Cosmic Log
For the second time in a row, SpaceX lost the second stage of its Starship launch system during a flight test, while recovering the first-stage Super Heavy booster.
Today’s eighth Starship flight test came a month and a half after a similarly less-than-perfect mission that sparked an investigation.
“The primary reason we do these flight tests is to learn,” SpaceX launch commentator Dan Huot said. “We have some more to learn about this vehicle.”
Three bodies? No problem!
The “three-body problem” has traditionally referred to the devilishly tricky challenge of working out the trajectories of three objects orbiting each other in space. The concept has inspired a sci-fi trilogy about an alien invasion, plus a Netflix series based on the novels.
In the books and in the TV show, the alien invaders are coming from the Alpha Centauri star system — where three stars are gravitationally bound to each other just a little more than 4 light-years away from us. But we don’t have to look that far away to find a three-body system.
Back in 2020, astronomers reported the detection of a trio of celestial objects in the Kuiper Belt, the broad ring of icy material at our solar system’s edge — and now scientists analyzing data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory say they may have come across the Kuiper Belt’s second three-body system.
A report about the system, known as Altjira, was published today in The Planetary Science Journal.
“The universe is filled with a range of three-body systems, including the closest stars to Earth, the Alpha Centauri star system, and we’re finding that the Kuiper Belt may be no exception,” study lead author Maia Nelsen, a physics and astronomy graduate of Brigham Young University, said in a NASA news release.