Warp drive pioneer and former NASA warp drive specialist Dr. Harold G “Sonny” White has reported the successful manifestation of an actual, real-world “Warp Bubble.” And, according to White, this first of its kind breakthrough by his Limitless Space Institute (LSI) team sets a new starting point for those trying to manufacture a full-sized, warp-capable spacecraft.
“To be clear, our finding is not a warp bubble analog, it is a real, albeit humble and tiny, warp bubble,” White told The Debrief, quickly dispensing with the notion that this is anything other than the creation of an actual, real-world warp bubble. “Hence the significance.”
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“While conducting analysis related to a DARPA-funded project to evaluate possible structure of the energy density present in a Casimir cavity as predicted by the dynamic vacuum model,” reads the actual findings published in the peer-reviewed European Physical Journal, “a micro/nano-scale structure has been discovered that predicts negative energy density distribution that closely matches requirements for the Alcubierre metric.”
Or put more simply, as White did in a recent email to The Debrief, “To my knowledge, this is the first paper in the peer-reviewed literature that proposes a realizable nano-structure that is predicted to manifest a real, albeit humble, warp bubble.”
This fortuitous finding, says White, not only confirms the predicted “toroidal” structure and negative energy aspects of a warp bubble, but also resulted in potential pathways he and other researchers can follow when trying to design, and one day actually construct, a real-world warp-capable spacecraft.
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“This is a potential structure we can propose to the community that one could build that will generate a negative vacuum energy density distribution that is very similar to what’s required for an Alcubierre space warp.”
When asked by The Debrief in December if his team has built and tested this proposed nano-scale warp craft design since that August announcement, or if they have plans to do so, White said, “We have not manufactured the one-micron sphere in the middle of a 4-micron cylinder.” However, he noted, if the LSI team were to undertake that at some point, “we’d probably use a nanoscribe GT 3D printer that prints at the nanometer scale.” In short, they have the means, now they just need the opportunity.
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White and his team have also outlined a second testable experiment that involves stringing a number of these Casimir-created warp bubbles in a chain-like configuration. This design, he said, would allow researchers to better understand the physics of the warp bubble structure already created, as well as how a craft may one day traverse actual space inside such a warp bubble.
“We could go through an examination of the optical properties as a result of these little, nano-scale warp bubbles,” explained White at the AIAA conference. “Aggregating a large number of them in a row, we can increase the magnitude of the effect so we can see (and study) it.”
Astrophysicists believe the heliosphere protects the planets within our solar system from powerful radiation emanating from supernovas, the final explosions of dying stars throughout the universe. They believe the heliosphere extends far beyond our solar system, but despite the massive buffer against cosmic radiation that the heliosphere provides Earth’s life-forms, no one really knows the shape of the heliosphere—or, for that matter, the size of it.
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Opher’s team has constructed some of the most compelling computer simulations of the heliosphere, based on models built on observable data and theoretical astrophysics.
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a paper published by Opher and collaborators in Astrophysical Journal reveals that neutral hydrogen particles streaming from outside our solar system most likely play a crucial role in the way our heliosphere takes shape.
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models predict that the heliosphere, traveling in tandem with our sun and encompassing our solar system, doesn’t appear to be stable. Other models of the heliosphere developed by other astrophysicists tend to depict the heliosphere as having a comet-like shape, with a jet—or a “tail”—streaming behind in its wake. In contrast, Opher’s model suggests the heliosphere is shaped more like a croissant or even a donut.
The reason for that? Neutral hydrogen particles, so-called because they have equal amounts of positive and negative charge that net no charge at all.
“They come streaming through the solar system,” Opher says. Using a computational model like a recipe to test the effect of ‘neutrals’ on the shape of the heliosphere, she “took one ingredient out of the cake—the neutrals—and noticed that the jets coming from the sun, shaping the heliosphere, become super stable. When I put them back in, things start bending, the center axis starts wiggling, and that means that something inside the heliospheric jets is becoming very unstable.”
Instability like that would theoretically cause disturbance in the solar winds and jets emanating from our sun, causing the heliosphere to split its shape—into a croissant-like form. Although astrophysicists haven’t yet developed ways to observe the actual shape of the heliosphere, Opher’s model suggests the presence of neutrals slamming into our solar system would make it impossible for the heliosphere to flow uniformly like a shooting comet. And one thing is for sure—neutrals are definitely pelting their way through space.
SpaceX employees received a nightmare email over the holiday weekend from CEO Elon Musk, warning them of a brewing crisis with its Raptor engine production that, if unsolved, could result in the company’s bankruptcy. The email, obtained by SpaceExplored, CNBC, and The Verge, urged employees to work over the weekend in a desperate attempt to increase production of the engine meant to power its next-generation Starship launch vehicle.
“Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago,” Musk reportedly wrote. “As we have dug into the issues following exiting prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this.”
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In his email, Musk advised workers to cut their holiday weekend short and called for an “all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster.” Summing up the problem, Musk warned the company could face bankruptcy if it could not get Starship flights running once every two weeks in 2022. If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because Musk has previously spoken publicly about times where both SpaceX and Tesla were on the verge of bankruptcy in their early years. More recently Musk claimed Tesla came within “single digits” of bankruptcy as recent as 2018.
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The alarming news comes near the close of what’s been an otherwise stellar year for SpaceX. In 11 months SpaceX managed to launch 25 successful Falcon 9 missions, sent a dozen astronauts to space and drew a roadmap to mass commercialization with its Starlink satellite internet service.
The ranks of orbit-capable spaceflight companies just grew ever so slightly. TechCrunchreports Astra has reached orbit for the first time when its Rocket 3 booster launched shortly after 1AM Eastern today (November 20th). The startup put a mass simulator into a 310-mile-high orbit as part of a demonstration for the US Air Force’s Rapid Agile Launch Initiative, which shows how private outfits could quickly and flexibly deliver Space Force payloads.
This success has been a long time in coming. Astra failed to reach orbit three times before, including a second attempt where the rocket reached space but didn’t have enough velocity for an orbital insertion.
Company chief Chris Kemp stressed on Twitter that Astra was “just getting started” despite the success. It’s a significant moment all the same. Companies and researchers wanting access to space currently don’t have many choices — they either have to hitch a ride on one of SpaceX’s not-so-common rideshare missions or turn to a handful of options like Rocket Lab. Astra hopes to produce its relatively modest rockets quickly enough that it delivers many small payloads in a timely fashion. That, in turn, might lower prices and make space more viable.
South Australian company Neumann Space has developed an “in-space electric propulsion system” that can be used in low Earth orbit to extend the missions of spacecraft, move satellites, or de-orbit them.
Now Neumann is working on a plan with three other companies to turn space junk into fuel for that propulsion system.
Japanese start-up Astroscale has already demonstrated how it can use satellites to capture bits of debris in space.
Nanorocks, in the US, is working on a plan using advanced robotics to store and cut up that debris while it is still in orbit. Another US company, Cislunar, is developing a space foundry to melt debris into metal rods.
And Neumann Space’s propulsion system can use those metal rods as fuel – their system ionises the metal which then creates thrust to move objects around orbit.
Chief executive officer Herve Astier said when Neumann was approached to be part of a supply chain to melt metal in space, he thought it was a futuristic plan, and would not be “as easy as it looks”.
“But they got a grant from Nasa so we built a prototype and it works,” he said.
“We did a live technology demonstration.“ One can grab a piece of debris, one can cut the debris open, one can melt the debris, and we can use that.”
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Australian researchers are also working on the problem.
Saber Astronautics has won a Nasa grant to develop a drag sail, which will launch from a spacecraft at the end of its life and drag it out of orbit.
Sydney’s Electro Optic Systems, working with the University of Canberra, has developed laser technology that can nudge junk away from potential collisions, or towards the atmosphere.
The Australian Institute of Machine Learning has a grant to improve detection and tracking of debris, and a new surveillance radar in Western Australia will help with that too.
Recycling the junk, instead of capturing it or destroying it, is another dimension again.
Astier says it is still futuristic, but now he can see that it’s possible.
In a test of its missile technology, Russia destroyed an old space satellite on Monday, littering Earth’s orbit with fragments and forcing astronauts on the International Space Station to temporarily take shelter.
The cloud of debris was generated when Cosmos 1408, a 2,200-kg defunct signals intelligence satellite launched in 1982, was blown up by a Russian anti-satellite missile. The US Department of State condemned the experiment for endangering “human spaceflight activities.”
“Earlier today, the Russian Federation recklessly conducted a destructive satellite test of a direct-ascent anti-satellite missile against one of its own satellites,” the department’s spokesperson Ned Price said at a press briefing on Monday. “The test has so far generated over 1,500 pieces of trackable orbital debris and hundreds of thousands of pieces of smaller orbital debris that now threaten the interests of all nations.
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The seven astronauts onboard the International Space Station were directed to close all hatches to external modules and climb into the Soyuz MS-19 and Crew Dragon capsules for safety. They remained there for about two hours, and will periodically close off and isolate sections of the ISS as the debris cloud crosses the station’s path every 90 minutes or so, according to NASA.
