When you think of a radio telescope, you usually think of a giant dish antenna pointing skyward. But [vhuvanmakes] built Wavy-Scope, a handheld radio telescope that can find the Sun and the Moon, among other things.
The build is relatively straightforward, using a commercial LNB to detect signals in the 10-12 GHz range. The detector is a simple satellite finder, although you could also connect it to a software-defined radio, if you wanted something more sophisticated.
If you built a car in, say, Germany, for use in Canada, you could assume that the roads will be more or less the same. Gravity will work the same. While the weather might not be exactly the same, it won’t be totally different. But imagine designing the Lunar Excursion Module that would land two astronauts on the moon for the first time. No one had any experience landing a craft on any alien body before.
The LEM was amazing for many reasons, but as [Apollo11Space] points out, the legs were a particularly thorny engineering problem. They had to land on mostly unknown terrain, stay upright, allow for the ascent module to take off again, and, of course, not weigh down the tiny spaceship. They also had to survive the blast of the LEM’s engine.
In case you hadn’t noticed, we live in a dangerous world. While our soft, fleshy selves are remarkably good at absorbing kinetic energy and healing the damage that results, there are very definite limits to what we humans can deal with, beyond which we’ll need some help. Car crashes, falls from height, or even penetrating trauma such as gunshot wounds — events such as these will often land you in a trauma center where, if things are desperate enough, you’ll be on the operating table within the so-called “Golden Hour” of maximum survivability, to patch the holes and plug the leaks.
While the Golden Hour may be less of a hard limit than the name implies, it remains true that the sooner someone with a major traumatic injury gets into surgery, the better their chances of survival. Here on planet Earth, most urban locations can support one or more Level 1 trauma centers, putting huge swathes of the population within that 60-minute goal. Even in rural areas, EMS systems with Advanced Life Support crews can stabilize the severely wounded until they can be evacuated to a trauma center by helicopter, putting even more of the population within this protective bubble.
But ironically, residents in the highest-priced neighborhood in human history enjoy no such luxury. Despite only being the equivalent of a quick helicopter ride away, the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station are pretty much on their own when it comes to any traumatic injuries or medical emergencies that might crop up in orbit. While the ISS crews are well-prepared for that eventuality, as we’ll see, there’s only so much we can do right now, and we have a long way to go before we’re ready to perform surgery in space
Continue reading “A Cut Above: Surgery In Space, Now And In The Future”
The big problem with Low Earth Orbit is, oddly enough, air resistance. Sure, there’s not enough air to breathe in space, but there is enough to create drag when you’re whipping around the planet at 28,000 km/h (17,000 mph) or more. Over time, that adds up to a decaying orbit. [Eager Space] recently did a video summarizing a paradoxical solution: go even lower, and let the air work for you.
So called air-breathing satellites would hang out in very low earth orbit– still well above the Karman line, but below 300 km (186 miles)– where atmospheric drag is too dominant for the current “coast on momentum” satellite paradigm to work. There are advantages to going so low, chiefly for communications (less latency) and earth observation (higher resolutions). You just need to find a way to fight that drag and not crash within a couple of orbits.
It turns out this space isn’t totally empty (aside from the monoatomic oxygen) as missions have been at very low orbits using conventional, Xenon-fueled ion engines to counter drag. The xenon runs out pretty quick in this application, though, and those satellites all had fairly short lifetimes.
That’s where the air-breathing satellites come in. You don’t need a lot of thrust to stabilize against drag, after all, and the thin whisps of air at 200 km or 300 km above ground level should provide ample reaction mass for some kind of solar-electric ion engine. The devil is in the details, of course, and [Eager Space] spends 13 minutes discussing challenges (like corrosive monoatomic oxygen) and various proposals.
Whoever is developing these satellites, they could do worse than talk to [Jay Bowles], whose air-breathing ion thrusters have been featured here several times over the years.
