Propulsion is consistently a significant aspect of space missions. When traveling to space, it is crucial to minimize weight, which means that having fuel with a higher energy density is advantageous. Additionally, it is typically not possible to replenish your fuel supply once you are in that location. A viable alternative, devoid of this issue, is employing a solar sail.

It is possible to easily propel a spacecraft by using the radiation pressure that sunlight exerts. Although this has been proven on multiple occasions, the technology still faces obstacles that need to be addressed. NASA is currently conducting tests on a new design called the Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. It was recently placed in orbit following its launch on a Rocket Lab mission.

In order to achieve maximum effectiveness, it is essential that the sails and booms that are put into use are as lightweight as feasible. NASA has created novel composite materials for a recent experiment that are not only lighter but also more rigid than previous methods used for solar sails.

“Historically, booms have been constructed either from heavy metal materials or from lightweight composites with a bulky structure, both of which are not suitable for modern small spacecraft.” “Solar sails require booms that are both large and stable, as well as lightweight and capable of folding down into a compact form,” stated Keats Wilkie, the principal investigator of the mission at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

The booms of this sail are cylindrical in shape and can be compressed into a flat form and rolled up similar to a tape measure, allowing for easy storage in a compact size. Despite their collapsible nature, these booms still possess the benefits associated with composite materials, such as reduced bending and flexing when exposed to temperature variations.

When the sails are fully out, they cover an area of 80 square meters, which is about 860 square feet, or about six parking spots. But they pack really small and can move around a CubeSat the size of an air fryer. They will move in a circle around the sun that is about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) above Earth’s surface.

Ames Research Center lead systems engineer Alan Rhodes said, “Seven meters of the deployable booms can roll up into a shape that fits in your hand.” Rhodes works at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. “We hope that the new technologies that were tested on this spacecraft will lead other people to use them in ways that we haven’t even thought of.”

With this technology, spacecraft could move around Earth, the Moon, and the inner solar system. If the sun shines on the sail at just the right angle, it might be possible to see this test from the ground.

It’s true that space is the final frontier, but life in microgravity still has a long way to go when it comes to food. It seems like this has always been the case. While on the first trip around the sun, Yuri Gagarin ate the first meal ever eaten in space. How did he eat? Yes, it was a choice.

Cosmonaut Gagarin was the first person to go into space. He did one orbit of the Earth in 108 minutes in 1961. Gagarin’s Vostok 1 spaceship had enough food for 13 days in case the retrorocket didn’t work. He would have to wait for Earth to come back to him through natural orbital decay, but it was a good chance to try eating in space. Scientists weren’t sure if basic tasks like chewing and swallowing could be done in microgravity, even though tests had been done on the “Vomit Comet” back on Earth. “No crumbs” was a very important factor, so food that could be turned into a paste and put in a metal tube like toothpaste was used.

Gagarin had two courses, even though he was in orbit for less than two hours. Beef and liver puree was the main dish. Gagarin ate two tubes of it, so maybe it tasted better than it sounds. For dessert, he had a tube of chocolate sauce.

Scientists didn’t know what microgravity would do to people at the time, so they didn’t want Gagarin to lose consciousness, so the capsule was controlled from the ground with a code that could be used to switch to manual control in case of an emergency. This meant they could eat even if something went wrong with their digestion, but Gagarin’s first meal in space showed it was safe to do so.

More and more astronauts went into space and stayed there longer. This made it clear that our taste buds can change when we’re in microgravity. Body fluids move to the top of your head, and research has shown that this may make the smell and taste of food less strong, similar to eating while you have a cold.

As time has gone on, the food and drinks that astronauts and cosmonauts eat and drink in space have changed and gotten better. “Freeze-dried astronaut ice cream” is a thing of the past. Aside from being able to order pizza at the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts can also bake cookies there. Thanks to a specially made cup, you can even get an espresso and drink it in deep space.

Scientists have even been brave enough to see if they can fry food in space. Carefully planned tests were done with a special fryer on a parabolic plane that simulated weightlessness. The results showed that it is possible to deep fry things in microgravity, but please don’t try this at home.

The “no crumbs” rule, on the other hand, is still hard to break, and bread is still a problem. Wraps, pittas, rotis, and bread that doesn’t have crumbs are fine in space, but if you want a space sandwich, we still have work to do.

Two preprint papers from a large team of experimenters reveal their unsuccessful search for magnetic monopoles, the elusive north or south magnetic poles without partners. However, they express optimism as they make progress in narrowing down the potential locations for these elusive particles.

