Universe Today

November 17, 2022November 17, 2022 by David Dickinson

Are We in for a Leonid Outburst Friday Night?

Leonid from 2001 — A lone Leonid meteor from 2001. Image credit and copyright: Frankie Lucena.

The November Leonid meteors may produce a surprise outburst this weekend.

If forecasters are right, a notorious meteor shower may put on a surprise showing soon, right after its expected peak. The meteor shower in question is the November Leonids. Most years, the Leonids are really nothing to wake up early for, producing an average hourly rate of 10 meteors an hour, barely double the background sporadic rate. But every 33 years or so, the Leonids are the source of great storms of meteors, as the Earth plows headlong into the stream of debris laid down by comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle on its 33-year orbit around the Sun.

November 17, 2022November 17, 2022 by Andy Tomaswick

Europe is Building a Communications Network Around the Moon

GPS and the world’s other global positioning systems all have one very limiting disadvantage: they’re global to only one world. There is no equivalent to the precise geolocation features these systems offer for any other body in our solar system. Recently, there has been an increased focus on Lunar missions, but no way for anything on the Lunar surface to know precisely where it is. Enter the European Space Agency and their Moonlight initiative, which was showcased in a recent video on their YouTube channel.

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022 by Laurence Tognetti

NASA’s MAVEN Witnessed Auroras as Multiple Solar Storms Crashed into Mars

Artist’s illustration of NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars. (Credit: NASA)

After orbiting Mars for eight long years, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft observed an extraordinary duo of auroras around the Red Planet that resulted from solar storms emanating from the Sun only a few days earlier on August 27. This observation is extraordinary since Mars lacks a global magnetic field so the solar flares must have been very powerful for MAVEN to detect them.

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022 by Alan Boyle

Artemis 1 Sends Back Snapshots of Earth as It Speeds Toward the Moon

Earth as seen from Orion capsule — Earth shines in an image captured by a camera mounted on one of the Orion service module’s solar array wings. (NASA / ESA / JP Major)

As it heads for the moon, NASA’s Orion space capsule is sending back snapshots of Earth that evoke the “blue marble” pictures taken by Apollo astronauts five decades earlier.

This time around, the photographer is basically a robot, built into the camera system for the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission. The round-the-moon odyssey got off to a spectacular start early today with the first launch of NASA’s Space Launch System, and over the next 25 days it’s due to blaze a trail for future crewed trips to the lunar surface.

Hours after liftoff, a camera mounted on one of Orion’s four solar arrays pivoted around to capture a view of the spacecraft’s European-built service module in the foreground — with our half-shadowed planet set against the black background of space.

“Orion looking back at Earth as it travels toward the moon, 57,000 miles away from the place we call home,” NASA’s Sandra Jones intoned as the imagery came down.

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022 by Evan Gough

The Future of Mars Exploration Belongs to Helicopters

NASA's Mars Helicopters: Present, Future, and Proposed: A family portrait of Mars helicopters - Ingenuity, Sample Recovery Helicopter, and a future Mars Science Helicopter concept. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Even though there’s no firm date for a Mars sample return mission, the Perseverance rover is busy collecting rock samples and caching them for retrieval. We’ve known of the future Mars sample return mission for a while now, and as time goes on, we’re learning more details.

The latest development concerns helicopters. With Ingenuity’s success, NASA has decided that the sample return mission will take two helicopters.

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022 by Brian Koberlein

Mapping the Interiors of Meteorites to Learn how Earth got its Water

A composite image of Earth as a watery world. Credit: Reto Stöckli, Robert Simmon, MODIS/NASA

Earth is a strange world. A warm, rocky planet covered with oceans of liquid water. This strangeness is central to life on Earth, but it has been a longstanding puzzle for astronomers. Just why is our planet wet while other terrestrial worlds are dry? Where did all of Earth’s water come from?

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022 by Matt Williams

Greenland’s ice Loss is Worse Than We Thought

Cumulative melt days on the Greenland Ice Sheet for the 2022 melt season (left) and difference from the 1981 to 2010 average melt days for the same period (right). Credit: NSIDC/T. Mote, University of Georgia

Climate change is the single greatest threat facing our planet today. Thanks to excess carbon emissions that have been growing steadily since the mid-20th century, average temperatures continue to rise worldwide. This leads to feedback mechanisms, such as rising sea levels, extreme weather, drought, wildfires, and glacial melting. This includes the Arctic Ice Pack, the East Antarctic glacier, and the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS), which are rapidly melting and increasing global sea levels.

Worse than that, the disappearance of the world’s ice sheets means that Earth’s surface and oceans absorb more heat, driving global temperatures even further. According to a new NASA-supported study by an international team of Earth scientists and glaciologists, the Greenland Ice Sheet is melting at an accelerating rate, much faster than existing models predict. According to these findings, far more ice will be lost from Greenland during the 21st century, which means its contribution to sea-level rise will be significantly higher.

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022 by Matt Williams

What Would Asteroid Mining do to the World's Economy?

Artist's impression of an astronaut conducting an EVA with an asteroid. Credit: NASA

About a decade ago, the prospect of “asteroid mining” saw a massive surge in interest. This was due largely to the rise of the commercial space sector and the belief that harvesting resources from space would soon become a reality. What had been the stuff of science fiction and futurist predictions was now being talked about seriously in the business sector, with many claiming that the future of resource exploitation and manufacturing lay in space. Since then, there’s been a bit of a cooling off as these hopes failed to materialize in the expected timeframe.

Nevertheless, there is little doubt that a human presence in space will entail harvesting resources from Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and beyond. In a recent paper, a team of researchers from the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China, examined the potential impact of asteroid mining on the global economy. Based on their detailed assessment that includes market forces, environmental impact, asteroid and mineral type, and the scale of mining, they show how asteroid mining can be done in a way that is consistent with the Outer Space Treaty (i.e., for the benefit of all humanity).

November 16, 2022November 16, 2022 by Nancy Atkinson

Artemis I is On Its Way to the Moon

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft launches on the Artemis I flight test, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky.

It really, finally, actually happened. The long-waited Space Launch System (SLS) rocket carrying the Orion capsule launched successfully and is now on its way to the Moon. After years of delays — and then two scrubbed launch attempts and a rollback of the rocket to the Vehicle Assembly Building this fall — this is the first time in 50 years that a human capable spacecraft is going to the Moon. In a way, it is fitting that Artemis launched in the dark, as the last human-rated spacecraft that launched to the Moon – Apollo 17 – also had liftoff at night.

“It’s taken a lot to get here, but Orion is now on its way to the Moon,” said Jim Free, NASA deputy associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. “This successful launch means NASA and our partners are on a path to explore farther in space than ever before for the benefit of humanity.”

November 15, 2022November 15, 2022 by Scott Alan Johnston

The X-37B is Back After 908 Days in Orbit. What was it Doing up There? That's Classified

At 5:22 AM Eastern Time on November 12, the Space Force’s (and Air Force’s) X-37B spaceplane landed back on Earth after two and a half years in orbit. The secretive spaceplane has now performed 6 missions, and the latest, OTV-6, was the longest flight yet. Details about the X-37B’s purpose are scarce, though it is clear that the vehicle is designed to serve as a testbed for advanced spaceflight capabilities. Here’s what we know about the latest mission.