Thought "The Rest"-section of ASIF could use some science, astrometrical data has revealed a new companion galaxy to Milky Way, located on the far side, south of Vela constelllation. Very dim of course: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/large-strangely-dim-galaxy-found-lurking-far-side-milky-way
The team found that the amount of starlight, or the number of photons (particles of visible light) that stars have emitted throughout the history of the observable universe is 4×10^84 photons. Or, alternatively, 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 photons.
A meteor that exploded in the air near the Dead Sea 3,700 years ago may have wiped out communities, killed tens of thousands of people, and provided the kernel of truth to an old Bible story. The area is in modern-day Jordan, in a 25 km wide circular plain called Middle Ghor. Most of the evidence for this event comes from archaeological evidence excavated at the Bronze Age city of Tall el-Hammam located in that area, which some scholars say is the city of Sodom from the Bible.
Archaeologists have been digging at the Tall el-Hamman site for 13 years, and have unearthed some pretty convincing evidence supporting the air-burst idea. The findings were presented on November 15th at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research, by archaeologist Phillip Silvia of Trinity Southwest University.
Tall el-Hammam was a thriving city state occupying Middle Ghor. The civilization had occupied the area for over 2,500 years. The city itself held the administrative center of the kingdom, and was protected by a perimeter wall up to 30m (100 ft) thick and up to 15m (50 ft.) high, for a linear distance of over 2.5km. The wall held multiple gates, towers, and likely other defensive features. But all that was obliterated when the meteor pierced the atmosphere and exploded over the area.
Evidence gathered at the Tall el-Hammam site tells the story of the event. When the meteor air-burst occurred, there was an intensely hot and powerful shock wave. The shock wave wiped out all settlements in the area and destroyed an area of 500 sq. km. And the area remained uninhabited for a remarkable 700 years after the event. Several lines of evidence support the likelihood of this event.QuoteSilvia and Collins say in their paper that the destruction and the damage on walls and other structures in the city is directional, supporting the idea of a shock wave. In the past, archaeologist have wondered if an earthquake could have caused the collapse of the region, but an earthquake would not have caused the type of directional damage that the remaining structures and fortifications display.(https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-t2nEv0JDb0U/WYZNKc8-bOI/AAAAAAAAFUI/1WjcoFsRK80Dvi98zHG0cXWZHGuI0ZNQQCLcBGAs/s1600/Screenshot_2017-08-05-18-54-44-1.png)
A pottery shard was found in the city that had one side melted to glass. Only extreme heat can do that. Examination revealed zircon crystals inside a bubble in the glass which could only have been formed by temperatures over 4000 Celsius. Additionally, the layer of melted clay that turned to glass is only 1 mm, not the entire depth of the shard. This indicates only a short burst of intense heat, rather than long exposure from something like burning petro-chemical eruptions. The research team concluded that the shard was exposed to temperatures between 8,000°C and 12,000°C for less than a few milliseconds. That certainly supports the idea of an airburst.
Signature markers of an airburst event include high levels of platinum, typically 600% above normal background levels, and a high platinum-palladium ratio. (Both of these occur in asteroids and meteors, but are not common on Earth.)
Researchers at the site also found what's called a "melt rock" weighing over 600 grams. It's an agglomeration of three different rocks melted together by extreme heat and covered with a layer of glass. This also contained zirconium crystals, and further analysis of the melt rock concluded that it had probably been exposed to 12,000 degree Celsius temperatures for a few seconds.
The final piece of evidence concerns what happened to the Tall el-Hammam area after the destruction. This region is considered the best-watered agricultural area in the region, yet after the Tall el-Hammam city-state was destroyed, the area remained unoccupied for about 700 years. What could have caused this, if the extreme heat from the air burst lasted only a few seconds?
The answer lies in the soil, according to the researchers. Six samples from above, through, and below the soil layer from the time of the event were analyzed geochemically. The results showed "salt and sulfate levels > 6 percent (60,000 ppm) in the ash layer and > 5 percent (50,000 ppm) in the soil layers immediately above and below the ash layer," according to the paper. The source of these contaminants had to be the Dead Sea, which borders the Middle Ghor area.
The two scientists say that the massive shockwave and heat wave not only destroyed the settlements, but the shock wave deposited a layer of salts onto the top soil, destroying it and making it unable to support agriculture for hundreds of years. It only takes a salt content of 12,800 ppm to prevent wheat from germinating, and a salt content of 17,900 ppm to prevent barley from growing. Those thresholds were easily exceeded.
The researchers concluded that an airburst with a yield equivalent to a 10 mt nuclear warhead occurred about 1 km above northeast corner of the Dead Sea. They say this adequately explains all of the evidence gathered at Tall el-Hammam.
Dark matter mystery solved? Oxford University scientists may have solved one of the biggest questions in the universe
That proposed fluid appears to work exactly as dark energy does.
"The outcome seems rather beautiful: dark energy and dark matter can be unified into a single substance, with both effects being simply explainable as positive mass matter surfing on a sea of negative masses," he said.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/dark-matter-energy-solution-theory-negative-mass-astronomy-astrophysics-a8668476.html
Not sure if this will work but it would be nice to fill in the darks.
... There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Shakespeare - Hamlet (1.5.167-8)
University of Rochester researchers have succeeded in creating particles with negative mass in an atomically thin semiconductor, by causing it to interact with confined light in an optical microcavity.
... “By causing an exciton to give up some of its identity to a photon to create a polariton, we end up with an object that has a negative mass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_mass) associated with it,” Vamivakas explains. “That’s kind of a mind-bending thing to think about, because if you try to push or pull it, it will go in the opposite direction from what your intuition would tell you.”
Other research groups have been experimenting with similar devices, Vamivakas says, but this is the first device to produce particles with negative mass.
The research was funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys4303
Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology announced Wednesday that they have found new evidence of a giant icy planet lurking in the darkness of our solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto. They are calling it "Planet Nine."
Their paper, published in the Astronomical Journal, describes the planet as about five to 10 times as massive as the Earth.
... They have inferred its existence from the motion of recently discovered dwarf planets and other small objects in the outer solar system. Those smaller bodies have orbits that appear to be influenced by the gravity of a hidden planet – a "massive perturber." The astronomers suggest it might have been flung into deep space long ago by the gravitational force of Jupiter or Saturn.
... Brown notes that the putative ninth planet—at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto—is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet. Unlike the class of smaller objects now known as dwarf planets, Planet Nine gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system. In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets—a fact that Brown says makes it "the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar."
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Researchers find evidence of a real ninth planet (http://phys.org/news/2016-01-evidence-real-ninth-planet.html)
Batygin and Brown realized that the six most distant objects from Trujillo and Shepherd's original collection all follow elliptical orbits that point in the same direction in physical space. That is particularly surprising because the outermost points of their orbits move around the solar system, and they travel at different rates.
"It's almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they're all in exactly the same place," says Brown. The odds of having that happen are something like 1 in 100, he says. But on top of that, the orbits of the six objects are also all tilted in the same way—pointing about 30 degrees downward in the same direction relative to the plane of the eight known planets. The probability of that happening is about 0.007 percent. "Basically it shouldn't happen randomly," Brown says. "So we thought something else must be shaping these orbits."
After examining the orbital periods of these six Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) – Sedna, 2010 GB174, 2004 VN112, 2012 VP113, and 2013 GP136 – they concluded that a hypothetical planet with an orbital period of about 17,117 years (or a semimajor axis of about 665 AU), would have the necessary period ratios with these four objects. This would fall within the parameters estimated by Batygin and Brown for the planet's orbital period (10,000 – 20,000 years).
Their analysis also offered suggestions as to what kind of resonance the planet has with the KBOs in question. Whereas Sedna's orbital period would have a 3:2 resonance with the planet, 2010 GB174 would be in a 5:2 resonance, 2994 VN112 in a 3:1, 2004 VP113 in 4:1, and 2013 GP136 in 9:1. These sort of resonances are simply not likely without the presence of a larger planet.
"For a resonance to be dynamically meaningful in the outer Solar System, you need one of the objects to have enough mass to have a reasonably strong gravitational effect on the other," said the research team. "The extreme Kuiper belt objects aren't really massive enough to be in resonances with each other, but the fact that their orbital periods fall along simple ratios might mean that they each are in resonance with a massive, unseen object."
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Estimates of Planet Nine’s “possible” and “probable” zones. by French scientists based on a careful study of Saturn’s orbit and using mathematical models.
Constraints on the location of a possible 9th planet derived from the Cassini data http://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.06116v3.pdf
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... “For me candidate Planet Nine is a close object, although it is about 700 times further away as the distance between the Earth and the Sun,” noted Linder in a statement. The “ideal” Planet Nine, according to the models, features a mass ten times heavier than Earth, and a radius 3.7 times wider than our planet. Similar to Uranus and Neptune, it has an outer envelope of helium and hydrogen, a layer of gas (also consisting of helium and hydrogen), a water ice layer, a silicate mantle, and an iron core.
The models also projected a temperature of 47 Kelvin (-374 degrees Fahrenheit, -226 degrees Celsius). Planet Nine is bitterly cold—but this data suggests that it’s being heated from the inside.
“This means that the planet’s emission is dominated by the cooling of its core, otherwise the temperature would only be 10 Kelvin,” explained Linder.“Its intrinsic power is about 1,000 times bigger than its absorbed power.”
(https://images.sciencedaily.com/2016/05/160531082201_1_540x360.jpg)
Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVSEK9yvr3s) Through a computer-simulated study, astronomers at Lund University in Sweden show that it is highly likely that the so-called Planet 9 is an exoplanet. This would make it the first exoplanet to be discovered inside our own solar system. The theory is that our sun, in its youth some 4.5 billion years ago, stole Planet 9 from its original star.
An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is by definition a planet located outside our solar system. Now it appears that this definition is no longer viable. According to astronomers in Lund, there is a lot to indicate that Planet 9 was captured by the young sun and has been a part of our solar system completely undetected ever since.
"It is almost ironic that while astronomers often find exoplanets hundreds of light years away in other solar systems, there's probably one hiding in our own backyard", says Alexander Mustill, astronomer at Lund University.
Stars are born in clusters and often pass by one another. It is during these encounters that a star can "steal" one or more planets in orbit around another star. This is probably what happened when our own sun captured Planet 9.
In a computer-simulated model, Alexander together with astronomers in Lund and Bordeaux has shown that Planet 9 was probably captured by the sun when coming in close contact while orbiting another star.
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Simulations show that the glancing flyby shown here in a computer image best explains the current structure of our outer solar system. As the star and sun drew nearer, gravity began to take hold of objects in both systems. As the sun and passing star approach each other, gravity can yank small objects from one solar system to the other. Once the stellar encounter is complete, the disk of each solar system contains a mixture of indigenous and captured dust and planets, as shown in the final computer image. Credit: University of Utah and Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
"Planet 9 may very well have been 'shoved' by other planets, and when it ended up in an orbit that was too wide around its own star, our sun may have taken the opportunity to steal and capture Planet 9 from its original star. When the sun later departed from the stellar cluster in which it was born, Planet 9 was stuck in an orbit around the sun", says Alexander Mustill.
"This is the only exoplanet that we, realistically, would be able to reach using a space probe", he says.
Alexander J. Mustill et al. Is there an exoplanet in the Solar system? (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.07247.pdf), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters (2016).
Over four billion years ago, our sun stole hundreds of frozen mini-planets from a passing star – and the peculiar planetoid Sedna is one of them.
With its extremely elongated orbit taking it 200 times further from the sun than Neptune every 11,400 years, Sedna has been a mystery ever since its discovery in 2003. Its nearest neighbours, the thousand-plus “ice dwarfs” that populate the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune, are believed to be the frozen remnants of our solar system’s formation.
But Sedna, and a dozen other objects with similarly wonky orbits, are harder to explain. A gravitational kick from a planet in our solar system could never have thrown them into such orbits.
One idea was that Sedna could have been jolted out of place by a passing star, but there was little evidence to back it up.
... Using a low-cost, custom-built supercomputer, the team simulated over 10,000 possible encounters to find out which combination of a star’s mass, fly-by distance and velocity would lead to ice dwarfs being gravitationally captured into Sedna-like orbits.
They conclude that the passing star would have been 80 per cent more massive than the sun, and that it came as close as 34 billion kilometres – 51 times Neptune’s distance. The encounter probably took place when the sun was very young and still a member of a newly born star cluster.
The passing star would itself have stolen hundreds of ice dwarfs from the sun’s Kuiper belt, and flung hundreds more into interstellar space.
Scott Kenyon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who together with Ben Bromley of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City was one of the first to propose the idea, says the simulations are “pretty convincing”.
We are entering the greatest era of discovery in human history, an age of exploration that the thousands of Kepler planets, both confirmed and candidate, only hint at.
Want to work for NASA from the comforts of your couch? The space agency is looking to fulfill an amateur astronomer's dream — credit for the discovery of a new planet.
NASA is looking for help to find the mysterious and as-yet undiscovered Planet 9, which astronomers think may be the most distant planet in our solar system.
A new website — Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-worlds-planet-9) — lets people comb through footage captured by the agency's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/main/index.html) (WISE) mission a few years ago.
The footage shows objects gradually moving across the sky. "There are too many images for us to search through by ourselves," NASA said.
In this case, people are better than computers at spotting and identifying objects, such as a planet, in the footage. Human eyes can easily recognize the important moving objects while ignoring the background stars and other objects that computer programs would flag.
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If an average citizen spots something that leads to a discovery, he or she will get shared credit with the professional astronomers.
...The new objects they have submitted to the Minor Planet Center for designation include 2014 SR349, which adds to the class of the rare extreme trans-Neptunian objects. It exhibits similar orbital characteristics to the previously known extreme bodies whose positions and movements led Sheppard and Trujillo to initially propose the influence of Planet X.
Another new extreme object they found, 2013 FT28, has some characteristics similar to the other extreme objects but also some differences. The orbit of an object is defined by six parameters. The clustering of several of these parameters is the main argument for a ninth planet to exist in the outer solar system. 2013 FT28 shows similar clustering in some of these parameters (its semi-major axis, eccentricity, inclination, and argument of perihelion angle, for angle enthusiasts out there) but one of these parameters, an angle called the longitude of perihelion, is different from that of the other extreme objects, which makes that particular clustering trend less strong.
Another discovery, 2014 FE72, is the first distant Oort Cloud object found with an orbit entirely beyond Neptune. It has an orbit that takes the object so far away from the Sun (some 3000 times farther than Earth) that it is likely being influenced by forces of gravity from beyond our Solar System such as other stars and the galactic tide. It is the first object observed at such a large distance.
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Planet Nine—the undiscovered planet at the edge of the Solar System that was predicted by the work of Caltech's Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown in January 2016—appears to be responsible for the unusual tilt of the sun, according to a new study.
The large and distant planet may be adding a wobble to the solar system, giving the appearance that the sun is tilted slightly.
"Because Planet Nine is so massive and has an orbit tilted compared to the other planets, the solar system has no choice but to slowly twist out of alignment," says Elizabeth Bailey, a graduate student at Caltech and lead author of a study announcing the discovery.
