129E-141-Sailing The Cosmos

129E-141-Sailing The Cosmos

The first human use of the wind to power boats most likely occurred in about 3,000 BC. This was a major improvement in travel over walking and animal drawn carts. Three or four hundred years from now humans may send a robotic space probe to a nearby star using a light sail as big as the state of Texas. Ideally it would deploy its giant solar sail near the Sun perhaps as close to it as the planet Mercury. This would give it maximum initial thrust. After it gets far from the Sun it could be pushed along by a powerful pinpoint laser beam. Theoretically it is possible to achieve a fraction of the speed of light through this means.

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Jaksot(1000)

917-Space Dust

917-Space Dust

As the Earth orbits the Sun at 18.5 mi/s it sweeps up about 100 tons of micrometeorites and space dust every day of which some 14 tons eventually makes it to the ground. You can even find some of thes...

18 Syys 2min

406E-447-Nuking An Asteroid

406E-447-Nuking An Asteroid

Tonight, even though the chances are extremely slim, an asteroid hunter could find a sizable asteroid on a collision course with planet Earth. If we have decades warning, the potential impactor's arri...

15 Syys 2min

916-Past Glory

916-Past Glory

When accurately recorded historical observations do not agree with what we what we see today it is often very rewarding to find out why. In modern telescopes we see Theta Eridani to a be pair separate...

11 Syys 2min

405E-446-Asteroid Homestead

405E-446-Asteroid Homestead

In the future one can envision a space mining family boarding a descendent of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Launch Vehicle for a trip into low Earth orbit. A few hundred miles above the Earth's surface they...

8 Syys 2min

915-Raining Comets

915-Raining Comets

The comets we observe generally start out as icy dirty snowballs of frozen gases like water and frozen carbon dioxide in the Oort cloud. If recent scientific analysis is correct, we are now witnessing...

4 Syys 2min

404E-445-Not So Secret

404E-445-Not So Secret

A partnership of humans and computers will help to minimize the damage when asteroid hunters find a space rock with our number on it.

1 Syys 2min

914-Deep Synoptic Array

914-Deep Synoptic Array

Looking into the sky at night with radio eyes you would not see the points of starlight forming the constellations instead you would see a very bright, colorful and wildly changing scene. In a desert ...

28 Elo 2min

403E-444-Near Comets

403E-444-Near Comets

Although no comet nucleus impact on the Earth has been conclusively identified, there is some evidence that suggests the 1908 Tunguska event in Russia, which knocked down trees over a 770 square mile ...

25 Elo 2min

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