International Conference on Astrophysics and Astronomy

Thursday, June 15, 2023

Watch 2 NASA astronauts spacewalk outside space station on June 15 in this free livestream

Two NASA astronauts will conduct a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Thursday (June 15), and you can watch the excursion live.

Woody Hoburg and Stephen Bowen are scheduled to begin their spacewalk Thursday at 8:55 a.m. EDT (1255 GMT). They'll spend about six hours installing a roll-out solar array on the exterior of the International Space Station.

You can watch the extravehicular activity (EVA) live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency. Coverage will begin at 7:30 a.m. EDT (1130 GMT).

This will be the second spacewalk for Hoburg and Bowen in less than a week. The duo installed one of the solar arrays, known as iROSAs (short for "ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays") during a six-hour EVA on June 9.

That was Hoburg's first-ever spacewalk and the ninth for Bowen, who has now spent nearly 60.5 hours working in the vacuum of space across his four career spaceflights. Only four spaceflyers have more total EVA time to their names.

The iROSAs will augment rather than replace the station's current energy-production system. The entire complement of new arrays will boost the outpost's electricity generation by about 30%, NASA officials have said.

Wednesday was a busy day for the Expedition 69 crew’s astronauts and cosmonauts as they continued preparing for two different spacewalks at the International Space Station. The first spacewalk will see two astronauts install another roll-out solar array on Thursday. The second spacewalk will take place a week later when two cosmonauts replace hardware and conduct photographic inspections.

Mission managers gave the “go” for Thursday’s spacewalk with NASA astronauts Woody Hoburg and Stephen Bowen. The duo will set their spacesuits to battery power at 8:55 a.m. signifying the official start of their second spacewalk together. The duo will spend about six hours installing a roll-out solar array on the opposite side of the starboard truss segment where they installed the previous roll-out solar array on Friday, June 9. NASA TV begins its live broadcast of the spacewalk at 7:30 a.m. on Thursday on the agency’s app and website.

Hoburg and Bowen started Wednesday readying their spacesuits inside the Quest airlock where they will exit the station into the vacuum of space on Thursday. After lunchtime, the duo organized their spacewalking tools and tethers inside Quest with assistance from NASA Flight Engineer Frank Rubio. Finally, the three NASA astronauts joined Flight Engineer Sultan Alneyadi of UAE (United Arab Emirates) for a final review of the spacewalk procedures and robotics activities necessary to support the solar array installation job.

Two cosmonauts are also getting ready for their own spacewalk scheduled for June 22 for maintenance on the outside of the orbital outpost’s Roscosmos segment. Commander Sergey Prokopyev and Flight Engineer Dmitri Petelin spent Wednesday gathering spacewalking hardware, testing support equipment, and configuring their spacesuit components. The duo will exit the Poisk airlock next Thursday and spend about seven hours replacing communications and science hardware and photographing the condition of the Zvezda service module.

Roscosmos Flight Engineer Andrey Fedyaev started his morning working on life support maintenance tasks. Next, he activated and handed over radiation sensors to Hoburg and Bowen who will wear them on their spacesuits during Thursday’s spacewalk. Fedyaev later exercised on a treadmill as ground specialists monitored real-time video of his workout and hardware operations.

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Tuesday, June 13, 2023

Solar system planets, order and formation: A guide

The order of the planets in the solar system, starting nearest the sun and working outward is the following: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and then the possible Planet Nine.

The solar system extends from the sun, goes past the four inner planets, through the asteroid belt to the four gas giants and on to the disk-shaped Kuiper Belt and far beyond to the teardrop-shaped heliopause.

Scientists estimate that the edge of the solar system is about 9 billion miles (15 billion kilometers) from the sun. Beyond the heliopause lies the giant, spherical Oort Cloud, which is thought to surround the solar system.

Ever since the discovery of Pluto in 1930, kids grew up learning that the solar system has nine planets. That all changed in the late 1990s when astronomers started arguing about whether Pluto was indeed a planet. In a highly controversial decision, the International Astronomical Union ultimately decided in 2006 to designate Pluto as a "dwarf planet," reducing the list of the solar system's true planets to just eight.

If you insist on including Pluto, it would come after Neptune on the list. Pluto is truly way out there and on a wildly tilted, elliptical orbit (two of the several reasons it was demoted).

Astronomers, however, are still hunting for another possible planet in our solar system, a true ninth planet, after mathematical evidence of its existence was revealed on Jan. 20, 2016. The alleged "Planet Nine," also called "Planet X," is believed to be about 10 times the mass of Earth and 5,000 times the mass of Pluto.