All of the planets orbit in a flat plane with respect to the sun, roughly within a couple degrees of each other. That plane, however, rotates at a six-degree tilt with respect to the sun—giving the appearance that the sun itself is cocked off at an angle. Until now, no one had found a compelling explanation to produce such an effect. "It's such a deep-rooted mystery and so difficult to explain that people just don't talk about it," says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy.
Brown and Batygin's discovery of evidence that the sun is orbited by an as-yet-unseen planet—that is about 10 times the size of Earth with an orbit that is about 20 times farther from the sun on average than Neptune's—changes the physics. Planet Nine, based on their calculations, appears to orbit at about 30 degrees off from the other planets' orbital plane—in the process, influencing the orbit of a large population of objects in the Kuiper Belt, which is how Brown and Batygin came to suspect a planet existed there in the first place.
"It continues to amaze us; every time we look carefully we continue to find that Planet Nine explains something about the solar system that had long been a mystery," says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science.
... In their paper, "Corralling a Distant Planet with Extreme Resonant Kuiper Belt Objects (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8205/824/2/L22)," Malhotra and her co-authors, Kathryn Volk and Xianyu Wang, point out peculiarities of the orbits of the extreme KBOs that went unnoticed until now: they found that the orbital period ratios of these objects are close to ratios of small whole numbers. An example of this would be one KBO traveling around the Sun once while another takes twice as long, or three times as long, or four times as long etc., but not, say, 2.7 times as long.
According to the authors, such ratios could arise most naturally if the extreme KBOs' orbital periods are in small whole number ratios with a massive planet, which would help to stabilize the highly elliptical orbits of eKBOs
The findings bolster previous work by other scientists that showed that six of those bodies travel on highly eccentric orbits whose long axes all point in the same direction. This clustering of orbital parameters of the most distant KBOs suggested a large, planetary size body shepherding their orbits.
"Our paper provides more specific estimates for the mass and orbit that this planet would have, and, more importantly, constraints on its current position within its orbit," Malhotra said.
The team's calculations also suggest two likely orbital planes for the planet: one moderately close to the mean plane of the solar system and near the mean plane of the four eKBOs at about 18 degrees, and one steeper plane, inclined at about 48 degrees.QuoteAbstract
The four longest period Kuiper Belt objects have orbital periods close to integer ratios with each other. A hypothetical planet with an orbital period of ~17,117 years and a semimajor axis ~665 au would have N/1 and N/2 period ratios with these four objects. The orbital geometries and dynamics of resonant orbits constrain the orbital plane, the orbital eccentricity, and the mass of such a planet as well as its current location in its orbital path.
In their paper, the team members describe the discovery of the two new objects, and how these two new objects have very distant perihelia but don't have extreme semi-major axes or eccentricities like the other high-perihelion extreme trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) such as Sedna and 2012 VP113. In fact, these newly found worlds occupy a region of space just beyond what is known as the "Kuiper Belt edge," which lies about 50 AU from the Sun. Until this most recent discovery, only one object was known to have a low-to-moderate semi-major axis and a perihelion beyond this edge. The team discovered several more of these objects with high perihelion but moderately eccentric orbits. Their semi-major axes are in the range of about 60 to 100 AUs.
What was surprising is that these new objects are all near Neptune Mean Motion Resonances (that is, the locations of their orbits have specific period ratios with respect to that of Neptune). One of the new objects goes around the Sun once every time Neptune goes around 4 times, while the other new objects go around once every time Neptune goes around 3 times. The new objects also have significant inclinations in their orbits and thus are affected by the Kozai resonance, which was first shown to affect high inclination objects by Yoshihide Kozai in 1962. This finding suggests these worlds were captured into this rare orbital region through interactions with Neptune while that planet was migrating outwards in the solar system in the distant past. Neptune was born much closer to the Sun than its current position, and its migration outwards disturbed other, smaller objects into these distant orbits we see today. Thus, these objects give us insights into the movement of Neptune during the very early history of the solar system.
... Whatever the cause of Niku's strange orbit (or those TNOs that share its orbital pattern) may be, it is clear that there is more going on in the outer solar system than we thought. And with every new discovery, and every new object catalogued by astronomers, we are bettering our understanding of the dynamics that are at work out there.
Researchers testing whether a much-mythologized object called Planet Nine might indeed be a captured rogue planet found it certainly looks like one. They also performed simulations of various different kinds of rogue encounters with our solar system; they found that if the rogue had a mass equal to or greater than that of Jupiter, it could subsequently leave a physical impact on the configuration of the entire system. James Vesper of New Mexico State University presented the research Friday at the 229th American Astronomical Science meeting in Grapevine, Texas.
Vesper said their data showed 60 percent of all rogue encounters being “slingshotted” into the galaxy — they come in close to the sun and then shoot right back out. About ten percent of these encounters take one or more planets out with them. If two or more planets are knocked out — but the rogue is captured — Vesper refers to the exchange as a “kick and stay.”
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... An unknown, unseen "planetary mass object" may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets to be published in the Astronomical Journal. This object would be different from—and much closer than—the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence yet awaits confirmation.
In the paper, Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, or LPL, present compelling evidence of a yet-to-be- discovered planetary body with a mass somewhere between that of Mars and Earth. The mysterious mass, the authors show, has given away its presence—for now—only by controlling the orbital planes of a population of space rocks known as Kuiper Belt objects, or KBOs, in the icy outskirts of the solar system.
While most KBOs—debris left over from the formation of the solar system—orbit the sun with orbital tilts (inclinations) that average out to what planetary scientists call the invariable plane of the solar system, the most distant of the Kuiper Belt's objects do not. Their average plane, Volk and Malhotra discovered, is tilted away from the invariable plane by about eight degrees. In other words, something unknown is warping the average orbital plane of the outer solar system.
... A possible alternative to an unseen object that could have ruffled the plane of outer Kuiper Belt objects could be a star that buzzed the solar system in recent (by astronomical standards) history, the authors said.
"A passing star would draw all the 'spinning tops' in one direction," Malhotra said. "Once the star is gone, all the KBOs will go back to precessing around their previous plane. That would have required an extremely close passage at about 100 AU, and the warp would be erased within 10 million years, so we don't consider this a likely scenario."
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/solar-system/new-wrinkles-in-the-search-for-planet-x/
Astronomers announced in 2016 that a Planet 9 might exist. Their theory was based on the way some trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs behave.
The new research announced on October 17 works with the orbits of trans-Neptunian objects, too. It’s led by Juliette Becker, a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy at University of Michigan. Becker’s work consists of a large set of computer simulations, which, the researchers say, uncovered two findings about trans-Neptunian objects, also known as TNOs. Their statement explained:QuoteFirst, the researchers established a version of Planet 9 that would most likely cause our solar system to look the way it currently does, by preventing the TNOs from being destroyed or thrown out of the solar system.There are now five different lines of observational evidence pointing to the existence of Planet 9. If you were to remove this explanation and imagine Planet 9 does not exist, then you generate more problems than you solve. All of a sudden, you have five different puzzles, and you must come up with five different theories to explain them.
Second, the simulations predict that there is a process that they call resonance hopping by which a TNO jumps between stable orbits. This process can prevent the TNOs from being ejected from the solar system.
… it is now harder to imagine our solar system without a Planet 9 than with one.
Evaluating the Dynamical Stability of Outer Solar System Objects in the Presence of Planet Nine (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aa7aa2/pdf), https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.06609
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This may be a problem for any humans still around.
Dwarf star Gliese 710, which we've known about for some time, could now arrive in 1.29 million years, instead of the previously calculated 1.36 million years.
Berski and Dybczyński found that Gliese 710 would enter the Oort cloud to pass by the Sun a distance of about 13,365 astronomical units (each astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the Sun).
According to the new research, it will graze us at a distance of 4,303 AU. That's not actually very close - it's over 100 times the distance to Pluto, which orbits the Sun at an average of 39.5 AU. But it still has the potential to disrupt the Solar System.
That'll put it 24 light days, or 400 billion miles, away from us, 4,300 times farther from Earth than the sun. But that's close enough to have an impact. At that time, Gliese 710 will shine three times brighter than Mars. More importantly, its gravity could shoot comets and frozen planet into our solar system, putting them on a potential collision course with Earth.
And that's not everything. Gliese 710 is not the only star that’s coming our way. Gaia, launched in 2013, has measured the positions and trajectories of millions of stars. Using this data, we now know that out of 300,000 trajectories, 16 will travel within 37 trillion miles around the sun
(1 light year) in the next 1,000,000 years, close enough to have an impact on our solar system. And there are many trajectories yet to be measured. Calculations show the systems are massive enough to give the Oort Cloud a good stir.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.07581
(https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--4eWxOKtu--/c_scale,f_auto,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800/iuatbcdzpfjug80ulc59.jpg)
Around the same time our ancestors left Africa, a dim red dwarf star came to within 0.8 light-years of our Sun, marking the closest known flyby of a star to our Solar System. New research suggests Scholz’s Star, as it’s known, left traces of this interstellar encounter by perturbing some comets in the outer Oort Cloud.
Though Scholz’s Star (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholz%27s_Star) visited the outer reaches of our Solar System some 70,000 years ago, awareness of this celestial meet-and-greet first emerged three years ago in a study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
According to this research, a dim red dwarf star, along with its even dimmer brown dwarf companion—a kind of bloated gas giant that failed to ignite into a full-blown star—came to within 0.8 light-years of our Sun (4.7 trillion miles, or 50,600 AU, where 1 AU is the average distance of the Earth to the Sun), and possibly as close as 0.6 light-years (3.53 trillion miles, or 37,900 AU). That’s a close shave, at least by cosmological standards. By comparison, MU69, a Kuiper Belt object that will be visited by the New Horizons spacecraft on New Year’s Day 2019, is about 43 AU from the Sun.
(https://images.derstandard.at/img/2018/03/23/sternenhimmel.jpg?tc=501&s=f02705ae)
Astronomers found a strange dwarf world that provides even more evidence that a giant planet is lurking at the edge of our solar system.
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... observations suggests the gravitational influence of another planet is altering the distant objects' orbits. Now additional findings of a newly discovered planetary object with an odd orbit support the case for an undiscovered Planet Nine. The new object, called 2015 BP519, takes an elliptical journey around the Sun spanning from 35 to 862 times the radius of Earth’s own orbit. 2015 BP519 orbits at a 54 degree angle compared to nearly everything in the inner solar system, and the theory is that Planet Nine is responsible.QuoteIn the new paper, they describe how they ran many simulations of the object within the known solar system, letting the clock run forward and backward 4.5 billion years at a time. Nothing could explain how the object landed in such a tilted orbit. It wasn’t until they added in a ninth planet — a planet with characteristics that perfectly match Batygin and Brown’s predictions — that the wacky orbit finally made sense. “The second you put Planet Nine in the simulations, not only can you form objects like this object, but you absolutely do,” said Juliette Becker, a graduate student at Michigan and the lead author on the new paper. A strong and sustained interaction with Planet Nine appears to be the only way to pump up the object’s inclination, pushing it away from the plane of the solar system. “There is no other reasonable way to populate the Kuiper belt with such highly inclined bodies,” Batygin said. “I think the case for the existence of Planet Nine is now genuinely excellent.”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.05355.pdf
(https://imagens.canaltech.com.br/206312.429920-orbita-do-Planeta-9.jpg)
https://twitter.com/dAArkEnergy/status/994593248017514497
Massively elongated orbit suggests object is influenced by theoretical giant Planet Nine in Oort Cloud region
An extremely distant dwarf planet, named The Goblin, has been discovered in observations that are redefining the outer reaches of the solar system.
Astronomers made the discovery while hunting for a hypothetical massive planet, known as Planet Nine, that is suspected to be in orbit far beyond Pluto in a mysterious region known as the Oort Cloud. Planet Nine has not yet been seen directly, but The Goblin appears to be under the gravitational influence of a giant unseen object, adding to astronomers’ certainty that it is out there.Quote... “Each time we find another one of these smaller objects, it will lead us to constrain where the bigger planet could be”The newly discovered icy world, estimated to be just 300km across, is in an extremely elongated orbit. At its closest, it gets about two and a half times as far from the sun as Pluto. Then it heads off to the outermost fringes of the solar system, to almost 60 times further out than Pluto, taking an astounding 40,000 years to loop once around the sun. For 99% of its orbit, it would be too faint to see.
The tiny rock — eloquently named TG387 and nicknamed “The Goblin” — was spotted by astronomers at the Carnegie Institution of Science using a giant Japanese observatory in Hawaii called Subaru.
(https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/831bc784e19bae5941a00dbad644f76e1e6384d1/0_0_1400_788/master/1400.jpg?width=620&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=fc8bd9f49677589fc4f8c410a2aacc92)
Intriguingly the orbits of the three objects discovered so far appear to be clustered together, suggesting that they are being shepherded by a giant, unknown object. This has pointed astronomers to the existence of a ninth, super-Earth sized planet.
Right now, there are 14 far-out space rocks that all share similar orbit patterns, suggesting that this planet is out there. Their paths are all super elongated, and they all cluster together in the same area when they approach the Sun. Plus, their orbits are all tilted alike, and they point in the same general direction, as if something big has pushed them into similar places. These objects are the strongest lines of evidence astronomers have for Planet X, and finding a new one that matches this pattern reinforces that idea that this planet is more than just a theory.
... Technosignatures are signs or signals, which if observed, would allow us to infer the existence of technological life elsewhere in the universe. The best known technosignature are radio signals, but there are many others that have not been explored fully.
In April 2018, new interest arose in Congress for NASA to begin supporting the scientific search for technosignatures as part of the agency's search for life. As part of that effort, the agency is hosting the NASA Technosignatures Workshop (https://www.seti.org/event/nasa-technosignatures-workshop) in Houston on Sept. 26-28, 2018, with the purpose of assessing the current state of the field, the most promising avenues of research in technosignatures and where investments could be made to advance the science.
The Search for Directed Intelligence: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02108
(https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XyweNCjH_ps/Vvi0Jgb1f6I/AAAAAAAAAxM/OO-4MrmzhkMbRlBQvJ2ehiCBqHgWoZjow/s600/Exoplanets%2Bwithin%2B20%2Bpc-2016-dimmer-names.gif)
73 exoplanetary host stars sorted by distance from our Sun. Spectral types are indicated by the color key at lower right. The inner circle has a radius of 5 parsecs, and each successive ring represents an increment of 5 parsecs.
Our Neighborhood: (http://www.astro.gsu.edu/~riedel/10pc2011.html)
Image: http://www.astro.gsu.edu/~riedel/images/10pc2010_pub.gif
Image: http://www.astro.gsu.edu/~riedel/images/25pc2012.0104.gif
Number of ExoPlanets - Range: 20 Parsecs
http://backalleyastronomy.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-nearest-20-parsecs.html
... The new research suggests that the rings are recent and temporary. Like some previous studies, it suggests a much younger age for the rings than 4 1/2 billion years. The new research indicates that they are unlikely to be older than 100 million years. Research suggests an even shorter timeframe for the rings survival, giving them less than 100 million years to live.
Ice and dust particles from Saturns ring...i don´t see how.
Ejection from the asteroid belt is thought to normally take many tens of millions of years. Resonances (http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/K/Kirkwood+Gaps) are areas in the main belt where gravity nudges from Jupiter and Saturn can act like a pinball machine to fling asteroids out of the main belt and into the region near Earth from time to time.
