A bright Geminid meteor flashes across the sky in an all-sky view from 2011. (NASA Photo)
The stars have aligned for this weekend’s peak of the annual Geminid meteor shower. Now let’s hope that the weather aligns as well.
Skywatchers rank December’s Geminids alongside August’s Perseids as the year’s highlights for meteor shows. Under peak conditions, sharp-eyed observers can see two meteors a minute. NASA notes that the shooting stars are bright and fast, and tend to be yellow in color.
But the strength of the show is highly dependent on viewing conditions. In some years, the moon’s glare washes out the night sky so that few meteor streaks stand out.
One of the few good things about 2020 is that the moon won’t interfere this year. It’s nearly a new moon, which means skywatchers will see only a thin crescent that rises in the east just before dawn.
A close-up of the edge of the Arecibo radio telescope shows collapsed structures. (UCF Photo)
The Arecibo radio telescope’s 900-ton instrument platform fell into the 1,000-foot-wide antenna dish this morning, adding to previous damage and putting Puerto Rico’s iconic scientific structure beyond repair.
The National Science Foundation, which funds the Arecibo Observatory through a management contract with the University of Central Florida, said no injuries were caused by the collapse.
“We are saddened by this situation but thankful that no one was hurt,” NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan said in a statement. “When engineers advised the NSF that the structure was unstable and presented a danger to work teams and Arecibo staff, we took their warnings seriously and continued to emphasize the importance of safety for everyone involved.”
The Chang’e-5 spacecraft was sent into space from south China’s Wenchang Space Launch Center at 4:30 a.m. local time Nov. 24 (12:30 p.m. PT Nov. 23) atop a heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket.
Like China’s previous lunar probes, Chang’e-5 is named after a moon goddess in Chinese mythology. This probe consists of an orbiter, a lander, an ascent vehicle and a re-entry capsule.
The 9-ton craft went into an Earth-moon transfer trajectory that should get it to lunar orbit in five days. On Nov. 29 or so, the paired lander and ascent vehicle are expected to separate from the orbiter and touch down on a lava dome known as Mons Rümker.
The mound is thought to contain rocks that formed relatively recently in geological terms — 1.2 billion years ago. Samples from such a region could yield the youngest rocks ever brought back from the moon, and shed new light on recent phases of lunar geology.
Chang’e-5’s lander is designed to study its surroundings with cameras and scientific instruments, including a ground-penetrating radar and a spectrometer. The most important scientific payloads are a mechanical scoop and a drill that can go 7 feet beneath the surface.
The radio telescope at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory is on its way to extinction after 57 years of sparking dreams of alien contact — and after a grim three years of weathering nature’s blows.
Two of the cables supporting the telescope’s 900-ton instrument platform have slipped loose, ripping through the 1,000-foot-wide web of aluminum panels and steel cables that’s spread 450 feet below.
Engineers assessed the damage and determined that the risk of a catastrophic failure was too great to attempt repairs. If more cables snap, the entire platform could crash down, potentially causing the dish’s collapse and life-threatening injuries to workers.
“Although it saddens us to make this recommendation, we believe the structure should be demolished in a controlled way as soon as pragmatically possible, ” Thornton Tomasetti, the engineering firm that made the structural assessment, said in its recommendations to the National Science Foundation and the University of Central Florida, which manages operations at Arecibo on the NSF’s behalf.
“It is therefore our recommendation to expeditiously plan for decommissioning of the observatory and execute a controlled demolition of the telescope,” the firm said.
After consulting with other engineering firms and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NSF decided to go ahead with the decommissioning.
A team works on the first Dream Chaser space plane destined for spaceflight at Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Colorado facility. (SNC Photo)
Sierra Nevada Corp. is closing in on the orbital debut of its Dream Chaser space plane, but the curtain-raiser will be later than previously planned, due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The company had planned to send its first space-worthy Dream Chaser, dubbed Tenacity, on its first uncrewed cargo run to the International Space Station next year.
SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule is docked to the International Space Station. (NASA via YouTube)
After a 27-hour trip, three Americans and a Japanese spaceflier arrived at the International Space Station tonight for the first regular six-month tour of duty facilitated by a commercial space taxi.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which was christened Resilience, handled the docking autonomously. “Excellent job, right down the center,” NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins radioed down to ground controllers at SpaceX’s California headquarters.
“All for one, Crew-1 for all,” Japan’s Soichi Noguchi declared.
The Dragon’s four crew members floated through the hatch a couple of hours later. As he brought up the rear, Noguchi carried a Baby Yoda toy mascot, which served as the Dragon’s zero-G indicator for the Nov. 16 launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Hopkins, Noguchi and their crewmates — NASA astronauts Shannon Walker and Victor Glover — were greeted with smiles and hugs by the three spacefliers on the other side of the hatch: NASA’s Kate Rubins and Russia’s Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifts off, sending a Dragon capsule and its crew into orbit. (NASA Photo / Joel Kowsky)
This is not a test: For the first time, a commercial space venture has sent astronauts on their way to the International Space Station for a regularly scheduled crew rotation.