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Only last week, the ISS performed an orbital burn to avoid any chance of smashing into the passing remains of a Chinese satellite that was blown up by Beijing.
The cloud of shrapnel that was once Cosmos 1408 will disperse and continue to occupy low-Earth orbit, where it all risks crashing into other objects. Some 1,500 pieces will probably remain in the region for decades. Small flecks of debris traveling at orbital speeds can cause huge amounts of damage, potentially setting off a chain reaction where collisions create more amounts of junk that go on to smash into more objects and so on.
This nightmare scenario, known as the Kessler syndrome, would make low Earth orbit a hostile environment as debris levels increase. It’d be difficult to launch future spacecraft without weighty armor and all existing satellites and space stations would be in danger of getting pelted by the junk.
A U.S. space launch start-up has, for the first time, demonstrated a kinetic-based system that’s intended one day to put small spacecraft into orbit. The SpinLaunch concept, which feels ripped right from the classic age of science fiction, is based around a vacuum-sealed centrifuge that spins an unpowered projectile at several times the speed of sound before releasing it, hurling it into the upper atmosphere, and ultimately into orbit. In this way, the company, based in Long Beach, Calif., hopes to challenge traditional rockets for putting payloads into space.
The first test flight of a prototype — a so-called suborbital accelerator — took place at Spaceport America in New Mexico on October 22, but the company only announced the milestone yesterday.
The system uses a vacuum chamber within which a rotating arm brings a projectile up to very high speed without any drag penalty, before hurling it into the atmosphere “in less than a millisecond,” according to the company, as a port opens for a fraction of a second to release the projectile. A counterbalance spins in the opposite direction to prevent the system from becoming unbalanced. The vacuum seal stays in place until the projectile breaks through a membrane at the top of the launch tube.
SpinLaunch
The moment the suborbital projectile used in the initial test is propelled out of the suborbital accelerator.
While the concept is fairly simple, the challenge of making it work reliably and repeatedly is a significant one.
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The suborbital accelerator used in the first SpinLaunch test is a one-third scale version of the planned final hardware but is still 300 feet tall, Yaney explains.
The suborbital projectile used in the initial test was around 10 feet long and was accelerated to “many thousands of miles an hour,” using approximately 20 percent of the accelerator’s power capacity.
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The company has future plans to add a rocket motor inside the projectile to provide for orbital flights. In that version, the rocket booster will ignite only after it separates from the projectile/launch vehicle, as you can see in this video. According to previous reports, the projectile will coast, unpowered, for around a minute, before the rocket ignites at an altitude of approximately 200,000 feet.
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The idea behind SpinLaunch may indeed be “audacious and crazy,” but, if it can be fully matured, the technology would appear to offer major advantages over traditional space launch systems. Today, a rocket delivering a payload into orbit will consist primarily of fuel, by mass, reducing the size of the payload that can be carried. SpinLaunch, in contrast, envisages a much smaller rocket that carried a reduced fuel load, but a proportionally larger payload. The company currently forecasts its orbital vehicle delivering a payload of around 400 pounds into orbit.
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Once the orbital vehicle is ready, SpinLaunch says it will have to move away from Spaceport America and seek a coastal space launch facility that will be able to support “dozens of launches per day,” according to Yaney. The rapid tempo of launches without the use of large complex rockets, will, in turn, bring down the costs of putting cargoes into orbit. The company claims that the velocity boost imparted by the accelerator drive results in a four-times reduction in the fuel required to reach orbit and a ten-times reduction in cost.
this report from the New York Times about a “particularly unusual” star about 150 light-years away that’s orbited by three planets: What’s unusual is the inclinations of the outer two planets, HD 3167 c and d. Whereas in our solar system all the planets orbit in the same flat plane around the sun, these two are in polar orbits. That is, they go above and below their star’s poles, rather than around the equator as Earth and the other planets in our system do.
Now scientists have discovered the system is even weirder than they thought. Researchers measured the orbit of the innermost planet, HD 3167 b, for the first time — and it doesn’t match the other two. It instead orbits in the star’s flat plane, like planets in our solar system, and perpendicular to HD 3167 c and d. This star system is the first one known to act like this…
The unusual configuration of HD 3167 highlights just how weird and wonderful other stars and their planets can be. “It puts in perspective again what we think we know about the formation of planetary systems,” said Vincent Bourrier from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, who led the discovery published last month in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“Planets can evolve in really, really different ways.”
The astronauts who will depart the International Space Station on Sunday will be stuck using diapers on the way home because of their capsule’s broken toilet.