Based on Voyager observations, the total current mass of the rings are estimated to be about 3 × 10^19 kg (3 quintillion kg). Wikipedia
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/PIA17202_-_Approaching_Enceladus.jpg/280px-PIA17202_-_Approaching_Enceladus.jpg)
Enceladus is about 500 kilometers (310 mi) in diameter - mass = 1.1×10^20.
Because ~ 1/3 of the debris of the resulting collision will be aimed (down) at Saturn's gravity well and fall onto the planet; 1/3 of the debris will retain the orbital path of the original moon; and 1/3 of the debris the will be aimed away (up) from Saturn and leave the system.
The US space agency's New Horizons probe has made contact with Earth to confirm its successful flyby of the icy world known as Ultima Thule.https://media.tenor.com/images/1ec915eb76dcff7edf9e5c195b70363f/tenor.gif
The encounter occurred some 6.5bn km (4bn miles) away, making it the most distant ever exploration of an object in our Solar System.
New Horizons acquired gigabytes of photos and other observations during the pass.
It will now send these home over the coming months.
Images taken during the spacecraft's approach — which brought New Horizons to within just 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) of Ultima at 12:33 a.m. EST — revealed that the Kuiper Belt object may have a shape similar to a bowling pin, spinning end over end, with dimensions of approximately 20 by 10 miles (32 by 16 kilometers).http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/News-Article.php?page=20190101
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Flyby data have already solved one of Ultima's mysteries, showing that the Kuiper Belt object is spinning like a propeller with the axis pointing approximately toward New Horizons. This explains why, in earlier images taken before Ultima was resolved, its brightness didn't appear to vary as it rotated.
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Hi-res images will be downloaded over the next 20 month's.
... “I was sitting there zoning out a little because I was sea sick and all of a sudden the sonar kid shouts 'fast mover, fast mover' and I’m jolted awake – thinking ‘What’s happening? Is it a torpedo?’
“The executive officer comes out and the operator shows him the path of the object and the officer says 'How fast is that going?'
“And the kid said 'several hundred knots'. I start to lean forward to listen in – and the officer said ‘Can you confirm it?’
“So he goes to another sonar machine and confirmed it wasn’t a machine anomaly - it was real. I thought ‘Wow that is incredible’.
“When the sonar guy said ‘What do I do with this?’ the officer said ‘log it and dog it’ - in other words log it and bury it.”
Four years later Marc said he was doing some more contract work for the Navy when he spoke to a senior naval figure about what he saw.
“I asked him ‘Can you tell me about the Fast Mover Programme?'" Marc explained.
“He looked at me and said 'Sorry Marc I can’t talk about that programme'.
“So he basically confirmed to me that the programme exists - he said everything without seeing anything.
“What that told me was that USOs are common – we even have a programme in place to classify and log and determine the speed of them and it goes into a vault.” ...
New research suggests that in the near future giant telescopes like the Webb might be replaced (or at least augmented) by swarms of tiny spacecraft working in concert.
... As documented in a paper published today in Optica, the team leapfrogs existing methods in an interesting way. Two satellites move in synchrony around the edge of a circle, collecting data as they go and beaming it to a third stationary one; this circle describes the synthetic aperture the two cameras are creating.
“We found that you only need a small part of a telescope lens to obtain quality images,” explained BGU grad student Angika Bulbul, who led the research, in a news release. “Even by using the perimeter aperture of a lens, as low as 0.43 percent, we managed to obtain similar image resolution compared to the full aperture area of mirror/lens-based imaging systems.”
In other words, they were basically able to get the results of a camera 50 times the size. That would be impressive anywhere, but up in space it’s especially important.
(https://mk0nextbigfuturj5ioe.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/nanosat2.jpeg?w=350)
Using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, citizen scientists have discovered a planet roughly twice the size of Earth located within its star's habitable zone, the range of orbital distances where liquid water may exist on the planet's surface. The new world, known as K2-288Bb, could be rocky or could be a gas-rich planet similar to Neptune. Its size is rare among exoplanets—planets beyond our solar system.
UCF planetary research scientist Phil Metzger worked with Honeybee Robotics of Pasadena, California, which developed the World Is Not Enough spacecraft prototype that extracts water from asteroids or other planetary bodies to generate steam and propel itself to its next mining target.
Flash! Ah-aah
Savior of the universe
Flash! Ah-aah
He'll save everyone of us…
Since they were first observed in the 1970s by the Viking missions, the slope streaks that periodically appear along slopes on Mars have continued to intrigue scientists.
Despite the progress that has been made in studying these features, the scientific community remains divided into two camps when it comes to what causes Martian slope streaks. Those who belong to the "wet" mechanism school of thought believe that liquid water could be responsible for their creation, possibly as a result of groundwater springs, melting surface ice, or the formation of brines (salt solutions).
In contrast, those who fall into the "dry" mechanism school theorize that dust avalanches are responsible. These, in turn, could be caused by air fall deposits, subsurface melting, or localized disturbances – ranging by rockfalls, meteorite impacts, or tectonic activity ("marsquakes"). Both of these explanations have limitations when it comes to explaining observed slope streaks.
(https://wol-prod-cdn.literatumonline.com/cms/attachment/189fb208-d730-4b64-9ac4-90db77f4d28c/rog20180-fig-0006-m.png)
Using a terrestrial analog from Bolivia, a research team from Sweden recently conducted a study that explored the mechanisms for streak formation and suggest that wet mechanisms appear to account for more, which could have serious implications for future missions to Mars.
The subject of what causes these streaks and other transient surface features is important for many reasons, not the least of which has to do with planetary protection. In Sept. 2016, the Curiosity rover encountered dark streaks while driving along the sloping terrain of Mount Sharp, which required that it alter its path to avoid contact and possible contamination of the site.
This decision was based on the possibility that subsurface water was responsible for the streak, and could be an indication of subsurface life. If slope streaks are indeed linked to seasonal water flows, then we proper measures will need to be put in place for future missions, especially crewed ones.
The study, titled "Are Slope Streaks Indicative of Global Scale Aqueous Processes on Contemporary Mars? (http://)" recently appeared in the Reviews of Geophysics
SpaceX is facing a bit of a setback in the development of its Martian rocket prototype, after high winds blew over the top half of the vehicle.What would Dan Dare do? ...
(https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/valleymorningstar.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/5/cc/5ccc39c9-8c22-5b92-a39c-63753f1de474/5c49019077b15.image.jpg?resize=320%2C187)
... It's just a flesh wound
CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet Wednesday that winds of 50 miles per hour "broke the mooring blocks late last night" and blew over the rocket's "fairing" – the large nosecone at the top of the rocket. The damage "will take a few weeks to repair," Musk added.
(https://news-24.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/starshipmariapointer2-450x300.jpg)
Havana, Cuba (CNN) A meteor broke apart over western Cuba on Friday, hurtling numerous pieces of various sizes to the ground in several towns in Pinar del Rio province, the state-run Granma newspaper reported.
One meteorite landed with a "loud explosion" in the town of Viñales, Granma said.
Researchers from several Cuban agencies, including the Institute of Geophysics and Astronomy, confirmed the meteorite strikes, Granma reported.Quote@NWSKeyWesthttps://mobile.twitter.com/NWSKeyWest/status/1091469022925852673
radar may have detected the meteor that affected western Cuba earlier today. At 121 pm, a signature was detected near Viñales, Cuba, at a height of over 26,000 ft above ground level.
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DyXCfFqUYAAPXKz?format=jpg&name=medium)
... According to new data posted by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies and flagged by CNET, the object’s collision with the atmosphere released the energy of around 1.4 kilotons (1,400 tons) of TNT.
the detonation over Cuba was one of the more notable fireballs since the meteor that hit Chelyabinsk, Russia near the nation’s border with Kazakhstan in 2013. Scientists say that explosion detonated with the force of over 470 kilotons of TNT, or nearly as strong as the MK-18 “Ivy King” in 1952, the largest pure-fission bomb ever tested by the U.S. at 500 kilotons. According to a Tulane University fact sheet, the Chelyabinsk object was probably around 56-65 feet (17-20 meters) in diameter.
The object that exploded over Cuba was likely much smaller, probably around the size of a van. Only minor property damage such as shattered windows—probably from the sonic boom generated by the object surpassing the speed of sound—was reported to have resulted, with no injuries.
(https://orig00.deviantart.net/f332/f/2012/105/3/7/ivy_king___animated_gif_by_thehappyspaceman01-d4wau39.gif)
Ivy King - 1952
In GRT, the Earth is not hit by asteroids but it is a source of them. Many rocks are launched (in a simulated environment) into thousands of directions in the sky and with different speeds, from a certain geographical location (a beach in the northwest of Cuba or a valley on the moon). The rocks that end up in orbits around the sun, similar to already discovered asteroids, are flagged as potential impactors. The rocks with orbits that are not typical of near-Earth objects (NEOs) are flagged as unnatural objects.
A used SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched an Israeli moon lander along with an Indonesian communications satellite from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida tonight (Feb. 21). After deploying its two payloads into orbit, the Falcon 9's first stage returned to Earth and aced a landing (the third for this booster) on SpaceX's drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. Liftoff occurred at 8:45 p.m. EST (0145 Feb. 22 GMT) just as the moon rose above the horizon here.
Although the primary payload for this mission was Indonesia's satellite, named Nusantara Satu, the tiny moon lander that hitched a ride with the satellite as a secondary payload stole the show today. It became not only the first Israeli spacecraft to venture beyond Earth's orbit, but also the first-ever privately funded moon mission.
I would be very surprised if we don't eventually find some trace of past microbial life on Mars.
... "They look remarkably similar to Ordovician trace fossils I have studied and photographed here on Earth,"
An asteroid as big as a jumbo jet made a close flyby of Earth today (March 4).Link >> https://www.space.com/asteroid-2015-eg-earth-flyby-march-2019.html
The space rock, named asteroid 2015 EG, posed no threat during the encounter as it passed by at a safe distance of about 274,400 miles (441,600 kilometers), or 1.1 times the average distance between Earth and the moon, at 4:03 p.m. EST (2103 GMT).
As its name implies, asteroid 2015 EG was discovered in 2015. NASA estimates that the space rock measures between 63 and 141 feet (19 to 43 meters) across and is currently barrelling through the solar system at 21,545 mph (9.63 km/h). It's actually one of five near-Earth asteroids on NASA's radar today, but asteroid 2015 EG made the closest approach of them all, according to NASA's Asteroid Watch.
After a prolonged quiet period, the sun let off an explosion Wednesday when a new sunspot fired a small solar flare lasting over an hour.Link >> https://www.cnet.com/news/a-solar-storm-hits-earth-this-week-pushing-northern-lights-south/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa1e&utm_source=reddit.com
The high-energy blast caused disruptions for some radio operators in Europe and Africa, but it was accompanied by a slower-moving, massive cloud of charged particles known as a coronal mass ejection (CME) that will deliver Earth a glancing blow this weekend.
All those particles colliding with Earth's magnetic field could turn up the range and the intensity of the aurora, also known as the northern and southern lights. Aurora are caused by particles from the sun that are constantly flowing toward our planet, but a CME delivers an extra large helping that can really amp up the display.
In North America, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that the aurora borealis could be visible as far south as New York and Chicago on Saturday, likely in the early morning hours.
Beresheet, Israel’s privately funded, engineered and launched mission to the Moon’s surface, has successfully entered lunar orbit after a month and a half in transit. The craft will now adjust its orbit in preparation for landing on April 11.
A new experiment confirms the existence of “superionic ice,” a bizarre form of water that might comprise the bulk of giant icy planets throughout the universe.Link >> https://www.quantamagazine.org/black-hot-superionic-ice-may-be-natures-most-common-form-of-water-20190508/
WOAD DYE – ISATIA TINCTORIAYou can make a beautiful blue woad dye from the leaves of the woad plant.
Woad belongs to the brassica family (cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower etc). It is a biennial plant, which means it grows for 2 years before dying off.
In the first year it grows as a small cluster of broad leaves and in the second year large sprays of yellow flowers form on its long woody stems. After flowering, a woad plant will produce seeds and then die back. You can harvest these seeds for sowing the next crop.
However – for our purpose – we need to harvest the woad plant in it’s first year, as it is these leaves that give us the beautiful blue dye extracted from woad.
Creating Woad Dye
Woad plants are ready for harvest in the summer months.
Take the leaves from the base of the plant and then cut them into small pieces. Submerge the torn or cut leaves in a stainless steel pan of water and bring up to a temperature of 175F (80C). Simmer for about 10 minutes.
Cool the woad dye down as quickly as possible, so that the leaves don’t breakdown too much. If they do, they will go through the strainer and pollute your dye bath. Partially submerging your saucepan in cold or icy water is the easiest way to do this.
Strain off the liquid and – whilst wearing gloves – gently squeeze as much liquid as possible from the leaves.
When you are sure your woad dye is below 120F (50C), add 3 teaspoons of soda ash. At this stage your lovely blue dye will be a greeny-brown color.
Aerate the liquid with an electric or hand-held beater. You will notice it foam up a fair bit. Leave the – now bluey-green – woad dye for a few hours, during which time the foam will evaporate and any pigment will settle.
Gently scoop or siphon off all the water, leaving only the pigment in the bottom of your saucepan. If you are having trouble seeing the sediment in your contained, pour the dye into a glass jar.
Fill with water again and repeat 2 or 3 times. Soon you will have clear water at the top and thick pigment in the bottom.
This is your blue woad dye!
... “Given this surprising result, we’ve reorganized the weekend to run a follow-up experiment,” Ashwin R. Vasavada, the project scientist for the mission, wrote to the science team in an email that was obtained by The Times.
The mission’s controllers on Earth sent new instructions to the rover on Friday to follow up on the readings, bumping previously planned science work. The results of these observations are expected back on the ground on Monday...
claiming that the U.S. needs the patentCiv 2?
Why not patent the Cure for Cancer while we are at it +2 happy citizens do wonders. ::)
Kool! :)
I saw an alarmist story on an asteroid in the Express and looked up this year's possible problems.[Hint: anybody can cross post an article to another thread, if you're so inclined. 1st: "Quote" button the original, copy all, then close thread without posting. 2nd: open destination thread, "Reply" button, type "cross post" and paste. Post. Added step if there are attached images/gifs in the original. Copy them to your hard drive and attach to the cross post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_QV89
The above is actually a very high number, with European scientists estimating a 1 in 7300 chance of impact (1 in 9100 other estimate).
I couldn't find an asteroid thread so I figured this was probably the next best fit. An exceedingly unlikely event, but we will apparently have a better idea of trajectory by the end of this month, so something to keep an eye on. The body is only 100 feet wide but that would still make quite a bang if it did end up impacting.
Added step if there are attached images/gifs in the original. Copy them to your hard drive and attach to the cross post.
This one blew my mind.If they are, they are even dumber than wot we is.
Are Alien Civilizations Sending Signals in Bacteria? with Dr. Robert Zubrin
Cool!
Regarding the bacteria you would have to send generalized bacteria everywhere which precludes adding extra info and you cannot really edit stuff when you do not know what is there.
