Four space technologies that will change our lives in the near future

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Imagine a world in which storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and lightning are no longer dangerous to humans. A world in which it takes one hour to fly from London to Sydney. Imagine a future in which our knowledge of matter is so deep that time travel becomes a reality. Scientists are already working on these technologies in California, in Palo Alto, in the laboratories of Lockheed Martin, the world giant in the field of aerospace technology and aircraft construction.

Lockheed Martin works side by side with NASA, the world's leading universities and powerful commercial partners. Scientists are focused on four projects that will revolutionize our world:

• preservation of human life;
• the discovery of new knowledge about the origin of the Universe;
• flights at the speed of sound;
• preventing the end of the world.

Following the lightning

In May, tornadoes, floods and other natural disasters cost the US economy more than $ 4.5 billion. According to the insurance company AON, there were 412 tornadoes in one month. In China, in the same month, 81 people died and 100,000 homes were damaged and destroyed by the Mei-yu rains.

No one is immune from weather disasters. In 2011, floods in Thailand hit computer component factories and raised prices for hard drives worldwide.

An accurate forecast of an upcoming tornado will help save lives. The Lightning Map (GLM) will give people a chance to hide from disaster.

Scott Fouse, vice president of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center, says that lightning forms in the clouds and only after a while reaches the ground, so you can predict a disaster. Scientists will connect sensors to collect lightning data to the US satellite GOES-R, which will be launched next year.

The chief engineer of the GOES-R satellite Stephen Jolly explains that the sensors are made using the technology of the Hubble telescope, only now we will not look at the stars, but at the Earth. The tornado starts 10 minutes after the start of the lightning activity, and these 10 minutes will save many lives.

The weather tracker, capturing the Earth at 500 frames per second, will help planes navigate through the storm and send a warning signal to power grids under threat on Earth. Scientists plan to deploy GLM system over the entire world.

In addition to bad weather, coronal mass ejections - substances from the solar corona - pose a threat to electrical systems and aviation. Having covered billions of kilometers in space, particles of matter reach the Earth in 1-3 days. Even small emissions can degrade the signal from satellites, and we will lose control of aircraft and electrical systems.

The larger the release, the more dangerous the consequences. Depending on the time when the release occurs, the location in the sun where it will occur, and the direction of movement of the particles, some parts of the world can lose electricity for up to 5 months. Insurance companies pay about $ 10 billion a year for coronal mass emissions damage. The GOES-R ultraviolet thermal imager will provide early warning of upcoming emissions.

Another tool on GOES-R, geoCARB, is being developed in partnership with the University of Oklahoma. It measures the level of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere so that we can predict changes related to its amount.

Time travel and shooting of nascent galaxies

Lockheed Martin and the University of Arizona are developing a supersensitive near-infrared camera that hopes to capture the light of the earliest stars and galaxies in their formation stage. Astronomers have installed a coronagraph in the camera, which takes pictures of weakly visible objects near bright sources. The mechanism of operation of the coronagraph in NIRCam is similar to when we cover our eyes with our palm from the sunlight in order to see something.

NIRCam will be launched into space aboard the James Webb Space Telescope in October 2018 from French Guiana using the Ariane 5 rocket. With the help of spectrometers, scientists will learn more about the nature of light and see how gas clouds form. This will help to understand a lot about the origin of the universe.

With NIRCam, researchers will study dark matter and dark energy. Now they are hidden from our telescopes, but we know that they exist. This knowledge will lay the foundation for understanding the interaction of space and time.

We believe that time moves in one direction, but matter is not what we think it is. There are cavities in space caused by large objects like the Sun, for example. Could this discovery lead to time travel? I am not ruling out anything. The old Star Trek series talked about many of these technologies, and my father, a physicist, laughed at them. Now these technologies are becoming a reality. When we understand the foundations of the origin of the Universe, we will be able to explain all the phenomena that we cannot comprehend now.

Stephen Jolly

Research with NIRCam is important not only for cosmologists, but for the whole world: it will affect the belief system and change the religious beliefs of humanity.

Twenty times faster than sound

The idea of hypersonic travel is not new. The term appeared in the 70s and denoted a speed of Mach 5, that is, 5 times the speed of sound. Many projects are devoted to attempts to overcome the speed of sound tens of times. Developers from Germany plan to launch the Hypersonic SpaceLiner by 2030, which will be able to fly from Europe to Australia in 90 minutes. Lockheed Martin is engaged in the development of technology to overcome Mach 20 - 24,498 km / h - and Mach 30.

Attempts to reach Mach 20 have been thwarted by the lack of reliable materials that can withstand the heat generated at these speeds. Scientists now have material that cools on its own by "spilling" electrons, just as the human body produces sweat.

Lockheed Martin is working with Imperial College London, which owns a hypersonic wind tunnel for materials testing. Supersonic flights are needed not only for ordinary passengers to quickly move from country to country. They are essential for providing immediate humanitarian or disaster relief assistance, although the cost of supersonic travel will be very high in the early years of use.

Along with hypersonic materials, other developments will be used to create machines of the future. For example, carbon nanotubes, which are 50,000 times thinner than a human hair, will be used in batteries.

We use space technologies in the aircraft industry, in the automotive industry and already in everyday life. We have invented sensors with a power source that can turn itself on and off without wires. This will make it possible to create satellites that are thousands of times smaller in size than the current ones. What will the cars be like? Who knows!

Stephen Jolly

Preventing the end of the world

In 2013, a meteorite about 15 meters across fell in Chelyabinsk, injuring about 2,000 people. This is the first time in recent history when a large meteorite fell and caused significant destruction. Small meteorites are constantly falling to Earth. A global threat can be posed by a meteorite about 400 meters in diameter. But these come to Earth once every thousand years, according to scientists from NASA.

NASA is currently observing over 1,400 asteroids that can cause significant damage. The Earth is protected by the giant planets of the solar system, which "pull" meteorites on themselves. Therefore, the last serious meteorite fell to Earth in 1908, again on the territory of Russia, and caused an earthquake with a magnitude of 5 on the Richter scale. The place of its fall was deserted, only one person died. If the meteorite had fallen 4 hours and 47 minutes later, it would have wiped out St. Petersburg, whose population at that time was more than a million people.

66 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, a meteorite about 10 km wide fell on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, forming the Chicxulub crater. The force of the impact was equivalent to a billion bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima, and caused a chemical reaction that "boiled" the Earth.

Scientists from NASA and Lockheed Martin are working to prevent similar disasters in the future. NASA has been maintaining a catalog of near-Earth objects since 1998, and plans to launch a mission in 2016 that will change humanity's relationship with asteroids.

The unmanned mission OSIRIS-REX will travel to asteroid Bennu, one of the most potentially dangerous asteroids. It is highly likely that it will crash into the Earth at the end of the XXII century. OSIRIS-REX will fly up to Bennu, take a sample of its composition and bring it to Earth. Scientists hope to understand how the asteroid and its orbit can be influenced. Also, the mission can find chemical elements not yet known to scientists on the asteroid.

Saving our planet is about more than just protecting it from a meteor impact. For example, one of the biggest mysteries: what happened to the atmosphere on Mars, what caused drastic changes in the climate? In 2013, the MAVEN mission was launched, which, perhaps, will provide answers to these questions and help to understand whether the future of the red planet is not prepared for the Earth.

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