After it launched on Tuesday and nailed a series of maneuvers, China’s future crewed spacecraft has made a successful desert touchdown. Built by China’s main space contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), the uncrewed prototype will ferry astronauts to China’s future space station and, eventually, the moon.

The crewed capsule (which doesn’t have a name yet), was lofted into an 5,000-mile-high orbit by China’s Long March 5B carrier rocket. During the mission, it underwent deep space trials similar to Orion’s 2014 mission, completing seven orbital adjustment maneuvers. Early this morning, the craft completed a deorbit burn, followed by separation of the crew and service modules. The three chutes deployed shortly after re-entry and it touched down in the Dongfeng desert area at 1:49 AM ET.

Designed to carry crews of up to six astronauts, the craft tested weighed 14 tons and is designed to be the primary transport to China’s future space station. CASC and the CNSA, China’s space agency, are also working on a 21.6-ton variant for deep space, designed to be used in future manned lunar missions. However, the CNSA has yet to nail down details for the larger craft and its moon missions are at least a decade away.

On top of doing orbital maneuvers, the prototype craft (with no life-support systems) conducted experiments on 3D printing of composite materials, high-definition image transmission and more. The mission was largely a success, apart from the malfunction of a cargo return capsule equipped with an inflatable heat shield.

Source: China’s next-generation crew spacecraft nails its test mission landing | Engadget

Russian rocket tanks used to launch a radio telescope have broken up into 65 chunks, littering Earth’s orbit with debris.

The tanks, dumped from the Fregat-SB upper stage of the Zenit-3SLBF rocket that took the Spektr-R radio telescope into orbit in 2011, disintegrated on Friday, Roscosmos said on Sunday. “According to reports, the destruction occurred on May 8, 2020 in the time interval 08:00 – 09:00 Moscow time over the Indian Ocean,” a statement reads.

It’s not clear what caused the break-up. The 18th Space Control Squadron (18 SPCS) of the US Air Force went public with details of the disintegration on Saturday, and noted there was no evidence it was caused by a collision

[…]

Roscosmos said it is counting up the exact number of fragments from the, well, rapid self-disassembly of the tank block. There are said to be at least 65 pieces whizzing round at thousands of miles per hour in an orbit with an apogee height of 3,606 kilometres, perigee height of 422 kilometres, and orbital inclination of 51.45 degrees.

As for the Spektr-R: it was declared defunct in early 2019 after going silent. At the time, it was Russia’s only space telescope publicly known to be operational.

Source: Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket’s tanks just disintegrated in Earth’s orbit

This simulator will familiarize you with the controls of the actual interface used by NASA Astronauts to manually pilot the SpaceX Dragon 2 vehicle to the International Space Station.

Source: SPACEX – ISS Docking Simulator

Turns out it’s quite easy in a sim 😀

The giant hexagon-shaped storm raging atop Saturn’s North Pole is made out of frozen hydrocarbon ice suspended in seven hazy layers stacked on top of one another, according to a study published in Nature Communications on Friday.

The swirling six-sided wonder, which El Reg once dubbed the hexacane, has perplexed scientists since its discovery in the 1980s by NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft. The strange vortex has sides measuring about 14,500 kilometres long – more than the diameter of Earth – and remains intact despite winds that reach 400 kilometres per hour rippling through the ringed giant.

Now, a group of astronomers have analysed images taken from NASA’s Cassini probe to reveal the hexacane’s tower-like structure in more detail.

“The Cassini images have enabled us to discover that, just as if a sandwich had been formed, the hexagon has a multi-layered system of at least seven mists that extend from the summit of its clouds to an altitude of more than 300 km above them,” said Agustín Sánchez-Lavega, a physics professor at the University of Basque Country, Spain, who led the study. “Other cold worlds, such as Saturn’s satellite Titan or the dwarf planet Pluto, also have layers of hazes, but not in such numbers nor as regularly spaced out”.

A picture of the different layers in Saturn’s hexagonal storm
Click to enlarge … Image Credit: GCP/UPV/EHU/NASA/ESA

Each layer is estimated to be seven to 18 kilometres thick, and is made up of tiny micrometre-sized frozen hydrocarbon crystals, including propyne, propane, and diacetylene, and possibly acetylene and benzene at the top. Each particle is estimated to have a diameter of 0.07 to 1.4 micrometres. The layers appear hazy as the concentration of particles suspended in each one varies.