The mind was blown by the colorfulness of the theory?
Today (July 11), the Hayabusa2 spacecraft performed a 2nd touchdown on the surface of asteroid Ryugu. The touchdown occurred at 10:06 JST at the onboard time and was successful. Below we show images taken before and after the touchdown. As this is a quick bulletin, more detailed information will be given in the future.Link >> http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/topics/20190711e_PPTD_ImageBulletin/
India Farmers Shocked as 15 kg Meteorite Crashes into Rice Paddy
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-india-farmers-meteorite-rice-field.html
India Farmers Shocked as 15 kg Meteorite Crashes into Rice Paddy
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-india-farmers-meteorite-rice-field.html
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/15kg-meteorite-crashes-into-madhubani-paddy-field/articleshow/70351611.cms
IT WAS JUST before midnight on April 11 and everyone at the Israel Aerospace Industries mission control center in Yehud, Israel, had their eyes fixed on two large projector screens. On the left screen was a stream of data being sent back to Earth by Beresheet, its lunar lander, which was about to become the first private spacecraft to land on the moon. The right screen featured a crude animation of Beresheet firing its engines as it prepared for a soft landing in the Sea of Serenity. But only seconds before the scheduled landing, the numbers on the left screen stopped. Mission control had lost contact with the spacecraft, and it crashed into the moon shortly thereafter.
Half a world away, Nova Spivack watched a livestream of Beresheet’s mission control from a conference room in Los Angeles. As the founder of the Arch Mission Foundation, a nonprofit whose goal is to create “a backup of planet Earth,” Spivack had a lot at stake in the Beresheet mission. The spacecraft was carrying the foundation’s first lunar library, a DVD-sized archive containing 30 million pages of information, human DNA samples, and thousands of tardigrades, those microscopic “water bears” that can survive pretty much any environment—including space.
But when the Israelis confirmed Beresheet had been destroyed, Spivack was faced with a distressing question: Did he just smear the toughest animal in the known universe across the surface of the moon?
In the weeks following the Beresheet crash, Spivack pulled together the Arch Mission Foundation’s advisers in an attempt to determine whether the lunar library had survived the crash. Based on their analysis of the spacecraft’s trajectory and the composition of the lunar library, Spivack says he is quite confident that the library—a roughly DVD-sized object made of thin sheets of nickel—survived the crash mostly or entirely intact. In fact, the decision to include DNA samples and tardigrades in the lunar library may have been key to its survival.
“For the first 24 hours we were just in shock,” Spivack says. “We sort of expected that it would be successful. We knew there were risks but we didn’t think the risks were that significant.”
Well ...... That was unfortunate! 😝
A CRASHED ISRAELI LUNAR LANDER SPILLED TARDIGRADES ON THE MOON
However, they weren't released into deep space, where they might eventually find their way to Proxima Centauri (or wherever), they were deposited on the moon. "Daytime the temperature can reach 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius)." Poor little water bears will be cooked.
They can survive a wide range of temperatures and situations. Research has found that tardigrades can withstand environments as cold as minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 Celsius) or highs of more than 300 degrees F (148.9 C), according to Smithsonian magazine.
maybe not quite cooked?
https://www.google.com/search?q=tardigrades+temperature+survival&oq=tartigrades+temperature&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l3.12403j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8QuoteThey can survive a wide range of temperatures and situations. Research has found that tardigrades can withstand environments as cold as minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 200 Celsius) or highs of more than 300 degrees F (148.9 C), according to Smithsonian magazine.
A 100-metre-wide asteroid passed just 70,000km from Earth on Thursday, Australian time. It was discovered by the Brazilian SONEAR survey just days ago, and its presence was announced mere hours before it zoomed past our planet. The lack of warning shows how quickly potentially dangerous asteroids can sneak up on us.
So, where is everybody?
But possibly the other intelligent species hadn't evolved with hands. It's hard to develop an industrial civilization with only paws or tentacles or flippers.
Yes, one perfectly fine answer to the Fermi paradox. We are missing us in time.
But then there is the big number of possibilities and you start thinking again...
But possibly the other intelligent species hadn't evolved with hands. It's hard to develop an industrial civilization with only paws or tentacles or flippers.
Yes, one perfectly fine answer to the Fermi paradox. We are missing us in time.
But then there is the big number of possibilities and you start thinking again...
So, where is everybody?So obvious IMHO. They ran out of their planet's finite resources and/or polluted it to extinction, before they managed to create a true spacefaring civilization.
<snip>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
Ramen!So, where is everybody?So obvious IMHO. They ran out of their planet's finite resources and/or polluted it to extinction, before they managed to create a true spacefaring civilization.
The Fermi paradox is not a paradox, but a warning that humanity disregards.
I did not come for the astronomy, but sir, please, cheer up! We can colonize Siberia, Sahara, and the North American Southwest without polluting more than we already pollute. Plus, there's oxygen and we do not need CO2 increasing rockets.Ramen!So, where is everybody?So obvious IMHO. They ran out of their planet's finite resources and/or polluted it to extinction, before they managed to create a true spacefaring civilization.
The Fermi paradox is not a paradox, but a warning that humanity disregards.
We quite recently polluted the moon with lifeforms - and we haven't even set up an outpost!
We're a filthy species that will die in our own pollution. :-[
Terry
First Water Detected on Potentially 'Habitable' Planet
Agree to your comment (well 8 times earth mass does not imply 8g at surface).First Water Detected on Potentially 'Habitable' Planet
This is still interesting don't get me wrong, but this kind of info belongs to any mention of so called "earth-like" exoplanets.
IMO this kind of exoplanet is not even worth to mention in the context of finding "Earth II" or habitability. It's clearly NOT habitable because it's obvious for several reasons that it is not suitable for the kind of life we're ultimately looking for and habitable means "FOR US HUMANS" and not for germs and bacteria etc.
It takes way more than the right temps and then gravitation eight times earth level would crush all things we know are necessary for intelligent and/or human life.
A planet so close to it's sun cannot even considered inside the habitable zone, despite perhaps the right temps.
Further planets that are to close to their sun usually stopped rotating long ago and therefore would have very small band of "right" temps while the rest would be burning or freezing and in the process produce extremely strong winds, way beyond what we consider strong on planet earth.
And what you said, radiation without being protected due to lack of magnetic field due to lack of rotation etc. etc.
this object should be observable for at least a year,
... “Today, we were notified by the US Air Force that there is a 5.6% chance that Genesis II will collide with dead Russian satellite Cosmos 1300 in 15 hours,” says the tweet. “Although this is a relatively low probability, it brings to light that low Earth orbit is becoming increasingly more littered.”
Great read. There is a mature planetary system with millions of times our dust level... implying collision of Earth sized planets.What 'read' are you talking about?
... "Venus currently has almost twice the solar radiation that we have at Earth. However, in all the scenarios we have modelled, we have found that Venus could still support surface temperatures amenable for liquid water"
‘Planet Nine’ may actually be a black hole
Link >> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/planet-nine-may-actually-be-black-hole?rss=1
One dark horse way you could have a Black Hole less than two solar masses in the present universe is if they are primordial...compressed local inhomogeneities in the Big Bang.
But even if they are possible, they would almost certainly not be in orbit around a present day star.
...“Microbial introduction should not be considered accidental but inevitable.”
We Should Deliberately Contaminate Mars With Our Microbes, Controversial Study Argues
... "Mathematically, if you fulfill all the energy requirements, they can’t prove that it doesn’t work"
Warp drive, as Star Trek fans know, is the ability to fly through space at speeds faster than light.
Just weeks after the discovery of the second-ever comet from outside of our solar system (the first was the cigar-shaped ‘Oumuamua), astronomers have detected gas emitted from its surface—the first hint of what an interstellar traveler is made of.
Sadly, it’s not kryptonite, or even unobtanium, but cyanogen, a simple but toxic molecule made up of two carbon and two nitrogen atoms. The comet, dubbed 2I/Borisov, was first spotted on 30 August by Ukrainian astronomer Gennadiy Borisov. Later observations showed it was moving in an orbit not bound by the sun’s gravity. Since then, many astronomers have studied the object including a team using the 4.2-meter William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in Spain’s Canary Islands.
QuoteWarp drive, as Star Trek fans know, is the ability to fly through space at speeds faster than light.
Well, as a Star Trek fan, i know warp drive does nothing of sorts. It wraps the space and therefore moves the vessel relative in space. Nothing is faster than light. ;)
... There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167
Like its two predecessors, OSTM/Jason-2 used high-precision ocean altimetry to measure the distance between the satellite and the ocean surface to within a few centimeters. These very accurate observations of variations in sea surface height—also known as ocean topography—provide information about global sea level, the speed and direction of ocean currents, and heat stored in the ocean.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSTM/Jason-2
Building a Galaxy: Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey
July 23, 2014: If an asteroid big enough to knock modern civilization back to the 18th century appeared out of deep space and buzzed the Earth-Moon system, the near-miss would be instant worldwide headline news.
Two years ago, Earth experienced a close shave just as perilous, but most newspapers didn't mention it. The "impactor" was an extreme solar storm, the most powerful in as much as 150+ years.
"If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces," says Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado.
... This suggests that the temporal version of the cosmological origin story may be an illusion. Time can be seen as an “emergent” dimension, a kind of hologram springing from the universe’s spatial correlations, which themselves seem to come from basic symmetries. In short, the approach has the potential to help explain why time began, and why it might end.
Craig Nevin - Answered Jan 13, 2017
A Mobius strip has one edge. Does the universe have an edge? Probably not. Two Mobius strips of opposite chirality, however, can be combined into an edgeless surfce known as a kleinbottle. A kleinbottle has no inside nor outside. Therefore you can never be outside such an universe. Since the word universe means everything in space without edge, this makes logical sense. A model of the universe that imagines it as a sphere or torus or topological equivalent, raises the issue of there being a place outside of the universe, which quite frankly deflates the everday notion of the word “universe”. My answer is therefore definitely YES.
... "We're struggling to explain this," ... "The fact that the oxygen behavior isn't perfectly repeatable every season makes us think that it's not an issue that has to do with atmospheric dynamics. It has to be some chemical source and sink that we can't yet account for."
- Melissa Trainer - planetary scientist - NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
...[1st link to BBC article; 2nd link to Wikipedia article]
The Hayabusa-2 is expected to return to Earth in December 2020, dropping a capsule containing the rock samples in the South Australian desert.
...
While asteroids are some of the oldest objects in space, Ryugu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/162173_Ryugu) belongs to a particularly primitive type of space rock, and may contain clues about the conditions and chemistry of the early days of the Solar System - some 4.5 billion years ago.
Galactic Curiosity (@GalacCuriosity) 11/13/19, 9:44 PMhttps://twitter.com/galaccuriosity/status/1194808274081796096
Near miss of earth and moon of asteroid apophis in 10 years
... With all the crew incapacitated for extended periods of time, the mission would have to be designed for largely autonomous operations, with optimum use of artificial intelligence and "fault detection, isolation and recovery" to maintain a minimum level of system performance until the crew could be revived.
Hibernating Astronauts Need Smaller Spacecraft
... Work directly with NASA Johnson Space Center in designing the next generation of humanoid robot.
Join the Valkyrie humanoid robot team in NASA’s Robotic Systems Technology Branch.
Build on the success of the existing Valkyrie and Robonaut 2 humanoid robots and advance NASA’s ability to project a remote human presence and dexterous manipulation capability into challenging, dangerous, and distant environments both in space and here on earth.
Hibernating Astronauts Need Smaller Spacecraft
So drooling idiot - invalids, then. :o. or ....
-------------------------------------
...
Artificial gravity
With our current technology, I still reckon that for humankind - there is no Planet BRaman !
AI and robotics have improved immeasurably since 1971. If we need to explore, or extract minerals, or do damn near anything else on another planet we can do it without the need for humans.
With our current technology, I still reckon that for humankind - there is no Planet BRaman !
It's not clear to me that manned interplanetary travel will ever take place.
On November 2nd, 2019, Northrop Grumman performed a spaceflight first, and launched an oven aboard their Cygnus Cargo Ship on a resupply mission to the International Space Station for NASA. The spacecraft contained just over 3,700 kg of scientific experiments, vehicle hardware, and crew supplies, along with a variety of other important space stuff.https://everydayastronaut.com/cookies-in-space/
But included on this flight was a space first. An oven. And not just any oven, but a custom zero g oven developed by Nanoracks, a leading provider of commercial access to space, that will be used to bake the first food in space – the DoubleTree chocolate chip cookie.
So today, I thought we should do a history of space food, figure out why we haven’t ever baked anything in space before, and learn from the experts on how DoubleTree by Hilton, the sponsor of this article, will actually bake their cookies on the International Space Station. ...
philopek
I don't believe we've a lot of time left before were faced with a horrific catastrophe. I don't think it kills everyone, but I do believe it's the end of the of the civilization cycle that we're in. By the time hominids again reach a stage where space travel is possible they won't be Homo Sapiens any longer. Evolution leaps about after a "Great Die Off", and I think we're just about due for one.
Whatever succeeds us will have a much harder time making 'progress' than our ancestors had, simply because we've picked all of the low hanging fruit. It took us ~ 10k yrs. to get from the end of the old stone age (paleolithic), to where we are in an "information" age, but we did it with abundant coal, copper, and oil that was pooling on the surface, ready for use to seal early sailboats - before we discovered how valuable it could become as liquid fuel. The beasties that we father may even be brighter than ourselves, but they'll have none of our advantages and it will take them much longer (if ever) to reach our stage of development.
I think they'll reach a paleolithic level with no particular problems. (We did leave plenty of knappable rocks). But the neolithic will be more difficult with the lack of diverse species, the poisoning of large swaths of land, and much of the oceans still (hopefully) recovering. The copper age, bronze age and iron ages are steps that they'll need to circumvent, and it's difficult to imagine an industrial age without coal, copper or iron.
If they do follow our lead and look quizzically towards space, it will take many eons to get there, many more that it took our species, and we probably wouldn't recognize them as our descendants. We certainly wouldn't view them as being human.
Sorry about the rambling, but I craved a distraction from Spacex.
Terry
Hoffman is one of three board members who run a nonprofit scientific organization known as the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). Unknown or unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) is the current rebranding of unidentified flying objects (UFO), a term that many believe to carry too much cultural baggage.Just as UFO replaced "flying saucer" or "flying disk" back in the day.
“Most of Earth is shielded from the solar wind,” said Mark Conde, space physicist as the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “But right near the poles, in the midday sector, our magnetic field becomes a funnel where the solar wind can get all the way down to the atmosphere.”https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-rockets-study-why-tech-goes-haywire-near-poles
These funnels, known as the polar cusps, can cause some trouble. The influx of solar wind disturbs the atmosphere, disrupting satellites and radio and GPS signals. Beginning Nov. 25, 2019, three new NASA-supported missions will launch into the northern polar cusp, aiming to improve the technology affected by it.
The three missions are all part of the Grand Challenge Initiative – Cusp, a series of nine sounding rocket missions exploring the polar cusp. Sounding rockets are a type of space vehicle that makes 15-minute flights into space before falling back to Earth. Standing up to 65 feet tall and flying anywhere from 20 to 800 miles high, sounding rockets can be aimed and fired at moving targets with only a few minutes notice. This flexibility and precision make them ideal for capturing the strange phenomena inside the cusp.
