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A SpaceX Falcon 9 carries a batch of Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit
SpaceX made is 10th successful Falcon 9 launch Wednesday morning, carrying 48 new Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit.
The launch comes as SpaceX CEO Elon Musk continues to use the Starlink satellite constellation support Ukraine against Russian attempts to disrupt the besieged country’s internet. SpaceX shipped user terminals to Ukraine and allows Ukrainians free access to the network.
In other space launch news, Cardiff-based start up Space Forge have contracted with Sir Richard Branson’s Long Beach, California-based Virgin Orbit to launch the first satellite from Wales sometime this summer. The Space Forge Satellite will ride to space aboard a Virgin Orbit LauncherOne rocket from Spaceport Cornwall in Newquay, Cornwall, and will be the first satellite launch from UK soil.
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When scientists first discovered a 31-kilometer-wide meteorite crater a kilometer beneath Greenland’s ice sheet in 2015, they hypothesized that it might have formed as recently as 13,000 years ago, a time when humans walked the Earth.
But in a new study published Wednesday in Science Advances, researchers using lasers to data sand washed from the crater by glacial rivers put the impact that formed the Hiawatha crater much further back in history — around 58 million years ago. That’s just 8 million years after the Chicxulub meteorite impact that formed a 200-kilometer-wide crater in present-day Mexico.
Although the Hiawatha impact was much smaller than the dinosaur killing Chicxulub, the energy released was greater than that of an atomic bomb, and may have cooled Earth’s climate for a time, although more research is necessary to say with certainty how Hiawatha affected the climate.
SpaceX completed its 10th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday morning, placing 48 of the company’s Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit.
The launch brings the number of operational Starlink satellites to more than 1,500, a count SpaceX hopes to eventually grow to more than 40,000 in a bid to provide global broadband internet coverage. At a press conference in February, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said his company could launch, on average, one Falcon 9 rocket per week in 2022.
The new batch of 48 satellites will help SpaceX get back on track after a solar storm pulled 40 newly launched Starlink satellites out of orbit to their doom in Earth’s atmosphere.
Nasa’s Psyche spacecraft just got its wings — a pair of massive solar panels that will power the science mission on its long sojourn in the asteroid belt.
Nasa’s Jet Propulsion laboratory published photos of the recently attached solar panels Monday. Each of the photovoltaic panels spans 11.3 meters and 7.3 meters wide when fullly extended, for a total of 75 square meters converting sunlight to electricity.
Engineers at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory attach solar panels to the Psyche spacecraft, which will blast off to the asteroid belt in August, 2022
Psyche will need those panels once it launches in August. The spacecraft’s target is 16 Psyche, a very dense, M-type asteroid around 370 million kilometers away in the asteroid belt.
Psyche the spacecraft will enter orbit around 16 Psyche the asteroid in 2026 and help scientists study what is believed to be the exposed core of an infant planet that never fully developed, providing an opportunity to better understand planetary formation, and even the Earth beneath our feet.
On 22 February, German astronomer Erwin Schwab discovered a new near-Earth asteroid, a 10-meter diameter space rock named 2022 DX.
As detailed in the March newsletter of the European Space Agency’s Near Earth Object Coordination Center, 2022 DX poses no threat to Earth, but it has scientists interested nonetheless. That’s because 2022 DX is an extremely slow cruising asteroid.
“2022 DX is moving sloowwly (for an asteroid) at ~ 1km/s compared to Earth,” The ESA operations Twitter account tweeted Tuesday. “This means it’ll remain in our vicinity for many months!”
According to Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Small Body Database Lookup tool, 2022 DX’s closest approach will take place on 19 March, but it won’t get closer than about 3.2 million kilometers from Earth. That’s closer than the asteroid 138971 (2001 CB21), which passed more than 4 million kilometers from Earth on 4 March.
But while 138971 (2001 CB21) was the size of a sky scraper, 2022 DX is more like a small house, and wouldn’t reach the ground even if it were to intercept Earth.
Tuesday, 8 March is International Women’s Day, and both the European Space Agency and Nasa have used social media to celebrate women space scientists, leaders and pioneers.
Nasa’s Ames Research Center, for instance, tweeted about Dr. Patricia Cowings, who in the late 1970s the first American woman to receive astronaut scientist training, even though she never flew in space. A psychophysiologist, Dr Cowings joined Nasa in 1971 and developed a form of biofeedback to help astronauts combat space sickness. She is still active at Nasa Ames today.