Source: There’s a world out there with a hexagon vortex over its pole packed with hydrocarbon ice crystals. That planet is Saturn • The Register

The pieces are finally starting to come together for Virgin Galactic’s space tourism — the company has flown SpaceShipTwo from Spaceport America for the first time. It was just a glide test from 50,000 feet up, but the flight let the spaceport fulfill its intended purpose and gave pilots familiarity with the New Mexico airspace. This will also help Virgin compare performance against similar maneuvers from earlier tests.

And before you ask: yes, Virgin took steps to keep crews safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reworked operational elements to keep people apart, and required “universal” mask usage.

There are still more test flights in the pipeline. Even so, this nudges Virgin considerably closer to its goal of taking paying passengers into space. The company is certainly under pressure to get things up and running quickly. Its financial situation has been rough for a while, and it won’t turn around until customers get what they’re paying for.

Source: Virgin Galactic’s spaceship flies from its new home base for the first time | Engadget

There are more than 2,000 active satellites orbiting Earth. At the end of their useful lives, many will simply burn up as they reenter the atmosphere. But some will continue circling as “zombie” satellites — neither alive nor quite dead.

“Most zombie satellites are satellites that are no longer under human control, or have failed to some degree,” says Scott Tilley.

Tilley, an amateur radio operator living in Canada, has a passion for hunting them down.

The Two-Way

Amateur Astronomer Finds NASA Satellite Long Given Up For Dead

In 2018, he found a signal from a NASA probe called IMAGE that the space agency had lost track of in 2005. With Tilley’s help, NASA was able to reestablish contact.

But he has tracked down zombies even older than IMAGE.

“The oldest one I’ve seen is Transit 5B-5. And it launched in 1965,” he says, referring to a nuclear-powered U.S. Navy navigation satellite that still circles the Earth in a polar orbit, long forgotten by all but a few amateurs interested in hearing it “sing” as it passes overhead.

Recently, Tilley got interested in a communications satellite he thought might still be alive — or at least among the living dead. LES-5, built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, was launched in 1967.

By scouring the Internet, he found a paper describing the radio frequency that LES-5, an experimental military UHF communications satellite, should be operating on — if it was still alive. So he decided to have a look.

“This required the building of an antenna, erecting a new structure to support it. Pre-amps, filters, stuff that takes time to gather and put all together,” he says.

“When you have a family and a busy business, you don’t really have a lot of time for that,” he says.

But then came the COVID-19 pandemic.

Well folks, here’s what appears to be a new ZOMBIE SAT!

LES-5 [2866, 1967-066E] in a GEO graveyard orbit.

Confirmation will occur at ~0445 UTC this evening when the satellite should pass through eclipse.

If so this is definitely the oldest emitting GEOsat I know of. pic.twitter.com/QFSRb5bT1I

— Scott Tilley (@coastal8049) March 25, 2020

British Columbia, where Tilley lives, was on lockdown. Like many of us, suddenly Tilley had time on his hands. He used it to look for LES-5, and on March 24, he hit the ham radio equivalent of pay dirt.

He’s been making additional measurements ever since.

“The reason this one is kind of intriguing is its telemetry beacon is still operating,” Tilley says.

In other words, says Tilley, even though the satellite was supposed to shut down in 1972, it’s still going. As long as the solar panels are in the sun, the satellite’s radio continues to operate. Tilley thinks it may even be possible to send commands to the satellite.

The MIT lab that built LES-5 still does a lot of work on classified projects for the military. NPR contacted its news office to ask if someone could say more about LES-5 and whether it really could still receive commands.

But after repeated requests, Lincoln Laboratory finally answered with a “no comment.”

It seems that even a 50-year-old zombie satellite might still have secrets.

Source: ‘Zombie’ Satellite Found By Amateur Radio Operator On COVID-19 Lockdown : NPR

The colors divide the map into geologic units; scientists divide the Moon’s geologic history into a different eras, so a color represents the kind of rock and its era. For example, yellow on the map represents Copernican craters—the rim, wall, and floor of bright material from the Moon’s Copernican period, which lasted from a billion years ago to today. Shading represents topographical information.

Lunar maps have various uses to scientists. Skinner explained that they can show hazards as well as resources and where we might be able to develop the Moon, though mapping an extraterrestrial body to that level of detail is far off. Given this map’s scale, its main purpose is to serve as a summary of what scientists know about the Moon today. The map is available in a GIS (geographical information system) format that allows researchers to overlay their own scientific results on top of it in order to better put discoveries into context.

This isn’t the final version of the map, Skinner told Gizmodo. As scientists learn more about the Moon, we’ll start to see more tweaks. But ultimately, this map is a high-level overview, and higher-resolution maps will be needed to elucidate smaller sections of the Moon.