The inner four planets closest to the sun — Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars — are often called the "terrestrial planets" because their surfaces are rocky. Pluto also has a rocky, albeit frozen, surface but has never been grouped with the four terrestrials.

The four large outer worlds — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — are sometimes called the Jovian or "Jupiter-like" planets because of their enormous size relative to the terrestrial planets. They're also mostly made of gases like hydrogen, helium and ammonia rather than of rocky surfaces, although astronomers believe some or all of them may have solid cores.

Jupiter and Saturn are sometimes called the gas giants, whereas the more distant Uranus and Neptune have been nicknamed the ice giants. This is because Uranus and Neptune have more atmospheric water and other ice-forming molecules, such as methane, hydrogen sulfide and phosphene, that crystallize into clouds in the planets' frigid conditions, according to the Planetary Society. For perspective, methane crystallizes at minus 296 Fahrenheit (minus 183 degrees Celsius), according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Are there other solar systems in the Milky Way?

Yes, so many! If you had asked anyone just 30 years ago, the answer would have been "we don’t know". But since then we have discovered already more than 5,000 planets orbiting stars other than our sun (so-called exoplanets). And since often we find multiple of them orbiting the same star, we can count about 4,000 other solar systems

Friday, June 9, 2023

SpaceX Starship Woes Have NASA Worried About Artemis Moon Landing Delays

SpaceX’s Starship could end up delaying humanity’s return to the Moon as NASA waits on the company’s lander to be ready to touchdown on the lunar surface, according to a space agency official.

On Wednesday, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said that the Artemis 3 mission, designed to land astronauts on the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years, would likely be pushed back to 2026 instead of 2025, SpaceNews reported

“With the difficulties that SpaceX has had, I think that’s really concerning,” Free said during a joint meeting of the National Academies’ Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and Space Studies Board.

SpaceX is under a $2.89 billion contract to use a lunar lander version of its Starship rocket in landing humans on the Moon by late 2025 as part of NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, and then again for Artemis 4 in 2028, under a separate $1.15 billion contract signed last year.

Before it can land humans on the Moon, however, Starship has to carry out an uncrewed mission to the lunar surface first, which also involves launching tanking vehicles to Earth orbit so that they can fuel the vehicle prior to its journey to the Moon. “That’s a lot of launches to get those missions done,” Free is quoted as saying in SpaceNews. “They have a significant number of launches to go, and that, of course, gives me concern about the December of 2025 [Artemis 3 launch] date.”

NASA has a second option for a commercial lunar lander, namely Blue Origin’s Blue Moon, but that’s slated for Artemis 5, which won’t happen until 2029.

SpaceX’s Starship launched for the first time on April 20 for a less-than-perfect test flight. About four minutes after liftoff, Starship exploded in the skies above the Gulf of Mexico. A few of the rocket’s engines failed in flight and the two-stage heavy-lift launch vehicle was forced to self-destruct; that said, it took the rocket 40 seconds to respond to the self-destruct command, in what was yet another troublesome aspect from the debut launch.

Despite its untimely explosion, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk still deemed the test flight a success and anticipated that Starship would be ready to fly again in a “couple of months.” At the time, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson expressed confidence in SpaceX’s ambitious timeline during a hearing before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

It may have been that NASA’s sentiment recently changed after SpaceX showed little to no progress on the launch of Starship more than a month after its orbital test flight. SpaceX still needs the green light from the Federal Aviation Administration, which has grounded Starship pending an ongoing investigation into its botched flight. The FAA is also battling a lawsuit related to the botched launch, which prompted a coalition of conservation and Texas-local non-profit groups to sue the administration over its approval of SpaceX’s Starship activities in Boca Chica. SpaceX recently filed to fight alongside the FAA in this lawsuit.

The space agency is on a tight timeline for its Artemis program, fearing that China may take the lead in landing on the Moon. China recently announced that it is targeting 2030 for its own crewed landing on the Moon, aiming to establish its own presence on the lunar surface to compete with NASA.

NASA has been relying more on its commercial partners as of late and that can sometimes lead to delays outside of the space agency’s control. SpaceX has been successful in delivering astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, while Boeing has fallen behind with its CST-100 Starliner program designed for the same missions.

The space agency’s private partnerships are designed to save NASA time and money, although it can come with its own bout of launch vehicle anxiety.

