HackingTheUniverse

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This is an imaginary animation of a mission to retrieve an asteroid that has been proposed by NASA. It is unlikely to actually occur. It doesn’t make sense to spend the enormous amount of time and energy required to accomplish this, when it will be much easier to examine the asteroid where it already is. [...]

The history of basic tools begins with cutting tools and progresses into moving tools, then eventually into the use of fire and other chemical reactions. Moving tools were developed for use on a planet and involved overcoming gravity and associated friction. The lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, and variations on these all helped [...]

Voyager – The Interstellar Mission – [nasa.gov] Voyager Mission Fast Facts – [nasa.gov] Launch Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. On September 5, Voyager 1 launched, also from Cape Canaveral aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. Planetary Tour Between them, Voyager 1 and 2 explored all the giant [...]

The main factor that will drive a mass emigration from Earth into the vast expanses of the asteroid belt will be freedom. People will say it is done for greed, for want of wealth, but the real reason will be a quest for personal freedom. Freedom from government interference in our lives, freedom from religious [...]

Since our current growth rate in some areas of technology is accelerating toward a singularity threshold, it is difficult to predict what our civilization will be like in only a few hundred years. To describe civilization a thousand years from now is nearly impossible to accomplish with any confidence of accuracy. It might be reasonable [...]

The Kardashev scale classifies theoretical civilizations according to their usable energy resources. The scale is named after Nikolai Kardashev, a Russian astrophysicist who created it. He described three different levels, each separated by a factor of around ten billion: Type I – planetary scale, comparable to our civilization which is capable of using around 10^16 [...]

Voyager 1 is at the edge of our Solar System and poised to leave us forever. Our Sun is constantly pushing a stream of charged particles, that we call the solar wind, outward beyond all the planets in our system. This area of solar wind is called the heliosphere. The space beyond the reach of [...]

A new space exploration company is announcing their intent to create a new industry and redefine “natural resources” by mining asteroids. Planetary Resources plans to launch a small, low cost, space telescope that will discover asteroids and examine them to determine what valuable metals and elements they contain. Ice and platinum group metals are among [...]

Getting to the Moon on Drops of Fuel – [epfl.ch] Imagine reaching the Moon using just a tenth of a liter of fuel. With their ionic motor, MicroThrust, EPFL scientists and their European partners are making this a reality and ushering in a new era of low-cost space exploration. The complete thruster weighs just a [...]

Magnetic levitation is used to both lift railway trains off their guiding rail and to propel them forward along the rail. This reduces friction with the rail, leaving air resistance as the primary obstacle to forward speed. By operating a maglev transport inside a tube with evacuated atmosphere, the drag from air can also be [...]