Category: Cosmic Space

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Cosmic Space

China’s Mars probe enters orbit, scoring another first

Tianwen-1 probe at Mars
An artist's conception shows China's Tianwen-1 probe entering Martian orbit. (CASC Illustration)

For the second time this week, a spacefaring nation put its first robotic probe in Martian orbit.

Today it was China’s turn: After a seven-month, 300 million-mile cruise, China’s Tianwen-1 probe executed a 15-minute firing of its main engine, putting it into an elliptical orbit that comes as near as 250 miles (400 kilometers) to the surface of Mars every 10 days.

Tianwen-1’s success came less than 24 hours after the United Arab Emirates’ Hope spacecraft began orbiting the Red Planet.

Both nations have sent probes into space before, and China has put three probes on the surface of the moon. One of China’s moon probes even returned lunar samples to Earth. But these were the first successful Mars missions for each country. Only four other spacefaring powers — the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency and India — have put spacecraft into Martian orbit. Officials at NASA and ESA were among those tweeting their congratulations today.

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Cosmic Space

Arab orbiter reaches Mars, kicking off a robot invasion

Hope Mars orbiter
An artist's conception shows the Hope orbiter at Mars. (MBRSC / UAE Illustration)

The United Arab Emirates’ Hope space probe went into orbit around Mars today after a months-long cruise, adding a new member to an exclusive international club.

Only four other spacefaring powers — the United States, Russia, the European Space Agency and India — have successfully sent spacecraft to Mars. One more nation, China, could join the club this week.

Word that the SUV-sized Hope probe successfully reached its destination after a seven-month, 300 million-mile cruise was greeted with cheers at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai.

Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the world’s tallest building, lit up like a Red Planet billboard to mark the achievement.

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Cosmic Space

Another awesome flip (and fiery crash) for Starship

Starship flip
A view from below shows SpaceX's Starship SN9 prototype doing a pre-landing flip. (SpaceX via YouTube)

SpaceX’s second high-altitude test flight of its Starship super-rocket prototype looked picture-perfect until the fiery crash at the very end.

In that sense, today’s up-and-down launch for SN9 echoed last month’s test of SN8. The 160-foot-tall rocket rose majestically from SpaceX’s Boca Chica test facility in South Texas, climbed to a maximum altitude of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), hovered for a few moments and then went horizontal for an aerodynamic descent at subsonic speeds.

The rocket was programmed to fire up its methane-fueled Raptor engines and flip itself back to a vertical position, just moments before  touchdown. Video of the test flight showed SN9 pitching over, but failing to straighten itself. As a result, the massive rocket belly-flopped onto its landing pad, exploding in a huge fiery cloud.

During today’s webcast, SpaceX launch commentator John Insprucker insisted the flight wasn’t a flop. He pointed out that the test was designed to try out all of Starship’s systems, from the three Raptors to the flight control system and its stabilizing flaps.

“We had, again, another great flight up to the 10-kilometer apogee. We demonstrated the ability to transition the engines to the landing propellant tanks. The subsonic re-entry looked very good and stable,” he said. “Again, we’ve just got to work on that landing a little bit.”

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Cosmic Space

Meet the crew for Axiom’s first space odyssey

Axiom Space crew
Michael Lopez-Alegria, Mark Pathy, Larry Connor and Eylan Stibbe will visit the International Space Station. (Axiom Space Photo)

Axiom Space’s first privately funded trip to the International Space Station will be as notable for who’s not on the crew as for who is.

Sorry, Tom Cruise: Your filmed-in-space movie will have to wait.

Since last May, Tom Cruise fans and space fans have been buzzing over reports that the star of “Top Gun” and the “Mission: Impossible” movies was working with NASA and SpaceX to fly to the space station and shoot scenes for a movie.

According to some accounts, Cruise and director Doug Liman were lining up a trip through Axiom Space, which forged a deal with NASA and SpaceX for private-sector space missions.

