Space News

[Hunny]

TODAY'S OFFERING..

SpaceX's Falcon rocket passes in front of full moon as fire spews from its engines.

A rocket transiting the moon is a rare sight. Capturing a good photo takes rare skill.

Pascal Fouquet, Florida photographer, captured such a shot and won the Sony World Photography Award 2024.

Fouquet captured his Falcon Heavy photo just before the new year, when SpaceX launched the U S Space Force X-37B spaceplane, on the USSF-52 mission.

The uncrewed X-37B spacecraft lifted off atop Falcon Heavy from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Florida on Dec. 28.

Fouquet realized the upcoming opportunity to try and nail that shot less than 48 hours before the launch took place. 

"Scouting for an ideal location proved challenging, given the limited spots available for capturing the shot. 

I settled on an unconventional choice—an open field behind a hospice 14 miles away from the launch pad," he said.

The trick, Fouquet said, was to expose the camera to capture the details of the moon, not the rocket. 

Shot with a Nikon D850, Fouquet set his shutter speed to just 1/1600 of a second, 

capturing the split second moment Falcon Heavy passed in front of the moon.

MORE about the mission:   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTV-7   

johnnylee   justbec   apple   Big Lin  mikemarshall3  

 deyana mrright and all who come

I'll provide A WEEKLY NEWS POST!

And anyone can post a story of interest.

 

[Big Lin]

Wonderful - I love stuff like this!

[Hunny]

Journey To The Edge of The Universe...

[Hunny]

[deyana]

That's very cool.

[Hunny]

From: www.yahoo.com/news/harvard-scientists-may-unknown-technologically-150917239.html

Harvard Scientists Say There May Be an Unknown, Technologically Advanced Civilization Hiding on Earth

Victor Tangermann June 11, 2024

What if an unknown technological civilization is hiding right here on Earth, sheltering in bases deep underground and possibly even emerging with UFOs or disguised as everyday humans?

In a new paper that's bound to raise eyebrows, a team of researchers from Harvard and Montana Tech speculates that sightings of UFO's "may reflect activities of intelligent beings concealed in stealth here on Earth (e.g., underground), and/or its near environs (e.g., the Moon), and/or even 'walking among us' (e.g., passing as humans)."

Yes, that's a direct quote from the paper. Needless to say, the researchers admit, this idea of hidden "crypoterrestrials" is a highly exotic hypothesis that's "likely to be regarded skeptically by most scientists." Nonetheless, they argue, the theory "deserves genuine consideration in a spirit of epistemic humility and openness."

The interest in unexplained sightings of UFOs by military personnel has grown considerably over the past decade or so. This attention grew to a peak last summer, when former Air Force intelligence officer and whistleblower David Grusch testified in front of Congress, claiming that the US had already recovered alien spacecraft as part of a decades-long UFO retrieval program.

Even NASA has opened its doors for researchers to explore mysterious, high-speed objects that have been spotted by military pilots over the years.

But several Pentagon reports later, we have yet to find any evidence of extraterrestrial life.

That hasn't dissuaded these Harvard researchers, though. In the paper, they suggest a range of possibilities, each more outlandish than the next.

First is that a "remnant form" of an ancient, highly advanced human civilization is still hanging around, observing us. Second is that an intelligent species evolved independently of humans in the distant past, possibly from "intelligent dinosaurs," and is now hiding their presence from us. Third is that these hidden occupants of Earth traveled here from another planet or time period. And fourth — please keep a straight face, everybody — is that these unknown inhabitants of Earth are "less technological than magical," which the researchers liken to "earthbound angels."

UFO sightings of "craft and other phenomena (e.g., 'orbs') appearing to enter/exit potential underground access points, like volcanoes," they write, could be evidence that these cryptoterrestrials may not be drawn to these spots, but actually reside in underground or underwater bases.

The paper quotes former House Representative Mike Gallagher, who suggested last year that one explanation for the UFO sightings might be "an ancient civilization that’s just been hiding here, for all this time, and is suddenly showing itself right now," following Grusch's testimony.

The researchers didn't stop there, even suggesting that these cryptoterrestrials may take on different, non-human primate or even reptile forms.

Beyond residing deep underground, they even speculate that this mysterious species could even be concealing themselves on the Moon or have mastered the art of blending in as human beings, a folk theory that has inspired countless works of science fiction.

Another explanation, as put forward by controversial Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, suggests that other ancient civilizations may have lived on "planets like Mars or Earth" but a "billion years apart and hence were not aware of each other."

Of course, these are all "far-fetched" hypotheses, as the scientists admit, and deserve to be regarded with plenty of skepticism.

"We entertain them here because some aspects of UAP are strange enough that they seem to call for unconventional explanations," the paper reads.

"It may be exceedingly improbable, but hopefully this paper has shown it should nevertheless be kept on the table as we seek to understand the ongoing empirical mystery of UAP," the researchers conclude.

johnnylee

[Hunny]

Mercury has a layer of diamond 10 miles thick, NASA spacecraft finds!

 Robert Lea  July 24, 2024      From:  www.yahoo.com/news/mercury-layer-diamond-10-miles-171907980.html

(Left) A colorful view of Mercury produced using images from the color base map imaging campaign during MESSENGER's primary mission 

(Right) what Mercury may look like were its outer layers stripped to expose its 10-mile-thick layer of diamond. 

      

The solar system's tiniest planet may be hiding a big secret. Using data from NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, scientists have determined that a 10-mile-thick diamond mantle may lie beneath the crust of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun.

Mercury has long puzzled scientists as it possesses many qualities that aren't common to other solar system planets. These include its very dark surface, remarkably dense core, and the premature end of Mercury's volcanic era.

Also among these puzzles are patches of graphite, a type (or "allotrope") of carbon on the surface of the innermost planet of the solar system. These patches have led scientists to suggest that in Mercury's early history, the tiny planet had a carbon-rich magma ocean. This ocean would have floated to the surface, creating graphite patches and the dark-shaded hue of Mercury's surface.

The same process would have also led to the formation of a carbon-rich mantle beneath the surface. The team behind these findings thinks that this mantle isn't graphene, as previously suspected, but is composed of another much more precious allotrope of carbon: diamond.

"We calculate that, given the new estimate of the pressure at the mantle-core boundary, and knowing that Mercury is a carbon-rich planet, the carbon-bearing mineral that would form at the interface between mantle and core is diamond and not graphite," team member Olivier Namur, an associate professor at KU Leuven, told Space.com. "Our study uses geophysical data collected by the NASA MESSENGER spacecraft."

MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging) launched in Aug. 2004 and became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. The mission, which ended in 2015, mapped the entire tiny world, discovering abundant water ice in shadows at the poles and gathering crucial data about Mercury's geology and magnetic field.

Under pressure!

This new study also relates to a major surprise that came a few years ago when scientists re-evaluated the distribution of mass on Mercury, discovering the mantle of this tiny planet is thicker than previously thought. "We directly thought that this must have a huge implication for the speciation [the distribution of an element or an allotrope amongst chemical species in a system] of carbon, diamond vs graphite, on Mercury," Namur said.

The team investigated this here on Earth by using a large-volume press to replicate the pressures and temperatures that exist within the interior of Mercury. They applied incredible amounts of pressure, over seven gigapascals, to a synthetic silicate acting as a proxy for the material found in the mantle of Mercury, achieving temperatures of up to 3,950 degrees Fahrenheit (2,177 degrees Celsius). This allowed them to study how minerals like those that would have been found in Mercury's mantle in its early existence changed under these conditions. They also used computer modeling to assess data about Mercury's interior, which gave them clues to how the diamond mantle of Mercury could have been created.

"We believe that diamond could have been formed by two processes. First is the crystallization of the magma ocean, but this process likely contributed to forming only a very thin diamond layer at the core/mantle interface," Namur explained. "Secondly, and most importantly, the crystallization of the metal core of Mercury."

