dramatic seasons it seems.
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Brian Wang, at “Next Big Future”, reports on the conceptual ancestor of the ISV “Venturestar” from Giga-Movie “Avatar”. As he notes, the designer is Charles Pellegrino, long-time friend and colleague of James Cameron, and inventor, with Jim Powell, of the antimatter-propelled “Valkyrie” starship. Brian’s Post Valkyrie Starship at Pellegrino’s website Valkyrie at the BBC Archive
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“Project Daedalus” now has a sequel, “Project Icarus”, which promises a smarter, better design… http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/ …look for the Terms of Reference and see what’s planned to be discussed and thrashed out over the next 5 years. Some very cool “Project Daedalus” artwork can be found on the “Icarus” website – plus some superb animations by
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Next Big Future reports on Diamond Oceans. Apparently the Lawrence Livermore National Lab has been doing ultra-pressure experiments on diamond, getting up to 4 TPa (40 Mbar) then dropping the pressure and temperature to examine what phase changes occur. Seems the stuff becomes a liquid in a pressure/temperature range of relevance to the cores of
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Friedwardt Winterberg’s fusion pulse driven space vehicles initiate fusion by injecting a rapid jolt of energy into the fusion target causing an implosion to high density fast enough that the fuel fuses before being blown apart and loses energy to brehmstrahlung. Vital to successful ignition is to rapidly compress the fuel to extremely high densities
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Friedwardt Winterberg’s fusion pulse driven space vehicles initiate fusion by injecting a rapid jolt of energy into the fusion target causing an implosion to high density fast enough that the fuel fuses before being blown apart. A mere 10 MJ is enough for the D-T triggered D-D pulse units to implode, but it has to
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