Posted on by Andy Tomaswick

Webb is Cool, but it Still Needs to get Cooler

Cooling things down in space is trickier than it might sound.  But that is exactly the process the James Webb telescope is going through right now.  Getting down to cryogenic temperature is imperative for its infrared imaging systems to work correctly.  While the telescope has already started, it will be another few weeks before the process is complete, and it’s ready to start capturing its first groundbreaking infrared images of the universe.

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Posted on by Andy Tomaswick

How Well Does Concrete Work in Space?

Concrete is not the first material one usually thinks of when exploring space.  Nor is it the focus of much cutting-edge research.  The most common building material has been used by humanity for thousands of years.  But surprisingly, little is still known about some of its properties, due in no small part to the limitations of the environments it can be tested in.  Now, this most ubiquitous of materials will be tested in a new environment – the microgravity aboard the International Space Station.

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Posted on by Andy Tomaswick

Satellites can now see Exactly Where Methane is Being Dumped Into the Atmosphere

Methane is one of the most important greenhouse gases, despite the overwhelming interest in carbon dioxide emissions as the primary source of climate change.  It is hard to track, though, as its sources can range from leaking chemical and gas pipelines to literal farm fields.  Now an energy analytics company has a system they believe can track otherwise undocumented methane emissions in a way that could prove helpful in eliminating them altogether.

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Posted on by Scott Alan Johnston

The Object About to Hit the Moon isn’t a SpaceX Booster After All

Last month, astronomers reported that a discarded upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket, launched 7 years ago, was on a collision course with the Moon. The rocket in question carried NASA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) to the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, where the still-operating observatory provides advance warning on solar wind activities. The leftover rocket stage, meanwhile, became a floating piece of space junk orbiting the Sun. Its ultimate fate was unknown, until last month, when astronomer Bill Gray predicted that it was bound for an impact with the Moon sometime on March 4th, 2022.

This week, Gray, who has been tracking the object ever since, released an update on the situation. He confirmed that there is indeed a rocket stage on course to crash into the far side of the Moon, but it’s not a SpaceX rocket at all. Instead, it’s a Chinese booster: the upper stage of the rocket that carried China’s Chang’e 5-T1 mission to the Moon in 2014.

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Posted on by Evan Gough

Astronomers Scan the Center of the Milky Way for Any Sign of Intelligent Civilizations. Nothing but Silence.

This is an image of the center of the Milky Way. The bright white area right of center is home of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A star. Image Credit: By NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI - http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12348See also http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo0928a/ and http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/28/image/a/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24958921

Are there civilizations somewhere else in the Universe? Somewhere else in the Milky Way? That’s one of our overarching questions, and an answer in the affirmative would be profound.

Humanity’s pursued the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) in one form or another since shortly after the advent of radio waves in the early 20th century. Efforts have waxed and waned over the decades, but the search has never been completely abandoned.

The search detected transient hints in the form of unexplained radio waves in the past, but nothing that comprises reliable evidence. Now a new search for technosignatures in the Milky Way’s center has turned up nothing.

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Posted on by Brian Koberlein

Astronomers see Dead Planets Crashing Into Dead Stars

Artist’s impression of a white dwarf accreting planetary material from a circumstellar debris disk. Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick

When our Sun dies, the Earth will die with it. As a star of middling mass, the Sun will end its life by swelling into a red giant star. After a last cosmic moment of brilliance, the remnant core of the Sun will collapse into a white dwarf. This won’t occur for billions of years, but the mass and composition of the Sun means a white dwarf is its inevitable fate.

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Posted on by Evan Gough

Water was Already Here Before the Earth Formed

Earth as seen by the JUNO spacecraft in 2013. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill.

Where did Earth’s water come from? That’s one of the most compelling questions in the ongoing effort to understand life’s emergence. Earth’s inner solar system location was too hot for water to condense onto the primordial Earth. The prevailing view is that asteroids and comets brought water to Earth from regions of the Solar System beyond the frost line.

But a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy proposes a further explanation for Earth’s water. As the prevailing view says, some of it could’ve come from asteroids and comets.

But most of the hydrogen was already here, waiting for Earth to form.

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Posted on by Andy Tomaswick

Musk Shows how They’re Planning to Catch SuperHeavy Boosters

SpaceX’s entire business model is based on the reusability of its rockets.  That business model has proven viable time and time again as boosters continue to land safely only to be reused later.  But as the rockets they’re using get bigger and bigger, the harder and harder it will get for them to land directly on the ground, as models they’ve completed so far have.  So for its SuperHeavy Booster, designed to launch its Starship craft into orbit, SpaceX has to develop a new way of capturing the rockets without damaging them. Its head, Elon Musk, has shared a Twitter video showing how it will do just that.

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