NASA astronaut Megan McArthur described the situation Friday as “suboptimal” but manageable. She and her three crewmates will spend 20 hours in their SpaceX capsule, from the time the hatches are closed until Monday morning’s planned splashdown.
“Spaceflight is full of lots of little challenges,” she said during a news conference from orbit. “This is just one more that we’ll encounter and take care of in our mission. So we’re not too worried about it.”
After a series of meetings Friday, mission managers decided to bring McArthur and the rest of her crew home before launching their replacements. That SpaceX launch already had been delayed more than a week by bad weather and an undisclosed medical issue involving one of the crew.
SpaceX is now targeting liftoff for Wednesday night at the earliest.
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who will return with McArthur, told reporters that the past six months have been intense up there. The astronauts conducted a series of spacewalks to upgrade the station’s power grid, endured inadvertent thruster firings by docked Russian vehicles that sent the station into brief spins, and hosted a private Russian film crew—a space station first.
They also had to deal with the toilet leak, pulling up panels in their SpaceX capsule and discovering pools of urine. The problem was first noted during SpaceX’s private flight in September, when a tube came unglued and spilled urine beneath the floorboards. SpaceX fixed the toilet on the capsule awaiting liftoff, but deemed the one in orbit unusable.
Engineers determined that the capsule had not been structurally compromised by the urine and was safe for the ride back. The astronauts will have to rely on what NASA describes as absorbent “undergarments.”
On the culinary side, the astronauts grew the first chile peppers in space—”a nice moral boost,” according to McArthur. They got to sample their harvest in the past week, adding pieces of the green and red peppers to tacos.
“They have a nice spiciness to them, a little bit of a lingering burn,” she said. “Some found that more troublesome than others.”
Also returning with McArthur and Pesquet: NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide. SpaceX launched them to the space station on April 23. Their capsule is certified for a maximum 210 days in space, and with Friday marking their 196th day aloft, NASA is eager to get them back as soon as possible.
One American and two Russians will remain on the space station following their departure. While it would be better if their replacements arrived first—in order to share tips on living in space—Kimbrough said the remaining NASA astronaut will fill in the newcomers.
Chinese astronauts began Saturday their six-month mission on China’s first permanent space station, after successfully docking aboard their spacecraft.
The astronauts, two men and a woman, were seen floating around the module before speaking via a live-streamed video.
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The space travelers’ Shenzhou-13 spacecraft was launched by a Long March-2F rocket at 12:23 a.m. Saturday and docked with the Tianhe core module of the space station at 6:56 a.m.
The three astronauts entered the station’s core module at about 10 a.m., the China Manned Space Agency said.
They are the second crew to move into China’s Tiangong space station, which was launched last April. The first crew stayed three months.
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The crew will do three spacewalks to install equipment in preparation for expanding the station, assess living conditions in the Tianhe module, and conduct experiments in space medicine and other fields.
China’s military-run space program plans to send multiple crews to the station over the next two years to make it fully functional.
When completed with the addition of two more sections—named Mengtian and Wentian—the station will weigh about 66 tons, much smaller than the International Space Station, which launched its first module in 1998 and weighs around 450 tons.
New Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rules say astronaut hopefuls must be part of the flight crew and make contributions to space flight safety.
That means Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson may not yet be astronauts in the eyes of the US government.
These are the first changes since the FAA wings programme began in 2004.
The Commercial Astronaut Wings programme updates were announced on Tuesday – the same day that Amazon’s Mr Bezos flew aboard a Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space.
To qualify as commercial astronauts, space-goers must travel 50 miles (80km) above the Earth’s surface, which both Mr Bezos and Mr Branson accomplished.
But altitude aside, the agency says would-be astronauts must have also “demonstrated activities during flight that were essential to public safety, or contributed to human space flight safety”.
What exactly counts as such is determined by FAA officials.
In a statement, the FAA said that these changes brought the wings scheme more in line with its role to protect public safety during commercial space flights.
Mr Bezos and the three other crew members who flew on Blue Origin’s spacecraft may have less claim to the coveted title. Ahead of the launch, Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said that “there’s really nothing for a crew member to do” on the autonomous vehicle.
The rocket ship launched the 70-year-old and his crew from Spaceport America in the New Mexico desert.
Tropical storms had delayed the launch before setting off at around 3.30pm.
Branson – known as ‘Astronaut 001’ – soared into space in his blue spacesuit aboard Virgin Space Ship Unity, a 62ft rocket-powered space plane nestled between the twin hulls of Mother Ship Eve, which propelled them to an altitude of around 55 miles.