Wednesday, June 7, 2023

India's solar, wind energy potential likely to dip due to climate change: Study

According to a new study titled 'Analysis of future wind and solar potential over India using climate models' by Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, solar and wind potential in India are likely to face a negative trend in the future due to the climate change.

The seasonal and annual wind speed is likely to decrease over North India and increase along South India. The southern coast of Odisha and the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu show promising potential for wind energy in the climate change scenario.

Researchers used state-of-the-art climate models devised by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to analyze the wind and solar projections for the renewable energy sector over the Indian subcontinent.

The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Current Science recently.

Regional analysis of wind potential indicates that the frequency of high energy producing wind speeds will decrease, whereas low energy producing wind speeds are likely to increase in the future.

"Solar projections for the future indicate that solar radiation will decrease during all seasons over most of the Indian landmass. For future investments in the solar power sector, central and south-central India must be considered during pre-monsoon months, as the potential loss is minimal in these regions," it said.

"The present study shows that the renewable energy fields of solar and wind potential in India are likely to face a negative trend in the future... Expanded and more efficient networks of wind and solar farms are needed to increase renewable energy production," the report read.

Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay, one of the researchers who conducted the study, said, “Our industry must adapt to the changing climate, and our technologies must keep pace. Such predictions should not be taken as facts, but as possibilities.

“The efficiency of renewable energy may be impacted by climate change in the Indo-Gangetic plains. The study emphasises the importance of being prepared for scenarios of this kind and addressing it," he said.

The forecasts are important since India has updated its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to fight climate change, incorporating two of the promises made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Glasgow conference -- reducing emissions intensity of GDP by 45 per cent by 2030, from 2005 level, and achieving about 50 per cent cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030.

Friday, June 2, 2023

Rocket Lab’s private mission to Venus slips to 2025

Rocket Lab’s mission to Venus, which was originally scheduled to launch last month, is “not imminent,” a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. That means the mission will likely move ahead no earlier than January 2025, the only publicly stated back-up window for launch.

Our focus right now is on delivering customer missions as a priority,” the spokesperson said. They did not provide any further reasons for the slip.

Rocket Lab announced it would go to Venus last August, in what will be the first fully private mission to the yellow planet. The company will fund the mission, while a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other organizations contributed to the scientific payload. The company plans on using its small Electron rocket and Photon spacecraft to send a very tiny probe to around 30 miles above the surface of Venus, where atmospheric conditions are most similar to that of Earth.

Indeed, everything about the mission is compact and ambitious. The probe, which will measure just 40 centimeters in diameter, will search for organic chemicals in Venus’s clouds — or in other words, signs of life and suggestions of habitable conditions for supporting life. After spending only five minutes flying through the clouds, the probe will slowly lose altitude until it hits the surface of Venus around an hour after atmospheric entry.

One of the other primary goals of the mission, according to a paper detailing the mission parameters, is to further mature the high-energy Photon spacecraft. Photon is Rocket Lab’s workhorse spacecraft, but this high-energy variant is specifically designed for deep space missions.

Rocket Lab developed the high-energy Photon for the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) mission for NASA, which launched in June 2022. The company will also use this upper stage variant for a NASA mission to Mars next year.

What sets the high-energy Photon apart from the other variants that Rocket Lab sells — for example, as a satellite bus to startups like Varda Space — is that its capable of long-duration interplanetary cruising. The upcoming mission to Mars, and the mission to Venus in 2025, are likely only the tip of the iceberg for Rocket Lab’s ambitions.

Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Asteroid’s Comet-Like Tail Is Not Made of Dust, Solar Observatories Reveal

A weird asteroid has just gotten a little weirder.

We have known for a while that asteroid 3200 Phaethon acts like a comet. It brightens and forms a tail when it’s near the Sun, and it is the source of the annual Geminid meteor shower, even though comets are responsible for most meteor showers. Scientists had blamed Phaethon’s comet-like behavior on dust escaping from the asteroid as it’s scorched by the Sun. However, a new study using two NASA solar observatories reveals that Phaethon’s tail is not dusty at all but is actually made of sodium gas.

“Our analysis shows that Phaethon’s comet-like activity cannot be explained by any kind of dust,” said California Institute of Technology PhD student Qicheng Zhang, who is the lead author of a paper published in the Planetary Science Journal reporting the results.