Namur said that when Mercury formed around 4.5 billion years ago, the core of the planet was fully liquid, progressively crystallizing over time. The exact nature of the solid phases forming in the inner core is not currently well known, but the team believes that these phases must have been low in carbon or "carbon-poor."

"The liquid core before crystallization contained some carbon; crystallization, therefore, leads to carbon enrichment in the residual melt," he continued. "At some point, a solubility threshold is reached, meaning the liquid cannot dissolve more carbon, and diamond forms."

Diamond is a dense mineral but not as dense as metal, meaning that during this process, it would have floated to the top of the core, stopping at the boundary of Mercury's core and its mantle. This would have resulted in the formation of an around 0.62-mile (1 km) thick diamond layer that then continued to grow over time.

The discovery highlights the differences between the birth of the closest planet to the sun when compared with the creation of the solar system's other rocky planets, Venus, Earth, and Mars.  "Mercury formed much closer to the sun, likely from a carbon-rich cloud of dust. As a consequence, Mercury contains less oxygen and more carbon than other planets, which led to the formation of a diamond layer," Namur added. "However, Earth's core also contains carbon, and diamond formation in the Earth's core has already been suggested by various researchers."

The researcher hopes that this discovery could help reveal clues to some of the other mysteries surrounding the solar system's smallest planet, including why its volcanic phase was cut short around 3.5 billion years ago. "A major question that I have about Mercury's evolution is why the major phase of volcanism lasted only a few hundred million years, much shorter than other rocky planets. This must mean that the planet cooled down very fast," Namur said. "This is partly related to the small size of the planet, but we are now working with physicists to try to understand if a diamond layer could have contributed to very fast heat removal, therefore terminating major volcanism very early."

Namur said that the team's next step will be to investigate the thermal effect of a diamond layer at the mantle/core boundary. This study could be supported by data from a mission that will follow in the footsteps of MESSENGER.

"We are also eagerly waiting for the first data collected by BepiColombo, hopefully in 2026, to refine our understanding of Mercury's internal structure and evolution," Namur concluded.

The team's research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

[Hunny]

The Universe

in the past we thought
was an expanding bubble of evolving matter
which would eventually contract as a Big Crunch, producing another Big Bang
in a self-perpetuating cycle of un- and re- birthing.

Now, we've examined and measured with better instruments and found

the universe is expanding ever outward - and accelerating as it goes.

We don't know what's making it do that. We think it must be the unidentified DARK MATTER.
(Dark Matter is 84% of the matter in the universe, mathematically. But we can't see it or sort out what it is.)

But the universe is flying apart, never to retract back in. And it's accelerating as it goes.

And in five quintillion years we expect
all the matter in the universe will have degraded to a haze of dead nuclear bits.

It will have expanded to a fantastic volume

but filled only with inert nuclear bits which can never be anything again.

And nothing that was will be anymore. Not your soul. Not anything.

[Hunny]

Boeing Starliner astronauts have now been stranded in space 63 days!

 August 7, 2024

America had Apollo rockets, and then the shuttle, and then we deferred to other countries and private industry to pay to explore space for a while.

So it pleased our national ego to build a new rocket for now! And we sent it up for a crewed test flight to the International Space Station in Earth orbit.

But it got there, had a problem, and two months later we still haven't fixed it to bring it back down! Here's an update.

America's new Boeing Starliner, docked at the ISS where it has been waiting on repairs for two months to be able to return home.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — two veteran NASA astronauts piloting the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft

 have now been stranded in space for 63 days. And there is still no clear return date in sight.

NASA has not yet started a “flight readiness review” for the Starliner crew’s return from the International Space Station.

The agency had said on July 26 it would begin that process the first couple days of August.

But Boeing and NASA teams are still working on a return date, as officials evaluate testing data and conduct analyses 

of the propulsion issues and helium leaks that hampered the first leg of the Starliner capsule’s flight.

That delay of the flight readiness review process indicates Starliner’s return remains uncertain 

as officials work to come to an agreement on how the rest of the mission that had launched June 5 should play out.

NASA faces a flurry of questions about recent reporting from media outlets suggesting 

the space agency is considering returning Wilmore and Williams on a SpaceX vehicle instead.

NASA has always had such a scenario in place as a mission contingency, but the primary goal is 

to bring the two astronauts home on Starliner.  Boeing maintains that its spacecraft is safe for astronauts.

However, the space agency announced Tuesday that it was delaying the launch of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission, 

a routine flight slated to fly with four astronauts to replace the Crew-8 mission on board the International Space Station.

Crew-9 had been slated to take off as soon as August 18 — with the expectation that the Starliner capsule 

would have returned home with its astronauts before then. Now, Crew-9 will not take off before September 24, NASA said.

“This adjustment allows more time for mission managers to finalize return planning for the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test,” NASA said.

_______________________________________________

Apparently BOEING - which used to be so trustable - is now suffering from Big Business's current "make it cheap, rip everybody off" culture.  

 LINK

AND THESE ARTICLES..

Boeing 737 Factory Suffered from Severe Morale and Turnover Problems Prior to Blowout

On January 5, 2024, a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight some 16,000 feet above Oregon, causing chaos among the crew and incredible fear for the passengers. 

The problem was traced back to quality issues after the plane departed Boeing's factory in Renton, Washington, missing the four bolts that hold the door plug in place.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has released some 3,000 pages of documents about the accident, 

but questions remained about what happened on the manufacturing floor.  Boeing blamed supplier incompetence and pointed fingers at Spirit AeroSystems, 

which it has since acquired for some $8.3 billion.  Still, the incident was just another straw on Boeing's back, causing what has been called a "crisis of competence."

This week, the NTSB is holding a two-day hearing to gain insight into the root cause of the failures behind the blowout. On the first day of the hearing, 

testimony revealed a grim company culture, with Boeing workers feeling pressured to work too fast and partners treated like "cockroaches."

According to transcripts of conversations between NTSB investigators and workers via CNN, one worker identified as an assembler said, 

"We were definitely trying to put out too much product ... that's how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast."

Another employee said rework was common, which is how the door plug ended up missing bolts. The plug was taken out to fix some rivets,

 and the bolts were neglected when it was replaced. The worker says his team was in "uncharted waters," frequently replacing door plugs without any special training. 

The problems were consistent, as planes came in "jacked up every day."

Spirit AeroSystems made the fuselage in the incident, and while the supplier had employees on the plant floor, the two staffs didn't exactly play nice. 

One Spirit employee told investigators that workers felt like "the cockroaches of the factory."

FAA inspectors said they were unable to substantiate claims about workers being pressured, 

but one Boeing team captain did admit that the 737 factory suffered from problems with morale and turnover resulting from job-related stress.

And that's just what we heard on the first day of testimony.

_______________________________

‘Cockroaches of the factory’: Workers paint a picture of chaos and dysfunction at Boeing

Chris Isidore and Pete Muntean, CNN

Workers on the Boeing 737 Max that lost a door plug on a January flight told federal safety investigators that they felt pressure to do their jobs too fast to avoid mistakes, 

according to testimony released Tuesday at the start of a two-day investigative hearing.

The revelation came at the start of the hearing by the National Transportation Safety Board into the blowout, with investigators questioning Boeing personnel about safety issues 

at the planemaker and what that might mean for passengers on its ubiquitous planes.

Previously, the NTSB said the door plug ripped off in mid-flight because the plane left a Boeing factory without the four bolts needed to keep the door plug in place.

Cockroaches of the factory

Many of those documents were transcripts of interviews conducted by NTSB investigators during the seven months since the accident. One of those interviewed, identified only as “Assembler Installer Doors B,” told the investigator that the workload at the Boeing factory was too great to avoid mistakes from being made.

