NASA News 8 May, 2020

There has just been a breakthrough in mirror manufacturing and NASA is about to demonstrate this. It allows a thin coating in a specific wavelength to be applied onto a material in space. I don’t know yet how this will affect the process of grinding a mirror to the proper curvature. Hopefully it will make the process much faster since the coating is said to be very uniform over large areas. NASA is going to build telescope mirrors that are mirrors greater than 20 meters. This means these mirrors will have a diameter greater than 787 inches. This gives them far more light gathering power than anything we have today and will lead to some incredible discoveries. The NASA scientist who wants to do is going to fabricate a mirror in space as an experiment and has been saying the coating would work even if the telescope mirror was the size of the Washington DC area.

A few days ago, NASA put out a call asking researchers who have developed space technology to allow them to test it on commercial suborbital vehicles. This could be an opportunity to receive funding. Full proposals are due on May 22, 2020. This is one of the advantages of having an open society. You can call on private individuals and industry and make it worth their while if they have something good to contribute.

NASA has their fingers in a lot of pies. One of these pies is laser communications. Why is it NASA wants to switch from conventional radio communications to laser communications? I know a lot of people are wondering what the advantage might be. They claim it will reduce the amount of processing required before data can be sent. For years there has been talk about using a laser inside of our computers instead of the current system of wires and conventional circuits. It is said this would increase the internal speed of our devices. I have always felt if we break the speed of light it will be accomplished inside of a computer. Transmission by light is nothing new. It has been said some of our most advanced secret warplanes use it in their computers. In 2014 a prediction was made by sciencealert.com. It stated light powered computers would exist in ten years. As I said many people believe we already have them but they could be tied up in black projects.

NASA scientists sometimes find a way to save money and scientist Al Kogut is no exception. He has figured out a way to use a balloon and obtain what he calls Hubble Space Telescope class science on the cheap. It is basically a telescope mounted on a balloon. The telescope will be tuned to the far-infrared because scientists state they can detect 98% of all photons admitted after the Big Bang at this wavelength. A photon is a particle containing light. The balloon will not actually go into space but it will go to the top of the atmosphere.

One of the biggest problems NASA has encountered on the moon is the dust. You might think dust would not be such a big problem, but the dust on the moon is said to be razor-sharp and quickly destroys things including spacesuits limiting their use. NASA has been experimenting with a coating which it believes could eliminate this problem not only for spacesuits but for all types of components. The coating was invented originally to protect electronics in space. It was found at the coating stopped this dust from sticking to astronaut spacesuits and their equipment. The dust on the moon has been formed by millions of years of meteorite impacts and is composed of glass and mineral fragments. It also contains an electrical charge. The particles are negatively charged and are attracted to the positively charged astronauts suits and it devices. More research is being conducted on these problems.

NASA has revealed some plans for building a base on the moon under the Artemis Program. They also revealed what they thought the moon would look like after 2024 as far as human habitation goes. They shared this plan with the National Space Agency. The agency is an advisory group to the president. It goes on to say after twenty years of living in low earth orbit, we are ready to take the next step. The Artemis base camp might be set up in the Shackleton Crater at the moon’s South pole according to thinking at NASA. It is thought the camp might support four astronauts for about a week during visits. This means it would require certain types of infrastructure such as power, waste disposal, communications, a landing pad and some sort of radiation shielding. The camp would also need some way of keeping out lunar dust which I spoke about above. Current thinking is the camp would need some way to turn local resources into water and other useful things.

Recently SpaceX delivered tons of cargo to the space station and now some people are asking why. They believe there is some sort of secret mission going on. 94,000 pounds of supplies and equipment have been delivered to the space lab and of course this prompted all sorts of conspiracy theories. Some people find a conspiracy under every rock and while a few conspiracy theories might turn out to be credible most of them are not. As for the large delivery to the space station it could be as simple as more advanced devices being delivered along with the food.