Two of the three upcoming missions will study the same anomaly: a patch of atmosphere inside the cusp notably denser than its surroundings. It was discovered in 2004, when scientists noticed that part of the atmosphere inside the cusp was about 1.5 times heavier than expected.
“A little extra mass 200 miles up might seem like no big deal,” said Conde, the principal investigator for the Cusp Region Experiment-2, or CREX-2, mission. "But the pressure change associated with this increased mass density, if it occurred at ground level, would cause a continuous hurricane stronger than anything seen in meteorological records.”
This additional mass creates problems for spacecraft flying through it, like the many satellites that follow a polar orbit. Passing through the dense patch can shake up their trajectories, making close encounters with other spacecraft or orbital debris riskier than they would otherwise be.
“A small change of a few hundred meters can make the difference between having to do an evasive maneuver, or not,” Conde said. ...
We show that the total habitable volume in the atmospheres of cool brown dwarfs with effective temperatures of ̃250-350 K is possibly larger by 2 orders of magnitude than that of Earth-like planets. We also study the role of aerosols, nutrients, and photosynthesis in facilitating life in brown dwarf atmospheres. Our predictions might be testable through searches for spectral edges in the near-infrared and chemical disequilibrium in the atmospheres of nearby brown dwarfs that are either free-floating or within several au of stars. For the latter category, we find that the James Webb Space Telescope may be able to achieve a signal-to-noise ratio of ̃5 after a few hours of integration time per source for the detection of biogenic spectral features in ̃103 cool brown dwarfs.
Dark matter could be composed of compact dark objects (CDOs). These objects may interact
very weakly with normal matter and could move freely inside the Earth. A CDO moving in the inner
core of the Earth will have an orbital period near 55 min and produce a time dependent signal in a
gravimeter. Data from superconducting gravimeters rule out such objects moving inside the Earth
unless their mass mD and or orbital radius a are very small so that mD a < 1.2 × 10−13M⊕R⊕.
It’s feasible to flood space with flotillas of small satellites – but do we really want to?[/b]
Changing economics and advancing miniaturisation now enable flotillas of small satellites to be launched into space – up to a hundred on a single rocket. These microsatellites are already being deployed, by companies such as Planet Lab in California, to survey every point on the Earth every day, with sharp enough images to study building sites, road traffic, land use and so forth.
But a bigger leap is now in the offing. Elon Musk’s company SpaceX envisages the “Starlink” project. This entails launching up to 40,000 spacecraft into orbit in order to create a network that will enhance global broadband communication. Other companies, such as Amazon, say they have similar plans.
In principle, these are exciting and welcome developments, especially if they bring broadband internet to the whole of Africa and other parts of the developing world. But there is a downside. Starlink would involve launching more objects into space, in this single constellation, than all the satellites launched in the 60 years since the birth of the space age. There would be roughly one in every square degree over the sky (the area on the sky covered by a small coin held at arm’s length).
Skywatchers could find that their familiar starry sky was augmented by huge numbers of bright spots moving across it, especially soon after sunset and just before sunrise (the periods in the day when the sun is below our horizon but shining on to satellites hundreds of kilometres above us.) For professional astronomers looking steadily at a single celestial body, these rogue lights would only be a minor irritant. However, they would cause more confusion to projects that monitor or search large areas of sky to seek transient objects – exploding stars or even more exotic cosmic explosions. Especially confusing will be the cases when part of the satellite acts like a mirror, creating a specially bright and brief flash when it’s oriented so that it reflects the sun.
One particularly important project that could be impeded by these swarms of satellites is the search for asteroids. There are 2m asteroids, which are more than 50 metres across, whose orbits cross that of the Earth. Any of these could potentially hit Earth and would be big enough for its impact to destroy a large city. Even though most of the giant (dinosaur-killing) asteroids more than 1km across have been discovered, only 2% of these still dangerous smaller ones are known and there’s a strong motive to search for all the others, so that those with trajectories that could bring them dangerously close to our world can be deflected well in advance. In such searches, the “foreground” of unpredictably moving satellites would be a complication.
There are also concerns among astronomers making measurements in the microwave bands – trying to discover and understand young stars, protoplanets and such like, as well as their constituent gases and molecules. Such observations will be impeded if Starlink satellites’ uplinks or downlinks “pollute” observationally interesting wavebands.
Radio telescopes are constructed in “radio quiet” places to minimise artificial background, but there would be no hiding from the beams sent from these satellites.
In mitigation, this particular enterprise is motivated by a goal that we should acclaim: spreading the genuine benefit of broadband worldwide, especially to the developing world. And it’s a plus that the mega companies involved are genuinely aware of the downsides and will be doing all they can to minimise it by blackening the surfaces and choosing wavelengths carefully. These ventures are not as irresponsible as earlier (and fortunately quashed) proposals to build large advertising hoardings in space.
But we shouldn’t forget that it’s not just astronomers – a minority – who care about this issue. The night sky, the “vault of heaven”, is the one feature of our environment that has been shared, and wondered at, by all humanity through the ages. We should deplore anything that needlessly degrades its beauty and serenity, just as, more parochially, we don’t want tinsel or phone masts in our national parks.
• Martin Rees is the astronomer royal. His latest book is On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
Sulfur melts at 115 °C, 239 °F and volatizes at 160 °C, 320 °F.
It's not in the same league.
Neither is water.
ESA (@esa) 1/12/20, 3:00 AMhttps://twitter.com/esa/status/1216268627365810177
Just. Wow.
Photo taken by @astro_luca outside the @Space_Station on his first #SpacewalkForAMS on 15 November 2019. It shows the Japanese #Kibo module (left) and the Station's solar arrays with Earth behind
Space Shuttle Almanac (@ShuttleAlmanac) 1/12/20, 3:06 AM
Looks better right side up. This image shows a rare view of the join between Unity and Destiny, which is rarely seen so clearly. View orientation is station forward to the right and along the central truss toward the port side. The JEM on the right with Leonardo in the middle.
https://twitter.com/shuttlealmanac/status/1216270117996118017
[First image below!]
< Haha define "right side up"
Space Shuttle Almanac (@ShuttleAlmanac) 1/12/20, 3:48 AM
Easy. The ISS flies with the forward end facing direction of travel. Also the station has an up and down orientation. Internally there is a floor and a ceiling. The station flies with the floor facing the Earth as if flying over the Earth like a plane. So in my view this is up.
Space Shuttle Almanac (@ShuttleAlmanac) 1/12/20, 3:39 AMhttps://twitter.com/shuttlealmanac/status/1216278491911446528
Also two photos cross and you can throw in the Columbus module as well.
In case your local astronomer seems agitated, the big dog gravitational wave detector
@LIGO just detected an ‘unknown or unanticipated’ burst of gravitational waves somewhere deep in space. 👀
QuoteIn case your local astronomer seems agitated, the big dog gravitational wave detector
@LIGO just detected an ‘unknown or unanticipated’ burst of gravitational waves somewhere deep in space. 👀
Link >> https://twitter.com/aussiastronomer/status/1216939049006428160
We show results from the radiation hydrodynamics (RHD) simulations of tidal disruption of a star on a parabolic orbit by a supermassive black hole (SMBH) based on a
three-dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics code with radiative transfer. We
find that such a tidally disrupted star fragment and form clumps soon after its tidal
disruption. The fragmentation results from the endothermic processes of ionization and
dissociation that reduce the gas pressure, leading to local gravitational collapse. Radiative cooling is less effective because the stellar debris is still highly optically thick in
such an early time. Our simulations reveal that a solar-type star with a stellar density
profile of n = 3 disrupted by a 106
solar mass black hole produces ∼ 20 clumps of
masses in the range of 0.1 to 12 Jupiter masses. The mass fallback rate decays with
time, with pronounced spikes from early to late time. The spikes provide evidence for
the clumps of the returning debris, while the clumps on the unbound debris can be
potentially freely-floating planets and brown dwarfs. This ionization and dissociation
induced fragmentation on a tidally disrupted star are a promising candidate mechanism
to form low-mass stars to planets around an SMBH.
NASA and ESA have concluded a series of four spacewalks to repair the Station’s Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer experiment. NASA astronaut Drew Morgan and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano completed the series with the AMS deemed to be in good health.https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/01/nasa-esa-challenging-ams-repair-spacewalks/
Never designed to be serviceable after it was installed outside the Station in May 2011, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) required some unique thinking in order to bring it back to full operational capacity. ...
A new form of the northern lights has been captured by amateur enthusiasts, researchers have revealed.
The phenomenon of glowing green lights rippling across the night sky, also known as the aurora borealis, have long captivated the public and experts alike.
Some have suggested the lights are depicted in prehistoric cave paintings, while the Latin term is said to have been coined by the astronomer Galileo Galilei.
Auroras are produced when charged particles, such as electrons, are ejected by the sun and funnelled towards the Earth’s poles by our planet’s magnetic field. There they interact with gases in the atmosphere, including oxygen and nitrogen, increasing the energy of these gases – energy which is subsequently released as light.
“This is the same as neon lamps,” said Minna Palmroth, a professor of computational space physics at the University of Helsinki. “Basically we can say the auroras are celestial neon lamps.”
The northern lights have been seen in many forms, including “quiet arcs”, spirals and corona.
But now, thanks to the work of amateur enthusiasts, Palmroth and colleagues say they have discovered a previously unknown form, a pattern they claim resembles sand dunes.
LeoLabs, Inc. (@LeoLabs_Space) 1/29/20, 9:04 PM
Thankfully our latest data following the event shows no evidence of new debris. To be sure, we will perform a further assessment upon the next pass of both objects over Kiwi Space Radar occurring later tonight.
https://twitter.com/leolabs_space/status/1222702184711757825
LeoLabs, Inc. (@LeoLabs_Space) 1/30/20, 12:04 AM
We are pleased to report that in the first several radar passes of the two objects after the close approach, we see no evidence of new debris. This event has served to highlight the collision risks caused by derelict satellites in LEO.
LeoLabs, Inc. (@LeoLabs_Space) 1/30/20, 12:04 AM
We will continue to monitor the space environment for these types of close approaches and provide updates when we see high risk scenarios.
The researchers noted that they used frame dragging to yield insight into the rotating star that caused it. In the future, they said, they can use a similar method to analyze binary neutron stars to learn more about their internal composition, "which, even after more than 50 years of observing them, we do not yet have a handle on," Venkatraman Krishnan said. "The density of matter inside a neutron star far exceeds what can be achieved in a lab, so there is a wealth of new physics to be learnt by using this technique to double neutron-star systems."
Shannon Stirone (@shannonmstirone)m2/4/20, 11:07 PM
I know everything is crazy but BOTH Voyager 1 AND Voyager 2 are talking to the DSN right now. This is very rare and not going to happen again for a very long time.
eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html pic.twitter.com/Orsnx3qBOQ
https://twitter.com/shannonmstirone/status/1224907489226788864
< Wow! They're both so far out into space, yet still operating and communicating with Earth.
- Yep! Almost every day too
- Oo! India's Chandrayaan-2 just showed up on DSS 26! Fun night on the DSN
- Also something fun, the dishes don't just talk to spacecraft, they do science on their own. The dish 36 @CanberraDSN labeled GBRA is ground based radio astronomy.
Japan’s space agency has approved a robotic mission to retrieve a sample from the Martian moon Phobos for return to Earth to begin full development for a planned launch in 2024, officials said Thursday.https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/02/20/phobos-sample-return-mission-enters-development-for-2024-launch/
The Martian Moon eXploration, or MMX, spacecraft will attempt to return the first specimens from Phobos for analysis in laboratories on Earth, where scientists hope to trace the origins of the Martian moons to determine whether they were asteroids captured by Mars, or if they formed out of rocky debris generated from an ancient impact on Mars.
…
MMX builds upon JAXA’s two previous asteroid sample return missions.
The Hayabusa spacecraft launched in 2003 and collected microscopic samples from asteroid Itokawa in 2005. The probe returned the material to Earth in 2010, overcoming multiple technical malfunctions that threatened to prematurely end the mission.
Hayabusa 2 launched in 2014 and collected samples from Ryugu — a carbon-rich asteroid — during two touch-and-go landings last year. The spacecraft has departed Ryugu and is on track to return the samples to Earth late this year.
New Scientist (@newscientist) 2/26/20, 11:29 AM
Earth has acquired a brand new moon that's about the size of a car
https://twitter.com/newscientist/status/1232704211646844937
Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 2/26/20, 2:25 PM
@newscientist It’s not mine
Intelsat (@INTELSAT) 2/26/20, 4:09 PMhttps://twitter.com/intelsat/status/1232774822058496007
The successful docking of #MEV1 will help us extend the life of Intelsat 901, a satellite that provides service to our enterprise networks and mobility services customers in the Americas, Europe and Africa....
The successful maneuver marked a groundbreaking change in how satellites are operated in orbit, with the Mission Extension Vehicle capable of not just extending a satellite’s life but also moving defunct satellites to safer orbits.https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/02/northrop-grumman-history-mission-extension-vehicle-docks-satellite/
…
Under the terms of the contract with Intelsat, MEV-1 will provide five years of life extension services to the Intelsat 901 satellite before returning the spacecraft to a final decommissioning orbit in the GEO graveyard.
MEV-1 will then move on to provide mission extension services to a new client spacecraft.
The Mission Extension Vehicle was designed and built at the Northrop Grumman’s Dulles, Virginia, facility and utilizes a “low-risk” mechanical docking system that attaches to existing features on the client satellite.
Once docked, MEV takes over the attitude and orbit maintenance of the combined vehicle stack to meet the pointing and station keeping requirements of the customer.
The MEVs are designed for multiple dockings and undockings and can deliver over 15 years of life extension services.
A second MEV (MEV-2) is in final build and checkouts ahead of its planned launch later this year. ...
Yuri's Night (@YurisNight) 3/29/20, 2:50 AMhttps://twitter.com/yurisnight/status/1244154914818818049
T-minus TWO WEEKS
Yuri's Night Global Webcast Party
Sat, Apr 11, 4pm PST/7pm EST
@Cmdr_Hadfield
Grateful Dead’s @BobWeir
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Story Musgrave
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@Astro_Jessica
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JOIN US #SpaceParty2020
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Even in the midst of a global pandemic, gravity and velocity wait for no man. Spacecraft en route to far-flung destinations within our solar system demand course corrections. That’s why the European Space Agency (ESA) is temporarily disregarding COVID-19 protocol to provide the European-Japanese BepiColombo spacecraft with one of the nudges it needs to reach Mercury orbit by late 2025.https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2020/03/30/esa-will-break-covid-19-restrictions-to-nudge-bepicolombo-towards-mercury/#428a057e6426
Engineers will have to control the spacecraft maneuver at the agency’s European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany while complying with social distancing.
Meanwhile, the BepiColombo spacecraft, launched in October 2018, will be doing some incredible social distancing of its own.
Although BepiColombo is currently orbiting the Sun at a similar distance as Earth, on April 10th at 6.25 A.M. (CEST), the spacecraft will approach Earth at the distance of only 12,700 km, says ESA. That’s less than half the altitude of Europe’s Galileo navigational satellites, says the agency. This maneuver will both slow the spacecraft down while bending and tightening its solar orbit, ESA says.