This illustration depicts asteroid Phaethon being heated by the Sun. The asteroid’s surface gets so hot that sodium inside Phaethon’s rock likely vaporizes and vents into space, causing it to brighten like a comet and form a tail.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/IPAC

Asteroids, which are mostly rocky, do not usually form tails when they approach the Sun. Comets, however, are a mix of ice and rock, and typically do form tails as the Sun vaporizes their ice, blasting material off their surfaces and leaving a trail along their orbits. When Earth passes through a debris trail, those cometary bits burn up in our atmosphere and produce a swarm of shooting stars – a meteor shower.

After astronomers discovered Phaethon in 1983, they realized that the asteroid’s orbit matched that of the Geminid meteors. This pointed to Phaethon as the source of the annual meteor shower, even though Phaethon was an asteroid and not a comet.

In 2009, NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spotted a short tail extending from Phaethon as the asteroid reached its closest point to the Sun (or “perihelion”) along its 524-day orbit. Regular telescopes hadn’t seen the tail before because it only forms when Phaethon is too close to the Sun to observe, except with solar observatories. STEREO also saw Phaethon’s tail develop on later solar approaches in 2012 and 2016. The tail’s appearance supported the idea that dust was escaping the asteroid’s surface when heated by the Sun.

However, in 2018, another solar mission imaged part of the Geminid debris trail and found a surprise. Observations from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe showed that the trail contained far more material than Phaethon could possibly shed during its close approaches to the Sun.

Zhang’s team wondered whether something else, other than dust, was behind Phaethon’s comet-like behavior. “Comets often glow brilliantly by sodium emission when very near the Sun, so we suspected sodium could likewise serve a key role in Phaethon’s brightening,” Zhang said.

An earlier study, based on models and lab tests, suggested that the Sun’s intense heat during Phaethon’s close solar approaches could indeed vaporize sodium within the asteroid and drive comet-like activity.

Hoping to find out what the tail is really made of, Zhang looked for it again during Phaethon’s latest perihelion in 2022. He used the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft — a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) – which has color filters that can detect sodium and dust. Zhang’s team also searched archival images from STEREO and SOHO, finding the tail during 18 of Phaethon’s close solar approaches between 1997 and 2022.

In SOHO’s observations, the asteroid’s tail appeared bright in the filter that detects sodium, but it did not appear in the filter that detects dust. In addition, the shape of the tail and the way it brightened as Phaethon passed the Sun matched exactly what scientists would expect if it were made of sodium, but not if it were made of dust.

This evidence indicates that Phaethon’s tail is made of sodium, not dust.

“Not only do we have a really cool result that kind of upends 14 years of thinking about a well-scrutinized object,” said team member Karl Battams of the Naval Research Laboratory, “but we also did this using data from two heliophysics spacecraft – SOHO and STEREO – that were not at all intended to study phenomena like this.”

China’s rover finds signs of recent water on Mars, droughts likely ended the megacities of Indus Valley Civilisation

A new study suggests water on Mars may be more widespread and recent than previously thought. Scientists reported the finding from China’s Mars rover in Science Advances on Friday, April 28, 2023. | Photo Credit: AP

From finding West Eurasian genetic imprint in ancient DNA from Kerala’s Pattanam to increasing heat stress burden in Global South due to humidity, a lot has happened this week in the field of science. Find the most recent discoveries and findings here.

Expanding upon the historic first images of black holes, scientists have unveiled the first picture showing the violent events unfolding around one of these ravenous cosmic behemoths, including the launching point of a colossal jet of high-energy particles shooting outward into space. The new image of Messier 87 shows the entire system with the base of the jet of hot plasma, a fuzzy ring of light from hot plasma falling into the black hole, and a central dark area - sort of a donut hole - created by the black hole’s presence.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is training four people to live on planet Mars this summer. While the endeavor to send humans to the neighbouring planet on the part of the US space agency is not new, the four ‘Martians’ will be part of NASA's human exploration expedition on Mars.

"During the simulation, crew members will carry out different types of mission activities, including simulated spacewalks, robotic operations, habitat maintenance, personal hygiene, exercise, and crop growth," Nasa said in a statement.

The crew will face environmental stressors such as resource limitations, isolation, and equipment failure in order to be as close to the situation on Mars when humans arrive. The team will be subjected to resource limitations, isolation, equipment failure, and significant workloads during their habitation."

NASA has also sent satellites, lander called InSight designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough checkup, and a rover mission that includes the rover Perseverance, the small robotic helicopter Ingenuity, and associated delivery systems. During the simulation, crew members will carry out different types of mission activities, including simulated spacewalks, robotic operations, habitat maintenance, personal hygiene, exercise, and crop growth," Nasa said in a statement.