Virgin Orbit had a successful first commercial launch, meaning there’s now officially another small satellite launch provider in operation with a track record of delivering payloads to space. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket took off from its carrier aircraft at around 11:45 AM EDT today, and the spacecraft had a successful series of engine fires and stage separations to make the trip to low Earth orbit.
On board, Virgin Orbit carried seven payloads, including the first-ever defense satellite for the Netherlands, as well as cubsats developed by the U.S. Department of Defense for its Rapid Agile Launch initiative. The initiative is seeking to test the viability of flying small spacecraft to space on relatively short notice on launch platforms with increased flexibility, which Virgin Orbit’s provides thanks to its ability to take off horizontally from more or less conventional runways.
Virgin Orbit also carried two Earth observation satellites for Polish startup SatRevolution, and it will be delivering more in future flights to help build out that company’s planned 14-spacecraft constellation.
China has launched three astronauts into orbit to begin occupation of the country’s new space station.
The three men – Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo – are to spend three months aboard the Tianhe module some 380km (236 miles) above the Earth.
It will be China’s longest crewed space mission to date and the first in nearly five years.
The crew successfully docked with the space station just over seven hours after the launch.
The moment of contact was met with applause from mission control in China.
Their Shenzhou-12 capsule took off atop its Long March 2F rocket on Thursday.
Lift-off from the Jiuquan satellite launch centre in the Gobi desert was at 09:22 Beijing time (01:22 GMT).
The launch and subsequent mission are another demonstration of China’s growing confidence and capability in the space domain.
In the past six months, the country has returned rock and soil samples to Earth from the surface of the Moon, and landed a six-wheeled robot on Mars – both highly complex and challenging endeavours.
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This 16.6m-long, 4.2m-wide Tianhe cylinder was launched in April.
It is the first and core component in what will eventually be a near 70-tonne orbiting outpost, comprising living quarters, science labs and even a Hubble-class telescope to view the cosmos.
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It has poured significant funding into its space efforts, and in 2019 became the first country to send an un-crewed rover to the far side of the Moon.
But it’s had to go at it alone in developing a space station, in part because it has been excluded from the International Space Station project.
The US, which leads that partnership (with Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan) will not co-operate with the Asian nation in orbit.
For its part, China says it is open to foreign involvement on its station. In the first instance, this means hosted scientific experiments. For example, the Shenzhou-12 crew will conduct cancer investigations that are led from Norway. And on the outside of the station, there is an Indian-developed telescopic spectrograph to study ultraviolet emissions coming from deep space, from the likes of exploded stars.
But, long term, there probably also will be visits to the station by non-Chinese nationals.
When does the Alpha challenge drop begin and how much funding is available?
The Alpha challenge drop is now open and closes for proposals on 4 August 2021. The value of individual contracts offered throughout the entire Space to Innovate Campaign will be from £125k to £400k, with durations of the contracts expected to be from 6 months to 18 months. The amount of funding available for the entire Space to Innovate Campaign is expected to be £2m, with the campaign ending on 31 March 2023.
The second Bravo challenge drop will address challenges focusing on ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) and SSA (Space Situational Awareness).
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Alpha drop challenges
Challenge 1: Visualisation tools to enable space operators to exploit information gathered from multiple data sources
For challenge 1, DASA is looking for novel solutions that could help to address issues such as:
enhancing the situational awareness around an object
understanding and monitoring manoeuvres and changes of objects in orbit
streamlining ingestion issues with multiple data sources and different naming conventions
using machine learning to enhance our understanding and interrogation of the data presented & make sense of results
visualising uncertainty in data
Challenge 2: Novel methods for characterising objects in space and their intent
For challenge 2, DASA is looking for novel solutions that could help to address issues such as:
detecting changes of state and predicting future changes
exploiting non-traditional sensor configurations including bi- or multi-static configurations and the repurposing of existing facilities
technologies that allow resolution of individual features on an observed satellite, inferring information regarding payloads
observing the interaction and cooperation between satellites in formation in low Earth orbit (LEO) or geostationary Earth orbit (GEO)
satellite overflight warning of Earth observation missions primarily in LEO
asset protection for high value satellites operating in GEO
The inevitable has occurred. A piece of space debris too small to be tracked has hit and damaged part of the International Space Station – namely, the Canadarm2 robotic arm.
The instrument is still operational, but the object punctured the thermal blanket and damaged the boom beneath. It’s a sobering reminder that the low-Earth orbit’s space junk problem is a ticking time bomb.
Obviously space agencies around the world are aware of the space debris problem. Over 23,000 pieces are being tracked in low-Earth orbit to help satellites and the ISS avoid collisions – but they’re all about the size of a softball or larger.
