Andy Tomaswick, Author at Universe Today

April 3, 2024April 3, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

A Robot Hopper to Explore the Moon’s Dangerous Terrain

Intuitive Machines recently had a major breakthrough, successfully becoming the first non-governmental entity to land on the Moon in February. At least the landing was partially successful – the company’s Odysseus lander ended up on its side, though its instruments and communication links remained at least partially functional. That mission, dubbed IM-1, was the first in a series of ambitious missions the company has planned. And they recently released a paper detailing features of a unique hopping robot that will hitch a ride on its next Moon mission.

March 29, 2024March 29, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Thermal Modeling of a Pulsed Plasma Rocket Shows It Should Be Possible To Create One

We’ve reported on a technology called pulsed plasma rockets (PPRs) here at UT a few times. Several research groups have worked on variations of them. They are so popular partly because of their extremely high specific impulse and thrust levels, and they seemingly solve the trade-off between those two all-important variables in space exploration propulsion systems. Essentially, they are an extremely efficient propulsion methodology that, if scaled up, would allow payloads to reach other planets in weeks rather than months or years. However, some inherent dangers still need to be worked out, and overcoming some of those dangers was the purpose of a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) project back in 2020.

March 29, 2024March 29, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Civilizations Could Time Their Communications Based on the Movement of a Single Star

Image of the galactic centre. For the interferometric GRAVITY observations the star IRS 16C was used as a reference star, the actual target was the star S2. The position of the centre, which harbours the (invisible) black hole known as Sgr A*,with 4 million solar masses, is marked by the orange cross.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been ongoing for decades at this point. Despite that, we have yet to find any rock-hard evidence of a signal from an alien civilization. When asked about this, experts point out just how little of the overall signal space we’ve analyzed. A signal could be coming from anywhere in the sky, at any frequency, and might not be continuous. Constraining the “search space” could help us find a signal faster, but what could we use to constrain it? It’s hard to think like an alien intelligence, let alone to mimic them.

March 28, 2024March 28, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

This Black Hole is a Total Underachiever

Anyone can be an underachiever, even if you’re an astronomical singularity weighing over four billion times the mass of the Sun. At least the quasar H1821+643 doesn’t have parents to be disappointed in it. But its underachievement could shed light on how quasars, a potent type of black hole, can come to influence entire clusters of galaxies, as described in a new paper from researchers at the University of Nottingham and Harvard.

March 28, 2024March 28, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Astronomers Only Knew of a Single Binary Cepheid System. Now They Just Found Nine More

This Hubble image shows RS Puppis, a type of variable star known as a Cepheid variable. As variable stars go, Cepheids have comparatively long periods — RS Puppis, for example, varies in brightness by almost a factor of five every 40 or so days. RS Puppis is unusual; this variable star is shrouded by thick, dark clouds of dust enabling a phenomenon known as a light echo to be shown with stunning clarity. These Hubble observations show the ethereal object embedded in its dusty environment, set against a dark sky filled with background galaxies.

Measuring the distance to far away objects in space can be tricky. We don’t even know the precise distance to even our closest neighbors in the Universe – the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. But, we’re starting to get to the tools to measure it. One type of tool is a Cepheid Variable – a type of star that varies its luminosity in a well-defined pattern. However, we don’t know much about their physical properties, making utilizing them as distance markers harder. Finding their physical properties would be easier if there were any Cepheid binaries that we could study, but astronomers have only found one pair so far. Until a recent paper from researchers from Europe, the US, and Chile shows measurements of 9 additional binary Cepheid systems – enough that we can start understanding the statistics of these useful distance markers.

March 19, 2024March 19, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

One Impact on Mars Produced More than Two Billion Secondary Craters

There are plenty of craters on Mars, especially when compared to Earth. That is primarily thanks to the lack of weathering forces and strong plate tectonics that disrupt the formations of such impacts on our home planet. However, not all impact craters on Mars are directly caused by asteroid impacts. Many of them are caused by the ejecta from an asteroid impact falling back to the planet. One recent study showed how impactful this can be – it concludes that a single large impact crater on Mars created over two billion other smaller craters up to almost 2000 km away.

March 18, 2024March 18, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

NASA is Working on Zero-Boil Off Tanks for Space Exploration

No matter what mode of transportation you take for a long trip, at some point, you’ll have to refuel. For cars, this could be a simple trip to a gas station, while planes, trains, and ships have more specialized refueling services at their depots or ports. However, for spacecraft, there is currently no refueling infrastructure whatsoever. And since the fuel spacecraft use must be stored cryogenically, and the tanks the fuel is stored in are constantly subjected to the thermal radiation from the Sun, keeping enough fuel in a tank for a trip to Mars with astronauts is currently infeasible. Luckily, NASA is currently working on it and recently released a detailed look at some of that work on a blog on their website.

March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

The Cosmic Neutrino Background Would Tell Us Plenty About the Universe

Readers of Universe Today are probably already familiar with the concept of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Its serendipitous discovery by a pair of radio astronomers at Bell Labs is the stuff of astronomical legend. Over the past decades, it has offered plenty of insights into the Big Bang and the origins of our universe. But there is another, less well-known background signal that could be just as revolutionary – or at least we think there is. The Cosmic Neutrino Background (CvB) has been posited for years but has yet to be found, primarily because neutrinos are notoriously difficult to detect. Now, a paper from Professor Douglas Scott of the University of British Columbia, developed as part of a summer school on neutrinos held by the International School of AstroParticle Physics in the Italian town of Varenna, discusses what we could potentially learn if we do manage to detect the CvB eventually.

March 7, 2024March 7, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

How Long Will Advanced Civilizations Try to Communicate With Us?

Technosignature research is heating up, with plenty of papers speculating on the nature, and sometimes the longevity, of signals created by technically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations. While we haven’t found any so far, that isn’t to say that we won’t, and a better understanding of what to look for would undoubtedly help. Enter a new paper by Amedeo Balbi and Claudio Grimaldi, two professors at the Universita di Roma Tor Vergata and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, respectively. They have taken a statistical model to the problem of understanding how old a technosignature might be before we are likely to find it – and their answer is, surprisingly young.

March 7, 2024March 7, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Drones Could Help Map the Lunar Surface with Extreme Precision

Exploring the Moon has become increasingly more of a focal point lately, especially with a series of landers recently launched with various degrees of success. One of the difficulties those landers and any future human missions face is understanding the terrain they are landing on and potentially traversing in the case of a rover or human. To help fight this problem, a team of researchers from Switzerland has developed a drone concept that could help map out some of the more interesting, potentially hazardous areas to explore on the Moon.