Elon Musk unveils new Mars rocket prototype, expects missions in months

 

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled the latest iteration of his space company's newly assembled Starship, outlining a speedy development timeline for the centerpiece vehicle of SpaceXs quest to launch humans to the moon and Mars.
Mr. Musk showed a crowd of space enthusiasts and reporters at SpaceX’s rocket development site late on Saturday in the remote village of Boca Chica, Texas, animations of Starship landing on the moon and Mars and predicted that the rocket's first orbital flight could come in the next six months, followed by missions to space with humans aboard the next year.
“This is basically the holy grail of space,” Mr. Musk said, standing between a towering, newly assembled Starship rocket and Falcon 1 the company's first vehicle whose debut orbital mission was celebrated by SpaceX 11 years ago.

 

The Boca Chica village, a few miles north of the Mexican border, is ground zero for SpaceX’s three-year experimental test programme for Starship, whose rocket engine tests have rattled the nerves of residents living in a remote hamlet of roughly two dozen homes a mile away.
“I think the actual danger to the Boca Chica village is low but it's not tiny,” Mr. Musk said during a question and answer session. “So probably over time it had be better to buy out the villages, and we have made an offer to that effect.”
Some residents have rejected SpaceX’s non-negotiable offer to buyout their homes for three times the market value.
A three-legged prototype of the rocket named Starhopper has test launched in the village twice since July, most recently flying as high as 500 feet (152 metres) and landing on an adjacent slab of concrete to trial Mr. Musk’s next generation rocket engine dubbed Raptor.
Mr. Musk’s mission to the moon aligns with NASA’s goal of sending humans there by 2024 under its Artemis programme, an accelerated deep-space initiative spurred by the Trump administration in March that aims to work with a handful of U.S. space companies in building a long-term presence on the lunar surface before eventually colonizing Mars.
The space agency has tapped SpaceX to figure out how to land vehicles on the lunar surface and help develop a system for refueling rockets like Starship in space, an important technology to aid sustained exploration efforts on the Moon and Mars, NASA said in a release on Friday.
NASA has awarded SpaceX and Boeing Co. a total of $6.8 billion to build competing rocket and capsule systems to launch astronauts into orbit from American soil for the first time since 2011. Development of both astronaut capsules have been beset by delays and testing mishaps.
“I am looking forward to the SpaceX announcement tomorrow. In the meantime, Commercial Crew is years behind schedule,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a September 27 night statement. “NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer. It’s time to deliver.”


Shailesh k shukla
directoratnarvim@gmail.com

www.narvim.com

Researchers have developed a tiny nano laser that can function inside of living tissues without harming them.

Just 50 to 150 nanometers thick, the laser is about 1/1,000th the thickness of a single human hair. At this size, the laser can fit and function inside living tissues, with the potential to sense disease biomarkers or perhaps treat deep-brain neurological disorders, such as epilepsy.
Developed by researchers at Northwestern and Columbia Universities, the nanolaser shows specific promise for imaging in living tissues. Not only is it made mostly of glass, which is intrinsically biocompatible, the laser can also be excited with longer wavelengths of light and emit at shorter wavelengths.


"Longer wavelengths of light are needed for bioimaging because they can penetrate farther into tissues than visible wavelength photons," said Northwestern's Teri Odom, who co-led the research. "But shorter wavelengths of light are often desirable at those same deep areas. We have designed an optically clean system that can effectively deliver visible laser light at penetration depths accessible to longer wavelengths."
The nanolaser also can operate in extremely confined spaces, including quantum circuits and microprocessors for ultra-fast and low-power electronics.
The paper was published today (Sept. 23) in the journal Nature Materials. Odom co-led the work with P. James Schuck at Columbia University's School of Engineering.
While many applications require increasingly small lasers, researchers continually run into the same roadblock: Nanolasers tend to be much less efficient than their macroscopic counterparts. And these lasers typically need shorter wavelengths, such as ultraviolet light, to power them.
"This is bad because the unconventional environments in which people want to use small lasers are highly susceptible to damage from UV light and the excess heat generated by inefficient operation," said Schuck, an associate professor of mechanical engineering.
Odom, Schuck and their teams were able to achieve a nanolaser platform that solves these issues by using photon upconversion. In upconversion, low-energy photons are absorbed and converted into one photon with higher energy. In this project, the team started with low-energy, "bio-friendly" infrared photons and upconverted them to visible laser beams. The resulting laser can function under low powers and is vertically much smaller than the wavelength of light.
"Our nanolaser is transparent but can generate visible photons when optically pumped with light our eyes cannot see," said Odom, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. "The continuous wave, low-power characteristics will open numerous new applications, especially in biological imaging."
"Excitingly, our tiny lasers operate at powers that are orders of magnitude smaller than observed in any existing lasers," Schuck said.
The study, "Ultralow-threshold, continuous-wave upconverting lasing from subwavelength plasmons," was supported by the National Science Foundation (award number DMR-1608258), the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Defense (award number N00014-17-1-3023) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-AC02-05CH11231). Angel Fernandez-Bravo and Northwestern's Danqing Wang are the paper's co-first authors.
Odom is a member of Northwestern's International Institute of Nanotechnology, Chemistry of Life Processes Institute and the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.


Shailesh kr shukla
directoratace@gmail.com
www.narvim.com