It’s also the first crewed orbital launch to be licensed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial spaceflight. “This is a big night for many of us, and it’s a big night for the FAA,” the agency’s administrator, Steve Dickson, said at a post-launch briefing.
In response to issues that arose during the crewed test flight, SpaceX beefed up the Dragon’s heat shield and fine-tuned the triggering system for the parachutes used for the spacecraft’s at-sea homecoming.
The first opportunity for launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, on Nov. 14, had to be put off for a day due to weather concerns — and when today’s countdown began, the chances of acceptable weather were rated at 50-50. But the weather improved, a glitch involving a hatch leak was quickly resolved, and the Falcon 9 rose from its launch pad into the night at 7:27 p.m. ET (4:27 p.m. PT.)
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, thousands watched the launch in person from Florida’s Space Coast. Hundreds of thousands watched streaming video coverage via NASA and SpaceX. Live coverage is scheduled to continue during the Dragon’s cruise to the space station.
An artist's impression shows an outburst from a magnetar, surrounded by magnetic field lines. (McGill University Illustration)
For years, astronomers have puzzled over the origins of phenomena known as fast radio bursts — cosmic emissions that last only a fraction of a second but blast out more than 100 million times more power than our sun. Some even wondered whether the bursts, known as FRBs, might serve as signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
Now they’ve tracked down the source of the first fast radio burst detected in our own Milky Way galaxy — and it’s not aliens. Instead, it’s a magnetar, a type of neutron star with a powerful magnetic field.
Scientists have long suspected that fast radio bursts had something to do with magnetars. But the newly reported case, described in three studies published today by the journal Nature, serves as the astronomical equivalent of a smoking gun.
“There’s this great mystery as to what would produce these great outbursts of energy, which until now we’ve seen coming from halfway across the universe,” Kiyoshi Masui, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said today in a news release. “This is the first time we’ve been able to tie one of these exotic fast radio bursts to a single astrophysical object.”
Masui is part of the team that picked up the first clues to the source, a magnetar 30,000 light-years from Earth that’s known as SGR 1935+2154. The team includes researchers from MIT, the University of British Columbia, McGill University, the University of Toronto and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
They made use of a radio telescope array called the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, which began science operations in 2018 at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.
In April, astronomers detected bursts of X-ray and gamma-ray activity from SGR 1935 — which led the CHIME team to turn their attention to that part of the sky, around the center of the Milky Way. Shortly after an X-ray burst on April 28, CHIME registered two sharp peaks in radio emissions, within a few milliseconds of each other.
That fit the pattern for a fast radio burst, emanating from a point in the vicinity of SGR 1935. “If it was coming from any other object close to the magnetar, it would be a very big coincidence,” Masui said.
The source was near the edge of CHIME’s field of view, which made it difficult to determine the radio burst’s brightness. So the team put out the word for other astronomers to check their records.
By a stroke of luck, another radio astronomy project — known as the Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2, or STARE2 — had a wide-field view of the same blast.
“When I saw the data, I was basically paralyzed,” Caltech graduate student Christopher Bochenek said in a news release. “At the radio frequencies we observe with STARE2, the signal was much stronger than what CHIME reported. We had caught the FRB head-on.”
STARE2 isn’t your typical radio telescope array: The heart of the Caltech-led, NASA-funded project is a handmade radio receiver that’s about the size of a large bucket. “It’s a piece of 6-inch metal pipe with two literal cake pans around it,” Bochenek told The Associated Press.
Three of the receivers are placed at widely separated locations in California and Utah, which makes it possible to triangulate on the source of cosmic radio emissions. They’re not as sensitive as the more traditional big-dish telescopes, but they can take in the whole sky.
The readings from STARE2, combined with data from other instruments, suggested that the April 28 burst was 3,000 times brighter than any previously observed magnetar radio signal.
Among the other instruments participating in the observational campaign was China’s Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, also known as FAST. Astronomers on the FAST team missed out on detecting FRB 200428, but they kept an eye on SGR 1935 as it emitted a series of 29 gamma-ray bursts. None of those bursts coincided with a blast of high-energy radio waves.
“The weak correlation could be explained by special geometry and/or limited bandwidth of FRBs,” study co-author Zhang Bing of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas said in a news release. “The observations of SGR J1935 start to reveal the magnetar origin of FRBs, although other possibilities still exist.”
Astrophysicists haven’t yet figured out the mechanism for producing fast radio bursts, but one hypothesis is that they can occur when a magnetar throws off a flare of charged particles that interact with debris surrounding the star. The resulting shock wave could set electrons gyrating wildly, throwing off radio waves as well as X-rays.
To unravel that part of the mystery, the CHIME team and other astronomers are keeping a close watch on SGR 1935.
“We’ve got our eyes open for other magnetars,” Masui said, “but the big thing now is to study this one source and really drill down to see what it tells us about how FRBs are made.”
