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Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Gorgeous image of the center of the galaxy.

We were lucky* in a lot of ways, but one bit of bad luck is that we're way out in the galactic boonies, and it's just really far between star systems out here. What if instead of 4 light years away the nearest stars were more like .004. Pluto is .0006 light years away and we've already done a fly by -- it would only be about 7x farther. It took 10 years to get New Horizons out there, so, 70 years with current technology. Not pleasant, but do-able.

* obviously we weren't "lucky" at all, since if the conditions had been wrong "we" wouldn't be here at all.
 
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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Not really science, but tech, though we're going to need a lot of science to make it work.

State Grid Corporation of China, which run’s China's electric power grid, has announced it has signed memorandums of understanding with Russian energy grid compnay Rosseti, Electric Power Co. of South Korea, and SoftBank Group of Japan, to begin moving forward with State Grid’s proposed $50 trillion global electricity network based entirely on renewable energy sources.

The Wall Street Journal reported on March 30 that State Grid chairman Liu Zhenya outlined the $50 trillion plan to create a world grid that would deliver wind and solar energy from the Arctic and the Equator regions, to more populated areas around the world. It would easily be the largest infrastructure project in world history. The world grid would be completed by 2050, but Zhenya said his company has begun lining up partners to begin pilot projects to be completed within the next 10 years.
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Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Congrats to SpaceX. The first stage just landed on the ocean barge Of Course I Still Love You. Now for Dragon to get to ISS.
 
Re: Dr. Clayton Forrester's Science Roundup

Speaking of dreams...

Our solar system is also home to countless comets and asteroids that contain both water and simple organic molecules. Many astrobiologists speculate that the building blocks of life were delivered to Earth via rogue space rocks. Within these frozen time capsules, we stand to find answers to the question of whether we’re alone, but also, pieces of our cosmic origin story.

If only we had the resources to visit hundreds of them. That’s where Breakthrough Starshot comes in. The project, which launched yesterday with a $100 million initial investment, aims to develop spacecraft that weigh only a few grams but carry scientific equipment capable of doing everything from taking photographs to analyzing biological samples. Propelled by meter-sized, razor-thin lightsails, Milner’s “nanocraft” would be as cheap and expendable as NASA missions are expensive and precious. By punting them out of orbit with a 100 Gigawatt laser pulse, we could in theory accelerate the wee spaceships to 20 percent the speed of light.

“The ability to build very very small spacecraft and send them at high speeds gives us the ability to send a lot of spacecraft to a lot of places,” Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Starshot and the former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center told Gizmodo. “Asteroids might be a place where there’s lots of evidence of life. This enables us to sample thousands if not hundreds of thousands of them.”

In addition to the sheer number of targets a swarm of tiny spacecraft could hit, flying at relativistic speeds would give us the ability to move anywhere in the solar system in a matter of days. And that opens the door to something NASA’s planetary exploration outfits can only dream of: rapid-response.

Imagine if astronomers spotted an eruption on the surface of Europa—it’s happened before—and we could deploy a handful of spacecraft to investigate, right away.
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