Today the full crew was revealed on ABC News’ “Good Morning America”: Former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria will command the Crew Dragon mission. Investors Larry Connor, Mark Pathy and Eytan Stibbe are paying $55 million fares to join Lopez-Alegria for what’s expected to be a 10-day station stayover in 2022. Axiom says it’s still working with NASA to iron out the details.

Even without Cruise, there could be some movie-worthy twists to the mission’s tale. Connor turned 71 years old this month, which sets him up to become the second septuagenarian to go into orbit. (The late astronaut-senator John Glenn, who flew on the shuttle Discovery in 1998 at the age of 77, was the first.)

“Somebody said to me, ‘You’ll be the second-oldest person ever to go into outer space.’ And my response, which they already knew, was ‘Well, I think age is overrated,” Connor, who heads an Ohio real-estate investment firm, told ABC News.

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Cosmic Space

NASA’s moon rocket test ends early, raising questions

Steam billows from the RS-25 engines on the Space Launch System's core stage during a hot-fire test. (NASA Photo)

NASA’s first full-up, on-the-ground test for the main engines on its heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket ended prematurely today due to an automated shutdown.

“Today was an important day,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said after the test. “I know not everybody is feeling as happy as we otherwise could, because we wanted to get eight minutes of a hot fire, and we got over a minute.”

Despite the early shutdown,  NASA said the “Green Run” engine test produced valuable data in preparation for the first honest-to-goodness SLS launch, currently set for late this year.

That launch would kick off an uncrewed round-the-moon trip for NASA’s Orion spacecraft. The mission, known as Artemis 1, is a key step in the plan to send astronauts around the moon on NASA’s Artemis 2 mission in the 2023 time frame, and then put them on the lunar surface by as early as 2024 during the Artemis 3 mission.

Today’s test at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi focused on the SLS rocket’s core stage and its four Aerojet Rocketdyne RS-25 engines. The engines are refurbished leftovers from the space shuttle program, and had been used on shuttle missions going as far back as 1998.

Each of the engines delivers more than 400,000 pounds of thrust, adding up to 1.6 million pounds of thrust when all four engines are firing. When the Artemis 1 mission lifts off, the SLS’ solid rocket boosters will bring total thrust to more than 8 million pounds. In comparison, the Saturn V moon rocket’s first stage delivered 7.6 million pounds of thrust back in the 1960s and 1970s.

NASA’s SLS team put months of work into the preparations for today’s test. More than 700,000 pounds of super-chilled hydrogen and oxygen were loaded into the core stage’s tanks for the engine firing. When the countdown reached zero, all four engines roared into life on cue, sending giant clouds of steam billowing into the air.

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Cosmic Space

Intel office enlists AI to analyze satellite images

Flamingo Bay, Sudan
BlackSky's Spectra AI monitors construction at Flamingo Bay in Sudan, where Russia plans to establish a naval facility. (BlackSky Photo)

U.S. intelligence officials today launched a program to develop new satellite image analysis tools that use machine learning and other tricks of the artificial intelligence trade.

In a news release, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity announced that contracts for the Space-based Machine Automated Recognition Technique program, or SMART, have been awarded to teams led by BlackSky Geospatial Solutions, which has offices in Seattle as well as Herndon, Va.; Accenture Federal Services, with offices in Arlington, Va.; Kitware, headquartered in New York; and Systems & Technology Research in Woburn, Mass.

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Cosmic Space

Jupiter and Saturn pair up to make a Christmas Star

Jupiter and Saturn
Ths graphic shows how Jupiter and Saturn line up in the sky as seen from mid-northern latitudes. (Sky & Telescope Illustration)

Are you ready for a remake of the Christmas Star story? Depending on how much stock you put in historical hypotheses, this year’s solstice on Dec. 21 could bring a replay of the phenomenon that the Three Kings saw in the Gospel of Matthew.