The International Space Station has been occupied continuously for 20 years. (NASA via YouTube)
Twenty years ago today, the first crew moved into the International Space Station, kicking off what’s turned out to be the longest continuous stretch of habitation in any spacecraft. Now the space station is gearing up for another change of life.
The station’s first occupants — NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko — may not be as well known as, say, Neil Armstrong or John Glenn. But they did blaze a trail for the nearly 240 spacefliers from 19 countries who followed them to the orbital outpost.
Leading up to Nov. 2, 2000, the space station was envisioned as a steppingstone to the moon, Mars and beyond. Although the station never reached its potential as a literal way station for journeys beyond Earth orbit, NASA still talks up its value as a proving ground for future moon missions.
More than 3,000 science experiments have been conducted on the space station over the past 20 years, focusing on topics ranging from zero-G microbiology and plant growth to the ways in which long-duration spaceflight affects the human body and psyche. Perhaps the best-known experiment is the study that compared NASA astronaut Scott Kelly’s in-flight health status with that of his earthbound twin brother, former astronaut (and current Senate candidate) Mark Kelly.
NASA ranks the experiment involving the Kelly twins among the top 20 breakthroughs in space station science and technology. But you could argue that the most significant space station experiments relate to commercialization on the final frontier.
Meanwhile, Texas-based Nanoracks is getting set to have its Bishop Airlock sent to the space station sometime in the next couple of months, as part of a SpaceX Dragon shipment. Like Axiom’s habitation module, the commercial airlock is seen as an opening move that could eventually lead to free-flying orbital outposts.
Boeing, the prime commercial contractor for the space station, is part of the team for Axiom’s module as well as for Nanoracks’ airlock. (Seattle-based Olis Robotics and Stratolaunch have also been on Nanoracks’ outpost team.)
If commercial space ventures follow through on their ambitions, it may not be long before private-sector astronauts outnumber the space station’s government-supported crew, which has ranged between two and six over the past 20 years.
NASA’s current plan calls for commercial entities to take over management of the space station’s U.S. segment in the years ahead. Theoretically, that would free up government funding to focus on the next “steppingstone to the moon and Mars” — a moon-orbiting outpost known as the Gateway.
In the years ahead, will the International Space Station become a shopworn space arcade, replaying the latter days of Russia’s Mir space station? Will it be deorbited, following in Mir’s fiery footsteps? Or could the world’s first international outpost in space undergo the orbital equivalent of urban renewal, backed by private investment?
The space station’s status as a steppingstone to Mars may be fading fast. But its time as a steppingstone to commercial activities and a commercial workforce on the final frontier may be just starting.
How fast does the @Space_Station travel as it orbits Earth? How many people have visited the orbiting lab? How long does it take for a spacecraft to reach the ISS? Find these answers and many more on this cool graphic from our friends at @NASA as we celebrate #SpaceStation20th! pic.twitter.com/KfbDCac7iO
The University of Arizona’s Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the $800 million mission, said the sample should amount to much more than the 2 ounces (60 grams) that was considered the minimum for mission success.
That leakage forced NASA to hustle up the procedure for securing the sample, culminating in the closure of the sample return capsule on Oct. 28. Scientists got a sense of the size of the sample by checking photos of the sample collection head, but they didn’t have time to use other methods to measure the sample’s mass.
“Even though my heart breaks for the loss of sample, it turned out to be a pretty cool science experiment, and we’re learning a lot,” Lauretta said today during a teleconference.
OSIRIS-REx — which takes its Egyptian-sounding name from the acronym for “Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer” — was launched in 2016 and took two years to get to Bennu. The probe surveyed the 1,600-foot-wide asteroid during the two years that followed, leading up to last week’s sample collection effort.
I’ve officially closed the Sample Return Capsule! The sample of Bennu is sealed inside and ready for our voyage back to Earth. The SRC will touch down in the Utah desert on Sep. 24, 2023. Thanks, everyone, for being a part of my journey #ToBennuAndBackpic.twitter.com/z75ITNiGBf
If the mission sticks to its schedule, OSIRIS-REx will begin its homeward journey next March, and drop off its sample capsule over the Utah desert during a 2023 flyby.
Scientists hope that studying a pristine sample from Bennu will bring new insights into the origins of the solar system and the chemical building blocks for life on Earth. There’s also a chance they’ll learn more about the resources that could be extracted from near-Earth asteroids, and about the strategies that would work best if threatening space rocks had to be diverted.
OSIRIS-REx is the first NASA mission to bring back samples from an asteroid, but Japan’s Hayabusa mission did something similar a decade ago. A follow-up mission, Hayabusa 2, is due to deliver yet another asteroid sample in December. Comparing such samples should add to the prospects for scientific discoveries.
But wait … there’s more. NASA has two other asteroid missions in the works: The Lucy spacecraft, set for launch next year, will visit a series of asteroids anchored in Jupiter’s orbit. And in 2022, NASA will send the Psyche probe to study a metal-rich asteroid, also named Psyche.
