Niel Armstrong, the first man on the moon said the thing he feared the most about the Apollo 11 mission was a solar flare, this solar weather is a much an issue for the upcoming Artemis program in 2024 as it was for the Apollo missions, in fact in August …
The Scale of Everything – The Big, the Small and the Planck
There is something both calming and therapeutic about looking up at the night sky and even though the milky way makes for a stunning view of the heavens its easy to forget that what we can see with the naked eye is an incredibly tiny, tiny fraction of the Universe …
How Prepared Are We For A Carrington Level Solar Storm?
Preparedness is one of those attributes which has been sorely tested in recent times and in many ways has been found wanting but there are many bullets out there with our name potentially on them, one of which we have touched on before, namely solar storms and the CME or …
Will NASA’s Asteroid mission save us in the future? – Project DART
“It’s a 100 per cent certainty we’ll be hit by a devastating asteroid, but we’re not 100 per cent sure when.” That was a statement from the B612 Foundation in April 2018. Now with all our energies seemingly focused on the current biological threat we shouldn’t forget that there are …
Hypernovas & Magnetars – The Most Powerful Objects in the Universe
As we scurry around the surface of our planet doing all the things that we think are so important, we rarely think how lucky we are to living not only in a fairly benign and stable point in the earth’s lifetime but also in the life of our nearest star, …
Could We Live Without GPS?
Could we live without GPS? , Now this sounds like a bit of a daft question, I mean what is the worst that could happen, maybe we would all have to learn to use a map again. But seriously, the GPS service which was launched in 1978 for the US …
Could Anti-gravity Really be Possible?
Over the decades antigravity has been the stuff of science fiction, though there have been many inventions purporting to be antigravity devices, from gyroscopic lifters to superconducting magnets but so far there has been nothing that is capable nullifying, shielding or creating a repulsive form of what we know as …
Could We Really Sleep in Space for Years?
Watch almost any film involving deep space travel apart from the fantasy ones and you’ll see people going into or coming out of stasis of which the waking up part usually looks quite unpleasant but could this type of induced hibernation for longer space journeys become a reality in the …
Is this the fastest thing in the universe?
This is a Geiger counter, every click you hear is a little piece of ionizing radiation, which in this device could be alpha, beta, x-ray or gamma rays passing through it’s detector, the faster the clicks the more radiation there is. Ionizing radiation is of particular interest because unlike lower …
Will our electricity come from space in the future?
As our need for Electricity increases, solar power is increasingly seen as the future of renewable, green electricity generation. Every hour more solar energy reaches the earth than the whole world uses in a year. But it has two big drawbacks, our atmosphere, 30% of the suns energy is reflected …