Day: January 6, 2009

Milky Way revision

Heftier and quicker

Via careful measurements with the Very Long Baseline Array, Mark Reid and colleagues have revised the rotation rate of the Milky Way, thus adding mass and pace to its magnificent gyre…

Milky Way — the galaxy — not so snack-sized

…thus it’s now measured to rotate at 254 km/s, not the 220 km/s used for decades by most astronomers.

Mark Reid works for Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics. Their news post is available here, but it’s not as informative as the MSNBC report, which summarises what Reid presented at the current 213th AAS meeting.

New Way to Climb a Rope

Jiggle-it, just 36,000 km of it…

Space elevators, aside from lacking carbon nanotubes of sufficient length and strength, also suffer from a power problem when launching from planet Earth. They can’t carry a power source sufficiently light weight to feasibly climb the ribbon to geosynchronous orbit and beaming the power to the climber seems rather problematic (requires lots of battle-strength lasers pointed at space which some might look askance at.) So what to do?

Seems a launch engineer for the ESA might have a solution which has the added benefit of also being applicable to Earthly Super-Skycrapers…

By Broomstick to GEO

…by carefully timed “jiggles” the ribbon itself can transfer upward motions to the climber. It’s hoped the system can be applied to proposed kilometre high Super-Skyscrapers as well, thus making its inventor some serious dosh.