“As far as the workload, I feel like we were definitely trying to put out too much product, right?” said the unidentified Boeing worker. “That’s how mistakes are made. People try to work too fast. I mean, I can’t speak for anybody else, but we were busy. We were working a lot.”

One transcript showed that a Boeing employee, identified as a Door Master Lead, told investigators there planes required much of the work during the assembly process to be redone because of problems that are discovered, as happened with the door plug that was removed to fix some rivets. The worker said there was no special training to open, close, or remove a door plug versus a regular door.

That worker told the NTSB that his team was “put in uncharted waters to where… we were replacing doors like we were replacing our underwear.”

“The planes come in jacked up every day. Every day,” the second worker added.

One FAA inspector at the Boeing factory told NTSB investigators that FAA inspectors have “heard of pressure, [but] haven’t been able to substantiate those claims.”

The fuselage of the plane was manufactured by Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems, and it arrived at the Boeing factory with the four bolts in place, according to testimony at the hearing. But there were problems with the rivets by the door plug that needed to be repaired, so the door plug was removed so the work could be done. There were Spirit employees at the Boeing plant, but communication between the Boeing and Spirit workers on the floor of the Boeing factory wasn’t good, according to another interview transcript released Tuesday.

“Well, basically we’re the cockroaches of the factory,” one unidentified Spirit employee told NTSB investigators.

And a Boeing team captain at the 737 factory told investigators of problems of low employee morale and high turnover.

“We have a lot of turnover specifically because, you know, this can be a stressful job, you know,” the Boeing team captain is quoted as saying in one of the transcripts. “What the company wants and what we have the skills and capabilities to perform at the time sometimes that doesn’t coincide, and so some people get disgruntled; they feel like they’re being overworked; they feel like, you know, that we might be getting taken advantage of.”
‘Injuries we can’t see’

The January 5 Alaska Airlines flight had the door plug blow out of the side of a Boeing 737 Max as it approached 16,000 feet. The incident left a gaping hole in the side of the plane, sending oxygen masks falling from the ceiling, tearing off clothing and ripping phones out of passengers’ hands and hurling them into the darkness.

Fortunately, the crew was able to land the crippled jet without any serious physical injuries. There were seven passengers and one flight attendant treated for injuries upon landing. It was a combination of the skill of the flight crew and good luck that no one was killed.

But the trauma of being on the flight likely affected many of those aboard the plane, said Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the NTSB, in the opening comments of the hearing.

“Injuries we can’t see, which we often don’t talk about can have profound and lasting impacts on lives and livelihoods,” she said. She offered an apology on behalf of the agency to the people on the flight.

The accident did serious damage to the public’s confidence in plane manufacturer Boeing, prompting a series of federal investigations into its practices and the safety and quality of its aircraft.

Boeing executives in charge of quality control are facing the safety board for questions, including Boeing Commercial Airplanes’ senior vice president of quality Elizabeth Lund. Alongside Lund for half of Tuesday’s hearing is Doug Ackerman, vice president of supplier quality for Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

The rare, two-day-long investigative hearing is key to closing the case on the January 5 incident, which led to a 19-day-long grounding of 737 MAX 9s in the United States. The NTSB says it will “use the information gathered to complete the investigation, determine probable cause, and make recommendations to improve transportation safety.”

But Homendy was clearly frustrated and ready to push back on Boeing in early testimony, telling Lund that “this is not a PR campaign for Boeing.” She said the hearing is being held to find out what was done ahead of the accident, not the tougher training and quality improvements made since then.

“You can talk about where we are today, but this is an investigation on what happened on January 5th,” Homendy said.

A final report is still months away.

Missing bolts — and missing paperwork

The NTSB has already released preliminary findings from the incident, disclosing that the plane used on the flight left the Boeing factory in Renton, Washington, 10 weeks earlier and without the four bolts needed to hold the door plug in place.

Since that report, Boeing has said the reasons for that oversight came down to something as simple as a lack of paperwork.

When the fuselage of the plane arrived at the Boeing factory from supplier Spirit AeroSystems, the door plug was in place, as were the four bolts meant to hold it securely attached to the side of the jet. But there were problems with five rivets near where the door plug was installed, and Boeing workers removed the door plug in order to fix those rivets.

According to Boeing, the workers who fixed the rivets didn’t generate the paperwork indicating they had removed the door plug and the four bolts in order to do that work.

When a different group of employees put the plug back in place, Boeing says the employees didn’t think the plane would actually fly in that condition. Instead, they were just blocking the hole with the plug to protect the inside of the fuselage from weather as the plane moved outside to a different area of the factory compound. That group of employees often makes those kind of temporary fixes.

Those employees likely assumed paperwork existed showing that the plug and bolts had been removed, and that paperwork would prompt someone else along the line to install the bolts. But without the paperwork, no one on the assembly line knew that the door plug had ever been removed, or that its bolts were missing and needed to be replaced.
Boeing’s mounting problems

But the probe is only one of the problems Boeing faces because of the incident.

There could be criminal charges related to the failures that led to the incident, as the FBI has notified passengers and crew members that they might be considered crime victims.

Even before the flight, Boeing faced the possibility of criminal charges because of problems with the 737 Max that were kept hidden from the Federal Aviation Administration during the original certification process. Those problems led to a design flaw on the plane that is blamed for two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.

In January 2021, Boeing and the Justice Department agreed to a settlement that deferred criminal prosecution of Boeing for three years for its employees defrauding the FAA during the certification process. But that three-year probationary period had been due to end just days after the January 5 flight. Instead, the DOJ reopened the investigation following the Alaska Airlines incident, and last month Boeing agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and be put under the supervision of a court-appointed monitor.

The FAA has also increased scrutiny of Boeing’s manufacturing process and is limiting how many planes it can build, which has added to financial losses at the company that have now reached $33 billion since the second fatal crash in 2019.

Boeing’s sales have plunged 70% in the first six months of the this year. In June it sold just three passenger jets, and one of those was to Alaska Airlines to replace the plane used in the January 5 flight, which Boeing has repurchased from the airline.

[Big Lin]

Boeing have a long track record of design faults and poor quality engineering.

[Hunny]

UPDATE: The astronauts will remain at the space station as part of their regular crew, eventually returning by Space X vehicle.

And the capsule itself may have to be brought back down unpiloted. *shakes head at the failure*

But ya know, after losing two Apollo missions and two Shuttles due to not being careful enough - we're being careful.

This new vehicle is our hope of having a future space program once again. Of all things, we do need to shake the bugs out.

www.yahoo.com/news/boeing-starliner-astronauts-may-space-103655981.html

[Hunny]

UPDATE:

After 12 weeks in space, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is finally set to return home from the International Space Station on September 6 — albeit without its two-person crew.

The troubled spacecraft will undock from the orbiting laboratory around 6 p.m. ET, and it will spend about six hours maneuvering closer to home before landing around midnight in New Mexico’s White Sands Space Harbor.

The astronauts who rode aboard Starliner to the space station on June 5, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will remain on board the orbiting laboratory.

NASA announced on August 24 that experts were wary of gas leaks and issues with the Starliner capsule’s propulsion system, leading the agency to determine the spacecraft is not safe enough to finish its mission with crew on board.

“The uncrewed Starliner spacecraft will perform a fully autonomous return with flight controllers at Starliner Mission Control in Houston and at Boeing Mission Control Center in Florida,” according to a NASA update posted Thursday. “Teams on the ground are able to remotely command the spacecraft if needed through the necessary maneuvers for a safe undocking, re-entry, and parachute-assisted landing in the southwest United States.”

How the Starliner vehicle performs during its return trip could be crucial to the future of the overall Boeing program.

If the spacecraft experiences a mishap or NASA ultimately decides not to certify the vehicle for human spaceflight — a step that would set up the vehicle to make routine trips to orbit — it would mark yet another blow to Boeing’s already damaged reputation.