Anything below that size is too small to track, but travelling at orbital velocities can still do some significant damage, including punching right through metal plates.
An impact hole left in the Hubble Space Telescope antenna in 1997. (NASA)
Canadarm2 – formally known as the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), designed by the Canadian Space Agency – has been a fixture on the space station for 20 years. It’s a multi-jointed titanium robotic arm that can assist with maneuvering objects outside the ISS, including cargo shuttles, and performing station maintenance.
It’s unclear exactly when the impact occurred. The damage was first noticed on 12 May, during a routine inspection. NASA and the CSA worked together to take detailed images of and assess the damage.
“Despite the impact, results of the ongoing analysis indicate that the arm’s performance remains unaffected,” the CSA wrote in a blog post. “The damage is limited to a small section of the arm boom and thermal blanket. Canadarm2 is continuing to conduct its planned operations.”
Although the ISS seems to have gotten lucky this time, the space debris problem does seem to be increasing. Last year, the ISS had to perform emergency maneuvers three times in order to avoid collisions with space debris at its altitude of around 400 kilometers (250 miles).
Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered plane, carrying two pilots, soared into the upper atmosphere on its third mission to reach space Saturday morning.
The success cues up Virgin Galactic to begin launching paying customers within the next year as the company works to finish its testing campaign at its new headquarters in New Mexico.
Spaceplane VSS Unity reached an altitude of 55.45 miles, according to the company. The US government recognizes the 50-mile mark as the edge of space. The company tweeted Saturday morning that the spaceflight carried technology experiments for NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program.
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Recently, the company installed a new CEO, former Disney executive Michael Colglazier, and has been pledging to slowly ramp up to commercial operations over the next year or so. It’s also focused on constructing a new line of planes, called SpaceShipIII, and is angling to one day fly about 400 flights each year from its New Mexico spaceport.
The Tianwen-1 mission, China’s first interplanetary endeavor, reached the surface of the Red Planet Friday (May 14) at approximately 7:11 p.m. EDT (2311 GMT), though Chinese space officials have not yet confirmed the exact time and location of touchdown. Tianwen-1 (which translates to “Heavenly Questions”) arrived in Mars’ orbit in February after launching to the Red Planet on a Long March 5 rocket in July 2020.
After circling the Red Planet for more than three months, the Tianwen-1 lander, with the rover attached, separated from the orbiter to begin its plunge toward the planet’s surface. Once the lander and rover entered Mars’ atmosphere, the spacecraft endured a similar procedure to the “seven minutes of terror” that NASA’s Mars rovers have experienced when attempting soft landings on Mars.
An artist’s concept of China’s first Mars rover mission, Tianwen-1, at the Red Planet. (Image credit: CCTV/CNSA)
A heat shield protected the spacecraft during the fiery descent, after which the mission safely parachuted down to the Utopia Planitia region, a plain inside of an enormous impact basin in the planet’s northern hemisphere. Much like during NASA’s Perseverance rover landing, Tianwen-1’s landing platform fired some small, downward-facing rocket engines to slow down during the last few seconds of its descent.
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has not yet officially confirmed the successful landing, but it has been announced on social media by the state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN) and by researchers at Macau University of Science and Technology in China.
Succesful landing of #Tianwen1, on #Mars! Landing point: 109.7 E, 25.1 N, less than 40 km from target location in Utopia Planitia. More details expected later! pic.twitter.com/bMSvziscjiMay 15, 2021
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China’s Mars rover, called Zhurong after an ancient fire god in Chinese mythology, will part ways with the lander by driving down a foldable ramp. Once it has deployed, the rover is expected to spend at least 90 Mars days (or about 93 Earth days; a day on Mars lasts about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth) roving around on Mars to study the planet’s composition and look for signs of water ice. Utopia Planitia is believed to contain vast amounts of water ice beneath the surface. It’s also where NASA’s Viking 2 mission touched down in 1976.
An image of Utopia Planitia taken by the Tianwen-1 orbiter at an altitude of about 220 miles (350 kilometers). (Image credit: CNSA)
The six-wheeled rover, which is about the size of NASA’s twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, carries six scientific instruments on board, including two panoramic cameras, a ground-penetrating radar and a magnetic field detector. It also has a laser that it can use to zap rocks and study their composition, as well as a meteorological instrument to study the climate and weather on Mars.
Zhurong will work in tandem with the Tianwen-1 orbiter to study the Red Planet, and the orbiter will serve as a data relay station for communications between Zhurong and mission controllers on Earth. The orbiter is designed to last for at least one Mars year, or about 687 Earth days.
