This Week's Science News Bits

Satellite takes image of another satellite, coffee in the air, and a fancy rendering of a nuclear fusion plant

Satellite Takes Image of Another Satellite

The satellite WorldView 3, owned by the private company Maxar, normally looks at Earth. But in a recent encounter up in space, it took an image of NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite. At the time the picture was taken, the two spacecraft were about 100 kilometres apart. It's a vivid illustration that it’s getting really crowded up there. More details here.

Image: Maxar Technologies

Tokamak Energy Releases First Sketch Of Nuclear Fusion Power Plant

The company Tokamak Energy, based near Oxford UK, is moving forward with plans to build a nuclear fusion power plant. Their first step has been to produce an appealing image that shows the facility. They hope that their nuclear fusion device will power 50,000 people’s homes in the 2030s. Press release here.

Image: Tokamak Energy

There’s Coffee In the Air, Literally

A measurement of air pollution in downtown Auckland found traces of meth, nicotine, caffeine, and THC in the air. “The results aren’t as concerning as a headline might make them sound,” one of the authors said in a press release. And to be fair, the amounts are minuscule, at least compared to the pollution coming from road traffic. But of course I’ll now spend the next week being completely paranoid about just exactly what I might be breathing in.

We Could Beam Down Solar Energy from a Satellite. But Should We?

In this week’s video, we look at space-based solar power, that’s the idea to put huge solar panels into a geostationary orbit and send the energy down to earth with a big microwave beam. Several nations are planning on pilot projects and seem to be quite upbeat about it. I was not terribly convinced by those plans.