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Starting on September 29, 2024, Earth will briefly have a second "moon" as a small asteroid, 2024 PT5, gets captured by our planet's gravity. This mini-moon will stick around for nearly two months before continuing its journey through space.

commandeered spacewalks. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has new suits and big goals, and it wants to test them as fast as possible. It is now the only private company that delivers humans to live and work in space, and NASA, the space agency of the United States, relies on it.

Polaris Dawn is not a NASA mission, and it is not regulated by the US government. So when its astronauts exit their capsule and ‘walk’ in space, it will mark a massive first for the private industry that is starting to dominate realms beyond Earth.

And this raises a question: Is the US breaking a promise it made 50 years ago about how to operate in space?

Pumping Water - Required Horsepower
Horsepower required to pump water.

Energy imparted to water by the pump is called water horsepower - and can be calculated as

Pwhp = q h SG / (3960 μ)                           

where

Pwhp = water horsepower (hp)

q = flow (gal/min)

h = head (ft)

SG = 1 for water Specific Gravity

μ = pump efficiency (decimal value)

Horsepower can also be calculated as:

Pwhp = q dp / (1715 μ)                   

where

Pwhp = water horsepower (hp)

dp = delivered pressure (psi)

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was launched in 2006 in order to observe the surfaces of outer solar system bodies up close for the first time in our history. The spacecraft successfully completed a flyby of the Pluto system (2015), and later on (2019)  it made a flyby of one of the Kuiper Belt objects, (486958) Arrokoth.

While it was highly difficult to search for solar system objects with multiple background stars, the scientists were able to localize 24 Kuiper Belt objects.

Unfortunately, the Kuiper belt objects discovered until now require too much fuel for New Horizons to flyby, but new ones at greater distances might fall within the available fuel reach of the spacecraft.

In 2020, deeper observations with the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru Telescope began, and, by 2023, 239 Kuiper Belt objects were discovered.

"The most exciting part of the HSC observations was the discovery of 11 objects at distances beyond the known Kuiper Belt,

New Horizons is currently traveling further out, at approximately 60 au from the Sun, hoping to discover many more distant objects.

"Flight 5 Starship and Super Heavy are ready to fly, pending regulatory approval," the company said via X on Thursday afternoon (Aug. 8). "Additional booster catch testing and Flight 6 vehicle testing is planned while waiting for clearance to fly."

Two years after a nuclear power plant in Michigan was decommissioned, the United States government and Great Lakes State have invested nearly $2 billion to bring it back online.