That’s when Jupiter and Saturn can be seen incredibly close together in the night sky. If the skies are clear, the two planets will be hard to miss in southwest skies just after sunset, as seen from mid-northern latitudes. Jupiter will sparkle brighter, and Saturn will be shining only a tenth of a degree to the upper right. With a small telescope, you might be able to see both planets and their moons in a single field of view.

“Some astronomers suggest the pair will look like an elongated star, and others say the two planets will form a double planet,” NASA says in a blog posting about the Dec. 21 conjunction. “To know for sure, we’ll just have to look and see. Either way, take advantage of this opportunity because Jupiter and Saturn won’t appear this close in the sky until 2080!”

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Cosmic Space

OneWeb adds 36 satellites to revived constellation

OneWeb Soyuz launch
A Russian Soyuz rocket lifts off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, sending 36 OneWeb satellites to orbit. (OneWeb Photo)

Less than a month after emerging from bankruptcy, OneWeb resumed its campaign to provide global satellite internet access today with the successful launch and deployment of 36 satellites.

The satellites were sent into low Earth orbit by a Soyuz rocket that lifted off from Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East at 12:26 GMT (4:26 a.m. PT). Nine batches of satellites were dropped off in their target orbits over the course of nearly four hours, and OneWeb confirmed signal acquisition for all 36 satellites.

This was the first fully commercial launch from Russia’s Vostochny complex. Europe’s Arianespace consortium managed launch logistics.

Today’s operation brings OneWeb’s constellation to 110 satellites, with hundreds more due for launch in the months ahead. OneWeb says it’s back on track to provide broadband data services to customers in northern latitudes — including Alaska, Britain, Canada and northern Europe — during 2021, with global service to follow in 2022.

OneWeb’s prime rivals in the market for satellite internet services from low Earth orbit are SpaceX, which has already launched nearly 1,000 satellites and is offering limited beta service; Telesat, a Canadian satellite operator targeting the start of service in 2022; and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, which is aiming for a debut in the mid-2020s.

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Cosmic Space

President Trump boosts nuclear power in space

Nuclear propulsion for Mars transit habitat
An artist's conception shows a Mars transit habitat with a nuclear propulsion system. (NASA Illustration)

In what’s likely to be one of the last space policy initiatives of his administration, President Donald Trump today issued a directive that lays out a roadmap for nuclear power applications beyond Earth.

Space Policy Directive 6 calls on NASA and other federal agencies to advance the development of in-space nuclear propulsion systems as well as a nuclear fission power system on the moon.

“Space nuclear power and propulsion is a fundamentally enabling technology for American deep space missions to Mars and beyond,” Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in a White House news release. “The United States intends to remain the leader among spacefaring nations, applying nuclear power technology safely, securely and sustainably in space.”

Space-based nuclear power isn’t exactly a new idea: NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission considered thermal nuclear propulsion – a concept that would have involved heating up propellants with a nuclear reactor – way back in the 1970s as part of Project NERVA.

A different kind of nuclear power, which relies on using the heat from radioactive decay to generate electricity, has been used to power space hardware ranging from Apollo lunar surface experiments to the Curiosity rover on Mars. (NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is due to land on Mars in February, also has a radioisotope power system.)

NASA once considered putting a nuclear electric propulsion system on a spacecraft known as the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, but that mission was canceled in 2005. Now there’s renewed interest in missions that require more power than can be generated by solar arrays – and that’s reviving interest in nuclear power for space applications.

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How to watch the pandemic solar eclipse online

2017 total solar eclipse
Just a glimmer of the sun is visible in this view of the 2017 total solar eclipse as seen from Oregon. (NASA Photo / Gopalswamy)

Total solar eclipses are typically magnets for world travelers with a scientific bent — but when it comes to the eclipse that’ll be visible from Chile and Argentina on Dec. 14, the coronavirus pandemic has put a damper on the dreams of eclipse-chasers.

Fortunately, there are lots of ways to see the solar eclipse online, and this way at least you don’t have to worry about hurting your eyes.

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