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Tag Archives: powerful
Unprecedented Image of Black Hole’s Powerful Jet and Shadow Captured by Astronomers – SciTechDaily
- Unprecedented Image of Black Hole’s Powerful Jet and Shadow Captured by Astronomers SciTechDaily
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Taylor Swift shares powerful Pride month message during Chicago ‘Eras Tour’ concert – CNN
- Taylor Swift shares powerful Pride month message during Chicago ‘Eras Tour’ concert CNN
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- Taylor Swift Says Her Concert is ‘Safe Space’ to Celebrate Pride Month TMZ
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This powerful mid-range phone brings 1TB storage for under $400 – Android Authority
- This powerful mid-range phone brings 1TB storage for under $400 Android Authority
- Redmi Note 12 Turbo announced with Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2, up to 16GB RAM and 1TB storage – GSMArena.com news GSMArena.com
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At Least 26 Killed as Powerful Tornado Tears Through Mississippi – The New York Times
- At Least 26 Killed as Powerful Tornado Tears Through Mississippi The New York Times
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- Emergency teams from Adams County, surrounding area helping with tornado tragedy in Rolling Fork – Mississippi’s Best Community Newspaper | Mississippi’s Best Community Newspaper Natchez Democrat
- Meteorologist prays for Mississippi residents in path of tornado while on air: ‘Dear Jesus, please help them’ Fox News
Labor unions are split on Chicago mayor candidates as powerful IUOE Local 150 backs Paul Vallas – Chicago Tribune
- Labor unions are split on Chicago mayor candidates as powerful IUOE Local 150 backs Paul Vallas Chicago Tribune
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Daily Deals: Early Mario Day Sale Deals, Powerful RTX 4060 Gaming Laptop Finally Available, 20% Off Apple AirPods Pro, and More – IGN
- Daily Deals: Early Mario Day Sale Deals, Powerful RTX 4060 Gaming Laptop Finally Available, 20% Off Apple AirPods Pro, and More IGN
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Plasma thrusters used on satellites could be much more powerful than previously believed
It has been believed that Hall thrusters, an efficient kind of electric propulsion widely used in orbit, must be large to produce a lot of thrust. Now, a new study from the University of Michigan suggests that smaller Hall thrusters can generate much more thrust—potentially making them candidates for interplanetary missions.
“People had previously thought that you could only push a certain amount of current through a thruster area, which in turn translates directly into how much force or thrust you can generate per unit area,” said Benjamin Jorns, U-M associate professor of aerospace engineering who led the new Hall thruster study to be presented at the AIAA SciTech Forum in National Harbor, Maryland, today.
His team challenged this limit by running a 9 kilowatt Hall thruster up to 45 kilowatts, maintaining roughly 80% of its nominal efficiency. This increased the amount of force generated per unit area by almost a factor of 10.
Whether we call it a plasma thruster or an ion drive, electric propulsion is our best bet for interplanetary travel—but science is at a crossroads. While Hall thrusters are a well-proven technology, an alternative concept, known as a magnetoplasmadynamic thruster, promises to pack much more power into smaller engines. However, they are yet unproven in many ways, including lifetime.
Hall thrusters were believed to be unable to compete because of the way they operate. The propellant, typically a noble gas like xenon, moves through a cylindrical channel where it is accelerated by a powerful electric field. It generates thrust in the forward direction as it departs out the back. But before the propellant can be accelerated, it needs to lose some electrons to give it a positive charge.
Electrons accelerated by a magnetic field to run in a ring around that channel—described as a “buzz saw” by Jorns—knock electrons off the propellant atoms and turn them into positively charged ions. However, calculations suggested that if a Hall thruster tried to drive more propellant through the engine, the electrons whizzing in a ring would get knocked out of the formation, breaking down that “buzz saw” function.
“It’s like trying to bite off more than you can chew,” Jorns said. “The buzz saw can’t work its way through that much material.”
In addition, the engine would become extremely hot. Jorns’ team put these beliefs to the test.
“We named our thruster the H9 MUSCLE because essentially, we took the H9 thruster and made a muscle car out of it by turning it up to ’11’—really up to a hundred, if we’re going by accurate scaling,” said Leanne Su, a doctoral student in aerospace engineering who will present the study.
They tackled the heat problem by cooling it with water, which let them see how big a problem the buzz saw breakdown was going to be. Turns out, it wasn’t much trouble. Running with xenon, the conventional propellant, the H9 MUSCLE ran up to 37.5 kilowatts, with an overall efficiency of about 49%, not far off the 62% efficiency at its design power of 9 kilowatts.
Running with krypton, a lighter gas, they maxed out their power supply at 45 kilowatts. At an overall efficiency of 51%, they achieved their maximum thrust of about 1.8 Newtons, on par with the much larger 100-kilowatt-class X3 Hall thruster.
