Universe Today

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024 by Nancy Atkinson

ESA Sets the Launch Date for Ariane 6: July 9th

An artist concept of the Ariane 6 powering into space. Ariane 6 is Europe’s new heavy lift launch vehicle. Credit: ESA.

The European Space Agency has retired its Ariane 5 rocket, and all eyes are on its next generation, Ariane 6. The rocket’s pieces have been arriving at the Kourou facility in French Guiana and are now assembled. ESA has now announced they’ll attempt a test launch on July 9th and hope to complete a second flight before the end of 2024. This new heavy-life rocket has a re-ignitable upper stage, allowing it to launch multiple payloads into different orbits.

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Metal is 3D Printed on the Space Station

I have always wanted a 3D printer but never quite found a good enough reason to get one. Seeing that NASA are now 3D printing metal is even more tantalising than a plastic 3D printer. However, thinking about it, surely it is just a computer controlled soldering iron! I’m sure it’s far more advanced than that! Turns out that the first print really wasn’t much to right home about, just an s-curve deposited onto a metal plate! It does however prove and demonstrate the principle that a laser can liquify stainless steel and then deposit it precisely in a weightless environment.

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024 by Evan Gough

Primordial Black Holes Can Only Explain a Fraction of Dark Matter

This artist's illustration shows what primordial black holes might look like. In reality, the black holes would struggle to form accretion disks, as shown. Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

What is Dark Matter? That question is prominent in discussions about the nature of the Universe. There are many proposed explanations for dark matter, both within the Standard Model and outside of it.

One proposed component of dark matter is primordial black holes, created in the early Universe without a collapsing star as a progenitor.

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Research Work Begins on the Habitable Worlds Observatory

This artist’s concept features one of multiple initial possible design options for NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

NASA are planning on building a telescope to hunt for habitable worlds. The imaginatively named ‘Habitable Worlds Observatory’ is at least a decade away but NASA have started to develop the underlying technology needed. The contracts have been awarded to three companies to research the next-generation optics, mission designs and telescope features at a cost of $17.5 million. Work should begin late summer 2024.

June 5, 2024June 5, 2024 by Evan Gough

The JWST is Re-Writing Astronomy Textbooks

The first JWST Deep Field Image, showing large distant galaxies. The telescope's observations are revealing the previously unseen and are forcing a re-write of astronomy textbooks. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

When the James Webb Space Telescope was launched at the end of 2021, we expected stunning images and illuminating scientific results. So far, the powerful space telescope has lived up to our expectations. The JWST has shown us things about the early Universe we never anticipated.

Some of those results are forcing a rewrite of astronomy textbooks.

June 4, 2024June 4, 2024 by Matt Williams

Japan’s Lunar Lander Fails to Check-in

Illustration: SLIM lander on the moon — An artist's conception shows Japan's SLIM lander on the moon. Credit: ISAS/JAXA

On January 19th, 2024, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully landed its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) on the lunar surface. In so doing, JAXA became the fifth national space agency to achieve a soft landing on the Moon – after NASA, the Soviet space program (Interkosmos), the European Space Agency, and the China National Space Agency (CNSA). SLIM has since experienced some technical difficulties, which included upending shortly after landing, and had to be temporarily shut down after experiencing power problems when its first lunar night began.

On the Moon, the day/night cycle lasts fourteen days at a time, which has a drastic effect on missions that rely on solar panels. Nevertheless, SLIM managed to reorient its panels and recharge itself and has survived three consecutive lunar nights since it landed. However, when another lunar night began on May 27th, JAXA announced that they had failed to establish communications with the lander. As a result, all science operations were terminated while mission controllers attempt to reestablish communications, which could happen later this month.

June 4, 2024June 4, 2024 by Evan Gough

How Mars’ Moon Phobos Captures Our Imaginations

This is a colourized version of a black and white image captured by the ESA's Mars Express in 2010. Andrea Luck, a skilled image processor from Glasgow, improved the original image. Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck CC BY. Original Image: https://www.planetary.org/space-images/20130714_phobosnd_img

For a small, lumpy chunk of rock that barely reflects any light, Mars’ Moon Phobos draws a lot of attention. Maybe because it’s one of only two moons to orbit the planet, and its origins are unclear. But some of the attention is probably because we have such great images of it.

June 4, 2024June 4, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

NASA has a New Database to Predict Meteoroid Hazards for Spaceflight

There are plenty of problems that spacecraft designers have to consider. Getting smacked in the sensitive parts by a rock is just one of them, but it is a very important one. A micrometeoroid hitting the wrong part of the spacecraft could jeopardize an entire mission, and the years of work it took to get to the point where the mission was actually in space in the first place. But even if the engineers who design spacecraft know about this risk, how is it best to avoid them? A new programming library from research at NASA could help.

June 4, 2024June 4, 2024 by Evan Gough

Evidence of Dark Matter Interacting With Itself in El Gordo Merger

Image from a computer simulation of the distribution of matter in the universe. Orange regions host galaxies; blue structures are gas and dark matter. Credit: TNG Collaboration

The Standard Model of particle physics does a good job of explaining the interactions between matter’s basic building blocks. But it’s not perfect. It struggles to explain dark matter. Dark matter makes up most of the matter in the Universe, yet we don’t know what it is.

The Standard Model says that whatever dark matter is, it can’t interact with itself. New research may have turned that on its head.

June 4, 2024June 4, 2024 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Two Seismometers are Going to the Moon to Measure Moonquakes

The Moon is shrinking and causing moonquakes. New seismometers will go there to measure them. — The Moon is shrinking and causing moonquakes. New seismometers will go to Shrodinger Basin to measure them.

Our Moon is shrinking and has been doing so since just after its formation ~4.5 billion years ago from a collision with the young Earth. That shrinkage, along with a constant rain of micrometeorites, causes lunar seismic activity. NASA plans to send two instruments to the Moon to measure its moonquakes. Those dual seismometers share technology first used on Mars by the InSight lander to measure more than a thousand marsquakes.