UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

IN BRIEF

Researchers have discovered a way to make soybean oil into the super-strong material graphene. The material has a wide variety of potential uses and can revolutionize electronics.
The material could be used to make cell phone batteries last 25 percent longer, make more effective solar cells, and even filter fuel out of air.

DEEP FRIED HIGH-TECH

Researchers have found a way to turn cheap, everyday cooking oil into the wonder material graphene – a technique that could greatly reduce the cost of making the much-touted nanomaterial.

Graphene is a single sheet of carbon atoms with incredible properties – it’s 200 times stronger than steel, harder than diamond, and incredibly flexible. Under certain conditions, it can even be turned into a superconductor that carries electricity with zero resistance.

That means the material has the potential to make better electronics, more effective solar cells, and could even be used in medicine.

Last year, a study suggested that graphene could help mobile phone batteries last 25 percent longer, and the material has the potential to filter fuel out of thin air.

But these applications have been limited by the fact that graphene usually has to be made in a vacuum at intense heat using purified ingredients, which makes it expensive to produce.

Until we can find a cost-effective way to mass produce the over-achieving material, it’s pretty much limited to labs.

But scientists in Australia have now managed to create graphene in normal air conditions, using cheap soybean cooking oil.

“This ambient-air process for graphene fabrication is fast, simple, safe, potentially scalable, and integration-friendly,” said one of the researchers, Zhao Jun Han from Australia’s CSIRO.

“Our unique technology is expected to reduce the cost of graphene production and improve the uptake in new applications.”

The team has called the new technique ‘GraphAir’ technology, and it involves heating soybean oil in a tube furnace for about 30 minutes, causing it to decompose into carbon building blocks.

This carbon is then rapidly cooled on a foil made of nickel, where it diffuses into a thin rectangle of graphene that’s just 1 nanometre thick (about 80,000 times thinner than a human hair).

Not only is this technique cheaper and easier than other methods, it’s also a lot quicker – to create graphene in a vacuum takes several hours.

Photo credit: CSIRO

MORE CHEAP OPTIONS

Zhao told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the technique could reduce the cost of making graphene 10-fold.

Not only that, but it offers a more sustainable option for recycling waste cooking oil.

“We can now recycle waste oils that would have otherwise been discarded and transform them into something useful,” said one of the team, Dong Han Seo.

The question now is whether this new technique can be scaled up – finding a cheaper way to make graphene is awesome, but the graphene film produced so far was only 5 cm (1.9 inches) by 2 cm (0.8 inches) in size.

The team says that the largest film they can make using the technique right now is around the size of a credit card.

To really make graphene fit for commercial use, researchers will need to produce films that are a whole lot larger than that.

“The potential’s enormous,” David Officer, a graphene expert from the University of Wollongong in Australia, who wasn’t involved in the study, told the ABC.

“[But] the question will be whether you can economically scale a method like this, where they’ve sealed it inside a furnace tube, to create and handle metre-sized films.”

The team is now looking for commercial partners to pursue this goal.

But they’re not the only researchers working on it – last week, a team from Kansas State University patented a simple technique that creates graphene using only hydrocarbon gas, oxygen, and a spark plug. No vacuum required.

Time will tell if they can use it to effectively make large films of graphene in one go, but it’s nice to know that researchers around the world are working on finding a way to take this incredible material out of the lab and into our lives.

The research has been published in Nature Communications.

The Intelsat 603 satellite during a 1992 shuttle repair mission. That satellite is based on a bus similar to one that an unnamed government agency, perhaps the NRO, is offering to NASA.

Credit: NASA

WASHINGTON — NASA is soliciting concepts for payloads that could fly on a mysterious satellite it is in discussions to inherit from another government agency.

NASA issued a request for information (RFI) Feb. 15 for a proposed spacecraft called the NASA Science/Technology Platform Satellite, or NSTP-Sat. The RFI was the first time NASA had publicly discussed such a mission.

The RFI, issued by NASA's science mission directorate, solicits ideas for payloads, including remote sensing instruments and technology demonstrations, which could fly on the spacecraft. The RFI offered few details about the proposed mission, noting NSTP-Sat could fly "to low Earth orbit, geostationary equatorial orbit, medium Earth orbit, Earth-Moon L1, or lunar orbit in the 2021 timeframe."

The RFI, which remains open until March 17, seeks ideas for how this spacecraft could be used to meet NASA's science and technology development goals. The RFI states that NASA will use the responses to determine "whether there are science opportunities for new uses of this spacecraft" and "whether a solicitation for proposals is warranted to enable such opportunities." [Satellite Quiz: What's Up There?]

The RFI offered few details about the spacecraft itself. "The NSTP-Sat is a spacecraft platform that has become available to NASA as excess Government property through an interagency agreement," it stated. It added the spacecraft was a "Boeing GEO spinner bus" that could launch on an EELV-class rocket or as a secondary payload on a Space Launch System mission.

NASA and other organizations involved with NSTP-Sat have been reticent to provide additional details about how NASA gained access to the satellite bus. Alan Zide, a program executive in NASA's heliophysics division and the point of contact listed in the RFI, did not respond to email messages with questions about the satellite.

**A diagram of the satellite bus being offered to NASA from the NASA RFI issued in February.**
**Credit: NASA**

NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown said March 1 that NASA is in discussions with the U.S. Air Force to obtain the bus. "NASA and the U.S. Air Force (USAF) are in discussions concerning the transfer of a satellite bus that the USAF has determined does not meet current or projected Air Force mission requirements," he said.

U.S. Air Force spokeswoman Capt. AnnMarie Annicelli said March 2 she was not familiar with the satellite and was looking into it, but has not provided any additional information. When asked who the original customer was for this Boeing-built satellite, Addrian Brooks, a spokesman for Boeing Network and Space Systems, said March 2 that the company was "unable to disclose this information."

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who specializes in space history, notes the dimensions for the satellite provided in the RFI are consistent with two versions of satellites built by Hughes Space and Communications. One, the HS-389, was used for the Intelsat 6 series of satellites, while the HS-393 was sold to other commercial customers. Those satellites were built and launched in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Boeing acquired Hughes Space and Communications in 2000.

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), he noted, is thought to have used the same bus for a series of data relay satellites operating under the code name QUASAR, also known as the Satellite Data System (SDS). Four such satellites launched from 1989 through 1996.

Spin-stabilized satellites have fallen out of favor, having been replaced by three-axis stabilized satellites. The last Boeing-built commercial spin-stabilized satellite, a Boeing 376 spacecraft called e-BIRD, launched in 2003.

McDowell said a later generation of QUASAR satellites, launched from 1998 to as recently as 2014, were also assumed to be three-axis stabilized. However, he noted there’s little known about this series of satellites, leaving open the possibility it also used the same bus as the earlier spacecraft.

"It's possible that some other NRO program also used this bus, but QUASAR/SDS is definitely the most likely," he said in a March 3 email.

If the satellite in question is indeed from the NRO, it would not be the first time NASA inherited spare hardware from that intelligence agency. In 2012, NASA announced it was taking possession of two 2.4-meter mirror assemblies from the NRO. The mirrors were reportedly built for NRO's Future Imagery Architecture program, and became surplus when the NRO cancelled the optical portion of that program in the mid-2000s.

NASA, after taking possession of the mirrors, solicited ideas from the scientific community on how to use what it called Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets. NASA decided to use one of the mirrors for the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), which originally planned to build a much smaller mirror. WFIRST is planned for launch in the mid-2020s.

Phillip Swarts contributed to this story.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.