The team hopes their map will reach the broadest audience possible, and to be honest, I think it looks good enough to be framed on a wall. You can download the full map here.

Source: Incredible New Map of Moon Shows Its Every Nook and Cranny

Space.com calls it “the first commercial satellite servicing mission.” But more specifically, it’s being called “the first in-orbit rendezvous and docking of two commercial satellites” in a statement from Northrop Grumman Space Systems, which also notes their “subsequent repositioning of the two-spacecraft stack.” And it was all done using robotics floating 36,000km (22,369 miles) above the Earth.

Space.com describes the historic servicing of Intelsat 901 communications satellite (also known IS-901): The satellite, which launched in 2001, had been running low on fuel needed to maintain its correct orbit. But rather than launch a replacement internet satellite, its owner, Intelsat, hired Northrop Grumman to conduct a first-of-its-kind mission. That project sent another satellite, called Mission Extension Vehicle 1 (MEV-1) to connect to IS-901 in February and take responsibility for keeping the internet satellite in the proper location to do its job…

MEV-1 will now spend five years attached to IS-901 to extend that satellite’s tenure. After the contract ends, MEV-1 will steer the old satellite to a safe orbit, detach, and join up with a different satellite to provide the same services. MEV-1 should be able to partner with satellites for a total of 15 years, according to a previous Northrop Grumman statement.

Northrop Grumman is planning to launch a second mission-extension vehicle later this year, which will also aid an Intelsat satellite.
Long-time Slashdot reader mi tipped us off to the story, which included a number of firsts. “Prior to this, no two commercial spacecraft had ever docked in orbit before,” Ars Technica writes.

CNBC notes it also resulted in “one-of-a-kind images“, since a geosynchronous satellite had never even been photographed before by another spacecraft.

Source: For the First Time, a Robot Repaired a Satellite in Orbit – Slashdot

MEV-1 Mission w-Images_E5 from Ars Technica on Vimeo.

The water ice and other lunar resources that will help the United States establish a long-term human presence on the moon are there for the taking, the White House believes.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order today (April 6) establishing U.S. policy on the exploitation of off-Earth resources. That policy stresses that the current regulatory regime — notably, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — allows the use of such resources.

This view has long held sway in U.S. government circles. For example, the United States, like the other major spacefaring nations, has not signed the 1979 Moon Treaty, which stipulates that non-scientific use of space resources be governed by an international regulatory framework. And in 2015, Congress passed a law explicitly allowing American companies and citizens to use moon and asteroid resources.

The new executive order makes things even more official, stressing that the United States does not view space as a “global commons” and sees a clear path to off-Earth mining, without the need for further international treaty-level agreements.

The executive order, called “Encouraging International Support for the Recovery and Use of Space Resources,” has been in the works for about a year, a senior administration official said during a teleconference with reporters today. The order was prompted, at least in part, by a desire to clarify the United States’ position as it negotiates with international partners to help advance NASA’s Artemis program for crewed lunar exploration, the official added. (Engagement with international partners remains important, the official said.)

Artemis aims to land two astronauts on the moon in 2024 and to establish a sustainable human presence on and around Earth’s nearest neighbor by 2028. Lunar resources, especially the water ice thought to be plentiful on the permanently shadowed floors of polar craters, are key to Artemis’ grand ambitions, NASA officials have said.

The moon is not the final destination for these ambitions, by the way. Artemis is designed to help NASA and its partners learn how to support astronauts in deep space for long stretches, lessons that will be key to putting boots on Mars, which NASA wants to do in the 2030s.

“As America prepares to return humans to the moon and journey on to Mars, this executive order establishes U.S. policy toward the recovery and use of space resources, such as water and certain minerals, in order to encourage the commercial development of space,” Scott Pace, deputy assistant to the president and executive secretary of the U.S. National Space Council, said in a statement today.

President Trump has shown considerable interest in shaping U.S. space policy. In December 2017, for example, he signed Space Policy Directive-1, which laid the groundwork for the Artemis campaign. Two other directives have aimed to streamline commercial space regulation and the protocols for space traffic control. And Space Policy Directive-4, which the president signed in February 2019, called for the creation of the Space Force, the first new U.S. military branch since the Air Force was stood up in 1947.

Source: Trump signs executive order to support moon mining, tap asteroid resources | Space

Last year, Rocket Lab announced that it would attempt to reuse the first stage of its Electron rocket. The company’s goal is to catch the stage as it falls back towards the ocean by plucking it out of mid-air with a helicopter. While that’s ambitious, a video released today shows that Rocket Lab may not be too far off. The clip shows one helicopter dropping an Electron test stage and another hooking the stage’s parachute with a grappling hook and towing it back to land.