“This is kind of a crazy result because typically, krypton performs a lot worse than xenon on Hall thrusters. So it’s very cool and an interesting path forward to see that we can actually improve krypton’s performance relative to xenon by increasing the thruster current density,” Su said.
Nested Hall thrusters like the X3—also developed in part by U-M—have been explored for interplanetary cargo transport, but they are much larger and heavier, making it difficult for them to transport humans. Now, ordinary Hall thrusters are back on the table for crewed journeys.
Jorns says that the cooling problem would need a space-worthy solution if Hall thrusters are to run at these high powers. Still, he is optimistic that individual thrusters could run at 100 to 200 kilowatts, arranged into arrays that provide a megawatt’s worth of thrust. This could enable crewed missions to reach Mars even on the far side of the sun, traveling a distance of 250 million miles.
The team hopes to pursue the cooling problem as well as challenges in developing both Hall thrusters and magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters on Earth, where few facilities can test Mars-mission-level thrusters. The amount of propellant exhausting from the thruster comes too fast for the vacuum pumps to keep the conditions inside the testing chamber space-like.
More information:
Leanne L. Su et al, Operation and Performance of a Magnetically Shielded Hall Thruster at Ultrahigh Current Densities, AIAA SCITECH 2023 Forum (2023). DOI: 10.2514/6.2023-0842
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Plasma thrusters used on satellites could be much more powerful than previously believed (2023, January 24)
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Want to Stop Stress? A New Study Found This Solution Was More Powerful Than Meditation
A recent study from Cell Reports Medicine suggests that a process known as “cyclic breathing” may be better at reducing stress than meditation—at least for some key benefits.
Breathwork is an ancient practice that, to date, hasn’t been studied a great deal in a clinical setting. However, the researchers of the present study report their investigation was inspired by people’s overwhelming need to manage pandemic-related stress. As the study authors explain, “The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of simple, fast-acting, and cost-effective techniques to address widespread physical and mental health challenges and limited access to health care.”
This remote, randomized, controlled study compared three different daily breathwork exercises, each lasting five minutes, to an equivalent period of mindfulness meditation over one month. What they found: “Controlled breathing directly influences respiratory rate, which can cause more immediate physiological and psychological calming effects by increasing vagal tone during slow expiration.”
One adolescent psychology study explains what “vagal tone” is: “Vagal tone is a measure of cardiovascular function that facilitates adaptive responses to environmental challenge.”
The Cleveland Clinic‘s blog explains that the vagal nerves (which is often referred to as the vagus nerve, singularly), “are the main nerves of your parasympathetic nervous system. This system controls specific body functions such as your digestion, heart rate and immune system. These functions are involuntary, meaning you can’t consciously control them.”
So in sum, we might say this study suggests that cyclic breathing, especially the emphasizes a nice, slow exhale, can impact the vagal nerve in a way that calms respiratory rate (that’s breaths per minute). Respiratory rate is one main measure of stress response.
Deepak Chopra’s #1 Meditation for Happiness
What does cyclic breathing do?
Selena Gerefino, MPH, MA, 500 HR ERYT, is a movement and meditation teacher as well as a scholar. Although she’s a proponent of both cyclic breathwork and meditation, she worries that people will see a study like this and think, “Now we don’t need to meditate!” But Gerefino points out that cyclic breathing and meditation do slightly different things.
Garefino says cyclic breathing is great for reducing stress in the short term—struggling with a coworker, a fender bender, unauthorized charges on a credit card—but it typically doesn’t provide long-term changes to the brain in the same way that meditation does. The consensus to manage stress is to do both.
What are the benefits of cyclic breathing?
“Meditation can increase anxiety in beginners or people with trauma,” Garefino notes. This may be one reason the study’s researchers observed that cyclic breathing can be helpful for reducing respiration and anxiety, and improving mood and physiological arousal.
Research, such as a 2012 psychiatry study that used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has shown that meditation can increase gray matter density in five regions of the brain after about 30 minutes of meditation over eight weeks. (The Mayo Clinic explains that “gray matter” is healthy tissue that makes up a significant portion of the nervous system.)
Improvements in gray matter can lead to better memory, cognition, emotional regulation and “mind-wandering.” So if cyclic breathing calms the mind in the moment, while meditation changes the brain to physiologically manage stress better over time, combining both practices regularly in your routine can be an extremely worthwhile strategy to reduce stress.
How to Do a Quick 5-Minute Meditation
How can you practice cyclic breathing?
As a common entry point to cyclic breathing with roots in the yogic practice of pranayama, Garefino walks us through the process of box breathing—also known as “square breathing.”
