Month: December 2022

  • Perseverance, Ignition, Breakeven

    Overcoming decades of enormous physics and engineering challenges, and despite persistent pessimism, skepticism, and criticism, the National Ignition Facility has achieved an historic milestone for controlled nuclear fusion, a target energy gain factor of . Last week, NIF focussed the world’s most powerful laser pulse on a small gold cylinder that converted the incident ultraviolet light into x-rays and caused an enclosed…

  • Distant Retrograde Orbit

    The Artemis 1 mission’s Orion spacecraft has successfully entered and exited a distant retrograde orbit about Moon. DRO is a stable and easily accessible orbit requiring a low velocity change . In DRO, Earth‘s non-negligible gravity contributes to a 3-body problem that makes the inertial space orbit non-Keplerian: an ellipse centered — not focussed — on Earth.…

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