Key technologies include a compact pre-cooler heat-exchanger that can take an incoming airstream of over 1,000C and cool it to -150C in less than 1/100th of a second. This would permit Sabre to use oxygen direct from the atmosphere for combustion instead of carrying it in a tank with the weight penalty that implies.
Source: co.uk
Humans aren’t great at picking up their trash, a fact that is reinforced by the Great Pacific garbage patch and other massive dumps and landfills around the world. As it turns out, we are also taking our talent at producing rubbish into orbit with us. Since the advent of spaceflight in the 1950s, outer space has become congested with about 500,000 bits of spacecraft debris measuring larger than a marble, and 20,000 chunks larger than a softball, according to NASA.
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Dark matter and galaxies normally go hand in hand. Dark matter seems to be needed to draw in sufficient material to form the galaxy and its stars, and halos of dark matter keep galaxies from spinning apart as they rotate. So scientists were more than a bit surprised to find a galaxy that has little to no dark matter at all.
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This week, the Axion Dark Matter Experiment (ADMX) unveiled a new result, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, that places it in a category of one: it is the world’s first and only experiment to have achieved the necessary sensitivity to “hear” the telltale signs of dark matter axions. This technological breakthrough is the result of more than 30 years of research and development, with the latest piece of the puzzle coming in the form of a quantum-enabled device that allows ADMX to listen for axions more closely than any experiment ever built.
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