OSIRIS-REx, a NASA spacecraft tasked with collecting rocks and dust from a nearby asteroid named Bennu, is coming back home after almost five years away. The spacecraft, officially named Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer, officially fired its engines to begin its Earthward journey on May 10. Its return trip will take two and half years.
Bennu, the asteroid the spacecraft accosted, is a 1,600-foot-wide (500-meter) hunk of rock and ice located 200 million miles (321 million kilometers) from Earth. OSIRIS-REx snagged a handful of dust last October after a fairly dramatic encounter with the desolate little world. NASA was concerned that OSIRIS-REx wouldn’t be able to bring back a full sample due to leaks in the collection system. Thankfully, the samples now are headed to Earth, where they will be carefully examined by researchers.
China today launched the main module of its new space station into low Earth orbit. The ambitious project is set to be China’s answer to the International Space Station, which has never included China in its membership.
The 55-foot core module is called Tianhe, or Harmony of the Heavens. It blasted off from the Wenchang Launch Center in Hainan in the wee hours of Thursday morning, late Wednesday night for the United States. It launched aboard a 190-foot-tall Long March-5b Rocket, which has been the flagship launcher of the program since 2016. This is the first of 11 launches planned to see the finished product of the Chinese Space Station in operation by late 2022.
Should all go according to plan, Tianhe is the section of the station that will actually house Chinese astronauts, for stints of up to half a year. The next launches will send up two experimental modules, which will attach to either side of Tianhe, four cargo shipments, and four crewed missions, the first of which is slated for June. Tianhe has a total of five docking ports, which could be expanded to six.
The core module is the largest spacecraft yet developed by China, according to Chinese state media. The total station weight will be around 66 tons. While a far cry from the over 450 tons the ISS was at its completion in 1998, the main goals of the space station—conducting experiments in space and exploring how properties of space affect the results—doesn’t really require a ton of room.
Humans have explored and exploited near-earth space for more than six decades. More recently, the past two decades have seen the start of a New Space Era, characterized by more spacefaring nations and companies and a growing risk of collisions and conflict. Yet the basic treaties and mechanisms that were crafted 50 years ago to govern space activities have only marginally changed.
The calls for more progress on space governance and responsible space behavior are growing louder and coming from a larger group. To help address the gap between current space governance and future needs, the authors of this Perspective summarize the development of space governance and key problem areas, identify challenges and barriers to further progress, and, most importantly, offer recommended first steps on a trajectory toward responsible space behavior norms appropriate for the New Space Era. The authors used a review of relevant literature and official documents, expert workshops, and subject-matter expert interviews and discussions to identify these challenges, barriers, and potential solutions.
In 2008 there were 10k objects circling our planet. Now we have 20k. Especially with mr Musk sending up huge amounts of only partially working satellites in his Starlink program we need better agreements on how we use this incredibly congested area above us. For a visualisation of how bad it is, take a look at stuffin.space.
A band of dust that follows Venus along its entire orbital path has finally been viewed in full, thanks to a series of fortuitous maneuvers involving NASA’s Parker Solar Probe.
Astronomers suspected it was there, but now we know it’s real: a band of particles distributed along Venus’s orbital path around the Sun.
[…]
A paper detailing this discovery now appears in The Astrophysical Journal.
Combined images from WISPR, revealing Mercury, Venus, Earth and part of the Milky Way galaxy. The dust ring perfectly aligns with Venus’s orbit, as shown by the red dots.
Image: Stenborg et al.
To date, the Parker Solar Probe has completed seven orbits around the Sun. Equipped with its Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR)—a pair of visible light telescopes—the spacecraft has been analyzing the Sun’s corona and solar wind. That’s the probe’s primary focus, but mission planners had also planned on using WISPR to study the presumed dust ring.
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, the dust within this circumsolar ring is approximately 10% denser than the dust in outlying areas. The tiny particles that make up this ring are likely leftovers from the formation of the solar system and/or debris from colliding asteroids and disintegrating comets,
Stuff in Space is a realtime 3D map of objects in Earth orbit, visualized using WebGL.
The website updates daily with orbit data from Space-Track.org and uses the excellent satellite.js Javascript library to calculate satellite positions.
In recent days, NASA published three aerial photos taken by Ingenuity. These aren’t the first photos taken by the rover. It has previously sent back images of its shadows taken with its downward-facing navigation camera. And let’s not forget its watchful and proud surrogate parent, the Perseverance rover, which snaps magnificent photos of the helicopter in action. However, this latest set of images is special because they’re the first color photos of Mars taken by an aerial vehicle while it’s in the air.
