Strange, powerful signals from deep space called fast radio bursts are slippery little suckers.
Most of them just flash once, a mysterious huge spike in the radio data out of nowhere, lasting just milliseconds at most. They can’t be predicted, and because they’re so brief, they’re incredibly hard to trace.
Hard; but not impossible. Less than a year ago, for the first time, astronomers announced they traced one of these mysterious one-off signals to its source galaxy. Since then, their techniques have allowed them to trace three more.
Mars — glorious, dusty, complex Mars — may once have been even more dazzling. New research provides even more evidence that a rubbly ring once circled the Red Planet.
The new clue lies in Deimos, the smaller of the two Martian moons. It’s orbiting Mars at a slight tilt with respect to the planet’s equator — and this could very well be the result of the gravitational shenanigans caused by a planetary ring.
Ring systems aren’t actually all that uncommon. When you think about ring systems, your mind immediately leaps to Saturn, no doubt — but half the planets in the Solar System have rings, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Jupiter. Dwarf planet Haumea, and centaurs Chiron and Chariklo also have rings.
NASA is monitoring an asteroid that may be as large as the Empire State Building, expected to pass Earth on Saturday, June 6.
Asteroid 2002 NN4 is estimated to be 250–570 meters (820–1,870 feet) in diameter, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). New York City’s iconic Empire State Building is more than 1,400 feet tall at its tip.
The asteroid may seem daunting, but it will pass Earth at a safe distance, a representative for JPL told CBS News.
Social distance science made possible with public W. M. Keck Observatory and NASA archive data.
Determined to find a needle in a cosmic haystack, a pair of astronomers time traveled through archives of old data from W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauankea in Hawaii and old X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to unlock a mystery surrounding a bright, lensed, heavily obscured quasar.
NASA began exploring this idea in 2018. At the heart of this technology is a structure that gives mushrooms its shape — mycelium. These structures, which grow into mushrooms, are sturdy and flexible.
A Finnish research group has found strong evidence for the presence of exotic quark matter inside the cores of the largest neutron stars in existence. They reached this conclusion by combining recent results from theoretical particle and nuclear physics to measurements of gravitational waves from neutron star collisions.
SpaceX launching again this week, if all goes as planned.
Starlink deployment in orbit.
SpaceX is at it again. Love it or hate it, Starlink is growing again. The company is getting ready to launch the next batch of 60 satellites into orbit in just a few days. The original launch was postponed until after the successful launch of the crew dragon Demo-2 mission for NASA.
Now that the astronauts successfully docked with the International Space Station, SpaceX turns its focus back on Starlink. This launch, originally planned to launch before the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission, now looks promising for a launch this week.
The constellation consists of thousands of mass-produced small satellites in low Earth orbit adds up quickly. Each Falcon 9 launch gets packed full of sixty Starlink satellites. 60 satellites neatly fit in both size and mass limitations of the Falcon 9’s reusable configuration. Elon’s company delivered more than 420 satellites into orbit to date. SpaceX now plans to loft the next batch into space Wednesday around 9:25 p.m. EDT. Visitors at the Cape Canaveral’s Complex 40 launch pad should be able to witness the launch so long as the weather holds out… and the weather is looking promising.
A one-hour launch window for the Starlink mission opening at 8:55 p.m. EDT (0055 GMT). If the launch gets scrubbed, SpaceX will cycle again for another attempt. The prior attempt at launch got scrubbed because of Tropical Storm Arthur and the associated high winds. As an additional complication for SpaceX launches, the rough seas in the recovery area where SpaceX’s drone ship waits made a landing of the Falcon 9 risky.
Worries from Astronomers: Starlink changes the night sky
November 11 at 9:56 a.m. EST, 14:56 UTC, SpaceX launched 60 Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. Credit SpaceX.
This mission debuts a novel Starlink satellite not seen before. SpaceX, in response to concerned astronomers, includes additional features to reduce reflectivity. A new sunshade visor should help reduce the reflection of light and spoiling the night sky for astronomers.
