A blog is somehow alive and over time can change in many ways, even unexpected. That’s why, after more than four years of existence and almost 1,500 published articles, this blog is now facing a major change. Recently, articles about astronomy and space missions have increased so much that to convince me to open a second blog called Tachyon Beam hoping it will spread faster than light devoted exclusively to those themes.
In recent years, there’s a lot of talking about the extraordinary properties of graphene for the next generation of electric circuits but also for other applications, for example as a substitute for plastics. One of the major obstacles to the adoption of graphene is its cost: a small piece of graphene can cost more than 1,000 Euros (more than 1,100 USD). Now Shou-En Zhu of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands showed a technique that could lower production costs a thousand times.
The winners of the so-called Milestone Prizes have been announced. Those are the intermediate awards for a total of $6 million allocated during the Google Lunar XPRIZE. The ultimate goal is to bring a private automated spacecraft to the Moon and after its landing it must travel at least 500 meters on the surface and send images and data back to Earth. Five teams of participants showed their progress winning the Milestone Prizes while waiting to proceed with the attempts to actually send the spacecraft to the Moon.
The novel “Hyperion” by Dan Simmons was published for the first time in 1989. It’s the first book of the Hyperion Cantos. It won the Hugo and Locus awards as the best science fiction novel of the year.
On the planet Hyperion the Time Tombs are about to open up and no one knows what the Shrike might do. It’s a creature that lives near them and kills the pilgrims who go there. The Church of The Shrike has decided to send to the planet seven more pilgrims selected in collaboration with the Hegemony.
In the course of the interstellar journey, the pilgrims tell their stories. They reveal the reasons that led each of them to risk their lives to go to Hyperion. They also reveal the connections of various types they have with the planet Hyperion, the Time Tombs and in some cases even with the Ousters, the descendants of the colonists who developed their own civilization separate from the Hegemony.
NASA released an image of the Martian landscape seen from the Mars Rover Opportunity on the occasion of the earth’s eleventh anniversary of its arrival on Mars. Opportunity landed at 5:05 UTC on January 25, 2004 and now has traveled for about 41.7 km (25.9 miles) on the red planet. About three weeks ago it reached the top of the segment of the Endeavour Crater called Cape Tribulation and from there it used its Pancam (panoramic camera) instrument to take a series of photographs that were combined together.