“This is the last time we will see BepiColombo from Earth,” Joe Zender, BepiColombo Deputy Project Scientist at ESA, said in a statement. “After that it will head deeper into the inner Solar System.” ...
It wasn't so long ago that there were running jokes about the idea of the Trump administration creating something it called the "Space Force," but since its founding in December, we haven't heard too much about the military branch. Well, we now have an update for you, as the Space Force has announced something it calls the "Space Fence" is now operational. And no, it's not a space wall.https://www.inverse.com/innovation/space-fence-is-now-operational
The Space Force announced at the end of last week that the Space Fence radar system, which is a new radar system that can track objects smaller than 10 centimeters in space, is now fully operational. The radar system is located on Kwajalein Island in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and it is meant to improve the military's ability to track objects in space like depleted rocket boosters, military satellites and general space debris to protect U.S. assets.
Gen. Jay Raymond, chief of space operations for the U.S. Space Force and commander of U.S. Space Command, said in a statement that this is about protecting America's national security and financial interests.
"Space Fence is revolutionizing the way we view space by providing timely, precise orbital data on objects that threaten both manned and unmanned military and commercial space assets," Raymond said. "Our space capabilities are critical to our national defense and way of life, which is why Space Fence is so important to enhance our ability to identify, characterize and track threats to those systems."
The radar system will track 26,000 orbital objects that we're already aware of and monitor any new objects that are discovered. Considering it can track much smaller objects than we've previously been able to track, that database should grow pretty quickly. We'll soon have a map of just about every object that is orbiting our planet.
The Space Fence was developed by Lockheed Martin, and it's actually been in the works since its nearly $1 billion contract was awarded in 2014. The Pentagon indicated in a report that was released in January that it would finally be ready to go online by the end of February, so the program isn't far off schedule. ...
A Chinese rocket measuring around 100 feet long that launched earlier this month will likely plunge back into Earth’s atmosphere some time Monday, becoming the most massive object in decades to fall out of orbit in an uncontrolled manner.https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/05/09/u-s-military-tracking-large-chinese-rocket-reentry/
With the tanks empty, the Long March 5B’s core stage stage has a mass of roughly 20 metric tons. An exact mass figure has not been released by Chinese officials.
That makes the Long March 5B core stage the most massive object to make an uncontrolled re-entry since the Soviet Union’s Salyut 7 space station in 1991, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks global satellite and launch activity.
In the case of the Long March 5B, the core stage delivered its payload — a prototype Chinese crew capsule — into a low-altitude orbit. The heavy-lift Long March 5B is designed to directly inject payloads into low Earth orbit without an upper stage, meaning the core stage also ends up in orbit, instead of immediately falling back to Earth in a predetermined downrange drop zone.
China plans to launch at least three more Long March 5B rockets in 2021 and 2022 with modules for the country’s planned space station, so more uncontrolled rocket re-entries are expected in the next couple of years.
…
Dead satellites and old rocket stages regularly re-enter the atmosphere, but re-entering objects with masses of more than a few tons are rare.
There have been no reported human injuries or deaths from falling space junk. NASA in 2011 calculated a 1-in-3,200 chance of someone being hit by debris from the UARS satellite, which was less than one-third the mass of the Long March 5B core stage. A casualty risk estimate for the Long March 5B was not available. ...
U.S. military tracking unguided re-entry Monday of large Chinese rocket
Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) 5/11/20, 2:16 PMhttps://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1259910216612827138
And the TIP message is out, showing reentry at 1534 UTC at location 20W 20N, just before the ground track passed over Nouakchott.
NASA has revealed a series of principles that will govern the behavior of countries and companies on the moon and in space.https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/artemis-accords-nasa-unveils-rules-conduct-moon-and-space-155306
The new legal framework, called the Artemis Accords, also sets forth the creation of “safety zones” around lunar sites where future mining and exploration would take place.
...
Countries that sign off on the accord must also protect heritage sites and space artifacts, gather resources according to international agreements, avoid interference with other space missions and dispose of any debris or spacecraft responsibly. ...
HELSINKI — China is preparing to carry out 11 missions in two years to construct a space station and will soon select a new batch of astronauts for the project.https://spacenews.com/china-outlines-intense-space-station-launch-schedule-new-astronaut-selection/
The first module for the Chinese space station will launch next year, said Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s human spaceflight program, on the sidelines of a political conference in Beijing Tuesday.
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China will launch its Tianwen-1 Mars mission in July and Chang’e-5 lunar sample return in the fourth quarter before proceeding to launch the space station core module.
The three-module, 66-metric-ton space station will host three astronauts for six month rotations. Planned experiments include international projects in the areas of astronomy, space medicine, space life science, biotechnology, microgravity fluid physics, microgravity combustion and space technologies. …
• June 3, 2020https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/map-every-mars-landing-attempt.html
It’s almost Mars launch season again! Once every 26 months, as Earth runs on its inside track around the Sun, physics favors launches from our planet toward Mars. There are 3 Mars-bound missions that plan to launch in July, and 2 of them hope to land. (The one that won’t land is just named Hope.) NASA will be launching the Perseverance rover, and China its Tianwen-1 orbiter and rover. There was to have been a 3rd rover launching this summer, but the European Space Agency had to delay Rosalind Franklin and Kazachok’s mission until the next opportunity comes around in 2022.
Many years ago, as Spirit and Opportunity were readying for launch, I produced a map of all the locations of landed Mars missions, both failed and successful. Since then I’ve updated it with Phoenix, Curiosity, Schiaparelli, and InSight. Now that we have several new missions planned, I figured it was time for a complete do-over. Here it is! ...
Scientists In Antarctica Didn’t Find A ‘Parallel Universe.
NASA has announced another delay to the launch of its Mars-bound Perseverance rover. In a message posted on the rover’s own Twitter account on Tuesday, June 30, the space agency said that due to processing delays in uniting the rover with the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket, the first launch effort at Cape Canaveral in Florida would now take place no earlier than July 30.https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/mars-2020-mission-launch-date-slips-for-the-third-time/
...NASA added that it had managed to extend the end of the launch window from August 11 to August 15, and was looking into the possibility of extending it further to enable it to better handle any further delays.
...
The ambitious mission will see Perseverance exploring the red planet for signs of ancient life. The six-wheel vehicle, which has been put through its paces ahead of launch, will also collect rock and soil samples that could be brought to Earth for scientific examination.
Joining Perseverance will be the Mars helicopter — called Ingenuity — which is set to become the first-ever aircraft to fly on another planet. Camera-equipped Ingenuity will help NASA look for potentially useful research sites on the Martian surface, and also gather data for mapping routes for future Mars rovers.
Assuming NASA can launch the mission during its targeted window, Perseverance and Ingenuity will reach Mars sometime in February 2021.
The Hidden Magnetic Universe Begins to Come Into View"Primordial magnetism might also help resolve another cosmological conundrum known as the Hubble tension — probably the hottest topic in cosmology.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hidden-magnetic-universe-begins-to-come-into-view-20200702/
"Astronomers are discovering that magnetic fields permeate much of the cosmos. If these fields date back to the Big Bang, they could solve a major cosmological mystery."
latest in space (@latestinspace) 7/3/20, 10:50 PMhttps://twitter.com/latestinspace/status/1279246049983426560
Gorgeous 1.5 km wide crater on Mars captured by the HiRISE camera aboard a NASA satellite orbiting the red planet
A mission called Hope, the Arab region's first attempt to go interplanetary, is on its way to Mars.
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The $200 million Hope mission, also called the Emirates Mars Mission, is the UAE's first foray into interplanetary exploration, and its arrival was designed to mark the nation's 50th anniversary. In particular, mission planners wanted a project that would kickstart the nation's technology and science sectors as the country looks for an economic model that can sustain it beyond its oil wealth.
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So the nation targeted a Mars orbiter and stipulated that the mission needed to contribute internationally valuable science data. For a country with hardly any planetary science expertise, that was a steep challenge. …
Today's launch kicks off a spree of Red Planet-bound liftoffs as scientists seek to capitalize on a three-week window of favorable orbital alignment between Earth and Mars that only occurs every 26 months.https://www.space.com/hope-mars-mission-uae-launch.html
China is next on the launch docket, with a mission called Tianwen-1 scheduled to blast off on July 23. The mission will include an orbiter, lander and rover and will aim to tackle questions about the Red Planet's geology and environment.
Then, NASA's Mars 2020 mission heads to countdown on July 30. That launch stars Perseverance, a massive six-wheeled, life-hunting rover carrying a tiny helicopter that will, if all goes well, become the first aircraft to fly on another planet.
Chris B - NSF (@NASASpaceflight) 7/19/20, 5:59 PMhttps://twitter.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1284971190893903873
LAUNCH! Japanese H-IIA launches with Al Amal/Hope to Mars! ...
Chris B - NSF (@NASASpaceflight) 7/19/20, 6:00 PMhttps://twitter.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1284971490534973440
Staging - there go to the twin solids.
A flight of international cooperation, the mission has three main objectives, to:https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/07/uae-ready-for-first-mars-mission/
1 understand the climate dynamics and the global weather map of Mars through characterizing the planet’s lower atmosphere,
2 explain how weather changes the escape of hydrogen and oxygen through correlating the lower atmosphere conditions with the upper atmosphere,
3 understand the structure and variability of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere, as well as identifying why Mars is losing them to space.
With this set of three objectives, the Emirates Mars Mission will be the first to form a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere — including an improved understanding of how circulation and weather in Mars’ lower and middle atmosphere contribute to the escape of atmospheric particles to space.
In this regard, Al Amal will be “the first true weather satellite” at Mars, according to the mission’s project managers and leaders.
The Al Amal spacecraft was built by 150 Emirati engineers and 200 partnering U.S. engineers and scientists, with the majority of construction having taken place at the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado. Academic partners from Arizona State University and the University of California, Berkeley also collaborated in the development of the orbiter. …
The comet was visible last night here in Calif. It was about halfway between the horizon and the Big Dipper at 9:45pm. Kinda fuzzy with the naked eye but nice using binoculars. You only see so many comets in one lifetime. I can remember where I watched four memorable ones.Quite visible in the Maine darkness. Snagged a few shots last night.
Michael Sheetz (@thesheetztweetz) 7/23/20, 9:19 AMhttps://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1286291432324640772
The U.S. Space Force says “Russia conducted a non-destructive test of a space-based anti-satellite weapon” last Wednesday (July 15): BREAKING
Statement from Gen. Jay Ramond:
https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1286289896169234438
[text image at the link]
< Would it be this ?QuoteJonathan McDowell (@planet4589) 7/17/20, 5:04 PMMichael Sheetz (@thesheetztweetz) 7/23/20, 9:25 AM
Object 45915 appears to have separated from Kosmos-2543 at about 0750 UTC Jul 15 at a fairly high relative velocity (I don't entirely trust my code here so someone else should look at this)
Yes, that’s it.
From USSF: “Russia injected a new object into orbit from Cosmos 2543, currently Satellite Catalog Number 45915”
Michael Sheetz (@thesheetztweetz) 4/15/20, 4:50 PM
U.S. Space Command says Russia conducted a test of an anti-satellite missile today, "capable of destroying satellites in low Earth orbit."
Russia last conducted a test of its PL-19 Nudol anti-satellite missile system in December 2018.
~ Russia continues to try to expand its space capabilities. While this would be the 8th test of the PL-19 Nudol system, US intelligence has captured photographers of an air-launched anti-satellite missile on an MiG-31, as @amanda_m_macias reported:QuoteRussia tests anti-satellite missile, US general sayshttps://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1250527051972579338
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/04/15/russia-tests-anti-satellite-missile-us-general-says.html
A pair of Russian satellites are tailing a multibillion-dollar U.S. spy satellite hundreds of miles above the Earth’s surface, a top U.S. military commander tells TIME, underscoring a growing threat to America’s dominance in space-based espionage and a potentially costly new chapter in Washington’s decades-long competition with Moscow.https://time.com/5779315/russian-spacecraft-spy-satellite-space-force/
Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, commander of the newly minted U.S. Space Force, says the Russian spacecraft began maneuvering toward the American satellite shortly after being launched into orbit in November, at times creeping within 100 miles of it. “We view this behavior as unusual and disturbing,” Raymond says. “It has the potential to create a dangerous situation in space.” Raymond says the U.S. government has expressed concern to Moscow through diplomatic channels. …
Early Mars was covered in ice sheets, not flowing rivers, researchers say
...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200803120154.htm
Early Mars was covered in ice sheets, not flowing rivers, researchers say
...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200803120154.htm (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200803120154.htm)
Hmmm. Eskers? If Mars were once covered in an ice sheet, and rivers flowed under the ice, one would think there would be other evidence of this ice- moraines probably and eskers for sure. The article did not rule this out. Maybe nobody looked yet....
"The bursts of powerful radio waves last only a few milliseconds at most, but generate more energy in that time than Earth's sun does in a century. "
T.S. Kelso (@TSKelso) 8/11/20, 7:26 PMhttps://twitter.com/tskelso/status/1293327972074582017
We now have 230 pieces of cataloged debris from the 2020 May 8 Fregat fragmentation event. The debris has spread all over LEO due to differential precession. Yet one more reason not to leave upper stages in orbit after they have completed their mission:
Orbital Debris Quarterly News - August 2020
https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/pdfs/odqnv24i3.pdf
Second Fragmentation of Fregat Upper Stage Debris
Gregorian dome. You learn something new everyday.
I had never seen it before so thanks for number 2!
A week into its seven-month journey to Mars and already several million miles from Earth, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has been successfully powered up for the first time during its epic trip with the Perseverance rover.https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/nasas-ingenuity-mars-helicopter-passes-first-test-in-space/
The procedure, which lasted eight hours, saw the charge level of the helicopter’s six lithium-ion batteries brought up to 35%, with a low charge state considered optimal for battery health during the cruise to Mars. …
A NASA-funded satellite that launched last year on the third flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket has begun a sequence of thruster firings to begin falling out of orbit after successfully demonstrating the effectiveness of a non-toxic fuel that could fly on future space missions.https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/08/17/nasa-satellite-set-to-conclude-successful-green-propellant-demo-mission/
The Green Propellant Infusion Mission, or GPIM, spacecraft is in the final weeks of its in-orbit test campaign aimed at proving the usefulness of the non-toxic fuel that could replace hydrazine — a caustic liquid that requires special handling before launch — for spacecraft propulsion needs.
Ground teams exercised the GPIM spacecraft’s five thrusters across a range of operating modes over the past year, testing their ability to control the satellite’s attitude, or pointing, and demonstrating their effectiveness at changing the spacecraft’s orbital altitude.
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The main purpose of the $65 million GPIM mission was to test the performance of a hydroxyl ammonium nitrate fuel and oxidizer blend called AF-M315E, which could take the place of hydrazine used in conventional satellite propulsion systems. Hydrazine is often mixed with nitrogen tetroxide, another hazardous chemical, to feed small maneuvering thrusters on-board satellites in space.
The “green” propellant blend comes with several benefits, officials said before the mission’s launch.
