Building A Giant Catchers' Mitt On The Moon

Members of the space exploration community are always coming up with novel ideas to solve problems that they view as holding back humanity's expansion into the cosmos. One such problem that has become more noticeable of late, due to the failure of several powered lunar landers, is the difficulty of landing on the Moon. To open up the wealth of resources on our nearest neighbor, we will have to regularly deliver cargo to it as well as ship cargo off of it. A new idea from Lunar Cargo, a company based in Europe, has come up with a novel, patented way to deliver cargo to the Moon - the Momentum Absorption Catcher for Express Deliveries on Non-Atmospheric Somata, or M.A.C.E.D.O.N.A.S.

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More Data and Machine Learning has Kicked SETI Into High Gear

For over sixty years, astronomers and astrophysicists have been engaged in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). This consists of listening to other star systems for signs of technological activity (or “technosignatures), such as radio transmissions. This first attempt was in 1960, known as Project Ozma, where famed SETI researcher Dr. Frank Drake (father of the Drake Equation) and his colleagues used the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to conduct a radio survey of Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. Since then, the vast majority of SETI surveys have similarly looked for narrowband radio signals since they are very good at propagating through interstellar space. However, the biggest challenge has always been how to filter out radio transmissions on Earth – aka. radio frequency interference (RFI). In a recent study, an international team led by the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (DIAA) applied a new deep-learning algorithm to data collecte...

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Planetary Surfaces: Why study them? Can they help us find life elsewhere?

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