- “Start by releasing all the air from your lungs,” she says.
- “Then inhale through your nose for a count of four,
- hold for a count of four,
- and exhale for a count of four.
- Hold your breath for another count of four
- and repeat three or four times.”
The study’s researchers suggest that adding an audible sigh to the exhale helped to maximize the benefit to participants. (It’s possible the humming from the sigh both centers the mind and creates a vocal vibration of the voice that further impacts the vagus nerve.) Remember, the researchers suggest just five minutes of this type of breathing exercise can deliver major impact.
The key, many experts say, is to make sure you practice this very regularly—such as first thing in the morning or anytime you need to reset from a stressful moment. “Don’t be fooled by how simple this practice is,” Garefino says. “It’s impactful, and it just might change your life.”
A licensed respiratory therapist recently told us this type of cyclic breathing technique can help you recover from, and even prevent, respiratory infections such as COVID-19.
SpaceX’s most powerful rocket returns to flight
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SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the towering launch vehicle known for its boosters’ aerial acrobatics and synchronized landings when returning to Earth, took to the skies Sunday, delivering national security payloads to orbit for the US military.
The mission, called USSF-67, took off at 5:56 p.m. ET from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking the fifth successful flight of the rocket recently dethroned as the world’s most powerful operational launch vehicle. This mission was initially advertised to launch on Saturday, and the reason for the one-day delay was not immediately clear.
The Falcon Heavy debuted to much fanfare in 2018 when SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attached his personal Tesla Roadster as a test payload on the launch. The car is still in space, taking an oblong path around the sun that swings out as far as Mars’ orbital path.
The rocket followed up that test mission with two launches in 2019 before taking a three-year hiatus; the vast majority of SpaceX’s missions don’t require the Falcon Heavy’s amped-up power. On the other hand, SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket launched more than 60 times in 2022 alone, sending two groups of astronauts to space as well as Starlink satellites and a variety of other spacecraft.
But SpaceX is now making good on lucrative military launch contracts it signed for the Falcon Heavy years ago. The rocket returned to flight in November with the launch of the US military’s USSF-44 mission, and Sunday’s liftoff was a follow-up to that display.
“USSF-44 included six payloads on one satellite that advance communications, space weather sensing, and other technologies into near-geosynchronous orbits,” according to the military’s Space Operations Command.
And USSF-67 will make use of the same type of spacecraft deployed on USSF-44, called LDPE, which is essentially a bus for outer space that can carry smaller satellites. The Falcon Heavy also carried a communications satellite, called the Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM, for the US Space Force.
Additional details about the satellites on Sunday’s mission were not immediately available.
With each launch, the Falcon Heavy rocket puts on a dramatic show back on Earth.
After Sunday’s mission, the company recovered two of the Falcon Heavy rocket’s first-stage boosters — the tall white sticks strapped together to give the rocket its heightened power at liftoff. After expending most of their fuel, the side boosters fell away from the center core and reoriented themselves to slice back through the Earth’s atmosphere.
As they approached the ground, the boosters reignited their engines and completed a synchronized landing on ground pads near the Florida coastline. It’s a signature move for SpaceX, which routinely recovers and reuses its rocket boosters to drive down the cost of launches.
SpaceX did not attempt to recover the center booster because of fuel requirements.
The company hasn’t successfully retrieved all three boosters yet, although it’s come close. The two side boosters made a pinpoint, synchronized landing on ground pads after an April 2019 mission, and the rocket’s center booster touched down on a seafaring platform. But rough waves toppled it over.
For years, the Falcon Heavy was the world’s most powerful operational rocket. But in November, NASA’s new moon rocket, called Space Launch System, or SLS, stole that title with its inaugural launch. SLS launched the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission around the moon, paving the way for future missions with astronauts on board.
While the Falcon Heavy gives off about 5 million pounds of thrust, SLS is puts out as much as 8.8 million pounds of thrust — 15% more than the Saturn V rockets that powered the Apollo moon landings.
At its experimental facilities in South Texas, SpaceX is in the final stages of preparing for the first orbital launch attempt of its Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket. Though the test flight still awaits final approval from federal regulators, it could lift off in the coming weeks.
If successful, SpaceX’s Starship would dethrone the SLS as the most powerful rocket flying today.
The Starship system is expected to outpower both SLS and Falcon Heavy. The forthcoming Super Heavy booster, which is designed to vault the Starship spacecraft into space, is expected to put off about 17 million pounds of thrust.
It’s not all a competition, however. Both the SLS rocket and SpaceX’s Starship are integral to NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time in half a century.
SpaceX has its own, ambitious vision for the Starship: ferrying humans and cargo to Mars in hopes of one day establishing a permanent human settlement there.