Largest Digital Camera Ever
Image Credit: SLAC
Physicists and engineers at SLAC in California have just completed the decade-long construction of the world’s largest-ever digital camera – the 3.2 Gigapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera. It will next be shipped to Chile to become the heart of the Vera Rubin Observatory. Once completed, the observatory will collect copious quantities of data from the southern sky to help study astrophysical phenomena and determine the makeup of our universe.
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U.S. Researchers Go Ahead With Controversial Geoengineering Tests
Illustration showing how particles of sea salt released from a ship could help reflect incoming solar energy away from Earth. Credit: DOE
Researchers at the University of Washington in the United States are going ahead with an experiment known as marine cloud brightening. They will spray trillions of sea salt particles into the sky above the ocean to make the clouds whiter and thereby more reflective. This, according to the idea, will prevent some heat from getting trapped in Earth’s atmosphere and help slow global warming. The experiment is being conducted in California. It has begun already, and will collect data until May of this year.
Startup Claims Nuclear Fusion Space Thruster Works
Boron decaying into three alpha particles. Image: RocketStar
RocketStar Inc. has just announced they have “reinvented” spacecraft by releasing the world’s first fusion-enhanced space thruster, the FireStar™ Fusion Drive. They claim to have enhanced their water-powered plasma thruster by injecting boron into the exhaust plume. This, so they say, triggered a nuclear fusion reaction that boosted the thruster’s performance by 50%.
A 50% increase sounds good, but it’s a 50% increase over a thrust in the range of optimistically 0.02 Newton (that’s a unit of thrust). To get off our planet, the first stage of a rocket needs more like 40 million Newton. These plasma thrusters are mainly interesting to propel small spacecraft that have been launched into space already.