Category: Science

I’ve posted before about attempts by the company Space X to land a booster rocket in an upright position on a barge in the ocean. Pretty much since the dawn of space travel, booster rockets that launch astronauts and other payloads into space have simply been jettisoned during the early stages of the mission and have either burned up in the atmosphere or dropped into the ocean. Pundits have compared that to putting a new engine in your car after every time you go for a drive.

What Space X aims to do is recover the rocket intact, which would permit it to be reused — drastically reducing the potential cost of a space mission. After several near misses, Space X succeeded yesterday in landing one of its Falcon 9 rockets in an upright position on the barge.

While such landings are still a long way from being routine, it very definitely was a major step forward for Space X and its visionary founder/Internet billionaire Elon Musk. And if you don’t know already, here’s a bit of local trivia. While Musk himself was born in South Africa, his mother Maye was born in Regina.

So congrats to Musk and his Space X colleagues on their accomplishment.

After notching its first successful landing of a rocket booster in mid-December, SpaceX experienced a setback on the weekend when it attempted to land another booster. Instead of being on solid land as in December, the target this time was a barge in the Pacific Ocean.

Twice previously, SpaceX has attempted to land rocket boosters on barges and failed. While this attempt was unsuccessful too, it went far better than the previous two landings in January and April 2015, with the booster actually touching down before it slowly began to tilt and eventually topple over.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said later that one of the booster’s support legs had failed to lock into place after it had touched down, and that had caused the accident. He further speculated that the failure might have been due to ice build-up from condensation from heavy fog at the time of lift-off.

As might be imagined, a barge landing presents greater challenges than a landing on terra firma. This weekend, waves in the vicinity of the platform were in the three to four metre range. Barge landings offer greater flexibility in the type of launches SpaceX can do, though, so they’re seen as an important step in the development of a reusable rocket booster that would dramatically reduce the cost of space missions.

Here’s a short video clip of the Falcon 9 rocket’s descent:

https://youtu.be/ecLdz1p-_Rw

There was big news in the world of chemistry yesterday when scientists from Japan, the United States and Russia announced the existence of four new superheavy elements that complete the seventh row of the periodic table. The elements have the atomic numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 in the updated chart above.

It’s big news, I guess, although these elements, which have yet to be named, don’t exist in nature. Instead, they’re created in labs by slamming lighter elements together so they form a new element that exists only briefly before decaying into smaller components.

That process mimics, to a certain extent, how matter is created in the natural world. That’s done via fusion in stars. Hydrogen, being the simplest atom with one proton and one electron, is by far the most common element in universe. Under massive pressure in stellar interiors, hydrogen atoms “fuse” together to produce helium (two protons, two neutrons and two electrons). This fusion reaction produces some sub-atomic particles, along with a whole pile of energy in the form of light, heat and other radiation that, in the case of our Sun, we rely on for life.

Elements further down on the periodic table such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen are produced through a similar stellar process using combinations of hydrogen and helium atoms. Carbon, for instance, consists of six protons, six neutrons and six electrons.

The further down you go on the periodic table, the heavier the elements get. The heavier the element is, the more difficult it is to produce in nature. Elements such as sulphur (16 protons, 16 neutrons and 16 electrons) and iron (26 protons, 30 neutrons and 26 electrons), for instance, are only created at the end stages of a star’s life when it becomes unstable and gravitational forces are generated that produce sufficient pressure to fuse larger numbers of atomic elements together.

Then you have elements further down on the periodic table such as silver, gold and platinum that are heavier still. Gold, for instance, has 79 protons, 118 neutrons and 79 electrons, and elements like that are typically only created during a nova/supernova explosion that marks a star’s death. Because of those special circumstances, heavy elements are much rarer in the universe than lighter elements. But they do occur naturally.

We’ve produced synthetic elements before, and the four announced yesterday join that list. As you can read in this Guardian report, scientists will likely continue with experiments to produce even heavier synthetic elements which I guess will open up a whole new row on the periodic table — although how far we can go is unknown. Some scientists speculate there’s a theoretical limit with estimates ranging from atomic number 128 to 173. Although synthetic elements larger than that haven’t been ruled out.