Rocket Lab pulled off this stunt in early March. One helicopter dropped the Electron test stage over open ocean in New Zealand. A second helicopter caught it, on the first attempt, at around 5,000 feet.

Next, Rocket Lab will attempt to recover a full Electron first stage following a launch. It won’t pull that from the air but will retrieve the rocket stage after it lands in the ocean. A parachute will help slow its descent, and like previous versions, it will include instrumentation to “inform future recovery efforts.” That mission is planned for late 2020.

Of course, catching a rocket stage after an actual launch is a lot different than catching one that’s dropped neatly by a helicopter. But the feat is a key milestone, as Rocket Lab’s plans to reuse the rockets depend on this recovery method. If it’s successful, Rocket Lab will be able to lower costs, and in theory, that may lead to more launches.

Source: Rocket Lab proves it can recover a rocket in mid-air | Engadget

This week, SpaceX workers in South Texas loaded the third full-scale Starship prototype—SN3—onto a test stand ​at the company’s Boca Chica launch site. On Wednesday night, they pressure-tested the vehicle at ambient temperature with nitrogen, and SN3 performed fine.

On Thursday night SpaceX began cryo-testing the vehicle, which means it was loaded again with nitrogen, but this time it was chilled to flight-like temperatures and put under flight-like pressures. Unfortunately, a little after 2am local time, SN3 failed and began to collapse on top of itself. It appeared as if the vehicle may have lost pressurization and become top-heavy.

Shortly after the failure, SpaceX’s founder and chief engineer, Elon Musk, said on Twitter, “We will see what data review says in the morning, but this may have been a test configuration mistake.” A testing issue would be good in the sense that it means the vehicle itself performed well, and the problem can be more easily addressed.

This is the third time a Starship has failed during these proof tests that precede engine tests and, potentially flight tests. Multiple sources indicated that had these preliminary tests succeeded, SN3 would have attempted a 150-meter flight test as early as next Tuesday.

Here’s a recap of SpaceX’s efforts to test full-size Starships to date:

• Starship Mk1: Construction began in December, 2018. Failed during pressure test in November, 2019.
• Starship SN1: Construction began in October, 2019. Failed during a pressure test on Feb. 28.
• Starship SN2: Construction began in Feb., 2020. After SN1 failure, was converted into a test bed for thrust puck at base of rocket. Passed test on March 8, and was retired.
• Starship SN3: Construction began in March, 2020. Cryogenic test failure on April 3.
• Starship SN4: Construction began in March, 2020. Testing begins later this month?

This failure has to be a disappointment in that the prototype rocket failed for a third time before getting to Raptor engine tests. And after the SN1 failure, Musk said he told his engineers, “In the future, you treat that rocket like it’s your baby, and you do not send it to the test site unless you think your baby’s going to be OK.”

This baby was not OK.

Source: SpaceX loses its third Starship prototype during a cryogenic test | Ars Technica

Our galaxy is a whole lot bigger than it looks. New work finds that the Milky Way stretches nearly 2 million light-years across, more than 15 times wider than its luminous spiral disk. The number could lead to a better estimate of how massive the galaxy is and how many other galaxies orbit it.

Astronomers have long known that the brightest part of the Milky Way, the pancake-shaped disk of stars that houses the sun, is some 120,000 light-years across (SN: 8/1/19). Beyond this stellar disk is a disk of gas. A vast halo of dark matter, presumably full of invisible particles, engulfs both disks and stretches far beyond them (SN: 10/25/16). But because the dark halo emits no light, its diameter is hard to measure.

Now, Alis Deason, an astrophysicist at Durham University in England, and her colleagues have used nearby galaxies to locate the Milky Way’s edge. The precise diameter is 1.9 million light-years, give or take 0.4 million light-years, the team reports February 21 in a paper posted at arXiv.org.

To put that size into perspective, imagine a map in which the distance between the sun and the Earth is just one inch. If the Milky Way’s heart were at the center of the Earth, the galaxy’s edge would be four times farther away than the moon actually is.

To find the Milky Way’s edge, Deason’s team conducted computer simulations of how giant galaxies like the Milky Way form. In particular, the scientists sought cases where two giant galaxies arose side by side, like the Milky Way and Andromeda, our nearest giant neighbor, because each galaxy’s gravity tugs on the other (SN: 5/12/15). The simulations showed that just beyond the edge of a giant galaxy’s dark halo, the velocities of small nearby galaxies drop sharply (SN: 3/11/15).

