Now that the debate (if such a term can be applied to a back-and-forth with a dementia patient) is over, even most Democrats have had to admit that Joe Biden belongs in a nursing home, not the White House.…

Jason HopkinsDaily Caller News Foundation An illegal immigrant from Ecuador killed a woman on her birthday and then tried to hide her body in a local park, New York prosecutors are alleging. Jhon Moises…

Jason HopkinsDaily Caller News Foundation An illegal immigrant from Ecuador killed a woman on her birthday and then tried to hide her body in a local park, New York prosecutors are alleging. Jhon Moises…

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The establishment left formulated its line quickly after Old Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance Thursday night, and now that line has received the stamp of approval not only from The Great…

Many Afghans are applying for resettlement in the U.S., including Nizakat Parsa. The journalist and his family embarked on a three-month journey through the Americas in search of freedom and security.…

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Transgender accused of murdering fellow transgender is in a women's prison because he identifies as female | WND | by Around the Web Tap here to add The Western Journal to your home screen. Adblock test…

Utilizing regolith on the Moon or Mars, especially to refill propellant for rockets to get back off the surface, is a common theme in the more engineering-minded space exploration community. There have been plenty of proof-of-concept technologies that could move us toward that goal. One of the best supported was the Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR). Let’s take a look at what made this project unique. It was initially conceived at Swamp Works, NASA’s version of Skunk Works, the famous Lockheed Martin development facility that worked on the SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 stealth plane. So far, it has gone through two iterations, known as 1.0 and 2.0, released in 2013 and 2016, respectively.  RASSOR consists of a chassis, a drive train, and two large bucket drum excavators. The excavating elements are on opposing sides of the rover, allowing the system to cancel out any horizontal forces caused by the excavating activity. On Earth, those horizontal forces would be offset by the physical weight of the digging machinery. Since weight is a precious commodity on space missions, this force-canceling technology is arguably the most crucial innovation in the system. Video showing testing of the RASSOR 2.0 prototype.Credit – NASA Video Collection YouTube Channel The RASSOR 2.0 prototype had several design goals, but it’s probably most helpful to walk through a use-case scenario. According to the soil samples collected by Curiosity and other rovers, around 2% of the regolith on Mars is water, even in the relatively “dry” regions outside the poles. Collecting that water could help refuel rockets and supply settlements with drinking water, radiation shielding, or water for agriculture. NASA commonly uses a mission structure involving four astronauts on a journey to Mars. In a paper describing the 2.0 version of the robot back in 2016, the authors, including Robert Mueller, the founder of the Swamp Works facility and a doyen of ISRU research, describe a mission structure that would see RASSOR mining 1,000,000 kg of Martian regolith per year and supplying 10,000 kilograms of oxygen to the mission. To do so, it would utilize a lander with processing capabilities for separating the useful parts from the chaff and would trek from the lander site to the regolith collection site about 35 times a day. With a charging cycle that would take about 8 hours a day, that would leave upwards of 16 hours to continuously mine the surface of Mars for these valuable materials. Fraser describes how to live off the land in space using ISRU. The paper goes on to describe the design process for the RASSOR’s various subsystems, including the powerful actuators that make up the majority of the weight of the system. They also used 3D-printed titanium to make the bucket drum excavating tools, which required some ingenious machining by Swamp Work’s machinists.  But in the end, they did make a working prototype. They tested it with improvements like a 50% drop in weight and an autonomous mode that utilizes simple stereo-vision cameras. The team believes this project is ready to move on to the next phase, taking a step closer to making it a reality. That paper, however, was published eight years ago. A relatively detailed internet search doesn’t produce any results for RASSOR 3.0 other than a brief mention at the end of the 2.0 paper. So, for now, it seems the project is on hold. However, another NASA project, the Lunabotics Challenge, keeps university teams working toward effectively mining regolith for us in ISRU systems. Maybe one of those teams will pick up where the RASSOR team left off – or come up with a completely new design. We’ll have to wait and see. Learn More:Mueller et al. – Design of an Excavation Robot: Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR) 2.0UT – Japan Tests Robotic Earth-Moving Equipment in a Simulated Lunar JobsiteUT – NASA Wants to Learn to Live Off the Land on the MoonUT – What is ISRU, and How Will it Help Human Space Exploration? Lead Image:CAD model of the RASSOR 2.0 excavating robot.Credit – Mueller et al. The post A Single Robot Could Provide a Mission To Mars With Enough Water and Oxygen appeared first on Universe Today.

One of the easiest ways to find exoplanets is using the transit method. It relies upon monitoring the brightness of a star which will then dim as a planet passes in front of it. It is of course possible that other objects could pass between us and a star; perhaps binary planets, tidally distorted planets, exocomets and, ready for it…. alien megastructures! A transit simulator has been created by a team of researchers and it can predict the brightness change from different transiting objects, even Dyson Swarms in construction.  51 Pegasi-b was the first exoplanet discovered in 1995 and it sparked the development of numerous ground-based and space-based instruments. The launch of the Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) in 2018 popularised the transit method, leading to the discovery of over 4,000 exoplanets. As instruments have become increasingly sensitive and precise, research has progressed from simply detecting exoplanets to studying their detailed characteristics. Illustration of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Transit photometry has uncovered signatures of many interesting phenomena beyond the detection of exoplanets and eclipsing binaries. This technique has been instrumental in identifying features such as star-spots, and signatures of tidal interactions between host stars and exoplanets leading to significant growth in the sub-field of Asteroseismology The study of transiting exoplanets and their timing variations has led to many discoveries. Non-transiting planets in distant solar systems have been found, orbital decay, disintegrating planets, exocomets and exomoon candidates has all been identified. Additionally, and perhaps of particular interest is that transit photometry has detected signals that have sparked interest in the search for technosignatures for the evidence of advanced civilizations. It is important to note that no technosignatures have been confirmed yet but such signatures would not arise form natural processes and would demonstrate the presence of intelligent life. The signatures would come from a wide range of astroengineering projects like Dyson Spheres (a theoretical shell surrounding a star to capture its energy output) or the newly conceptualised Dyson Swarms (habitable satellites and energy collectors that orbit the star in formation.  The research team led by Ushasi Bhowmick from the Indian based Space Application Centre has reported that they have developed a transit simulator that can not only generate light curves for exoplanets but also for any object of any size or shape! The simulation uses the Monte-Carlo technique that predicts all possible outcomes of an uncertain event. In this instance it can predict the light curve when an object of any shape or size transits across the disk of star.  Artist’s impressions of two exoplanets in the TRAPPIST-1 system (TRAPPIST-1d and TRAPPIST-1f). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech When the simulation was tested against actual exoplanet systems such as Trappist-1 it nicely predicted the light curve. It can also be used to model tidal distortions in binary star systems and even predict the light curve of non-natural objects such as the alien megastructures. The simulator has shown itself to be an invaluable method for understanding a wide range of transit phenomena.  Source : A General-Purpose Transit Simulator for Arbitrary Shaped Objects Orbiting Stars The post That’s No Planet. Detecting Transiting Megastructures appeared first on Universe Today.