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Moon Landing Space Exploration Technology

Nvidia Debunks Conspiracy Theories About Moon Landing

A spokesperson from Nvidia, the American technology company specialized in manufacturing high-performance graphics processing units (GPUs), debunks the conspiracy theories about the moon landing. The tech giant uses the latest technology to digitally recreate some of the iconic photos taken during the moon landings and to debunk conspiracy theories around them.

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Space Exploration Technology

What is a Dyson Sphere and How to Build One?

Currently, we’re slowly transitioning to renewables and fusion energy may become available in the future. If we don’t destroy ourselves or the environment, as humanity progresses further, we will likely gain complete control of the Earth’s resources. At that stage, we’ll probably begin to look outwards for new places to expand into. But, if we want to expand into outer space someday, our planet’s resources are not enough (see the Kardashev scale below). We’d need incredible amounts of energy, even to expand into our solar system. Luckily, we know where to find it: the Sun. To harvest energy from the Sun, we can build a megastructure called the “Dyson Sphere” around it and capture a large percentage of its power output.

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Artificial Intelligence Technology

Why We Need to Overcome Our Fear of AI

Futurists and technology advocates, including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates, often warn about the imminent dangers artificial intelligence poses to humanity. Many of these soothsayers ask we harken their cries of existential risk unless we wish to change an intelligence explosion. They claim such an event, often dubbed the Singularity, could create a superintelligent computer, leading to human enslavement via the likes of Skynet, from the Terminator franchise, or HAL 9000, from Space Odyssey.

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Global Warming Climate Environment Technology

Why We Need to Trust Technology to Fight Climate Change

Based on the Paris Climate Agreement, more than 6,000 cities, states, and provinces in dozens of countries must drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to save life as we know it. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report foretells an inhospitable Earth unless we achieve this monumental undertaking.

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Astronomy Technology

Casting a $20 Million Mirror for the World’s Largest Telescope (Giant Magellan Telescope)

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) is a ground-based extremely large telescope under construction, planned for completion in 2025. When completed, it will be the world’s largest telescope and one member of the next class of giant ground-based telescopes that promises to revolutionize our view and understanding of the universe. It will be constructed in the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

GMT has a unique design that offers several advantages. It is a segmented mirror telescope that employs seven of today’s largest stiff monolith mirrors as segments. Six off-axis 8.4 meter or 27-foot segments surround a central on-axis segment, forming a single optical surface 24.5 meters, or 80 feet, in diameter with a total collecting area of 368 square meters. The GMT will have a resolving power 10 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope!

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Software Artificial Intelligence Technology

5 Ways Software Helps to Save the Planet

We all have heard about the influence that our technology-driven world is having on our planet – from industrialization to excessive resource consumption and carbon emissions. And when it comes to saving our planet from constant climate change, there are tons of main schools of thought. Some believe that with innovative economic and technological development, we’ll find a way to protect the ecological balance and clear out our environmental messes. The people on the other end of the spectrum believe that we should let nature takes its course and integrate only environmentally sustainable practices. Also, we should instead focus on reducing our resource consumption and conserving the natural environment.

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Technology Robotics

Robotics is Transforming the Healthcare Field

Over the course of a decade, technology has rapidly progressed, especially when it comes to robotics. Robots have helped us better investigate and understand space, have made innovation in education more readily available, and some robots have even developed the ability to physically evolve.

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Space Exploration Mars Moon Landing Robotics Technology

How NASA Reinvented The Wheel

On August 6, 2012, at 05:17 UTC, NASA has successfully landed a Mini-Cooper-sized rover, Curiosity, on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars. The 900-kg rover (899 kg, to be exact, which is 1,982 lbs) is equipped with six 50 cm (20 in) diameter wheels in a rocker-bogie suspension (see notes 1). For the first time in the history of space exploration, the suspension system also served as landing gear for the vehicle, unlike its smaller predecessors.

Curiosity “soft-landed”  (wheels down) on the surface of Mars. But, even it’s called “soft-landing”, the touchdown speed was 0.6739m/s vertical and 0.044m/s horizontal, which could damage the wheels. Plus, while the rover is moving, the wheels should withstand the substantial damage through the rough Martian surface. That’s why the wheels of the Curiosity rover have been one of the biggest technical difficulties encountered on the mission (see notes 2).

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Space Exploration Artificial Intelligence Mars Robotics

The Confluence Of Robotics With Space Research And Exploration

Those of us who have grown up reading Asimov’s robot series are quite informed about what robots can accomplish. While that’s only a reel representation, it definitely points to an abundance of opportunities in the realm of space research.

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Moon Landing Space Exploration Technology

Why can’t we Remake the Rocketdyne F-1 Engine, which took humans to the Moon?

The mighty Saturn V, the rocket that took humans to the moon, remains the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status (as of 2018). It was used by NASA between 1967 and 1973. It was powered by five Rocketdyne F-1 engines. With a thrust of 1,746,000 lbf (7,770 kN) in vacuum (1,522,000 lbf / 6,770 kN at sea level), the F-1 remains the most powerful single combustion chamber liquid-propellant rocket engine ever developed.

Today, private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and space agencies like NASA trying to build powerful rockets in order to reach Moon and Mars. But, we’ve already built a rocket that took us to the moon, why don’t we simply remake it (and the engines)? In the video below, Youtube user Curious Droid answers this question.