Using existing telescope observations, Deason and her colleagues found a similar plunge in the speeds of small galaxies near the Milky Way. This occurred at a distance of about 950,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s center, marking the galaxy’s edge, the scientists say. The edge is 35 times farther from the galactic center than the sun is.

Although dark matter makes up most of the Milky Way’s mass, the simulations reveal that stars should also exist at these far-out distances. “Both have a well-defined edge,” Deason says. “The edge of the stars is very sharp, almost like the stars just stop at a particular radius.”

Source: Astronomers have found the edge of the Milky Way at last | Science News

Comet ATLAS (C2019 Y4) is plunging toward the sun, and if it doesn’t fly apart it could soon become one of the brightest comets in years.

“Comet ATLAS continues to brighten much faster than expected,” says Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. “Some predictions for its peak brightness now border on the absurd.”

Above: Comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4) photographed on March 6, 2020, by Austrian astrophotographer Michael Jäger. The comet’s diffuse green atmosphere is about twice as wide as the planet Jupiter.

The comet was discovered in December 2019 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Hawaii. Astronomers quickly realized it might be special. On May 31, 2020, Comet ATLAS will pass deep inside the orbit of Mercury only 0.25 AU from the sun. If it can survive the blast furnace of solar heating, it could put on a good show.

However, no one expected the show to start this soon. More than 2 months before perihelion (closest approach to the sun), Comet ATLAS is already “heating up.” The worldwide Comet Observation Database shows it jumping from magnitude +17 in early February to +8 in mid-March–a 4000-fold increase in brightness. It could become visible to the naked eye in early April.

“Right now the comet is releasing huge amounts of its frozen volatiles (gases),” says Battams. “That’s why it’s brightening so fast.”

Can ATLAS sustain this crazy pace? If it has a big nucleus with large stores of frozen gas, then yes; we could get a very bright comet. Otherwise, Comet ATLAS might “run out of gas”, crumbling and fading as it approaches the sun.

Current best estimates of the comet’s peak brightness in May range from magnitude +1 to -5. If Comet ATLAS hits the high end of that range, a bit brighter than Venus, it could become visible in broad daylight.

Source: Comet ATLAS is Brightening Faster than Expected | Spaceweather.com

Since 1976, Spinoff has annually profiled an average of 50 commercial technologies with origins in NASA missions and research. Issues of Spinoff published since 1996 can be read online in HTML or downloaded in PDF. Scanned copies of Spinoff are available in PDF for issues published between 1976 and 1995.

Spinoff 2020

Click here to read online (HTML)

Download a copy of Spinoff 2020 (PDF)

Spinoff 2020 Summary Brochure (PDF)

Spinoff 2020 PowerPoint Presentation (PPT)

Source: NASA Spinoff 2020

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket aborted a planned launch on Sunday morning at the last second due to an engine power issue. The event produced confusion at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where countdown appeared to be proceeding normally. However, the rocket stayed where it was.

In a video published by SpaceX, you can hear a commentator begin to count down. At this moment, the rocket still looks like it’s getting ready to take off, and no one seems to suspect that something is wrong. Once the commentator gets to zero and says liftoff, they immediately add, “Disregard. We have an abort.”

According to Space.com, apparently, the Falcon 9’s onboard computer aborted the launch just before liftoff because it detected an issue with one of the rocket’s nine Merlin 1D engines. Michael Andrews, a supply chain supervisor at SpaceX, said in the launch commentary that they had a “condition regarding engine power that caused us to abort today’s launch.”

Andrews added that the vehicle appeared to be in good health, but the company would no longer try to launch today.

SpaceX itself weighed in on the matter on Twitter shortly after.

“Standing down today; standard auto-abort triggered due to out of family data during engine power check,” SpaceX said. “Will announce next launch date opportunity once confirmed on the Range.”

SpaceX was planning to launch a batch of 60 new Starlink satellites, part of an initiative to provide low-cost Internet to remote locations worldwide where it’s hard to obtain online services. CEO Elon Musk has said that the Starlink constellation system will be available once 400 satellites are in orbit and activated. He claims that it will achieve “significant operational capacity” with 800 satellites.

Today’s launch was significant because it would have been the first Falcon 9 rocket booster, or first stage, to launch five times. The first time this booster launched was in 2018, per Ars Technica. SpaceX had also announced that it would be reusing the rocket’s payload fairing. Overall, this meant that the only part of this Falcon 9 rocket that was not being reused was the second stage.

SpaceX aims to reduce the price of rocket launches by reusing parts of its rockets. There isn’t any word yet on when the company will try to launch this Falcon 9 rocket again. Even though it’s a small bummer, it’s better safe than sorry when you’re launching an expensive rocket, even if you do plan to reuse it. Better luck next time.