Technicians can load the AF-M315E blend onto a spacecraft without needing to wear protective self-contained suits to guard themselves against a toxic leak. The green propellant blend is more dense and viscous than hydrazine, allowing more of the AF-M315E fuel to fit into the same tank volume.
That results in an improvement in the performance of a spacecraft’s propulsion system.
“If I compare this to a standard monopropellant hydrazine system, we have 50 percent more total impulse available, mainly due the density of the propellant,” said Chris McLean, the GPIM mission’s principal investigator from Ball Aerospace. “So for a given tank volume, we’re able to squeeze in 50 percent more propellant, which means 50 percent more mileage for the spacecraft.” …
On Saturday, a Northrop Grumman spacecraft, designed to give a dying satellite a new lease on life, launched into space. Its objective is to latch onto an aging satellite that’s been in space for 16 years and prolong the old robot’s life in orbit by giving it a new set of engines and fuel.https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/17/21366674/northrop-grumman-space-logistics-mev-2-satellite-servicing-life-extension
The spacecraft is named MEV-2, for Mission Extension Vehicle 2. MEV-2’s predecessor was the groundbreaking MEV-1 satellite, which launched in October 2019. MEV-1 made history in February when it successfully grabbed hold of another satellite already in orbit, marking the first time that two commercial satellites had docked in space. MEV-1’s target was an out-of-commission communications satellite called Intelsat 901, which has been in space for nearly 20 years. After docking with Intelsat 901, MEV-1 nudged the satellite into a new orbit, allowing the spacecraft to start operating again and extending its life for at least five more years.
“MEV-2 will try a few new things during its time in space”
MEV-1 successfully demonstrated a concept known as satellite servicing — an emerging industry that is focused on sending handy satellites into space in order to fix, repair, or upgrade other satellites already in orbit. Now, with MEV-2, Northrop Grumman is going to try again. “It’s very similar,” Joe Anderson, vice president of operations and business development at Space Logistics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Northrop Grumman that oversees the MEV missions, tells The Verge. “MEV-2 is essentially a carbon copy of MEV-1 from a design standpoint.”
However, MEV-2 will try a few new things during its time in space. For one thing, it’s targeting a different type of satellite than the one MEV-1 wrangled. Intelsat 901 was no longer functioning and was located in an orbit above Earth often referred to as the “graveyard orbit.” Satellites orbiting many thousands of miles above the planet are moved to the graveyard orbit when they run out of fuel so that they don’t get in anyone’s way when they become inoperable. MEV-1 plucked Intelsat 901 out of the graveyard orbit and put it back in a coveted region known as geosynchronous orbit — a path above Earth where satellites match the rotation of the planet and seemingly hover over the same patch of sky at all times. The geosynchronous belt is a fairly critical orbit for satellites, home to many communications and Earth-observing probes.
““We will simply dock to them, and then take over the orbit and attitude control.”” …
…
Anderson says that these satellite servicing missions are a “business growth area” for Space Logistics and Northrop Grumman. Moving forward, the company is focusing on a new type of servicer called the Mission Robotic Vehicle, or MRV, which should take satellite tune-ups to a whole new level. Thanks to a partnership with DARPA, MRV will be able to do what the MEV satellites can do, but it will also be able to attach “pods” onto satellites that provide propulsion on their own, extending the life of a satellite by up to six years. Anderson notes the MRV will really be a multiservice satellite, capable of doing various types of repairs apart from providing extra propulsions. “That robotic vehicle can do other types of services such as detailed inspections, full repair missions,” he says. “So if someone has a stuck solar array, or antenna, for example, we may be able to use our robotic system to do those deployments. It can also grab onto the client vehicles and tug them and relocate them to other orbits as well.” …
A car-size asteroid flew within about 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) of Earth on Sunday.https://www.businessinsider.in/science/news/a-car-size-asteroid-flew-within-1830-miles-of-earth-over-the-weekend-the-closest-pass-ever-and-we-didnt-see-it-coming/articleshow/77603002.cms
That's a remarkably close shave — the closest ever recorded, in fact, according to asteroid trackers and a catalog compiled by Sormano Astronomical Observatory in Italy.
Because of its size, the space rock most likely wouldn't have posed any danger to people on the ground had it struck our planet. But the close call is worrisome nonetheless, since astronomers had no idea the asteroid existed until after it passed by. ...
Oops. :oTo place how close this is into some context, Low Earth Orbit, where most man-made objects orbit, is anywhere below 1,200mi. So, had it's approach path and speed been different, it could have been captured by Earth's gravity and become a new moon!
A car-size asteroid flew within 1,830 miles of Earth over the weekend — the closest pass ever — and we didn't see it comingQuoteA car-size asteroid flew within about 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) of Earth on Sunday.https://www.businessinsider.in/science/news/a-car-size-asteroid-flew-within-1830-miles-of-earth-over-the-weekend-the-closest-pass-ever-and-we-didnt-see-it-coming/articleshow/77603002.cms
That's a remarkably close shave — the closest ever recorded, in fact, according to asteroid trackers and a catalog compiled by Sormano Astronomical Observatory in Italy.
Because of its size, the space rock most likely wouldn't have posed any danger to people on the ground had it struck our planet. But the close call is worrisome nonetheless, since astronomers had no idea the asteroid existed until after it passed by. ...
To place how close this is into some context, Low Earth Orbit, where most man-made objects orbit, is anywhere below 1,200mi. So, had it's approach path and speed been different, it could have been captured by Earth's gravity and become a new moon!Umm, no. If it had been a bit closer, it could have hit one of those near-Earth satellites, but if not it would have just passed us by, as it actually did, even though it was a lot closer than actual geosynchronous satellites. To be captured you would need a third body to interact and slow it down. The best you could get would be a slowdown in the atmosphere to allow the Earth's gravity to capture it, but then it would go through the atmosphere again and crash.
Hope Mars Mission (@HopeMarsMission) 8/17/20, 7:02 AMhttps://twitter.com/hopemarsmission/status/1295314981198716928
The #HopeProbe has successfully completed its first trajectory correction manoeuvre - a major milestone in its journey to #Mars. This marks the first firing of the probe’s six Delta-V thrusters, for course correction that will see the probe directly targeting Mars’ capture orbit.
Bulked-up, mutant "mighty mice" held onto their muscle during a monthlong stay at the International Space Station, returning to Earth with ripped bodybuilder physiques, scientists reported Monday. The findings hold promise for preventing muscle and bone loss in astronauts on prolonged space trips like Mars missions, as well as people on Earth who are confined to bed or need wheelchairs.https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mighty-mice-keep-muscle-space-scientists/
A research team led by Dr. Se-Jin Lee of the Jackson Laboratory in Connecticut sent 40 young female black mice to the space station in December, launching aboard a SpaceX rocket.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Lee said the 24 regular untreated mice lost considerable muscle and bone mass in weightlessness as expected - up to 18%.
But the eight genetically engineered "mighty mice" launched with double the muscle maintained their bulk. Their muscles appeared to be comparable to similar "mighty mice" that stayed behind at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
In addition, eight normal mice that received "mighty mouse" treatment in space returned to Earth with dramatically bigger muscles. The treatment involves blocking a pair of proteins that typically limit muscle mass.
A SpaceX capsule brought all 40 mice back in good condition, parachuting into the Pacific off the California coast in January. Some of the ordinary mice were injected with the "mighty mice" drug after returning and quickly built up more muscle than their untreated companions, Lee said. …
Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) 9/10/20, 10:02 AMhttps://twitter.com/sciguyspace/status/1304057566318800896
NASA says it will purchase between 50g and 500g of lunar soil from commercial providers. 80 percent of funds to be paid only on delivery. This is a big deal!
beta.sam.gov/opp/7772617761…
NASA is officially in the market for Moon rocks — and it’s willing to pay any company that’s capable of scooping them up.https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/9/10/21429850/nasa-moon-rocks-sampling-commercial-space-transaction-lunar-marketplace
Today, the space agency is putting out a call for proposals from companies, challenging them to snag small samples of rocks on the Moon’s surface. The companies will have to prove that they have collected lunar samples in some kind of small container by sending pictures and data to NASA. If satisfied, NASA pledges to purchase the samples for between $15,000 and $25,000. Eventually, NASA will retrieve the rock samples and bring them back to Earth.
NASA ultimately wants the exchange to happen before 2024 — the agency’s current deadline for sending people back to the Moon. For companies that can pull this off, NASA will pay a small portion of the money when awarding the contract and during launch. The rest of the funds will be received when the sample is bagged. NASA says it may also make multiple awards to separate companies that can grab Moon rocks. …
Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) 9/10/20, 12:24 PM
Quick and dirty legal analysis of today's NASA announcement, the Outer Space Treaty, and international law:
https://twitter.com/sciguyspace/status/1304093383581937665
Prof. Chris Newman (@ChrisNewman1972) 9/10/20, 12:20 PM
…. It’s the only way to get meaningful international law: let’s act in accordance with the Treaty (which this does) and let anyone who objects put up or shut up.
Julia (@julia_bergeron) 9/9/20, 11:44 AMhttps://twitter.com/julia_bergeron/status/1303720863867514881
Way back Wednesday.
Riding the Booster with Shuttle with enhanced sound from Skywalker Sound. Truly an amazing experience.
Scientists Find Gas Linked to Life in Atmosphere of Venus
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/sep/14/scientists-find-gas-linked-to-life-in-atmosphere-of-venus
Phosphine, released by microbes in oxygen-starved environments, was present in quantities larger than expected
Astronomers detected phosphine 30 miles up in the planet’s atmosphere and have failed to identify a process other than life that could account for its presence.
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The presence of even a few parts per billion of PH3 is completely unexpected for an oxidized atmosphere (where oxygen-containing compounds greatly dominate over hydrogen-containing ones).
Twitter, at least one corner of it, has been noting that penguin guano can emit phosphine, and that maybe penguins colonized Venus....
Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) 9/14/20, 5:21 PM
Don't get me wrong. I for one welcome our new Venusian floating penguin overlords.
https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1305617803630739456
Jonathan McDowell: For those confused by the penguin ref: penguins are a major sources of phosphine on Earth. Therefore, Occam's razor implies that they are also the most likely source of phosphine of Venus. Right??
< Venus has a denser atmosphere suited for tiny little wings. Theory checks out.
<< Yes the venusian penguin is the only logical answer. Sulphuric rain would just roll off their sleek feathers
And we shall call the cloud city Bespin. ;)I agree if you can't go outside a probe makes more sense.
I bet a drone space ship that flies there and samples some of the clouds will be cheaper...
The announcement Monday of the discovery of phosphine gas in the clouds of Venus — an indicator of possible life — has raised hopes among scientists for new robotic missions to renew exploration of Earth’s planetary neighbor.https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/09/14/hints-of-life-raises-interest-in-venus-missions-and-a-privately-funded-probe-could-lead-the-way/
If Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck gets his way, a privately-funded mission could get the next crack at probing Venus’s soupy atmosphere. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine also tweeted Monday: “It’s time to prioritize Venus.”
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Putting together a private mission to Venus
The mission Beck is planning would send an entry probe in the atmosphere of Venus. It wouldn’t answer all the questions scientists have about Venus, but could open doors to new ways of exploring the solar system, Beck said.
With its light-class Electron rocket and Photon spacecraft platform, Rocket Lab could deliver nearly 60 pounds — about 27 kilograms — of useful payloads to Venus, according to Beck.
“It might not sound a lot, but 27 kilograms is a lot of radio. That’s a lot of science instrument,” Beck said. “It’s a lot of really good stuff. So we can do some pretty incredible things with that.”
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NASA last year selected four proposals from scientists for the next mission in the agency’s Discovery program, a line of cost-capped robotic interplanetary probes.
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The DAVINCI+ mission would send a descent probe into the atmosphere of Venus to precisely measure its composition down to the surface, according to NASA. The mission would help scientists understand how the atmosphere formed and evolved, and accumulate more information about the history of water at Venus.
A hardened “sphere” will carry the instruments to the surface of Venus, measuring atmospheric composition and conditions at various altitudes throughout a gradual hour-long descent. Cameras on the descent sphere and an orbiter component to the mission will map surface rock types, according to NASA.
The VERITAS mission would carry a synthetic aperture radar instrument on an orbiting spacecraft to survey nearly the entire surface of the Venus, according to NASA. The VERITAS orbiter would collect data on the types of rock that make up Venus’s crust, and like DAVINCI+, would pursue signs of ancient water on the planet.
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The European Space Agency is also weighing a selection of its next medium-class, cost-capped science mission. One of the European finalists, named EnVision, is a proposed orbiter that would launch to Venus in 2032 with similar objectives as VERITAS — to map the planet in unprecedented detail with radar.
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Russia’s Venera-D mission is in the early stages of development. Venera-D would consist of an orbiter and a lander, with a launch no earlier than the late 2020s. …
Thomas Burghardt (@TGMetsFan98) 9/22/20, 4:34 PM
The 3 crew members on the ISS have boarded the Soyuz MS-16 spacecraft due to a predicted close approach to a piece of space debris at 22:21 UTC. An avoidance maneuver is being conducted at 21:19 UTC using the Progress MS-14 spacecraft’s engines.
https://twitter.com/tgmetsfan98/status/1308504974721245187
Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) 9/22/20, 4:25 PM
The station is preparing to avoid a piece of unknown space debris being tracked by @NASA_Johnson flight controllers and @US_SpaceCom. The Exp 63 crew has relocated to its Soyuz crew ship. The time of closest approach is 6:21 pm ET. More... go.nasa.gov/2G546FF
https://twitter.com/space_station/status/1308502770530435072
Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) 9/22/20, 7:53 PMhttps://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1308555063690919936
The debris object that ISS avoided is now available on SpaceTrack as 2018-084CQ, 46477, from the breakup of Japan's H-2A F40 rocket stage. At 2221:07 UTC it passed within a few km of ISS at a relative velocity of 14 6 km/s, 422 km over the Pitcairn Is in the S Pacific
~ Correction: it passed within a few km of the position ISS would have been at if it hadn't manuevered
~ H2A F40 launched GOSAT-2 in Oct 2018. The stage appears to have made a depletion burn to lower orbit from 597 x 618 km to 598 x 520 km. Nevertheless it underwent a major breakup on 2019 Feb 6.
~ 77 debris objects have been cataloged from the breakup; 5 have reentered so far. This plot shows the locations at conjunction time of the remaining 72 (almost all in one plane) and the pre-maneuver track of ISS for +/- 10 min
⬇️Image below.
Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) 9/22/20, 8:50 PM
Most of the debris objects are still at somewhat higher altitudes, but they will eventually decay through the ISS height range pic.twitter.com/qMYNcXFrIr
Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) 9/22/20, 5:25 PMhttps://twitter.com/jimbridenstine/status/1308540671725318144
Maneuver Burn complete. The astronauts are coming out of safe haven
Jim Bridenstine: The @Space_Station has maneuvered 3 times in 2020 to avoid debris. In the last 2 weeks, there have been 3 high concern potential conjunctions. Debris is getting worse! Time for Congress to provide @CommerceGov with the $15 mil requested by @POTUS for the Office of Space Commerce.