Continue reading “It’s A Bird! It’s A Plane! It’s… An Air Breathing Satellite?!”
Usually when an alchemist shows up promising to turn rocks into gold, you should run the other way. Sure, rocket fuel isn’t gold, but on the moon it’s worth more than its weight in the yellow stuff. So there would be reason to be skeptical if this “Blue Alchemist” was actually an alchemist, and not a chemical reactor under development by the Blue Origin corporation.
The chemistry in question is quite simple, really: take moon dust, which is rich in aluminum silicate minerals, and melt the stuff. Then it’s just a matter of electrolysis to split the elements, collecting the gaseous oxygen for use in your rockets. So: moon dust to air and metals, just add power. Lots and lots of power.
Melting rock takes a lot of temperature, and the molten rock doesn’t electrolyse quite as easily as the water we’re more familiar with splitting. Still, it’s very doable; this is how aluminum is produced on Earth, though notably not from the sorts of minerals you find in moon dust. Given the image accompanying the press release, perhaps on the moon the old expression will be modified to “make oxygen while the sun shines”.
Hackaday wasn’t around to write about it, but forward-looking researchers at NASA, expecting just such a chemical reactor to be developed someday, proposed an Aluminum/Liquid Oxygen slurry monopropellant rocket back in the 1990s.
That’s not likely to be flying any time soon, but of course even with the Methalox rockets in vogue these days, there are appreciable cost savings to leaving your oxygen and home. And we’re not biologists, but maybe Astronauts would like to breathe some of this oxygen stuff? We’ve heard it’s good for your health.
We’ve all seen spectacular pictures of space, and it’s easy to assume that’s how it looks to the naked eye through a nice telescope. But in most cases, that’s simply not true. Space is rather dark, so to make out dim objects, you’ll need to amplify the available light. This can be done with a larger telescope, but that’s an expensive route. Alternatively, you can observe objects for longer periods. This second approach is what [Jordan Blanchard] chose, creating a budget electronic eyepiece for his telescope.
This eyepiece is housed in a 3D printed enclosure designed to fit a standard 1.25″ telescope focuser. The sleek, ergonomic enclosure resembles a night vision device, with a 0.39″ screen for real-time observation of what the camera captures through the telescope. The screen isn’t the only way to view — a USB-C video capture module lets you connect a phone or computer to save images as if you were peering through the viewfinder.
The star of this project is the IMX307 camera module, which supports sense-up mode for 1.2-second exposures and increased gain to capture dim objects without post-processing. This sensor, commonly used in low-light security cameras and dash cams, excels at revealing faint celestial details. All combined, this project cost under 200 Euros, an absolute steal in the often pricey world of astronomy.
Don’t have a telescope? Don’t worry, you can build one of those as well.
Japan’s Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki was launched on May 21, 2010, and started its active mission in 2015 after an initial orbital insertion failure. Since that time, Akatsuki has continuously observed Venus from orbit until issues began to crop up in 2024 when contact was lost in April of that year due to attitude control issues. Japan’s space agency, JAXA, has now announced that the mission has officially ended on September 18, 2025, after a period of trying to coax the spacecraft back into some level of functionality again.
The Akatsuki spacecraft had six instruments, consisting of cameras covering the visible spectrum, ultraviolet and infrared spectra, as well as an oscillator for radio occultation experiments.
All primary mission goals were successfully completed in April of 2018, but engineers determined Akatsuki was capable of lasting at least another few years. This puts it well past its original design lifespan, and has provided us with much more scientific data than we could have hoped for.
Unfortunately, the shutdown of Akatsuki represents the end of the last active Venus mission, with much uncertainty surrounding any potential upcoming mission to Earth’s near-twin planet. The next potential mission is the Venus Life Finder, as an atmospheric mission penciled in for a 2026 launch. It would take at least until 2028 for a potential orbiter mission to launch, so for the foreseeable future Venus will be left alone, without its artificial moon that has kept it company for a decade.