The albedo of the spacecraft measured quite high coupled with the angle of light reflecting off the craft gave rise to visible strings of satellites streaking across the sky. The visor blocks sunlight from reaching the portions of the spacecraft, making them less visible from the ground. Additionally, SpaceX plans an adjusted flight trajectory and angle relative to the ground.
SpaceX plans Starlink service in the Northern U.S. and Canada starting in 2020. After initial market deployment in North America, Starlink rapidly expanding coverage to create truly near global coverage of the populated world by 2021.
SpaceX also focused on debris mitigation. The Starlink website claims the network is on the leading edge of on-orbit debris mitigation, meeting or exceeding all regulatory and industry standards. At the end of the satellite’s life, the onboard ion engine propulsion system slowly lowers the altitude over the course of a few months. Should the propulsion system becomes inoperable, satellites still burn up in Earth’s atmosphere within 1–5 years. (there are satellites still orbiting Earth launched in the 1960s.)
The Starlink constellation, Phase 1, first orbital shell: 72 orbits with 22 each, 1,584 satellites at 550 km altitude.
Krypton… isn’t that related to Superman?
No, Starlink’s power does not come from Superman’s homeworld. Rather it does draw energy from our sun with a single solar panel which powers the Krypton ion drive. Krypton is an inert noble gas with the symbol Kr and atomic number 36. There are other satellites and spacecraft using ion engines, but Starlink is the first-ever Krypton propelled spacecraft flown.
Starlink does have sort of a superpower. Starlink satellites have a built-in star tracker to allow the satellite to self orient. If that wasn’t cool enough, the satellites also can perform automatic collision avoidance thanks to some nifty new technology from the Department of Defense’s debris tracking system. This technology allows Starlink satellites to quickly, without the need for human intervention, avoid collisions reliably.
The US military also plans to test out Starlink for their own purposes. The United States Army signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement contract with SpaceX to test and assess Starlink’s broadband communication in military platforms. The three-year agreement with the Army will determine if the network is reliable for future military operations. The low latency of Starlink and global coverage makes Starlink an ideal option for Military communications. Even if one satellite is disabled, Starlink satellite number in the thousands once complete.
An analysis of more than 200,000 spiral galaxies has revealed unexpected links between spin directions of galaxies, and the structure formed by these links might suggest that the early universe could have been spinning, according to a Kansas State University study.
Lior Shamir, a K-State computational astronomer and computer scientist, presented the findings at the 236th American Astronomical Society meeting in June 2020. The findings are significant because the observations conflict with some previous assumptions about the large-scale structure of the universe.
Since the time of Edwin Hubble, astronomers have believed that the universe is inflating with no particular direction and that the galaxies in it are distributed with no particular cosmological structure. But Shamir’s recent observations of geometrical patterns of more than 200,000 spiral galaxies suggest that the universe could have a defined structure and that the early universe could have been spinning. Patterns in the distribution of these galaxies suggest that spiral galaxies in different parts of the universe, separated by both space and time, are related through the directions toward which they spin, according to the study.
Ordinarily, planning a mid-afternoon launch from Florida during the summer would be inadvisable, especially if there’s no margin for error. The heat and humidity can make for “dynamic” weather conditions (to use a word that came up frequently in forecasts last week) that make it difficult to predict if a launch can proceed.
However, the schedule for the Demo-2 commercial crew mission was dictated not by Mother Nature but instead by Isaac Newton. The launch was tied to the orbit of the International Space Station so that the Crew Dragon spacecraft could reach the station after launch. That required an instantaneous launch window that, in late May, happened to be in the afternoon from the Kennedy Space Center.
Still, try explaining that to the boss. “I was told that the rocket you just witnessed had to be launched within one second, or it would be impossible for it to hit its target,” President Donald Trump said last Saturday, after a successful launch that he watched in person. He had been at the Kennedy Space Center three days earlier as well, when weather conditions didn’t quite clear in time to allow the launch.
