Friday, 7 October 2022

This Week in Space: A New Crew Reaches the ISS and We’ve Got News About Uranus

Hello, readers, and happy Friday. What a week! It’s October now. For better or for worse, this newsletter is completely free of pumpkin spice. And yet the spice must still flow. So, too, must the space news. Shall we start with NASA?

Crew-5 Makes Safe Berth At the International Space Station

After taking off from the KSC, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and its four passengers docked successfully with the ISS on Thursday evening. Crew-5 includes commander and Marine Col. Nicole Aunapu Mann, Navy Capt. Josh Cassada, Roscosmos’ lone female cosmonaut Anna Kikina, and Koichi Wakata of Japan’s aerospace agency, JAXA. Three of the astronauts are on their first flight to the ISS. This includes Cassada and Kikina, as well as Mann, who will also be the first Native American female in space. However, this will be Wakata’s fifth flight.

Crew-5 aboard the Crew Dragon capsule, part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program. They look like the hit new Euro band, They Might Be Clients. Image: NASA/SpaceX

“That was a smooth ride uphill,” Mann radioed back after the launch. “You’ve got three rookies who are pretty happy to be floating in space right now.”

Despite serious international tensions, Kikina will be the first Russian cosmonaut to ride to the ISS aboard an American vessel in twenty years. “We’re so glad to do it together,” said Kikina. “Spasibo!”

SpaceX Reschedules, ULA Launches Successfully to Clear Out the C Band

United Launch Alliance put two telecom satellites in orbit Thursday. SES, a European cable provider, sent its SES 20 and 21 satellites to space aboard an Atlas V rocket that took off from Canaveral Thursday afternoon. However, SpaceX rescheduled its Thursday launch for the same band-clearing purpose. After detecting a “tiny helium leak,” SpaceX stood down its Falcon 9 at T – 30 seconds before launch on Thursday evening. The company now means to make another attempt this evening (Friday) from Kennedy’s Space Launch Complex 40, during a launch window that opens at 7:06 PM ET. Aboard the rocket are the Galaxy 33 and 34 telecom satellites. SES, Intelsat, and other providers are launching them to clear out a 300MHz section of the C band, which the FCC has partitioned off for use with 5G. The new, tighter band takes formal effect in 2023.

Galaxy 33 and 34 will launch with veteran SpaceX boosters. The company’s reusable Falcon 9 boosters are good for fifteen flights. “We’re the first commercial customer to fly on a booster that’s going to fly for the 14th time,” said Intelsat’s Jean-Luc Froeliger, senior vice president of space systems. “We’ve looked at all the data. We’re very confident that it won’t be an issue.”

Confirmed: Artemis to Launch in November

Hurricane Ian left Kennedy mostly unscathed. NASA spokespeople confirmed Wednesday that inspections have shown that Artemis and Psyche suffered no damage. Both spacecraft rode out the storm in the KSC’s Vehicle Assembly Building. Meanwhile, the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule that carried Crew-5 to the ISS weathered Ian just fine in their own hangar at Pad 39B. Aside from a “fire” in the VAB, Ian trod but lightly on the KSC campus.

Hurricane Ian, as seen from the International Space Station. Image: NASA

KSC director Janet Petro explained before Ian made landfall that hurricane cleanup, along with some necessary attention to “some of the rocket’s more delicate components,” would take longer than the remaining October launch window permits. At the time, Petro confirmed that the agency would wait for the next lunar launch window, which opens on Nov. 12.

Now that the storm has passed, the agency confirms that they’re gearing back up for another launch attempt. However, Artemis 1 will in fact miss the remaining October launch window.

In a Thursday blog post, the agency echoed its earlier remarks, but with a sobering addition: “Although the Kennedy area received minimal impacts from Hurricane Ian, many team members who live farther west experienced larger effects from the storm and are still recovering. Managers are working with teams to ensure they have the time and support needed to address the needs of their families and homes.”

Ingenuity Catches Its Foot on… Something

NASA reports that its Ingenuity space helicopter snagged its foot on some mysterious foreign object while it was taking it off for its most recent flight, no. 33. We don’t know what it was, but the Perseverance team confirms that it didn’t hinder the helicopter’s minute-long flight.

Juno Captures Closest View Ever of Europa

Juno is our eye in the sky above Jupiter. It dips in and out of the gas giant’s fearsome magnetosphere, taking readings and images of Jupiter and its many moons. Now, during a recent and very close flyby, Juno has captured the closest shot we’ve ever taken of a curious, heavily fractured region of Europa’s crust.

Image: NASA

The picture actually comes from Juno’s Stellar Reference Unit (SRU), a “star camera” used to orient the spacecraft. The SRU took the black-and-white image during a flyby of Europa on Sept. 29, 2022. At the time, Juno was cruising at an altitude of about 256 miles (412 km).

“This image is unlocking an incredible level of detail in a region not previously imaged at such resolution and under such revealing illumination conditions,” said Heidi Becker, lead co-investigator for the SRU. “The team’s use of a star-tracker camera for science is a great example of Juno’s groundbreaking capabilities. These features are so intriguing. Understanding how they formed – and how they connect to Europa’s history – informs us about internal and external processes shaping the icy crust.”