Source: Watch This SpaceX Rocket Abort Its Launch at the Last Second

Astronomers have discovered 139 minor planets lurking at the edge of the Solar System after examining a dataset collected to study dark energy in the universe.

Small worlds that circle our Sun in orbits further out than Neptune are labelled trans-Neptunian objects (TNO), with one being the relegated-planet Pluto. Eggheads, led by those at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in the US, identified 316 TNOs in the dark-energy dataset, of which 139 bodies were previously unknown. That’s according to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal this week.

Specifically, the dataset features images snapped by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a project that used the Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to study the role of dark energy in the universe’s rate of expansion. The pictures were taken of the southern hemisphere for six years, from 2013 to 2019.

“The number of TNOs you can find depends on how much of the sky you look at and what’s the faintest thing you can find,” said Gary Bernstein, co-author of the study and a Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at UPenn.

Unlike stars or supernovas, TNOs don’t emit a lot of light. The trick to spotting TNOs among all the other stuff in the images is to look for things that move. TNOs orbit the Sun whereas stars and distant galaxies appear more fixed. “Dedicated TNO surveys have a way of seeing the object move, and it’s easy to track them down,” said Pedro Bernardinelli, first author of the paper and a graduate student at UPenn. “One of the key things we did in this paper was figure out a way to recover those movements.”

The academics began with seven billion objects in the DES dataset. After they removed static objects – things that appeared in the same spot on multiple nights – they were left with a list of 22 million transient objects.

Each one looks like a dot, and the goal was to track each dot as it traveled across the sky to see if it really was an individual object. That narrowed the list down to 400 candidates that warranted further study and verification.

“We have this list of candidates, and then we have to make sure that our candidates are actually real things,” Bernardinelli said. They then realized 316 of the 400 candidates were TNOs – and 139 of that 316 were previously undetected minor worlds.

The boffins only rifled through four years’ worth of data, and they believe that, by using their method, many more TNOs can be uncovered in the future.

Source: We’re not saying Earth is doomed… but 139 minor planets were spotted at the outer reaches of our Solar System. Just an FYI, that’s all • The Register

A star that pulsates on just one side has been discovered in the Milky Way about 1500 light years from Earth. It is the first of its kind to be found and scientists expect to find many more similar systems as technology to listen inside the beating hearts of stars improves.

[…]

Stars that pulsate have been known in astronomy for a long time. Our own Sun dances to its own rhythms. These rhythmic pulsations of the stellar surface occur in young and in old stars, and can have long or short periods, a wide range of strengths and different causes.

There is however one thing that all these stars had thus far in common: the oscillations were always visible on all sides of the star. Now an international team, including researchers from the University of Sydney, has discovered a star that oscillates largely over one hemisphere.

The scientists have identified the cause of the unusual single-sided pulsation: the star is located in a binary star system with a red dwarf. Its close companion distorts the oscillations with its gravitational pull. The clue that led to its discovery came from citizen scientists poring over public data from NASA’s TESS satellite, which is hunting for planets around distant stars.

The orbital period of the binary system, at less than two days, is so short that the larger star is being distorted into a tear-drop shape by the gravitational pull of the companion.

[…]

To their surprise the team observed that the strength of the pulsations depended on the aspect angle under which the star was observed, and the corresponding orientation of the star within the binary. This means the pulsation strength varies with the same period as that of the binary.

“As the binary stars orbit each other we see different parts of the pulsating star,” said Dr. David Jones at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias and co-author of the study. “Sometimes we see the side that points towards the companion star, and sometimes we see the outer face.”

This is how the astronomers could be certain that the pulsations were only found on one side of the star, with the tiny fluctuations in brightness always appearing in their observations when the same hemisphere of the star was pointed towards the telescope.

Source: New type of pulsating star discovered

After pondering the totality of issues that arose during a December test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft this week, NASA chief of human spaceflight Doug Loverro said Friday that he decided to escalate the incident.

So he designated Starliner’s uncrewed mission, during which the spacecraft flew a shortened profile and did not attempt to dock with the International Space Station, as a “high visibility close call.” This relatively rare designation for NASA’s human spaceflight program falls short of “loss of mission” but is nonetheless fairly rare. It was last used by NASA after a spacewalk in 2013 when water began to dangerously pool in the helmet of astronaut Luca Parmitano.

Further Reading

Boeing acknowledges “gaps” in its Starliner software testing

Asked to explain during a conference call with reporters why he did this, Loverro said, “We could have lost a spacecraft twice during this mission.”