Repeating this test flight and implementing redesigns on Starliner could cost the company millions of dollars — on top of the roughly $1.5 billion the company has already recorded in losses on the Starliner program.

“All of us really wanted to complete the (Boeing Starliner) test flight with crew, and I think unanimously we’re disappointed not to be able to do that,” Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said last week. But “you don’t want that disappointment to weigh unhealthily in your decision.”

Even if Starliner’s uncrewed return trip goes well, NASA will still face a crucial decision on whether to grant the spacecraft its human spaceflight certification even though it did not complete its mission as intended.

What’s ahead for Starliner’s crew

Throughout the weeks that engineers on the ground worked to understand the thruster issues and leaks plaguing the Starliner, Boeing maintained that it believed the vehicle would be safe to bring astronauts Williams and Wilmore home.

In a statement on August 24, Boeing said that it “continues to focus, first and foremost, on the safety of the crew and spacecraft. We are executing the mission as determined by NASA, and we are preparing the spacecraft for a safe and successful uncrewed return.”

Williams and Wilmore will now fly home aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule — on a mission called Crew-9 — no earlier than February. The Crew Dragon spacecraft has been certified to fly astronaut missions for about four years and has made around a dozen crewed trips to orbit.

To fit Williams and Wilmore on board the Crew-9 mission, NASA had to boot two astronauts who had already trained for the position off the flight. The space agency announced Friday that those two astronauts would be spaceflight veteran Stephanie Wilson and Zena Cardman, who was set to make her first trip to space and was expected to serve as commander of the Crew-9 mission.

Aleksandr Gorbunov, a Russian cosmonaut who got his seat via a ridesharing agreement between NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, will remain on the flight. Cardman will also hand over commander duties to Nick Hague, who was previously named as the pilot for Crew-9.

“Handing the helm to (Hague) is both heartbreaking and an honor. Nick and Alex are truly an excellent team, and they will be ready to step up,” Cardman said in a post on the social media site X on Friday. “I only wish (Wilson), Nick, Alex, and I could fly together, but we choose without hesitation to be part of something much larger than ourselves. Ad astra per aspera. Go Crew 9.”

[Hunny]

NASA's solar sail successfully spreads its wings in space

Sat, August 31, 2024

More than four months after launching to space, a solar-sailing spacecraft has successfully spread its wings above our planet.

NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) caught a ride to space on April 24 on Rocket Lab's Electron vehicle and, at the end of August, NASA shared in a release that its mission operators verified the technology reached full deployment in space. On Thursday, Aug. 29 at 1:33 p.m. EDT (5:33 UTC), the team obtained data indicating the test of the sail-hoisting boom system was a success.

Just like the wind guides a sailboat on the water, it only takes a slight amount of sunlight to guide solar sails through space. Though photons don't have mass, they can force momentum when they hit an object — that's what a solar sail takes advantage of. Thankfully for us, the spacecraft that deployed the sail contains four cameras that can capture a panoramic view of both the reflective sail and the accompanying composite booms. The first of the high-resolution imagery is expected to be accessible on Wednesday, Sept. 4.

The Advanced Composite Solar Sail System spacecraft will be put to the test over the next few weeks as the team observes the sail's maneuvering ability in space. By adjusting the orbit, researchers will be able to learn more about how to design and operate future sola- sail-equipped missions.

"Flight data obtained during the demonstration will be used for designing future larger-scale composite solar sail systems for space weather early-warning satellites, asteroid and other small body reconnaissance missions, and missions to observe the polar regions of the sun," Rocket Lab shared in a previous mission description.

The location of the spacecraft in its orbit is roughly two times the altitude of the International Space Station. If you were looking at the sail from above, it would look like a square that measures nearly half the size of a tennis court at approximately 860 square feet (80 square meters).

Related Stories:

-- If there's life on Europa, solar sails could help us find it

— These scientists want to put a massive 'sunshade' in orbit to help fight climate change

— Japan declares its SLIM moon lander dead at last

— Salsa's last dance: This European satellite will fall from space soon in a spicy reentry

[Hunny]

UPDATES:

The solar sail we launched is now tumbling end-over-end in Earth orbit. But we're told that was expected.

And America's new rocket, Starliner, is back from the Space Station. We brought it down unmanned and landed without a problem.

