Carnival of Space 284

The Carnival of Space 284 is up at Tranquility Base blog

Supernova condensate – Just how Earth-like was Mars in days long past? A 2 billion year old martian meteorite found in Morocco suggests that in ancient times, Mars was likely a much wetter planet than it is now.

Weirdwarp talks about the X-37B. After a delay of almost two months caused by a technical glitch, the Air Force’s secretive X-37B space plane blasted off again from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on its secret, undisclosed mission.

Nextbigfuture has been covering the work of independent researchers who are working to enable the Mach Effect to be used for propellentless space propulsion and potential as a means to create wormholes. James Woodward is the primary researcher and theorist in this area. He has written a book “”Making Starships and Stargates””. There are many useful insights in the book. It will help get a better understanding of advanced physics and why certain interpretations have issues. Things like how some interpretations of the nature of the electron were resulting in electron spin that was many times the speed of light. His solution depends on understanding the nature of electrons in terms of a semi-classical extension of the exact, general relativistic electron model of Arnowitt, Deser, and Misner (ADM), and Mach’s Principle.

The electric sail (ESAIL), invented by Dr. Pekka Janhunen at the Finnish Kumpula Space Centre in 2006, produces propulsion power for a spacecraft by utilizing the solar wind. The sail features electrically charged long and thin metal tethers that interact with the solar wind. Using ultrasonic welding, the Electronics Research Laboratory at the University of Helsinki successfully produced a 1 km long ESAIL tether. Four years ago, global experts in ultrasonic welding considered it impossible to weld together such thin wires. The produced tether proves that manufacturing full size ESAIL tethers is possible. The theoretically predicted electric sail force will be measured in space during 2013.

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