DART Asteroid Leaves “Comet-Like” Trail of Debris

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test slammed headlong into its target asteroid, Dimorphos (AKA ‘Didymoon’), on Monday of last week. We still don’t know what condition the asteroid is in after the impact. Shortly before the probe began its final maneuvers, we wrote about some scientific concern that instead of a rock covered in ice, Dimorphos was more like a pile of snowballs. The probe may have left a larger crater than we intended. However, videos continue to stream in, making it clear that the probe knocked loose a cloud of debris. A lot of debris.

Now, the cloud has turned into a streak like the tail of a comet, ten thousand kilometers long. The NSF’s NOIRLab’s SOAR telescope in Chile captured this image of the tremendous plume:

Astronomers using the NSF’s NOIRLab’s SOAR telescope in Chile captured the vast plume of dust and debris blasted from the surface of the asteroid Dimorphos by NASA’s DART spacecraft when it impacted on 26 September 2022. In this image, the more than 10,000 kilometer long dust trail — the ejecta that has been pushed away by the Sun’s radiation pressure, not unlike the tail of a comet — can be seen stretching from the center to the right-hand edge of the field of view.

Terrestrial and space telescopes everywhere were watching, including Hubble and Webb, so we’ll know more soon.

India’s Mangalyaan Mars Orbiter Runs Out of Fuel

India’s Mangalyaan Mars orbiter launched in 2013 and swiftly began surpassing expectations. Originally, the orbiter had a design lifetime of six months; it lasted more than eight years in orbit around Mars. Alas, its days are at an end. The Indian Space Research Agency (ISRO) announced at a meeting this week that it has lost contact with the orbiter. Ultimately, what brought Mangalyaan down was a prolonged eclipse.

The Mangalyaan orbiter. Image: ISRO

In their meeting report, ISRO explained that the spacecraft was “non-recoverable” after power loss during the eclipse threw its attitude correction systems offline.

The Mangalyaan probe was absolutely a technical breakthrough in its own right. But it was also a triumph of what Indian officials have called ‘frugal engineering.’ It cost ISRO less than sixty million dollars (Rs. 450 crore) to put Mangalyaan in the sky. The probe itself cost less than $25M.

SpinLaunch Does a Thing

Most of what we talk about here has to do with chemical rockets. SpaceX’s Falcon 9, for example, will use kerosene and oxygen. So does Soyuz. Artemis 1, pro or con, will use hydrogen rockets. But there are other legit ways to get things into space. Of course, it helps if your cargo can withstand the kind of inertial forces that would make a Soyuz veteran blanch.

As long as it can, though, California startup SpinLaunch has got some great news for you.

Image: SpinLaunch

SpinLaunch CEO Jonathan Yaney announced this week that the company has now aced its tenth launch. “Today we have accomplished our tenth test flight, and it has proven that it’s a system that is repeatedly reliable,” said Yaney in a Tuesday video post. “This is not a rocket, and clearly our ability to (in just less than eleven months) perform this many tests, and have them all function as planned, really is a testament to the nature of the technology.”

This is one of the company’s first high-profile launches, containing payloads from NASA, Airbus, Cornell University, and Outpost. It took flight from Spaceport America, in New Mexico.

Skywatchers Corner

Normally we reserve this section for things mere mortals can see through optical telescopes of the backyard kind. However, this week we’re breaking form, because we’ve learned some cool stuff about Uranus — even though the ice giant looks like an undifferentiated blue dot in the visible spectrum.

How Did Uranus Get So Tilted? We May Finally Know

For a long time, scientists have been trying to figure out why Uranus orbits lying on its side, spinning backwards. Now, a team of astronomers, applying some frankly wizardly math, may just have an explanation for why Uranus is all out of true. Somewhere in the planet’s early history, the astronomers propose that Uranus captured a rogue satellite of perhaps half the mass of Earth’s moon, in an off-axis, retrograde orbit. According to their model, the resulting tidal forces left Uranus all whopperjawed and eventually destroyed the satellite altogether.

Psst — Uranus actually has rings! Here you can see the faint trace of one of them, as seen by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. X-ray emissions in pink, over the blue we see with optical telescopes. Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/University College London/W. Dunn et al; Optical: W.M. Keck Observatory

If you don’t already know what a Hamiltonian is, I triple-dog dare you to try reading the paper. It’s been accepted for publication, but it hasn’t made it through peer review the whole way yet. However, it’s available on arXiv.

Giraffes in the Sky

Late last night into this morning, October’s Camelopardalid meteor shower came to its peak. Its radiant, the point from which meteor showers originate, lies within the Camelopardalis constellation, above Ursa Minor and Draco. It will be overhead for New York City around 11 AM today (Friday). However, you might catch a few longer fireballs as the shorter autumn day draws to a close.

“Camelopardalids” is a tongue twister. And its root word means “Giraffe,” or at least what classical astronomers evidently thought a giraffe was. Not unlike other ridiculous medieval beasties, the venerable camelopard was the closest posterity could come to making sense of the giraffe: a ridiculous leopard-camel with a forty-foot neck.

While we don’t know the source of the Camelopardalids, we do know the source of the upcoming Draconids: comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. As you might suspect given the name, this shower appears to originate from within the constellation of Draco, the Dragon. Like a dragon’s breath, this shower can be bright enough to sparkle, producing up to 600 meteors per minute.

This year, the Draconids run from October 6 – 10, peaking on Saturday and Sunday.

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