NASA is happy for the chance to work the bugs out and go forward with our new space vehicle.

~~~~~~~~~

Meanwhile, I dedicate this song to our two Voyager Spacecraft,
abandoned to wandering empty space alone

through eons of traveling very slow without power in the cold interstellar void.

click this -> LINK!

"The Golden Records they carry are expected to survive legibly for 5 billion years, which is beyond not just humanity's likely extinction, 

but also beyond the collision of the Milky Way with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, beyond even the extinction of most stars."

[Hunny]

Is this, finally, where the dark matter is ? ? ?


1 - www.yahoo.com/news/black-hole-bullets-fired-mars-130001415.html

2 - www.zmescience.com/space/nasa-esa-euclid-mission-29012013/

[Hunny]

A new 'mini-moon' comes to Earth this fall!
September 21, 2024

Earth's moon will have some company for a couple months this fall.

Earth will be hosting a new guest this fall. No, it's not an alien. It's an asteroid.

The space rock, which has been named “2024 PT5,” has been traveling along its normal path around the sun, but will be temporarily pulled into Earth's gravitational orbit later this month.

The object, which is around 33 feet long, was first spotted by researchers in South Africa, who wrote about it in the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society this month.

Some scientists have described 2024 PT5 as a “mini-moon” - a space object that is temporarily captured in a planet's orbit, as opposed to regular moons, which are permanent fixtures.

The researchers say 2024 PT5 will travel around the Earth in a “horseshoe” path for about two months, from Sept. 29 to Nov. 25.

But there’s some disagreement among scientists about whether 2024 PT5 should be classified as a mini-moon, since it won’t be making a full revolution around the Earth before the sun’s gravity pulls it back onto its normal path.

This is not the first time such a phenomenon has happened. In 2020, astronomers identified another mini-moon, 2020 CD3, which orbited the Earth for over a year.

This also will not be 2024 PT5’s only visit — scientists predict it will be captured again by Earth’s gravity in 2055.

Can we see it?

Unfortunately, 2024 PT5 will not be visible to the naked eye, and home telescopes likely won’t cut it.

"The object is too small and dim for typical amateur telescopes and binoculars," Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, one of the authors of the journal entry describing the asteroid, told Space.com.

“However, the object is well within the brightness range of typical telescopes used by professional astronomers,” Marcos said.

The asteroid was first observed using a telescope from the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System.

Despite that program’s menacing name, scientists say there is no cause for worry and assure that 2024 PT5 is not on a collision course with Earth.

[Hunny]

Did dark matter help black holes grow to monster sizes in the infant cosmos?

September 28, 2024

A supermassive black hole against a web of dark matter.

New research suggests that dark matter decay could have helped black holes grow to monstrous supermassive sizes relatively early in the infant universe. If true, this could help explain some of the most perplexing observations of the cosmos made by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) started beaming data back to Earth in the summer of 2022, the detection of supermassive black holes with masses millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun as early as 500 million years into the life of the 13.8 billion-year-old cosmos has baffled scientists. That's because it should take at least 1 billion years for black holes to reach "supermassive status."

One hypothesis to explain how early black holes get a head start on growth suggests they are born directly from massive clouds of gas and dust. This new research, however, posits that dark matter, the universe's most mysterious substance, was a catalyst for the process.

"The formation of supermassive black holes is a mystery. Finding supermassive black holes at the time when the universe was less than 1 billion years old is like finding some mammal bones among the dinosaur bones in a Jurassic sedimentary rock," research team member Alexander Kusenko, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told Space.com. "These observations call for a very different explanation of the supermassive black hole formation.

"We found that radiation from dark matter decay could cause some large clouds of gas to collapse into supermassive black holes, solving the mystery of their origin."

Dark matter is currently considered one of the biggest outstanding mysteries in physics because, despite making up around 85% of the matter in the universe, scientists don't know what it is.

Researchers know dark matter can't be made of the same "stuff" that makes up the atoms that comprise the ordinary matter in stars, planets, moons, asteroids and our bodies. That's because dark matter doesn't seem to interact with electromagnetic radiation (light), whereas electrons, protons and neutrons indeed do.

That lack of interaction with light also frustratingly makes dark matter effectively invisible to us, with scientists only able to infer its presence via its interaction with gravity and the effects of this interaction on ordinary matter and light.

85% of the universe is dark matter, while regular matter is only 15% of the universe.

Dark matter may not interact with light, but one of the proposed properties of this substance in some models has to do with the decay of its more unstable particles — which do release photons, the fundamental particles of light. The team thinks this radiation could be the missing piece of the supermassive black hole growth puzzle.

"Gravity can squeeze a cloud of gas and force it to collapse, so it seems possible that a million-solar-mass cloud could lead to the formation of a million-solar-mass black hole," Kusenko explained. "In reality, this does not happen because gravity works on all distance scales, and it causes small parts of a large cloud to collapse first before the whole cloud has a chance to collapse. So, instead of one giant black hole, we end up with a bunch of smaller gas clouds."

He added that if there was something to counter the action of gravity on short distances without affecting the collapse on long distances, this could spur a "direct collapse" of a huge amount of gas into a supermassive black hole. And one thing that could counter gravity is pressure.

"If the gas cloud remains hot for a long time, it cannot fragment into smaller halos because hot gas has greater pressure, strong enough to counter the pull of gravity," Kusenko continued. "This is true as long as the temperature is high enough. However, if the gas cools, pressure decreases, and gravity can prevail in many small regions, which collapse into dense objects before gravity has a chance to pull the entire cloud into a single black hole."

That cooling occurs because though the vast majority of the gas in the early universe consisted of hydrogen atoms; stars hadn't had a chance to forge heavier elements yet and disperse them with supernova explosions. Most of these hydrogen atoms would bounce off each other endlessly like billiard balls unless they were bonded into a molecule with rotational energy levels that can be excited by atomic collision.

"The excited molecule can then radiate away the energy and return to its initial state, ready for another interaction with a hydrogen atom. The hydrogen molecules become cooling agents as they absorb thermal energy and radiate it away. So, the more molecular hydrogen, the faster the cooling is," Kusenko added. "Dark matter particles can decay, producing radiation, which can dissociate [or break down] the molecules of hydrogen."

Thus, radiation from decaying dark matter could grant massive clouds of gas in the early universe the time to collapse and birth the first supermassive black holes.

"If that happens, direct collapse of hot gas into supermassive black holes becomes possible," Kusenko added.

Should this prove to be the case, what, if anything, does it tell us about dark matter itself?

"There are two possibilities: either dark matter particles can decay very slowly, or dark matter may contain a tiny component which decays fast, while the rest of dark matter is stable," Kusenko said. "In either case, the properties of radiation needed for making black holes tell us the mass of the decaying dark matter particles. This can help discover or rule out this scenario.

The team's research was published on Aug. 27 in the journal Physical Review

[Hunny]

FROM 'JPL' (NASA's JET PROPULSION LABORATORY IN CALIFORNIA, WHERE AMERICA's SPACECRAFT ARE ASSEMBLED ):

NASA Turns Off Science Instrument to Save Voyager 2 Power

Oct. 1, 2024

Engineers work on NASA’s Voyager 2 at JPL in March 1977, ahead of the spacecraft’s launch that August.
The probe carries 10 science instruments, some of which have been turned off over the years to save power.

The mission has been working to postpone the shut-off as long as possible. Four other instruments aboard the interstellar spacecraft continue to operate.

Mission engineers at NASA have turned off the plasma science instrument aboard the Voyager 2 spacecraft due to the probe’s gradually shrinking electrical power supply.

Traveling more than 12.8 billion miles (20.5 billion kilometers) from Earth, the spacecraft continues to use four science instruments to study the region outside our heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. The probe has enough power to continue exploring this region with at least one operational science instrument into the 2030s.

Mission engineers have taken steps to avoid turning off a science instrument for as long as possible because the science data collected by the twin Voyager probes is unique. No other human-made spacecraft has operated in interstellar space, the region outside the heliosphere.

The plasma science instrument measures the amount of plasma (electrically charged atoms) and the direction it is flowing. It has collected limited data in recent years due to its orientation relative to the direction that plasma is flowing in interstellar space.

Both spacecraft are powered by decaying plutonium and lose about 4 watts of power each year. After the twin Voyagers completed their exploration of the giant planets in the 1980s, the mission team turned off several science instruments that would not be used in the study of interstellar space. That gave the spacecraft plenty of extra power until a few years ago. Since then, the team has turned off all onboard systems not essential for keeping the probes working, including some heaters. In order to postpone having to shut off another science instrument, they also adjusted how Voyager 2’ voltage is monitored.

