Friday 17 February 2023

This Week in Space: Bolides, Lazarus Cycles, and ‘The Sparkler’

Hello, readers, and welcome to your Friday morning digest of the most important space news from here to the big empty. It’s a rough one this week. There’s another coolant leak on a spacecraft docking with the International Space Station. News from the recent Turkey-Syria earthquake is grim, but NASA life sign detectors are helping rescue and relief workers hold out a stubborn sliver of hope. We’ve got updates from several Mars missions, a look back at Chelyabinsk ten years later, and a wildly optimistic plan for electricity on the Moon. Plus, a team analyzing data from the James Webb Space Telescope has spotted a deep-sky object they hope will prove the Milky Way’s galactic ‘twin.’

India’s Smallsat Launcher Aces Second Flight

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) started off the week by announcing a successful second flight by its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, dubbed SSLV-D2. Six months ago, the SSLV’s inaugural flight ended in a “shortfall in velocity,” resulting in its payload satellites burning up in the atmosphere. ISRO officials credit careful study of the first flight for SSLV-D2’s success.

No Pressure, Guys: Another Russian Spacecraft Is Leaking Coolant

It’s been two months now since the crew on the International Space Station discovered a coolant leak in the Soyuz MS-22 capsule that was supposed to ferry home three crew members. An apparent micrometeoroid strike punctured the capsule’s external coolant loop, fully draining the reservoir. NASA and Roscosmos recently announced that Roscosmos will send up an unmanned Soyuz MS-23 later in February, dropping everything and delaying every other mission to scramble the replacement capsule. But shortly after we published last week’s newsletter, NASA reported another coolant leak in a different Russian spacecraft currently docking with the ISS. When Progress-83 docked with Russia’s Zvezda module, Roscosmos detected a coolant pressure loss in Progress-82, currently docking with Russia’s Poisk laboratory module.

Picard-Facepalm-Feature

Because at this point, why not?

As with the first leak, no crew are in danger. Progress-82 is loaded up with trash. Soon, it will undock and burn up in Earth’s atmosphere on purpose. The greater risk here appears to be that three astronauts may have to spend about twice their expected stay aboard the International Space Station. Instead of going home after their appointed six months in space, Frank Rubio, Sergey Prokopyev, and Dmitry Petelin may spend a year in microgravity. Russia has delayed its launch of the uncrewed MS-23 capsule, pending Roscosmos’ investigation of the leak.

Meanwhile, Crew-6 Enters Pre-Flight Quarantine

NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev began the week by entering their official quarantine period in preparation for their flight to the International Space Station on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission.

From left: Mission Specialist Andrey Fedyaev, Pilot Warren “Woody” Hoburg, Commander Stephen Bowen, and Mission Specialist Sultan Alneyadi. Photo credit: SpaceX

The mission is scheduled to launch in a window that opens at 2:07 a.m. EST on Sunday, Feb. 26, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. They will fly to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, named Endeavour, atop a Falcon 9 rocket.

Red Planet Gazette: The Latest From Mars

Mission updates from Mars abound this week — even Curiosity checked in again. But let’s start at Jezero Crater.

Ingenuity Charging Again, Perseverance Climbs Delta Slope

Perseverance is still preening after setting up its first-of-a-kind Martian sample depot. Over more than a month of careful labor, the rover put down ten titanium sample tubes for later retrieval. Eight are filled with rock and Martian regolith (broken rock and dust). A ninth one is a sample of Mars’ atmosphere, and the last is a “witness” tube. The rover is now ascending the Three Forks delta, which we’ve only seen from above.

The ten sample tubes, as seen by the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) camera on the end of the rover’s 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

Meanwhile, Ingenuity is showing signs of wear after a brutal Martian winter. Winter is dust season on Mars, and everything on the surface that uses solar power is at risk. That includes solar-powered Ingenuity, which has struggled to keep up with nuclear-powered Perseverance. The short days and dust storms of winter were preventing Ingenuity from charging enough to keep itself warm overnight. When the onboard heaters failed, Mars’ unrelenting cold was freezing Ingenuity’s batteries fully to death every night. Only a hardware loop called the Lazarus circuit kept the space copter alive by rebooting the disoriented spacecraft from its daily brownouts. However, Ingenuity is beginning to respond once more.

