And so the year continues to go at some pace – it’s week 7, so much has happened so far, and I can only see more happening over the coming weeks and months! Sharing my top 2 from the week gone…
- Perseverance – That’s right… NASA’s Perseverance landed on Mars!!! So what’s so significant about this, well firstly… Perseverance has a large amount of data in its memory banks which it is gradually offloading to Earth and… the pictures it’s been sharing initially have been brilliant!!
Its initial mission will last one Martian year (roughly two Earth years), although it’s hard to see the agency not extending this if all the hardware remains healthy.
As well as searching for signs of life (Imagine… it finds clear signs of life… how awesome would that be!!), Perseverance’s other key objective is to select and package rock samples that can be brought back to Earth laboratories by later missions.
2. The New Service Stations! – Usually, when on a journey, and you need to fill up… you’d stop at your nearest service stations and fill up. However, times are changing.. on the outskirts of Braintree in Essex (UK), there’s a service station that is the first of it’s kind in the UK… that has space for 36 cars to charge at once!!
The super-fast electric forecourt will deliver 350kW of charging power – enough to add 200 miles of driving range in 20 minutes – to up to 36 cars at a time. And… it will use clean energy sourced from one of the UK’s first subsidy-free solar farms at Clayhill in Bedfordshire, overhead solar canopies, and a battery capable of storing enough energy to drive 24,000 miles.
It is the first of more than 100 electric forecourts that Gridserve, a clean energy company, plans to roll out across the country over the next five years as part of a billion-pound “sun-to-wheel” infrastructure.
So… looks like infrastructure is finally catching up! Yes, there’s a long way to go, but great to see this happening…