On Sept. 26, engineers issued the command to turn off the plasma science instrument. Sent by NASA’s Deep Space Network, it took 19 hours to reach Voyager 2, and the return signal took another 19 hours to reach Earth.

Mission engineers always carefully monitor changes being made to the 47-year-old spacecraft’s operations to ensure they don’t generate any unwanted secondary effects. The team has confirmed that the switch-off command was executed without incident and the probe is operating normally.

In 2018, the plasma science instrument proved critical in determining that Voyager 2 left the heliosphere. The boundary between the heliosphere and interstellar space is demarcated by changes in the atoms, particles, and magnetic fields that instruments on the Voyagers can detect. Inside the heliosphere, particles from the Sun flow outward, away from our nearest star. The heliosphere is moving through interstellar space, so at Voyager 2’s position near the front of the solar bubble, the plasma flows in almost the opposite direction of the solar particles.

The plasma science instrument consists of four “cups.” Three cups point in the direction of the Sun and observed the solar wind while inside the heliosphere. A fourth points at a right angle to the direction of the other three and has observed the plasma in planetary magnetospheres, the heliosphere, and now, interstellar space.

When Voyager 2 exited the heliosphere, the flow of plasma into the three cups facing the Sun dropped off dramatically. The most useful data from the fourth cup comes only once every three months, when the spacecraft does a 360-degree turn on the axis pointed toward the Sun. This factored into the mission’s decision to turn this instrument off before others.

The plasma science instrument on Voyager 1 stopped working in 1980 and was turned off in 2007 to save power. Another instrument aboard Voyager 2, called the plasma wave subsystem, can estimate the plasma density when eruptions from the Sun drive shocks through the interstellar medium, producing plasma waves.

The Voyager team continues to monitor the health of the spacecraft and its available resources to make engineering decisions that maximize the mission’s science output.

For more information about NASA’s Voyager missions, visit: science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager

[Hunny]

NASA Citizen Scientists Spot Object Moving 1 Million Miles Per Hour

Aug. 15, 2024

This artist's concept shows a hypothetical white dwarf, left, that has exploded as a supernova. The object at right is CWISE J1249,
a brown dwarf star ejected from this system as a result of the explosion. This scenario is one explanation for where CWISE J1249 came from.

They used data from NASA’s WISE telescope, which later became the NEOWISE mission, to discover the faint, fast-moving object zooming out of the Milky Way.

Most familiar stars peacefully orbit the center of the Milky Way. But citizen scientists working on NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have helped discover an object moving so fast that it will escape the Milky Way’s gravity and shoot into intergalactic space. This hypervelocity object is the first such object found with the mass of a small star.

Backyard Worlds uses images from NASA’s WISE, or Wide Field Infrared Explorer, mission, which mapped the sky in infrared light from 2009 to 2011. It was re-activated as NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) in 2013, and retired on Aug. 8, 2024.

A few years ago, longtime Backyard Worlds citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden spotted a faint, fast-moving object called CWISE J1249 marching across their screens in the WISE images. Follow-up observations with several ground-based telescopes helped scientists confirm the discovery and characterize the object. These citizen scientists are now co-authors on the team’s study about this discovery published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (a pre-print version is available here).

“I can’t describe the level of excitement,” said Kabatnik, a citizen scientist from Nuremberg, Germany. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was convinced it must have been reported already.”

CWISE J1249 is zooming out of the Milky Way at about 1 million miles per hour. But it also stands out for its low mass, which makes it difficult to classify as a celestial object. It could be a low-mass star, or if it doesn’t steadily fuse hydrogen in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, putting it somewhere between a gas giant planet and a star.

Ordinary brown dwarfs are not that rare. Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 volunteers have discovered more than 4,000 of them! But none of the others are known to be on their way out of galaxy.

This new object has yet another unique property. Data obtained with the W. M. Keck Observatory in Maunakea, Hawaii, show that it has much less iron and other metals than other stars and brown dwarfs. This unusual composition suggests that CWISE J1249 is quite old, likely from one of the first generations of stars in our galaxy.

Why does this object move at such high speed? One theory is that CWISE J1249 originally came from a binary system with a white dwarf, which exploded as a supernova when it pulled off too much material from its companion. Another possibility is that it came from a tightly bound cluster of stars called a globular cluster, and a chance meeting with a pair of black holes sent it soaring away.

“When a star encounters a black hole binary, the complex dynamics of this three-body interaction can toss that star right out of the globular cluster,” says Kyle Kremer, incoming assistant professor in UC San Diego’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Scientists will look more closely at the elemental composition of CWISE J1249 for clues about which of these scenarios is more likely.

This discovery has been a team effort on multiple levels — a collaboration involving volunteers, professionals, and students. Kabatnik credits other citizen scientists with helping him search, including Melina Thévenot, who “blew my mind with her personal blog about doing searches using Astronomical Data Query Language,” he said. Software written by citizen scientist Frank Kiwy was also instrumental in this finding, he said.

The study is led by Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 science team member Adam Burgasser, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and includes co-authors Hunter Brooks and Austin Rothermich, astronomy students who both began their astronomy careers as citizen scientists.


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[Hunny]

July 15, 2024

  Space.com

Can the James Webb Space Telescope see galaxies over the universe's horizon?

 

How can we see a galaxy 33.8 billion light-years away in a universe that's only 13.8 billion years old?

The galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0 which exists 33.8 billion light-years from Earth.

Since it began sending data back to Earth in 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has greatly impacted astronomy, and one of its most revolutionary achievements is the observation of some of the most distant galaxies ever seen. However, because light doesn't travel instantly — but rather moves at about 300 million meters (985 million feet) per second in a vacuum — we don't see those galaxies as they are today, but as they were billions of years ago.

Moreover, our universe is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old. So, we should assume that the most distant galaxy we could ever hope to see is no more than 13.8 billion light-years away. (One light-years is the distance light travels in a year). That point should be a "cosmological horizon" of sorts — beyond which no telescope should be able to see. And, because nothing can travel through space faster than c, that means there should be no way a galaxy further than 13.8 billion light years away, and getting more distant all the time could affect Earth. Right?

Wrong. If only the universe were that simple.

The red-shifted spectrum of JADES-GS-z14-0 as measured by the JWST's NIRSpec instrument

"A cosmological horizon is a maximum distance from which one could possibly retrieve information," Jake Helton, a University of Arizona astronomer who is also part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) team, told Space.com.

"There are a few different cosmological horizons," Helton continued, "which have different definitions and depend on various cosmological quantities. The most relevant here is the cosmological horizon which is the maximum distance from which light could have traveled to us in the age of the universe. This defines
the edge of the observable cosmos."

In March of 2024, JADES scientists revealed the powerful telescope had spotted JADES-GS-z14-0, the most distant and early galaxy humanity has ever seen. The paradox, however, is that JADES-GS-z14-0 is located about 33.8 billion light years away.

How can we see light from an object so distant the universe isn't old enough to have allowed it to have reached us? Doesn't JADES-GS-z14-0's position 33.8 billion light-years away mean we see it as it was 33.8 billion years ago, something that would surely challenge the estimation of the age of the universe?

Not so. Again, this is evidence that the universe has a way of turning sensible and logical conclusions on their heads.

"How can a distant galaxy like JADES-GS-z14-0 ever be observed, since it is more than 13.8 billion light years away from us and its light seemingly would have taken more time than the age of the universe to reach us?" Helton asked rhetorically. "The answer is the expansion of the universe."

Seeing a galaxy older than time itself

If the universe would just sit still, then light from a galaxy 33.8 billion light-years away would take 33.8 billion years to reach us, and that would be that. But, in the early 1900s, Edwin Hubble found that distant galaxies appeared to be receding away from each other, and the further apart they were, the faster they were going. In other words, the universe isn't static; it is expanding.

This was further complicated in 1998, as the 20th century drew to a close when two separate teams of astronomers observed that, not only is the universe expanding, but that expansion is also accelerating. The force responsible is a mystery, but it has been given the placeholder name of "dark energy."

Left to right: graph shows the expansion of the the universe, at first due to the Big Bang, and then at an accelerating rate when dark energy took over.

There are two major and distinct periods of expansion over the 13.8 billion-year history of the universe. The first is an initial period of rapid cosmic inflation that is now commonly called the "Big Bang."