In this, Loverro referred to two software errors that occurred during the two-day flight. The first problem occurred when Starliner captured the wrong “mission elapsed time” from its Atlas V launch vehicle—it was supposed to pick up this time during the terminal phase of the countdown, but instead it grabbed data 11 hours off of the correct time. This led to a delayed push to reach orbit. The second error, caught and fixed just a few hours before the vehicle returned to Earth through the atmosphere, was due to a software mapping error that would have caused thrusters on Starliner’s service module to fire in the wrong manner.

NASA and Boeing officials held Friday’s teleconference to announce the conclusion of a report from an Independent Review Team established after December’s flight. These reviewers made 60 recommendations to NASA and Boeing for corrective actions that ranged from fixing these software issues to ferreting out others that may still exist in the spacecraft’s flight code. The investigative team is also still looking into an issue that led to multiple dropouts in communications between the ground and spacecraft during key moments of the flight.

Corrective action plan

By declaring the Starliner mishap a “close call,” Loverro also formally opened a process during which the space agency’s Safety Office will investigate the organization elements that may have led to the incident—likely focusing on why NASA did not detect the errors in Starliner’s flight software.

Loverro said no decisions are close to being made on when Starliner will return to flight or whether Boeing will have to fly another uncrewed demonstration test flight before NASA astronauts fly on Starliner. The next step, he said, is for Boeing to prepare a “corrective action plan” to implement the review team’s findings, and that will include a schedule. NASA will evaluate that plan and then it may be in a position to decide whether another test flight is needed.

Source: NASA declares Starliner mishap a “high visibility close call” | Ars Technica

The Starship SN1 prototype was undergoing pressure testing at the Musketeers’ factory at Boca Chica in Texas, USA, by filling its tanks with liquid nitrogen. The base of the rocket appears to have ruptured, sending the structure crashing to the ground, which you can see here:

SpaceX supremo Elon Musk himself seemed sanguine about the whole affair, taking to Twitter to say: “It’s fine, we’ll just buff it out. Where’s Flextape when you need it!?”

It’s entirely possible this was a scheduled test-to-destruction for the prototype which, when ready and in its final form, Elon wants to use for regular trips to Mars. Or it could be that someone was lax on their welding, leading to Friday’s explosion.

A second prototype, SN2, is already being built, Musk said, and will be stripped down to the bare minimum of hardware before being filled with water and then cryogenic fuel for pressure testing. Many more iterations are planned before Musk can fulfill his dream of using the Starship as a vehicle to set up a self-sustaining colony on Mars.

Source: Starship bloopers: Watch Elon Musk’s Mars ferry prototype explode on the pad during liquid nitrogen test • The Register

Astronomers have spotted molecular oxygen in a galaxy far far away, marking the first time that this important element has ever been detected outside of the Milky Way.

This momentous “first detection of extragalactic molecular oxygen,” as it is described in a recent study in The Astrophysical Journal, has big implications for understanding the crucial role of oxygen in the evolution of planets, stars, galaxies, and life.

Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium, and is one of the key ingredients for life here on Earth. Molecular oxygen is the most common free form of the element and consists of two oxygen atoms with the designation O2. It is the version of the gas that we humans, among many other organisms, need to breathe in order to live.

Yet despite its ubiquity and significance to habitability, scientists have struggled for decades to detect molecular oxygen in the wider cosmos.

Now, a team led by Junzhi Wang, an astronomer at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, reports the discovery of molecular oxygen in a dazzling galaxy called Markarian 231, located 581 million light years from the Milky Way.

The researchers were able to make this detection with ground-based radio observatories. “Deep observations” from the IRAM 30-meter telescope in Spain and the NOEMA interferometer in France revealed molecular oxygen emission “in an external galaxy for the first time,” Wang and his co-authors wrote.

Source: Scientists Found Breathable Oxygen in Another Galaxy for the First Time – VICE

SpaceX’s new Starship prototype appeared to burst during a pressure test late Friday (Feb. 28), rupturing under the glare of flood lights and mist at the company’s south Texas facility.

The Starship SN1 prototype, which SpaceX moved to a launchpad near its Boca Chica, Texas, assembly site earlier this week, blew apart during a liquid nitrogen pressure test according to a video captured by SPadre.com.

A separate video posted by NASASpaceflight.com member BocaChicaGal clearly shows the Starship SN1’s midsection buckle during the test, then shoot upward before crashing back to the ground.

Source: SpaceX’s Starship SN1 prototype appears to burst during pressure test | Space

Not a good moment for Elon Musk

In a historic first for satellite operations, a commercial spacecraft “helper” has docked with a working communications satellite to provide life-extension services.

