Chinese sources now say that Yutu was not dead but just sleeping or pining for the lunar fjords :
China’s moon rover Yutu is awake after its troubled dormancy but experts are still trying to find out the cause of its abnormality, a spokesman with the country’s lunar probe program said on Thursday.
“Yutu has come back to life,” said Pei Zhaoyu, the spokesman.
Speaking of lasers, Philip Lubin, a professor of experimental cosmology at UC Santa Barbara, gives a SETI Institute lecture on the DE-STAR project to design a system to protect earth from comet and asteroid collisions : Is Planetary Defense Feasible – DE-STAR: A Planetary Defense and Exploration System –
Dr. Lubin will discuss how his team has proposed an orbital planetary defense system that is capable of beamed power allowing a number of directed energy (DE) possibilities including planetary defense, propulsion allowing relativistic probes and interstellar communications using existing technologies. Recent developments in photonics allow such a system whereas even a decade ago it would have been simply science fiction.
The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has achieved scientific break-even in laser fusion tests for the first time. This is comparing the amount of laser energy impinging upon a tiny drop of tritium-deuterium to the fusion energy that takes place in the droplet due to the compression and high temperatures resulting from the blast of laser light:
The amount of fusion energy, however, is still only about 1% of the total energy needed to create those laser pulses. However, as they understand better how to shape and time the pulses and how to design the fuel droplet and the “hohlraum” capsule that holds it, the fusion output could rise very rapidly. This ignition condition occurs when the heat of the fusions starts to drive other tritium-deuterium fusions, which in turn creates more heat, etc.
To build a reactor from such a process will require an efficient way to turn the emitted energy (high energy helium nuclei and neutrons) into heat to drive electrical generators. And the rate of laser pulsing needs to be increased substantially. All tough technology challenges.
An announcement from the Space Frontier Foundation:
A New Generation Takes the Lead at the Space Frontier Foundation
Board Announces Retirement of co-Founder Bob Werb and Election
of Space Entrepreneur Jeff Feige as Chairman
Silicon Valley, CA – The Board of Directors of the Space Frontier Foundation announced today that Bob Werb, Co-Founder and long-time Chairman of the Board, has retired from the position, and that they have unanimously elected space entrepreneur Jeff Feige to take over as the Foundation’s new Chairman.
“Bob’s extraordinary vision and leadership permeates every corner of our organization,” said Foundation President James Pura. “As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of our founding, you can look back at 25 years of his passionate contribution of ideas, common sense, and business excellence to nearly everything we’ve done to advocate for an open frontier in space for everyone.”
“At the same time, a new generation of leaders has taken over the nuts and bolts of the Foundation, so we are very excited that Jeff Feige – a long-time Advocate and past conference manager – will be joining our Board again to lead us in our next phase of growth and achievement,” Pura added.
Jeff Feige is currently the CEO of space and pressure suit provider Orbital Outfitters Ltd., and has served in this role for the past six years. He also currently sits on the Board of Directors of Talon Aerospace LLC., an aerospace LED lighting company focused on supporting the commercial aircraft industry. Prior to his work with Orbital Outfitters, Jeff worked as a space business strategy and policy consultant at PoliSpace. Earlier, Jeff was the Assistant to the Executive Director of the Aerospace States Association (ASA), an organization representing U.S. state governments on aerospace and related economic development issues. In the past, Feige served on the Foundation’s Board and managed both the Return to the Moon Conference and the NewSpace Conference. He holds a B.S. from Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, and is an avid SCUBA diver, sailor, and private pilot.
A beautiful set of image sequences showing the auroras of Saturn in action: Dance of Saturn’s Auroras – YouTube
From the caption:
Ultraviolet and infrared images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft and Hubble Space Telescope show active and quiet auroras at Saturn’s north and south poles.
Saturn’s auroras glow when energetic electrons dive into the planet’s atmosphere and collide with hydrogen molecules. Sometimes a blast of fast solar wind, composed of mostly electrons and protons, creates an active aurora at Saturn, as occurred on April 5 and May 20, 2013.
The first set of images, as seen in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum by Hubble, shows an active aurora dancing around Saturn’s north pole on April 5. The movie then shows a relatively quiet time between April 19 to 22 and between May 18 and 19. The aurora flares up again in Hubble images from May 20. This version, shown in false-color, has been processed to show the auroras more clearly.
A second set of ultraviolet images shows a closer view of an active north polar aurora in white. This set comes from Cassini ultraviolet imaging spectrograph observations on May 20 and 21.
The last set of images, in the infrared, shows a quiet southern aurora (in green) in observations from Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer on May 17. Saturn’s inner heat glows in red, with dark areas showing where high clouds block the heat