Space and astronomy news
The Shenzhou-14 mission, carrying three Chinese astronauts, docked successfully earlier this week with the Tiangong-3 space station. During their six-month mission on board the station, the new crew hopes to continue work on construction of the orbital Chinese outpost, which will be about one-fifth the size of the International Space Station.
Continue reading “Shenzhou-14 Astronauts Begin Their Mission of 6 Months in Space”
Jupiter is composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. The amounts of each closely conform to the theoretical quantities in the primordial solar nebula. But it also contains other heavier elements, which astronomers call metals. Even though metals are a small component of Jupiter, their presence and distribution tell astronomers a lot.
According to a new study, Jupiter’s metal content and distribution mean that the planet ate a lot of rocky planetesimals in its youth.
Continue reading “Jupiter is up to 9% Rock and Metal, Which Means it Ate a lot of Planets in its Youth”
Why does a Mars rover have a rock in one of its wheels? Maybe it’s because a rover doesn’t have pockets.
Who among us hasn’t picked up a great rock, carried it around, maybe saved it for a long time, or even placed it somewhere safe or special? The Perseverance rover is doing just that, having carried a random Mars rock in its wheel for quite some time.
Continue reading “Perseverance Has Been Carrying a Rock in its Wheel for Over 100 Days”
Astronomers have a brown dwarf problem. They should be seeing a lot more of these objects, which are cooler than stars but hotter than planets. Yet, there have only been about 40 directly imaged over the past few decades. Why aren’t astronomers finding more of them? It helps to remember that brown dwarfs are dim, low-temperature objects. They don’t stand out in a crowded starfield. If they’re too close to their stars, the starlight hides them from our view. They’re much better observed in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. All these characteristics make hunting for them difficult.
Continue reading “A New Technique Finds a Bundle of Brown Dwarfs”
SpaceX’s massive and totally-reusable launch vehicle, the Starship and Super Heavy, is getting closer to its first orbital test flight! According to the flight plan filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), this will consist of a fully-stacked spacecraft and booster prototype (SN24 and BN7) taking off from the SpaceX Starbase near Boca Chica, Texas. The booster element will separate at suborbital altitude and land off the coast of Texas, while the Starship will carry on to an altitude of 200 km (125 mi), placing it in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).
With this milestone in its rearview, SpaceX will have fully validated its super-heavy launch system and be ready to conduct crewed flights. According to previous statements by Musk, these flights will include payloads and crews destined for the Moon and Mars. During the SpaceX All-Hands Meeting – which took place on Sunday, June 5th – Musk showed how the Starship will also be used to deploy Starlink satellites like a “Pez dispenser.” This announcement and the slideshow presented at the meeting were shared by Musk via Twitter shortly thereafter.
Continue reading “Starship Will Spit out Starlinks Like a Candy Dispenser”
The search for technosignatures has always taken a back seat in the broad search for extraterrestrial life forms. Biosignatures, such as methane in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, have long been front and center. But while we are searching for signs of biology, signs of technology might be hiding in plain sight. According to a new report from the members of the TechnoClimes conference, humanity could potentially find signs of technology by simply using data that will already be collected for other purposes. To prove their point, they came up with a list of possible technosignatures and cross-referenced them with a list of observatories that could potentially find them. The result is a framework of how to best search for technosignatures and a plethora of references for those seeking them out.
Continue reading “Which Missions and Observatories can Detect Technosignatures?”
As most everyone knows, Venus is called Earth’s twin, though its scorching temperatures and extreme surface pressure are more like an evil twin. For a twin and our closest planetary neighbour, we don’t know it very well. Venus’ dense clouds keep the planet’s surface hidden in visible-light observations.
It wasn’t until NASA’s Magellan spacecraft visited the planet in the early 1990s that we obtained a radar map of the surface. The survey showed almost 1,000 craters on the planet’s surface, finally visible through the sulphuric acid clouds that shroud the planet.
Continue reading “Venus Does Have Craters. Here’s one”
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia Observatory is a mission dedicated to astrometry, a branch of astronomy where the velocity and proper motion of celestial objects are measured to learn more about the formation and evolution of the cosmos. For the past eight and a half years, this space-based has been studying over two billion objects in the Universe. This includes stars in the Milky Way but also planets, comets, asteroids, and distant galaxies. This information obtained by this mission will be used to create the most-detailed 3D catalog of the Milky Way ever.
Since the mission began in 2013, two major catalogs have been released, known as Gaia Data Release 1 and 2 (DR1 and DR2), accompanied by a smaller data set – Early Data Release 3 (EDR3). On June 13th, Gaia’s third full catalog (DR3) will be released, containing new and improved details for the two billion celestial objects it has been observing. The release will coincide with a virtual press event hosted by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), where featured speakers will share the significance of this latest release and how it revolutionizes our understanding of the galaxy.
Continue reading “ESA is About to Release its Third Giant Data Release From Gaia”
NASA has dipped into the debate over UFOs for decades, but today the space agency said it’s commissioning an independent study team to survey a wide range of what are now known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs.
“The most exciting things in science are things we don’t understand, and my starting point — I think all our starting points for this — is that there are phenomena that we don’t understand,” astrophysicist David Spergel, who’ll lead the study team, told reporters. “How do we start to make progress? We have a very limited set of observations right now with these UAPs. This makes it difficult to draw conclusions. So we start by trying to figure out what data is out there. We’re going to be working with government, nonprofits, companies, civilians, and try to identify what data is already there, then start to think about what data should we collect in the future.”
NASA’s independent study will start early in the fall and run in parallel to the Pentagon-led effort to analyze UAP reports from aviators, which was the focus of a congressional hearing last month.
Continue reading “What’s Out There? NASA Sets Up Independent Study on UFOs”
Scientists and engineers for the James Webb Space Telescope revealed that since its deployment in space, the telescope has been struck at least five times by micrometeroids, with one recent strike by an object that was larger than what pre-launch models suggested that the telescope would likely encounter.
Continue reading “JWST was Recently Hit by a Surprisingly Large Micrometeoroid”