India landed a craft on the moon!
It’s always nice to hear good Space News. :)
space
i learned a while ago that the whole “most of the stars we see in the sky are actually already dead because they’re so far away that we’re seeing them as they were thousands of years ago” thing is a myth because stars live so long that it’s unlikely many, if any, of them have burned out yet, but i’m still glad that myth exists because there’s just something about the thought of the sky as a graveyard of stars that gets to me
It’s interesting because one day that will be true for some people in some planet out there, but we are so young, the universe is so young, that we live in a time when we get to see more stars born than we ever will see die. There’s poetry in looking up and seeing a star graveyard, but I think there’s also poetry in looking up and seeing a star nursery.
Like, momento mori but also momento vivere
Flower on Mars
Bad things are happening on this planet, horrors and human rights abuses in Ukraine, Texas, all over. Mars grew a flower.
(Delivered to us via the Curiosity Rover)
What A Tragic Waste!!! — Filosofa’s Word
I’ve made no secret of my feelings about millionaires and billionaires who hoard their wealth rather than using it to help people in need. I’ve also made no secret of my feelings about space travel in this, the 21st century, but in case you missed it, I think it is a complete and total waste […]
What A Tragic Waste!!! — Filosofa’s Word
There is a part of me that still hopes, perhaps in some very far-off future humanity as a whole may have access to space. We’ll be able to fix the planet we live on and then (peacefully) take what we learned and head off to see what’s out there.
Jeff Bezos et al have alas disqualified themselves many times over from the phrase “humanity as a whole.”
Nasa’s rover makes breathable oxygen on Mars
Nasa’s rover makes breathable oxygen on Mars
An instrument on Nasa’s Perseverance rover on Mars has made oxygen from the planet’s carbon dioxide atmosphere.
It’s the second successful technology demonstration on the mission, which flew a mini-helicopter on Monday.
The oxygen generation was performed by a toaster-sized unit in the rover called Moxie – the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment.
It made 5 grams of the gas – equivalent to what an astronaut at Mars would need to breathe for roughly 10 minutes.
Nasa’s thinking is that future human missions would take scaled-up versions of Moxie with them to the Red Planet rather than try to carry from Earth all the oxygen needed to sustain them.
Oxygen (O₂) is also an integral part of the chemistry that propels a rocket. Thrust is achieved by burning a fuel in the presence of an oxidiser, which could be simple oxygen.
Mars’ atmosphere is dominated by carbon dioxide (CO₂) at a concentration of 96%. Oxygen is only 0.13%, compared with 21% in Earth’s atmosphere.
Moxie is able to strip oxygen atoms from CO₂ molecules, which are made up of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. The waste product is carbon monoxide, which is vented to the Martian atmosphere.
The Nasa team behind Moxie is running the unit in different modes to discover how well it works.
The expectation is that it can produce up to 10 grams of O₂ per hour.
“Moxie isn’t just the first instrument to produce oxygen on another world, it’s the first technology of its kind that will help future missions ‘live off the land’, using elements of another world’s environment, also known as in-situ resource utilisation,” said Trudy Kortes, director of technology demonstrations within Nasa’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.
“It’s taking regolith, the substance you find on the ground, and putting it through a processing plant, making it into a large structure, or taking carbon dioxide – the bulk of the atmosphere – and converting it into oxygen. This process allows us to convert these abundant materials into useable things: propellant, breathable air, or, combined with hydrogen, water.”