A few weeks ago, Ingenuity reported that it was “sleeping warmly” again after 260 Lazarus cycles. According to a Tuesday mission update, the team is seeing “end-of-sol states of charge in our batteries of more than 90% — an unbelievable number just days earlier.”

Curiosity Fires Up Its Drill

Curiosity, for its part, is about to begin drilling a new rock sample from the Dinira slab. In the latest mission update, NASA officials said that the rover also caught “dust devil movies” before snapping some photos at twilight and a picture of Phobos.

Curiosity recently discovered this striking evidence of water on the surface of ancient Mars. Image: NASA/JPL

Currently, Curiosity is in the Gale Crater, just south of Mars’ equator. The rover recently discovered exciting evidence of Mars’ watery past. In sandstone from the bottom of an ancient lake, Curiosity found unmistakable ripples carved into the rock. Now, it’s time for the rover to dig in.

To MAVEN, With Love

Finally: It’s spring on Mars, and love ozone is in the air! The MAVEN Mars satellite’s team wrote the orbiter a love letter for Valentine’s Day. To accompany its sweet words, the team released a new composite image of Mars — as MAVEN sees it.

This fancy cabbage is actually Mars, as seen from the MAVEN orbiter. If you squint really hard, it kind of looks like a Bulbasaur.

Magenta swirls near the top show the presence of ozone in the atmosphere near Mars’ north pole. Ozone builds up there during the winter. Then, when spring warms the atmosphere, dynamic circulation creates weather patterns in the clouds. Toward the west, you can see two dots: volcanoes sticking straight out of the atmosphere.

10 Years After Chelyabinsk, Another Meteoroid Found Hours Before Earth Impact

Harmless hunks of space rock hit Earth’s atmosphere on a daily basis. When they do, they disintegrate, creating “shooting stars” — and sometimes bright fireballs or bolides. Such was the case on Monday when an asteroid about a meter long burned up in Earth’s atmosphere over Northern France in the wee hours of the morning.

The meteoroid put on a spectacular light show for locals and left debris strewn across Normandy. However, its timing recalled another bolide event almost exactly ten years ago: the Chelyabinsk asteroid impact.

Occasionally, an asteroid too small to reach the ground intact but large enough to release “considerable energy” when it disintegrates can significantly damage the ground. On Feb. 15, 2013, an asteroid the size of a house plowed into Earth’s atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. It approached in daylight from the sunward side of the planet, so our eyes in the sky didn’t detect it until it was already too late. The meteor never touched the Earth — but it turns out that didn’t stop it from wreaking absolute mayhem. When it disintegrated, it was 14 miles above the surface, streaking westward at 11 miles per second. The airburst explosion was equivalent to a 440-kiloton blast. It blew out windows over 200 square miles, damaged buildings, and injured over 1,600 people – mostly due to broken glass.

Monday’s bolide, as it descends over Northern France. Image courtesy of Muhammed Uzzal, via ESA

Since then, NASA has greatly stepped up its efforts in planetary defense. In 2022 the agency’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) successfully bonked a harmless asteroid into an even more harmless orbit. Even so, Monday’s asteroid was just the seventh one humans have ever predicted before it hit.

“A collision of a NEO with Earth is the only natural disaster we now know how humanity could completely prevent,” said NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson. “We must keep searching for what we know is still out there, and we must continue to research and test Planetary Defense technologies and capabilities that could one day protect our planet’s inhabitants from a devastating event.”

Webb Deep-Field ‘Sparkler’ Could Be Milky Way’s Twin

Last summer, the James Webb space telescope opened for science with a deep-field image of the night sky clearer and bolder than we’d ever seen. Thanks to Webb’s unprecedented clarity of vision, scientists have been finding jewels in that patch of sky ever since. In a newly published paper, astronomers report that one such gem, the Sparkler, may be the Milky Way’s distant galactic ‘twin.’