The preprints, which have not yet undergone peer review, also explored the possibility that we may have inadvertently created magnetic monopoles in the past and overlooked the equipment where they could have been detected.

We learn early on in physics that magnets consistently possess two opposing poles, commonly referred to as north and south. When a bar magnet is sliced in two, new poles will emerge near the break, ensuring that each smaller magnet retains one of each pole. With a magnet that is sufficiently brittle, this is something you can easily test on your own. While you’re at it, it might be worth considering the validity of more recent claims regarding magnets and questioning the reliability of the source.

However, the possibility of a single magnetic pole, also known as a monopole, existing apart from its counterpart has long intrigued scientists. Indeed, positive and negative electric charges can exist independently without requiring their opposites to be present.

James Clerk Maxwell, a pioneer in magnetic theory, believed he had successfully debunked the concept. However, many years later, Paul Dirac revived the idea by demonstrating that the existence of monopoles could provide an explanation for the quantization of electric charge. It is worth noting that if magnetic charge is quantized, it would consist of fundamental units known as the Dirac charge. The symbol for these units is 2/e, which is equal to 68.5 times the charge on an electron. Scientists in the field have become more and more convinced of this concept over time, yet researchers conducting experiments have yet to discover the evidence needed to support it.

Truly, the theory of monopoles has been extensively studied and has gained widespread acceptance among physicists, indicating their likely existence. In numerous circumstances that are significantly different from the ones that CERN is investigating, we have seen signs of these phenomena. However, the verification of subatomic magnetic monopoles continues to be an ongoing challenge.

Many theories regarding magnetic monopoles necessitate their adherence to laws of symmetry. As a result, it is necessary for there to be an equal number of north and south poles in the universe without the need for them to be attached like traditional magnetic poles.

Since 2012, the MoEDAL collaboration has been utilizing the particle annihilations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to search for magnetic monopoles.

There are various ways in which scientists speculate that monopolies could potentially be created. In a recent study, scientists from MoEDAL investigated the detection of monopole production from virtual photons. It may seem far-fetched to those unfamiliar with the field, but in the realm of science, there is a concept that is crucial to our understanding of physics. This concept involves virtual photons, which serve as carriers of the electromagnetic force between two charged particles. However, it’s important to note that these virtual photons do not exist as independent particles.

Virtual photons can be generated through the collision of particles at high velocities, along with various other techniques. The creation of magnetic monopoles has two potential methods, according to theoretical physicists. One method involves the fusion of two virtual photons, while the other process, called the Drell-Yan process, can generate a monopole from a single virtual photon.

Contrary to expectations, the search for a magnetic monopole does not solely rely on its magnetic field. The charge that theoretical monopoles carry is quite significant. Discovering a High Electric Charge Object (HECO) would suggest the presence of physics beyond the standard model. Specifically, it could indicate the presence of hidden monopoles, along with other intriguing possibilities like remnants of microscopic black holes.

“The search reach of MoEDAL for both monopoles and HECOs enables the collaboration to extensively explore the theoretical ‘discovery space’ for these hypothetical particles,” stated MoEDAL spokesperson James Pinfold.

In the first preprint, the MoEDAL team presents their findings on the lower limits of the mass of a monopole, claiming that these limits are the most robust ones published so far. They assert that they have outperformed the larger ATLAS experiment, which utilized the LHC for the identical objective.

The second preprint discusses an alternative approach to searching for monopoles. It focuses on the monopoles generated through the Schwinger mechanism, which occurs when heavy ions are collided during the initial run of the LHC. According to the Schwinger mechanism, it is postulated that the presence of intense electric or magnetic fields has the potential to generate particles from a vacuum. “If monopoles are composite particles, this and our previous Schwinger-monopole search may have been the first-ever opportunities to observe them,” Pinfold said.

It was hypothesized that monopoles could have been generated during the experiment and subsequently become trapped and unnoticed in a section of the collider that had been taken out of service. No magnetic monopoles were discovered; however, the authors were able to deduce that the creation of a magnetic monopole requires a significant amount of energy. They confidently stated, with a 95 percent confidence level, that these magnetic monopoles must have masses exceeding 80 billion electron volts.

This comes as no surprise to most theoretical physicists. Understanding the role of magnetic monopoles is crucial in various endeavors to combine quantum mechanics and gravity in grand unified theories. These predictions often involve extremely high masses, on the scale of trillions of electron volts, and necessitate charges that are at least two or three times greater than the Dirac charge.

You can find both preprints on arXiv.org, here and here.