Ingenuity’s First Aerial Color Image of Mars
At the time of this image, Ingenuity was 17 feet (5.2 meters) above the surface and pitching (moving the camera’s field of view upward) so the helicopter could begin its 7-foot (2-meter) translation to the west.
This is the first color image taken by Ingenuity, which is equipped with a high-resolution color camera that contains a 4208 x 3120-pixel sensor, on its April 22 test flight. According to NASA, Ingenuity was 17 feet (5.2 meters) above the surface. It was also moving its field of view upward as it prepared to move sideways for its 51.9-second flight.
“The image, as well as the inset showing a closeup of a portion of the tracks [of] the Perseverance Mars rover and Mars surface features, demonstrates the utility of scouting Martian terrain from an aerial perspective,” NASA explained in the photo’s description.
Speaking of Perseverance, you can check out the six-wheeled rover’s tracks in the winding parallel discolorations on the surface. Apparently, Perseverance itself isn’t too far away, but rather top center and unfortunately out of frame.
“Wright Brothers Field,” which is what NASA has named Ingenuity’s official launch zone, is in the vicinity of the helicopter’s shadow at the bottom center, the space agency said, and its point of takeoff is just below the image. Meanwhile, the black objects on the sides of the photo are Ingenuity’s landing pads. And in case this photo couldn’t get any better, you can see a small part of the horizon on the upper left and right corners.
Ingenuity’s Second Aerial Color Image of Mars
This is the second color image taken by NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter.
Besides stating that this photo was also taken at an altitude of 17 feet (5.2 meters), NASA didn’t have much to say. Nonetheless, the space agency noted that you could see tracks made by Perseverance here as well.
Ingenuity’s Third Aerial Color Image of Mars
This is the third color image taken by NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter.
NASA was short on words for this photo, too, but helpfully reminded us that Perseverance’s tracks can be seen in this case if you’re looking. (I was). I see the tracks at the bottom of the photo, but the rest of the picture is a lot more captivating to me.
The drone, called Ingenuity, was airborne for less than a minute, but Nasa is celebrating what represents the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another world.
Confirmation came via a satellite at Mars which relayed the chopper’s data back to Earth.
The space agency is promising more adventurous flights in the days ahead.
Ingenuity will be commanded to fly higher and further as engineers seek to test the limits of the technology.
The rotorcraft was carried to Mars in the belly of Nasa’s Perseverance Rover, which touched down in Jezero Crater on the Red Planet in February.
“We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet,” said a delighted MiMi Aung, project manager for Ingenuity at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
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Ingenuity even carries a small swatch of fabric from one of the wings of Flyer 1, the aircraft that made that historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, more than 117 years ago.
image copyrightNASA/JPL-CALTECH
image captionThe chopper took this image of its own shadow on the ground
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The demonstration saw the Mars-copter rise to about 3m, hover, swivel and then land. In all, it managed almost 40 seconds of flight, from take-off to landing.
Getting airborne on the Red Planet is not easy. The atmosphere is very thin, just 1% of the density here at Earth. This gives the blades on a rotorcraft very little to bite into to gain lift.
There’s help from the lower gravity at Mars, but still – it takes a lot of work to get up off the ground
Ingenuity was therefore made extremely light and given the power (a peak power of 350 watts) to turn those blades extremely fast – at over 2,500 revolutions per minute for this particular flight.
Control was autonomous. The distance to Mars – currently just under 300 million km – means radio signals take minutes to traverse the intervening space. Flying by joystick is simply out of the question.
[…]
Ingenuity has two cameras onboard. A black-and-white camera that points down to the ground, which is used for navigation, and a high-resolution colour camera that looks out to the horizon.
A sample navigation image sent back to Earth revealed the helicopter’s shadow on the floor of the crater as it came back in to land. Satellites will send home more pictures of the flight over the next day. There was only sufficient bandwidth in the orbiters’ first overflight to return a short snatch of video from Perseverance, which was watching and snapping away from a distance of 65m. Longer sequences should become available in due course.
image copyrightNasa
image captionA selfie of the Ingenuity helicopter and the Perseverance rover
Nasa has announced that the “airstrip” in Jezero where Perseverance dropped off Ingenuity for its demonstration will henceforth be known as the “Wright Brothers Field”.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) – the United Nations’ civil aviation agency – has also presented the Nasa and the US Federal Aviation Administration with an official ICAO designator: IGY, call-sign INGENUITY.
A successful maiden outing means that a further four flights will be attempted over the coming days, each one taking the helicopter further afield.
An impact hole left in the Hubble Space Telescope antenna in 1997. (NASA)