The companies involved in the meetup  — Northrop Grumman and Intelsat — hailed the operation, which took place Tuesday (Feb. 25), as the beginning of a new era that will see robotic spacecraft giving new life to older satellites that are low on fuel or require repairs.

Because launch costs constitute a large part of a satellite’s total price tag, the hope is that refurbishing aging satellites will eventually reduce the expense of services that satellites provide, such as telecommunications or weather monitoring.

Video: Watch Northrop Grumman’s MEV-1 dock with Intelsat 901!

In a historic first, Northrop Grumman’s privately built MEV-1 satellite servicing spacecraft captures the Intelsat 901 communications satellite on Feb. 25, 2020. MEV-1’s grappler (right) latched on to Intelsat’s engine nozzle at center.

The docking occurred Tuesday at 2:15 a.m. EST (0715 GMT). On one side of the meeting was a spacecraft called Mission Extension Vehicle-1 (MEV-1), overseen by Northrop Grumman and its subsidiary SpaceLogistics LLC; on the other was a telecommunications satellite, Intelsat’s IS-901, Northrop Grumman said in a statement.

This maneuver took place about 180 miles (290 kilometers) above geosynchronous orbit, which is at an altitude of 22,236 miles (35,786 km). That’s roughly 90 times higher than the International Space Station.

Intelsat IS-901 is low on fuel and was removed from service in December 2019 to prepare for this operation, according to the statement. Controllers raised the satellite’s orbit and awaited MEV-1’s arrival. Now that the pair have docked, MEV-1 will perform checkouts of IS-901, then push the satellite back to its normal orbit in late March, according to Northrop Grumman.

Source: Two private satellites just docked in space in historic first for orbital servicing | Space

View the high resolution version of this incredible map by clicking here

In this stunning visualization, biologist Eleanor Lutz painstakingly mapped out every known object in Earth’s solar system (>10km in diameter), hopefully helping you on your next journey through space.

Data-Driven Solar System

This particular visualization combines five different data sets from NASA:

Source: Tabletop Whale

From this data, Lutz mapped all the orbits of over 18,000 asteroids in the solar system, including 10,000 that were at least 10km in diameter, and about 8,000 objects of unknown size.

This map shows each asteroid’s position on New Year’s Eve 1999.

The Pull of Gravity

When plotting the objects, Lutz observed that the solar system is not arranged in linear distances. Rather, it is logarithmic, with exponentially more objects situated close to the sun. Lutz made use of this observation to space out their various orbits of the 18,000 objects in her map.

What she is visualizing is the pull of the sun, as the majority of objects tend to gravitate towards the inner part of the solar system. This is the same observation Sir Isaac Newton used to develop the concept of gravity, positing that heavier objects produce a bigger gravitational pull than lighter ones. Since the sun is the largest object in our solar system, it has the strongest gravitational pull.

If the sun is continually pulling at the planets, why don’t they all fall into the sun? It’s because the planets are moving sideways at the same time.

Without that sideways motion, the objects would fall to the center – and without the pull toward the center, it would go flying off in a straight line.

This explains the clustering of patterns in solar systems, and why the farther you travel through the solar system, the bigger the distance and the fewer the objects.

The Top Ten Non-Planets in the Solar System

We all know that the sun and the planets are the largest objects in our corner of the universe, but there are many noteworthy objects as well.

Rank	Name	Diameter	Notes
1	Ganymede	3,273 mi (5,268 km)	Jupiter’s largest moon
2	Titan	3,200 mi (5,151 km)	Saturn’s largest moon
3	Callisto	2,996 mi (4,821 km)	Jupiter’s second largest moon
4	Io	2,264 mi (3,643 km)	Moon orbiting Jupiter
5	Moon	2,159 mi (3,474 km)	Earth’s only moon
6	Europa	1,940 mi (3,122 km)	Moon orbiting Jupiter
7	Triton	1,680 mi (2,710 km)	Neptune’s largest moon
8	Pluto	1,476 mi (2,376 km)	Dwarf planet
9	Eris	1,473 mi (2,372 km)	Dwarf planet
10	Titania	981 mi (1,578 km)	Uranus’ largest moon

Source: Ourplnt.com

While the map only shows objects greater than 10 kilometers in diameter, there are plenty of smaller objects to watch out for as well.

An Atlas of Space

This map is one among many of Lutz’s space related visualizations. She is also in the process of creating an Atlas of Space to showcase her work.

As we reach further and further beyond the boundaries of earth, her work may come in handy the next time you make a wrong turn at Mars and find yourself lost in an asteroid belt.

Source: A Map of Every Object in Our Solar System – Visual Capitalist