Center: the Sparkler, a distant galaxy that may be able to teach us more about the evolution of the Milky Way.

In the paper, the astronomers confirm speculation from last summer that those orange sparkles are globular clusters. The Sparkler also appears to be evolving along the same lines as our galaxy, which got some of its mass by absorbing globular clusters. However, its redshift suggests we’re seeing it as it appeared nine billion years ago. The astronomers hope that the Sparkler will help furnish insights into the early days of the Milky Way.

Satellite Images Pinpoint Hottest Places on the Sun

A new composite image from NASA has made visible a spectacular hidden light show on the Sun. In it, the agency’s NuSTAR ultraviolet imaging satellite joins forces with its Solar Dynamics Observatory and JAXA’s Hinode X-ray observatory to produce a composite mosaic that shows the Sun as only our satellites can see it. The SDO’s infrared observations are shown in red here. High-energy X-ray observations from NuSTAR are in blue, while JAXA’s lower-energy X-ray detector readings are in green.

NuSTAR detected ‘nanoflares’ on the surface of the Sun. One such event is visible at bottom right.

NASA believes the NuSTAR data will help scientists understand why the Sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface. The surface of the Sun is around 5,500 degrees Celsius, but the corona reaches more than a million degrees. Solar flares alone don’t happen enough to get the corona this hot. However, NASA scientists are using NuSTAR to study whether ‘nanoflares’ might help explain the difference.

NASA’s Heartbeat Detectors Aid Earthquake Rescue Efforts

On February 6, a series of devastating earthquakes struck southern Turkey and neighboring Syria. The tremors sundered the Earth’s crust and left behind rifts totaling nearly 300 miles long. Eleven days after the catastrophe, more than forty thousand people are dead, and hope is waning that rescuers will find survivors still trapped in the wreckage. But what humans and rescue dogs can’t find, maybe — against all odds — machines still can. NASA confirmed Wednesday that life sign detectors based on NASA technology shipped out to Turkey over the weekend. The devices, called FINDERs (Finding Individuals for Disaster Emergency Response), use microwave radar sensors to locate the faint life signs of people trapped in avalanches or rubble.

“NASA’s hearts and minds are with those impacted by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “NASA is our eyes in the sky, and our teams of experts are working hard to provide valuable information from our Earth-observing fleet to first responders on the ground.”

The agency has thrown open its doors, sharing data from its Earth-observing satellites to support relief and recovery workers in the region. Agency scientists have even managed to scrape out useful effort from missions that are just tangentially related. Scientists are hopeful that NASA’s EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation) atmospheric dust sampling instrument, mounted on the International Space Station last year, can be useful in finding gas leaks before they cause explosions.

Blue Origin Develops System for ‘Unlimited’ Solar Power… On The Moon

Blue Origin, the aerospace firm founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, has thus far focused on its New Shepard sub-orbital rocket. However, my colleague Ryan Whitwam writes the company has bigger plans, including a newly unveiled solar panel manufacturing system called Blue Alchemist.

A prototype solar panel manufactured from simulated regolith.

Blue Origin claims the system can manufacture solar panels using only lunar regolith, bringing essentially unlimited electricity to the moon. However, much rests on the company’s simulated lunar regolith, with which it has done its demonstrations to date.

Skywatchers Corner

For observers in the Northern Hemisphere, Orion is still high in the February sky. Meanwhile, brilliant Sirius shines toward the south. The Pleiades also make a fun skywatching target, especially for little beans; finding the Pleiades is one step, and counting them is another challenge. Making a drawing really can help. There are dozens of stars in the Pleiades formation. We know they’re related because they have exactly the same proper motion. However, even under optimal Earthly viewing conditions, just 14 are visible to the eye. Most nights, you can see seven or so.

The weekend might be a great opportunity for a little stargazing. This close to the new moon, its light won’t be drowning out fainter sky objects. Tuesday night into Wednesday, Jupiter will be just a degree apart from the waxing crescent moon, low in the western sky. Venus will join them, closer to the horizon, about an hour after sunset.

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