This inflationary epoch saw the volume of the cosmos increase by a factor of 10^26 (10 followed by 25 zeroes). That is equivalent to your fingernail going from growing at 1 nanometer per second to suddenly growing 10.6 light-years (62 trillion miles) long. At this time, the universe was dominated by energy, and this period is known as the energy-dominated epoch.

This was followed by a matter-dominated epoch beginning 47,000 years after the Big Bang. Eventually, universal expansion allowed the cosmos to cool enough to allow protons to form from quarks and gluons, and then protons to bond with electrons to form the first atoms of hydrogen, which formed the first stars and galaxies. During this period, the Big-Bang-driven expansion of the universe slowed to a near halt.

The matter-dominated epoch came to a surprising end when the universe was just under 10 billion years old. At this time, the universe suddenly began to expand rapidly yet again. Plus, that expansion got faster and faster and even continues to accelerate today. This third significant period of the universe is called the dark-energy-dominated epoch. It's the epoch we're currently in.

Thanks to these periods of expansion of the universe, the light from JADES-GS-z14-0 has only actually been traveling to the JWST and Earth for 13.5 billion years, despite its source now being much more distant than 13.5 billion light-years away. That means the JWST sees JADES-GS-z14-0 as it was 300 million years after the Big Bang. Without the expansion of the universe, JADES-GS-z14-0 would still be around 13.5 billion light-years away, though it would have still experienced smaller local motions that could have moved it closer together or further from nearby galaxies. But such galactic movement would've been nowhere near the kind caused by the expansion of the universe.

According to Helton, the cosmological horizon, or the "Photon Horizon," is a sphere with a boundary around 46.1 billion light years away, a figure dictated by the universe's expansion. This is the actual horizon beyond which we shouldn't be able to "see" a galaxy. The galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0 is indeed within that horizon.

To avoid confusion, astronomers actually use two distance measurement scales: a co-moving distance that eliminates the expansion of the universe as a factor and a proper distance that includes it. That means the co-moving distance of JADES-GS-z14-0 is 13.5 billion light-years, while its proper distance is 33.8 billion light-years.

JADES-GS-z14-0 and other distant and ancient galaxies won't always be visible, though.

A diagram showing the journey of light from an early galaxy to the JWST.

A lucky era to have the James Webb Space Telescope..

The fact that the JWST can see JADES-GS-z14-0 means it was once "causally connected" to Earth and our local universe. In other words, it was possible for a signal from JADES-GS-z14-0 to reach us in the Milky Way, thus a "cause" in this galaxy that existed at the dawn of time could have an "effect" in our galaxy in this modern epoch of the cosmos.

"Any observable galaxy must be within the particle horizon and must have been causally connected with us at some point in the history of the universe," Helton said.

This isn't the case anymore, however. Galaxies like JADES-GS-z14-0 and the other JADES-discovered galaxies are now so distant and are driven away from us so rapidly, thanks to dark energy, that no signal from them sent today could ever reach us. That's because the photon horizon moves away from us at the speed of light, but for really distant objects, the space between the Milky Way and those galaxies is expanding faster than the speed of light.

This might seem implausible, as Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity sets the speed of light as a universal speed limit. However, that is a rule for objects with mass moving through space, not a rule for the very fabric of space itself.

In around 2 trillion years after Earth and humanity are long gone, the expansion of the universe means that, whatever intelligent species replaces us in the Milky Way (if one ever does), will be unable to see any galaxies that exist beyond our local group — which has a diameter of around 10 million light-years.

It is a sobering thought, and it means humanity lives at a unique point in the history of the universe at which the most distant galaxies are still within our view. We are capable of knowing more about the universe and its origins than any intelligent life that may follow us. Astronomers, including Helton, intend to use the JWST to fully exploit this cosmic privilege.

READ ALSO! -> www.yahoo.com/news/ancient-supermassive-black-hole-blowing-130022388.html

[Hunny]

October 12, 2024  Associated Press:

NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft will scour Jupiter moon for the ingredients for life

The Europa Clipper spacecraft over the moon Europa, with Jupiter at background left.

 The Europa Clipper spacecraft above the surface of the moon Europa, foreground, and Jupiter behind.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A NASA spacecraft is ready to set sail for Jupiter and its moon Europa, one of the best bets for finding life beyond Earth. Europa Clipper will peer beneath the moon’s icy crust where an ocean is thought to be sloshing fairly close to the surface. It won’t search for life, but rather determine whether conditions there could support it. Another mission would be needed to flush out any microorganisms lurking there.

“It’s a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable right now,” said program scientist Curt Niebur.

Its massive solar panels make Clipper the biggest craft built by NASA to investigate another planet. It will take 5 1/2 years to reach Jupiter and will sneak within 16 miles (25 kilometers) of Europa's surface — considerably closer than any other spacecraft.

Liftoff is at 12:06 p.m. EDT, Monday Oct. 14, aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.  Mission cost: $5.2 billion.

Europa, the superstar among Jupiter’s many moons

One of Jupiter’s 95 known moons, Europa is almost the size of our own moon. It's encased in an ice sheet estimated to be 10 miles to 15 miles or more (15 kilometers to 24 kilometers) thick. Scientists believe this frozen crust hides an ocean that could be 80 miles (120 kilometers) or more deep. The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted what appear to be geysers erupting from the surface. Discovered by Galileo in 1610, Europa is one of the four so-called Galilean moons of Jupiter, along with Ganymede, Io and Callisto.

Seeking conditions that support life

What type of life might Europa harbor? Besides water, organic compounds are needed for life as we know it, plus an energy source. In Europa’s case that could be thermal vents on the ocean floor. Deputy project scientist Bonnie Buratti imagines any life would be primitive like the bacterial life that originated in Earth’s deep ocean vents. “We will not know from this mission because we can’t see that deep,” she said. Unlike missions to Mars where habitability is one of many questions, Clipper’s sole job is to establish whether the moon could support life in its ocean or possibly in any pockets of water in the ice.

Supersized spacecraft

When its solar wings and antennas are unfurled, Clipper is about the size of a basketball court — more than 100 feet (30 meters) end to end — and weighs nearly 13,000 pounds (6,000 kilograms). The supersized solar panels are needed because of Jupiter’s distance from the sun. The main body — about the size of a camper — is packed with nine science instruments, including radar that will penetrate the ice, cameras that will map virtually the entire moon and tools to tease out the contents of Europa’s surface and tenuous atmosphere. The name hearkens to the swift sailing ships of centuries past.

Circling Jupiter to fly by Europa

The roundabout trip to Jupiter will span 1.8 billion miles (3 billion kilometers). For extra oomph, the spacecraft will swing past Mars early next year and then Earth in late 2026. It arrives at Jupiter in 2030 and begins science work the next year. While orbiting Jupiter, it will cross paths with Europa 49 times. The mission ends in 2034 with a planned crash into Ganymede — Jupiter’s biggest moon and the solar system's too.

Europa flybys pose huge radiation risk

There’s more radiation around Jupiter than anywhere else in our solar system, besides the sun. Europa passes through Jupiter’s bands of radiation as it orbits the gas giant, making it especially menacing for spacecraft. That’s why Clipper’s electronics are inside a vault with dense aluminum and zinc walls. All this radiation would nix any life on Europa’s surface. But it could break down water molecules and, perhaps, release oxygen all the way down into the ocean that could possibly fuel sea life.

Earlier this year, NASA was in a panic that the spacecraft's many transistors might not withstand the intense radiation. But after months of analysis, engineers concluded the mission could proceed as planned.

Other visitors to Jupiter and Europa

NASA’s twin Pioneer spacecraft and then two Voyagers swept past Jupiter in the 1970s. The Voyagers provided the first detailed photos of Europa but from quite a distance. NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had repeated flybys of the moon during the 1990s, passing as close as 124 miles (200 kilometers). Still in action around Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has added to Europa’s photo album. Arriving at Jupiter a year after Clipper will be the European Space Agency’s Juice spacecraft, launched last year.

Ganymede and other possible ocean worlds

Like Europa, Jupiter’s jumbo moon Ganymede is thought to host an underground ocean. But its frozen shell is much thicker — possibly 100 miles (160 kilometers) thick — making it tougher to probe the environment below. Callisto’s ice sheet may be even thicker, possibly hiding an ocean. Saturn’s moon Enceladus has geysers shooting up, but it’s much farther than Jupiter. Ditto for Saturn’s moon Titan, also suspected of having a subterranean sea. While no ocean worlds have been confirmed beyond our solar system, scientists believe they’re out there — and may even be relatively common.

Messages in a cosmic bottle

Like many robotic explorers before it, Clipper bears messages from Earth. Attached to the electronics vault is a triangular metal plate. On one side is a design labeled “water words” with representations of the word for water in 104 languages. On the opposite side: a poem about the moon by U.S. poet laureate Ada Limon and a silicon chip containing the names of 2.6 million people who signed up to vicariously ride along.

MORE, CLICK --> JUPITER AND ITS MOONS

LAUNCH!

[Hunny]

Engineering feat: mechanical SpaceX arms catch rocket booster back at the launch pad

October 13, 2024

Watch the whole launch --> CLICK!

SpaceX pulled off the boldest test flight yet of its enormous Starship rocket on Sunday, catching the returning booster back at the launch pad with mechanical arms.  A jubilant Elon Musk called it “science fiction without the fiction part.”