—- ISS Maneuvers to avoid space debris from a 2019 Japanese rocket breakup
The best place and time to live in the Milky Way
R. Spinelli ‹1
, G. Ghirlanda2
, F. Haardt1, 2, 3 G. Ghisellini2
, G. Scuderi4
1 Dipartimento di Scienza e Alta Tecnologia, Università dell’Insubria, Via Valleggio 11, 22100 Como, Italy
2
INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Via E. Bianchi 46, 23807 Merate (LC), Italy
3
INFN – Sezione Milano–Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza 3, 20126 Milano, Italy
4 Dipartimento di Fisica G. Occhialini, Università Milano–Bicocca, Piazza della Scienza 3, 20126 Milano, Italy
Received September 18, 2020; accepted
ABSTRACT
Context. Among the most powerful cosmic events, supernovae (SNe) and γ´ray bursts (GRBs) can be highly disruptive for life:
their radiation can be harmful for biota or induce extinction by removing most of the protective atmospheric ozone layer on terrestrial
planets. Nearby high-energy transient astrophysical events have been proposed as possible triggers of mass extinctions on Earth.
Aims. We aim at assessing the habitability of the Milky Way (MW) along its cosmic history against potentially disruptive astrophysical
transients with the scope of identifying the safest places and epochs within our Galaxy. We also test the hypothesis that long GRBs
had a leading role in the late Ordovician mass extinction event („ 440 Myrs ago).
Methods. We characterise the habitability of the MW along its cosmic history as a function of galactocentric distance of terrestrial
planets. We estimate the dangerous effects of transient astrophysical events (long/short GRBs and SNe) with a model which binds
their rate to the specific star formation and metallicity evolution within the Galaxy along its cosmic history. Our model also accounts
for the probability of forming terrestrial planets around FGK and M stars.
Results. Until „6 billion years ago the outskirts of the Galaxy were the safest places to live, despite the relatively low density of
terrestrial planets. In the last „4 billion years, regions between 2 and 8 kpc from the center, featuring a higher density of terrestrial
planets, became the best places for a relatively safer biotic life growth. We confirm the hypothesis that one long GRB had a leading
role in the late Ordovician mass extinction event. In the last 500 Myrs, the safest galactic region is comprised between 2 and 8 kpc
from the center of the MW, whereas the outskirts of the Galaxy have been sterilized by 2–5 long GRBs.
Annular structures (rings and gaps) in disks around pre-main-sequence stars have been detected in abundance towards class II protostellar objects that are approximately 1,000,000 years old1. These structures are often interpreted as evidence of planet formation1,2,3, with planetary-mass bodies carving rings and gaps in the disk4. This implies that planet formation may already be underway in even younger disks in the class I phase, when the protostar is still embedded in a larger-scale dense envelope of gas and dust5. Only within the past decade have detailed properties of disks in the earliest star-forming phases been observed6,7. Here we report 1.3-millimetre dust emission observations with a resolution of five astronomical units that show four annular substructures in the disk of the young (less than 500,000 years old)8 protostar IRS 63. IRS 63 is a single class I source located in the nearby Ophiuchus molecular cloud at a distance of 144 parsecs9, and is one of the brightest class I protostars at millimetre wavelengths. IRS 63 also has a relatively large disk compared to other young disks (greater than 50 astronomical units)10. Multiple annular substructures observed towards disks at young ages can act as an early foothold for dust-grain growth, which is a prerequisite of planet formation. Whether or not planets already exist in the disk of IRS 63, it is clear that the planet-formation process begins in the initial protostellar phases, earlier than predicted by current planet-formation theories11.
< Unfortunately, LeoLabs’ updated numbers on tomorrow’s conjunction between two defunct spacecraft over Antarctica doesn’t spell good things to come. A miss distance of 12 meters, give or take, with a collision probability of over 10 percent. :o
LeoLabs, Inc. (@LeoLabs_Space) 10/14/20, 12:09 PM
1/ This event continues to be very high risk and will likely stay this way through the time of closest approach. Our system generates new conjunction reports 6-8x per day on this event with new observation data each time.
https://twitter.com/leolabs_space/status/1316410780552699909
[gif of orbital conjunction at the link.]
LeoLabs, Inc.:
2/ Current risk metrics from our most recent CDMs:
Miss distance: 12 meters (+18/-12 meters)
Probability of Collision: >10%, scaled to account for large object sizes
Relative velocity: 14.7 km/s
[⬇️ Graph below]
LeoLabs, Inc.:
3/ Shortly after TCA, we will have a direct pass of CZ-4C R/B over our Kiwi Space Radar in New Zealand. We have scheduled a search mode scan during this time to ensure we only see two objects as expected and hopefully confirm that no new debris is detected.
[⬇️ Graphic below]
LeoLabs, Inc. (@LeoLabs_Space) 10/15/20, 9:51 PMhttps://twitter.com/leolabs_space/status/1316919600160903168
No indication of collision.
CZ-4C R/B passed over LeoLabs Kiwi Space Radar 10 minutes after TCA. Our data shows only a single object as we'd hoped, with no signs of debris.
We will follow up in the coming days on Medium with a full in-depth risk assessment of this event!
Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) 10/15/20, 11:19 AMhttps://twitter.com/ajamesmccarthy/status/1316760737059008514
Yesterday morning I captured an incredibly brief and rare event, the ISS transiting the 4% illuminated moon during the daytime. #astrophotography #space #opteam
... Scientists want at least 60 grams but the spacecraft is capable of picking up as much as two kilograms, or five pounds.On Earth, 2 kg ~ 5 lb., but on the asteroid, way less than a pound (link (https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AwrDQq4xnJBfKI0AgwUPxQt.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzgEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny?qid=20080604175400AA48dNn)). (2 kg on Pluto is about 0.3 lbs. (https://onlineconversion.com/weight_on_other_planets.htm))
... If OSIRIS-REx successfully comes home in September 2023, it will have collected the largest sample returned from space since the Apollo era.
Now, astronomers have solved the mystery and pinned down that second star by searching gamma-ray data obtained between 2008 and 2018. Together, the two stars constitute one of the weirdest binary systems we've ever seen.
"The binary star system and the neutron star at its heart, now known as PSR J1653-0158, set new records," said astronomer Lars Nieder of the Albert Einstein Institute Hannover in Germany.
"We have discovered the galactic dance of a super heavyweight with a flyweight: At slightly more than twice the mass of our Sun, the neutron star is extraordinarily heavy. Its companion has about six times the density of lead, but only about 1 percent the mass of our Sun.
"This 'odd couple' orbits every 75 minutes, more quickly than all known comparable binaries."
... "The new observations we obtained with the Subaru telescope earlier this year were good enough to reveal the Yarkovsky acceleration of Apophis, and they show that the asteroid is drifting away from a purely gravitational orbit by about 170 meters per year, which is enough to keep the 2068 impact scenario in play."
Scientists Find Gas Linked to Life in Atmosphere of VenusTurns out to be a faulty step in analysis. Paper can be found here:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/sep/14/scientists-find-gas-linked-to-life-in-atmosphere-of-venus
Phosphine, released by microbes in oxygen-starved environments, was present in quantities larger than expected
NASA's OSIRIS-REx (@OSIRISREx) 10/29/20, 4:19 PM➡️ https://twitter.com/osirisrex/status/1321909550547652619
I’ve officially closed the Sample Return Capsule! The sample of Bennu is sealed inside and ready for our voyage back to Earth. The SRC will touch down in the Utah desert on Sep. 24, 2023. Thanks, everyone, for being a part of my journey #ToBennuAndBack
Abstract
The thermal evolution of rocky planets on geological timescales (Gyr) depends on the heat input from the long-lived radiogenic elements potassium, thorium, and uranium. Concentrations of the latter two in rocky planet mantles are likely to vary by up to an order of magnitude between different planetary systems because Th and U, like other heavy r-process elements, are produced by rare stellar processes. Here we discuss the effects of these variations on the thermal evolution of an Earth-size planet, using a 1D parameterized convection model. Assuming Th and U abundances consistent with geochemical models of the Bulk Silicate Earth based on chondritic meteorites, we find that Earth had just enough radiogenic heating to maintain a persistent dynamo. According to this model, Earth-like planets of stars with higher abundances of heavy r-process elements, indicated by the relative abundance of europium in their spectra, are likely to have lacked a dynamo for a significant fraction of their lifetimes, with potentially negative consequences for hosting a biosphere. Because the qualitative outcomes of our 1D model are strongly dependent on the treatment of viscosity, further investigations using fully 3D convection models are desirable.
In general, K stars are suitable for hosting life-bearing worlds, and some are even thought to have “superhabitable” worlds in orbit around them. K2-141b is quite the opposite. With an estimated mass about five times that of Earth, it orbits its star more than 100 times closer than Earth orbits the Sun, making its year less than seven hours long! Temperatures near the surface are so high that the planet likely has a magma ocean tens of kilometers deep.
National Science Foundation (@NSF)11/19/20, 11:32 AMhttps://twitter.com/nsf/status/1329462672627277829
Following engineering assessments concluding damage to Arecibo Observatory cannot be addressed without endangering the lives and safety of crew and staff, NSF plans to decommission the 305-meter telescope
NSF’s first priority is safety. Multiple assessments by independent engineering companies found the telescope structure is in danger of a catastrophic failure and its cables may no longer be capable of carrying the loads they were designed to support.
An engineering firm hired by the University of Central Florida to assess the structure concluded it would be unsafe to proceed with repairs. Even stress tests to determine the strength of the remaining cables could trigger a catastrophic collapse.https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/11/19/arecibo-observatory-faces-demolition-after-cable-failures/
Instead, engineers recommended a controlled demolition, bringing down the suspended instrument platform in a way that will prevent damage to other structures at the periphery of the dish by making sure the towers themselves don’t collapse and by ensuring no cables whip into those structures.
“The telescope is at serious risk of an unexpected, uncontrolled collapse,” said Ralph Gaume, director of NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences. “According to engineering assessment, even attempted stabilization, or testing the table could result in accelerating the catastrophic failure.
“Engineers cannot tell us the safety margin of the structure, but they have advised NSF that the structure will collapse in the near future on its own.”
Plans for bringing down the instrument platform have not yet been finalized and it’s not yet known whether explosives will be used in a controlled demolition or whether it might be possible to somehow lower the platform to the dish below.
However it plays out, the 1,000-foot-wide telescope will essentially be destroyed. While the laser facility and visitor’s center will hopefully be preserved, the radio telescope itself will be no more. ...
The DragRacer experiment includes two satellites — built by Millennium Space Systems — that will separate shortly after launching on the Electron rocket in a 310-mile-high (500-kilometer) sun-synchronous orbit. One satellite — named Alchemy — will extend a 230-foot-long (70-meter) electrically conductive tether, a device designed to increase the surface area of the spacecraft, allowing it to succumb to aerodynamic drag and naturally re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/11/19/boeing-subsidiary-ready-to-launch-satellite-deorbiting-experiment/
Both DragRacer spacecraft are identical, except that one carries the tether and the other — named Augury — does not.
According to preflight predictions, the satellite with the tether could re-enter the atmosphere within 45 days. The spacecraft without the tether — the control for the experiment — is expected to remain in orbit for around seven years, according to mission team members.
The device affixed to DragRacer’s Alchemy satellite is called a Terminator Tape. Developed by Tethers Unlimited, the tape measures just a few inches wide, but it can spool out to lengths of hundreds of feet.
The DragRacer experiment is a purely commercial experiment to quantify the effectiveness of the Terminator Tape technology, which Millennium and Tethers Unlimited say is a more reliable, lower cost, and less complex alternative to other deorbit methods, such as drag sails or propulsive thrusters.
“This scientific method experiment will demonstrate Millennium’s ability to field and fly a low-cost and straightforward orbital debris mitigation solution that doesn’t require added mass, volume, cost and complexity of propulsion system to deorbit a satellite in low Earth orbit,” said Stan Dubyn, founder and CEO of Millennium Space Systems, in a press release.
…
Tethers Unlimited’s Terminator Tape technology has flown before. The company says the tether module — which attaches on the exterior of a host spacecraft — weighs about 2 pounds and is about the size of a notebook, and is suitable for a range of satellite sizes. ...
All through the summer and into the fall, the two gas giants of the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, have been calling attention to themselves in the southern evening sky.https://www.space.com/jupiter-saturn-great-conjunction-2020
Jupiter of course, always appears brilliant and is usually one of the brightest nighttime objects, but in recent months it has stood out even more than usual because of the presence of bright Saturn trailing just off to its left (east).
Appearing about one-twelfth as bright, Saturn has, in a way, served as Jupiter's "lieutenant" in this year of 2020. ...
In the dusty desert town of Woomera, in the South Australian desert, scientists are getting ready. On 6 December 2020, after six years in space, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Hayabusa2 spacecraft will finally return to Earth.https://www.sciencealert.com/hayabusa2-is-about-to-return-to-earth-bringing-us-a-piece-of-precious-asteroid
It carries with it a cargo unbelievably rare, precious, and hard-won - at least 100 milligrams of material collected from the surface of asteroid Ryugu. It will drop the capsule containing the sample to Earth, the spacecraft itself continuing on to visit more asteroid targets.
Hayabusa2's return will mark a milestone in a remarkable feat of space science, a total journey of around 5.24 billion kilometres (almost 3.3 billion miles). Asteroid Ryugu - formerly known as 1999 JU3 - is on an elliptical orbit that carries it just inside Earth's orbital path around the Sun, and out almost as far as Mars' orbit.
...
Meanwhile, Hayabusa2's flight will continue. Its next stop will be asteroid (98943) 2001 CC21 in July 2026, after which it will continue on to asteroid 1998 KY26 for a July 2031 rendezvous.
WENCHANG, China -- Chinese technicians were making final preparations Monday for a mission to bring back material from the moon's surface for the first time in nearly half a century — an undertaking that could boost human understanding of the moon and of the solar system more generally.https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/china-final-preparations-latest-lunar-mission-74353397
Chang’e 5 — named for the Chinese moon goddess — is the country's most ambitious lunar mission yet. If successful, it would be a major advance for China's space program, and some experts say it could pave the way for bringing samples back from Mars or even a crewed lunar mission.
The four modules of the Chang’e 5 spacecraft are expected be sent into space Tuesday aboard a massive Long March-5 rocket from the Wenchang launch center along the coast of the southern island province of Hainan, according to a NASA description of the mission.
The secretive Chinese National Space Administration has only said that a launch is scheduled for late November, although the Lunar Exploration Project said in a statement Monday that success in orbiting, descending and returning would “lay a solid foundation for future missions.”
The mission's key task is to drill 2 meters (almost 7 feet) beneath the moon's surface and scoop up about 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of rocks and other debris to be brought back to Earth, according to NASA. That would offer the first opportunity to scientists to study newly obtained lunar material since the American and Russian missions of the 1960s and 1970s.
After making the three-day trip from Earth, the Chang’e 5 lander’s time on the moon is scheduled to be short and sweet. It can only stay one lunar daytime, or about 14 Earth days, because it lacks the radioisotope heating units to withstand the moon’s freezing nights.
The lander will dig for materials with its drill and robotic arm and transfer them to what's called an ascender, which will lift off from the moon and dock with the “service capsule.” The materials will then be moved to the return capsule for the trip home to Earth. ...