ESA, meanwhile, tweeted a link to a list of profiles of women within the space agency using the #BreakTheBias and #ESAWomen hashtags. Women such as Meadhbh Griffin, a young graduate trainee working in flight software systems, and Xiaochen Zhang , a planetary scientist studying how to use extraterrestrial resources while exploring other planets.
Nasa’s Ground Exploration System, the group responsible for all preparation, testing and launch operations for the US space agencies new Moon rocket, shared photos of the big launch vehicle on Twitter Tuesday.
The rocket, known as the Space Launch System, or SLS, and the Orion spacecraft at its top, are currently housed in the Vehicle Assembly building at Cape Canveral, Florida. But Nasa plans to move the entire, 98-meter tall and 7.7 million kilogram vehicle out to the launch pad on a giant treaded crawler on the evening of 17 March, an 11 hour trip.
Once there, SLS and Orion will spend about a month on the launchpad undergoing testing, including a “wet dress rehearsal” for launch, which involves loading the rocket with liquid hydrogen fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer, a simulated countdown and then pumping the cryogenic fuel back out of the rocket. It will then move back to the assembly building for final adjustments before an orbital test flight sometime in spring or early summer.
The SLS and Orion are the key components of Nasa’s Artemis program, which aims to return humans to the Moon in 2025. The forthcoming orbital test flight mission, dubbed Artemis I, will see an uncrewed Orion spacecraft fly out to and beyond the Moon before returning to Earth.
The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft has already captures the closest pictures ever of the Sun, and documented the largest solar prominence ever recorded.
Now the Solar Orbiter, which was launched in in February, 2020, will take another plunge close to the Sun to better understand our star. On 14 March, the spacecraft will pass within the orbit of Mercury on it’s way to its closest approach on 26 March, which will bring the spacecraft within around 45 million kilometers of the Sun.
The Solar Orbiter’s trajectory uses repeated gravity assist flybys of both Earth and Venus to fling the spacecraft toward its close approaches with the Sun — at slightly different angles — every six months. The spacecrafts mission could continue into the 2030s and will help scientists better understand the Sun, solar eruptions and the space weather they generate.
Space weather can impact space and satellite operations around Earth, such as the solar eruption that triggered a geomagnetic storm in early February, ultimately pulling 40 newly launched SpaceX Starlink satellites from their orbits.
At least two former US astronauts have been posting information about the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Twitter, in Russian, seemingly in an attempt to inform Russians who may not understand what their nation is doing.
On 2 March, Garret Reisman, a former Space Shuttle and International Space Station astronaut tweeted in Russian saying, “Who is guilty? The terrible war in Ukraine is not the fault of the Russian people. They did not decide to invade their brotherly country, many still do not know that this is happening. Only one person is to blame, Putin.”
And Scott Kelly, a former Space Shuttle pilot and ISS commander, has kept up a steady stream of tweets about the war in Russian, drawing the ire of Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, who on Sunday told Capt Kelly to stop before blocking the former astronaut on the social media site.
“We know that Russia uses a lot of disinformation, to manipulate his population and manipulate the world,” said Laura Forczyk, a physicist and founder of space consulting firm Astralytical. “By offering another viewpoint in their native language, those two astronauts are not only engaging in a Twitter spat, but also may be trying to correct the viewpoint for people who don’t know any better.”
Nasa scientists are searching for the crash site of the spent rocket section that likely struck the far side of the Moon on Friday, but it could take some time to confirm the impact.
Scientists hope to use Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been in orbit around and mapping the Moon since 2009, to spit the wreckage of the rocket and study the resulting impact crater.
But the orbiter was not in a position to view the rocket’s demise as it happened, and according to a Nasa spokesperson, the process of comparing old lunar photographs to new images taken in the coming days “will be challenging and might take weeks to months.”
There had been some debate over the identity of the defunct rocket segment, with early reporting suggesting it was a former SpaceX rocket booster launched more than six years ago.
But Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory now believes the large piece of space junk was the remnant of a Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 booster launched in 2014.
“This update results from analysis of the object’s orbits in the 2016 – 2017 timeframe,” the spokesperson said.
A spent rocket segment left over from either a SpaceX or Chinese rocket launch, depending on who you believe, struck the far side of the Moon around 12:25 p.m. GMT.
At least, it probably struck the Moon.
The predicted impact site, the massive Hertzsprung crater on the lunar far side, was out of site of any satellites or telescopes during the predicted time of impact.
But scientists with Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter program hope the Moon mapping lunar satellite will soon lay eyes on the aftermath of the rocket’s demise — and learn a thing or two about the Moon and the physics of high velocity impacts as well.
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 carries a batch of Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit
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