Towering almost 400 feet (121 meters), the empty Starship blasted off at sunrise from the southern tip of Texas near the Mexican border. It arced over the Gulf of Mexico like the four Starships before it that ended up being destroyed, either soon after liftoff or while ditching into the sea. The previous one in June had been the most successful until Sunday's demo, completing its flight without exploding.

This time, Musk, SpaceX's CEO and founder, upped the challenge for the rocket that he plans to use to send people back to the moon and on to Mars.

At the flight director's command, the first-stage booster flew back to the launch pad where it had blasted off seven minutes earlier. The launch tower's monstrous metal arms, dubbed chopsticks, caught the descending 232-foot (71-meter) stainless steel booster and gripped it tightly, dangling it well above the ground.

“The tower has caught the rocket!!” Musk announced via X. “Big step towards making life multi-planetary was made today.”

Company employees screamed in joy, jumping and pumping their fists into the air. NASA joined in the celebration, with Administrator Bill Nelson sending congratulations.

Continued Starship testing will prepare the nation for landing astronauts at the moon’s south pole, Nelson noted. NASA’s new Artemis program is the follow-up to Apollo, which put 12 men on the moon more than a half-century ago.

“Folks, this is a day for the engineering history books,” SpaceX engineering manager Kate Tice said from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

“Even in this day and age, what we just saw is magic,” added company spokesman Dan Huot from near the launch and landing site. “I am shaking right now.”

It was up to the flight director to decide, in real time with a manual control, whether to attempt the landing. SpaceX said both the booster and launch tower had to be in good, stable condition. Otherwise, it was going to end up in the gulf like the previous ones. Everything was judged to be ready for the catch. Once free of the booster, the empty retro-looking spacecraft on top continued around the world. An hour later, it made a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean, adding to the day's achievement. Cameras on a nearby buoy showed flames shooting up from the water as the booster impacted precisely at the targeted spot and sank, as planned.

“What a day,” Huot said. “Let's get ready for the next one.”

The June flight came up short at the end after pieces came off. SpaceX upgraded the software and reworked the heat shield, improving the thermal tiles.

SpaceX has been recovering the first-stage boosters of its smaller Falcon 9 rockets for nine years, after delivering satellites and crews to orbit from Florida or California. But they land on floating ocean platforms or on concrete slabs several miles from their launch pads — not on them.

Recycling Falcon boosters has sped up the launch rate and saved SpaceX millions. Musk intends to do the same for Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone.

Musk said the captured Starship booster looked to be in good shape, with just a little warping of some of the outer engines from all the heat and aerodynamic forces. That can be fixed easily, he noted.

NASA has ordered two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. SpaceX intends to use Starship to send people and supplies to the moon and, eventually Mars.

[Hunny]

October 15, 2024

Euclid 'dark universe' telescope reveals first breathtaking images from massive 'cosmic atlas' map

A wider view of the Milky Way with a section studied by Euclid highlighted representing just 1% of the "cosmic atlas" it will create. [/div]

The Euclid Space Telescope has revealed the "first page" of the cosmic atlas it is building. The section of the map of the cosmos being built by Euclid  was released on Monday (Oct. 15), and it features tens of millions of stars within the Milky Way and around 14 million distant galaxies beyond our own.

The vast cosmic mosaic was constructed from 260 Euclid observations collected between March 25 and April 8, 2024 and contains 208 gigapixels of data. The region charted is around 500 times as wide as the full moon appears in the sky over Earth.

Perhaps most astoundingly, the mosaic accounts for just 1% of the total survey Euclid will conduct over the next six years as it tracks the shapes, distances and movements of galaxies as far as 10 billion light-years away. Not only will this result in the largest 3D map of the cosmos ever created, but the vast scale of this map will help scientists investigate the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, sometimes collectively known as the "dark universe."

"This stunning image is the first piece of a map that in six years will reveal more than one-third of the sky." Valeria Pettorino,  Euclid Project Scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA), said in a statement. "This is just 1% of the map, and yet it is full of a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the universe."

Cosmic atlas, or "dark universe detective" case file?

Launched in July 2023, Euclid began making scientific observations in February. This wide-angle space telescope with a 600-megapixel camera is able to record visible light and near-infrared light using a spectrometer. This enables us to measure "red shift," the changes in which wavelengths of light reach us caused as galaxies race away from the Milky Way.

By doing this for a wide array of galaxies, Euclid can measure the effect of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the acceleration of the universe, by expanding the space between galaxies.

"Euclid is observing the universe in a brand new way, and it's gonna get a gigantic census of the galaxies," Universidad ECCI cosmologist Luz Ángela García Peñaloza told Space.com. "Any image that reveals information about the distribution of galaxies in the large-scale structure of the universe will provide handfuls of information on the nature of the dark side of the cosmos.

"We still need to wait a bit more to recover a larger sample of galaxies to infer cosmological parameters and rule out some existing models."

 

 This image shows an area of the mosaic released by ESA’s Euclid space telescope on 15 October 2024. The area is zoomed in 150 times 

compared to the large mosaic. On the left of the image, Euclid captured two galaxies (called ESO 364-G035 and G036) that are interacting 

with each other, 420 million light-years from us. On the right of the image, galaxy cluster Abell 3381 is visible, 678 million light-years away from us.

Despite representing just two weeks of observations, the Euclid spacecraft's sensitive cameras captured a wide array of objects in great detail for this new release.

One feature that will captivate scientists in this Euclid mosaic is the dim clouds that can be seen stretching between stars within the Milky Way. These appear in the wider images as light blue streaks against the black background of space.

These blue tracks are a mix of gas and dust and are sometimes referred to as "galactic cirrus" because they look like cirrus clouds in the skies over Earth. 

Euclid's ability to visualize these clouds comes from the fact that they reflect optical light from the Milky Way and shine brightly in far-infrared light.

Taking a wider view of the cosmos and then narrowing down, the deep detail facilitated by Euclid allows astronomers to zoom very deep into the mosaic and see intricate structures, such as the shape of the spiral galaxy ESO 364-G036, which is located around 420 million light-years away.

This first page of the Euclid cosmic atlas and a tiny slice of the map of the universe that it will eventually create is simply a teaser for greater things to come from the mission.

Around 12% of Euclid's planned data collection has been completed, and the release of 53 square degrees of the survey, including a preview of the Euclid Deep Field areas, is planned for March 2025. The mission's first year of cosmology data will be released to the scientific community in 2026.

"This is just the beginning of what we will be able to see in Euclid's lifetime," García Peñaloza concluded. "For sure, the best is still to come! I'm positive Euclid will shed light on our understanding of the cosmic mysteries."

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and the space agency's Director of Science Carole Mundell revealed the Euclid mosaic at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy.

[Hunny]

Watch SpaceX's Starship come down for nighttime splashdown during epic test flight

 October 19, 2024

The upper stage of SpaceX's fifth Starship vehicle comes down for a splashdown in the Indian Ocean on Oct. 13, 2024. | Credit: SpaceX via X

SpaceX has given us another angle on the epic fifth test flight of its Starship megarocket. The company made history on that Oct. 13 mission, catching Starship's Super Heavy first-stage booster with the "chopstick" arms of the launch tower about seven minutes after liftoff.

But Starship's 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper stage — known as Starship, or just Ship — aced its return to Earth as well. It came down for a pinpoint splashdown halfway around the world from its South Texas launch site, as a newly released video from SpaceX shows.

"Starship flip maneuver and landing burn on its fifth flight test. Vehicle improvements ensured flaps were protected from high heating, resulting in a controlled entry and high-accuracy splashdown at the targeted area in the Indian Ocean," SpaceX wrote in a Friday (Oct. 18) post on X that shared the 21-second video.

That video was taken from the ocean's surface, from a buoy or other bobbing object, as SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk noted in a jokey reply to the company's post.

"Oh buoy, what a great video!" Musk wrote on X on Friday.

There may not be many more ocean splashdowns in Ship's future. SpaceX plans to bring the upper stage as well as Super Heavy back for launch-tower landings in the future — something that seems quite achievable given the performance on Flight 5, according to Musk.

"Starship achieved a precise, soft landing in the ocean, paving the way for return to launch site and being caught by the tower arms, like the booster. Full & rapid reusability improves the cost of access to orbit & beyond by >10,000%. It is the fundamental technology breakthrough needed to make life multiplanetary and for us to become a true spacefaring civilization," the billionaire entrepreneur wrote in another Friday X post.

As that post notes, SpaceX is developing Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, to help humanity settle the moon and Mars. The company believes that its combination of brawn and full, rapid reusability can help make such long-held dreams come true.

WATCH VIDEO --> x.com/i/status/1847368836947071496

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