Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 141

As the human race continues to expand our technological capabilities with space exploration, the amount of space debris is growing exponentially, which will eventually hinder our progress if something isn't done.

An example of space debris becoming a problem is the International Space Station is currently preparing to perform a maneuver out of the way of some space debris that was created after China tested an anti-satellite weapon back in 2007. A Chinese weather satellite that was decommissioned was selected as a target for an experimental anti-satellite missile.

The test was a success as the satellite was completely destroyed, but it caused 3,500 individual pieces of space debris that are being tracked and monitored by officials. In September last year, the ISS had to maneuver again to dodge some space debris, which marked the third time in 2020 the floating laboratory had to do so. The ISS will make its closest approach with the space junk on this coming Friday. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

This month skywatchers will be able to enjoy a partial lunar eclipse that will be the longest of this century, according to CBS.

In a new video posted to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory YouTube channel, the agency confirms that the partial lunar eclipse will take place overnight on November 18 and 19. The moon will slip into Earth's shadow for 3 hours and 28 minutes, and according to NASA, a large portion of the planet will be able to see it. Regions such as North and South America, Eastern Asia, Australia, and the Pacific region will be able to see the eclipse.

While partial solar eclipses may not be as spectacular as total solar eclipses, where the entire moon is engulfed in Earth's shadow, they occur more frequently, and according to NASA, "that just means more opportunities to witness little changes in our solar system that sometimes occur right before our eyes." Be sure to check your respective location and timezone for the best opportunity to see the partial lunar eclipse, and if you aren't able to see it yourself, you can always watch NASA's livestream that will cover almost 97% of the full moon's surface.

Astronomers have managed to detect using telescopes the first evidence of a black hole outside of our Milky Way galaxy.

The study will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and details a team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years away from Earth. The researchers were looking for any stars showing signs of gravitational anomaly that may mean a black hole is nearby, and they found one, a star five times the mass of the Sun.

The star was showing blips in its motion, and after performing further analysis, the researchers discovered it was a black hole with around 11 times the mass of the Sun. The black hole was located in NGC 1850 and is estimated to be only 100 million years old, which is extremely young when considering some of the ages of other celestial objects in the universe.

Onlookers located on the banks of a reservoir were confused and intrigued at the sight of what appeared to be at the time a dead "prehistoric" sea creature.

The creature washed up on the banks of MacRitchie Reservoir in Singapore and was spotted by Scottish ex-pat Karen Lythgoe who decided to go and get a closer look. Lythgoe explained to the Independent that at first she should it was a crocodile, but upon closer inspection, she believed it was "something you might see in a zoo - it looked prehistoric with its big jaws and teeth". Imran Kassim, an individual from the local area, said, "it flat out looked like an alligator", but it "It was pretty damn strange, but it looked enough like a lizard with its jaws wide open."

The local city's water agency and the National Parks Board declared that the mysterious creature was an alligator gar native to the southern United States. The creature somehow managed to get 10,000 miles away from its native land, and according to The Strait Times, this specific species is known for being released by owners who can't manage it once it's grown to its maximum size of around eight feet. The law in Singapore fines any individual up to $50,000 for being caught releasing animals in parks and nature reserves.

NASA has taken to its YouTube channel to answer another popular question as part of its "We Asked a NASA Expert" series.

This week a NASA expert has answered the question "Is NASA aware of any Earth-threatening asteroids?", and taking center stage is NASA asteroid expert Davide Farnocchia who explains that NASA isn't aware of any Earth-threatening asteroids, but the agency is always searching. Farnocchia explains that for more than 20 years, NASA has funded programs that construct telescopes such as telescopes to observe the sky. Farnocchia adds that over the years, the observations have increased, and now the agency is watching the sky almost every single night.

Continuing on, the NASA asteroid expert explains that through these constant observations, the agency has been able to locate 95% of the asteroids that are greater than 3,280 feet and that could come close to the Earth. Additionally, more than a million asteroids have been discovered. Out of all the asteroids found, the scale that assesses the risk of each asteroid (0 - 10, zero being the lowest, ten being highest) has never categorized an asteroid above 0-level risk. With this information, NASA is able to say that for the next 100 years, there is a very low chance of an asteroid threat.

The head of NASA has told reporters that the date for the Artemis III mission when humans will return back to the Moon has been changed.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson spoke to reports on Tuesday and said that the space agency is pushing back the launch of Artemis III by at least a year. The delay in the launch comes after the Artemis program was smacked by delays that range from the development of technology to legal disputes. After losing to Elon Musk's SpaceX, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin moved to sue NASA for allegedly changing the terms of the contract throughout the competition to present proposals for designs.

Since the contract was now a legal matter, all development on SpaceX's lander had to be paused until the dispute was over. Nelson commented on the matter between NASA and Blue Origin, saying,"We lost nearly seven months in litigation, and that likely has pushed the first human landing likely to no earlier than 2025".

Richard Branson's space company Virgin Galactic has announced its targets for how many tourists it wants to be taking to suborbital space per month.

In July, Virgin Galactic took Richard Branson and three others to suborbital space via the company's VSS Unity spaceplane. At the moment, the VSS Unity is the only spaceplane the company offers, but Virgin Galactic won't be stopping there as the company has plans for testing the VSS Imagine in early 2023. The VSS Unity will be flown once a month starting in 2023, and during the second half of 2023, the VSS Imagine will begin accepting travelers.

Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said that in 2023 Virgin Galactic plans on taking tourists to space three times per month. On Monday, the company announced it has already presold 700 tickets, and of those 700 tickets, one-hundred of them were at the new price point of $450,000. Virgin Galactic has delayed the launch of commercial flights until late 2022 as it announced it had to work on VMS Eve. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

Recently four astronauts that lived on the International Space Station (ISS) for six months returned back to Earth safely with SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule.

The four astronauts, NASA's Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide from Japan, took off from the ISS and touched back down on Earth on Monday. SpaceX celebrated the safe arrival by posting to its Twitter with the following message, "Splashdown of Dragon confirmed - welcome back to Earth", and "The Crew-2 astronauts and Dragon spent 199 days in orbit, the first U.S. spacecraft to reach that milestone!"

Dragon spent nine hours navigating Earth's upper atmosphere before reaching the thick atmospheric layers. Upon getting lower into the atmosphere, Dragon was spotted by several people in separate locations across the U.S. Residents in New Orleans were happy to see the SpaceX crew and astronauts travel through the sky in a fiery hot blaze as Dragon re-entered the atmosphere. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk even saw a video of Dragon re-entering and said, "Dragon enters like a shooting star".

Some social media users and tourists are taking it upon themselves to inspect the simulated Mars base that is being used for research purposes.

In an op-ed published in Space.com, Dr. Shannon Rupert, the director of the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) that she has chased more people off the premises than welcomed them. The MDRS used the Utah desert to create a simulated Mars environment that is used to conduct research that will become valuable information for future astronauts that may live on Mars one day.

The director explains that some people are just tourists and are very polite, while others have resulted in the local police being called and them being removed from the property. Additionally, Dr. Rupert writes that some intruders are using drones to take images of the area to post online, which only attracts more curiosity from the public.

The largest and most technically challenging space telescope to ever be created stands at three stories tall and as wide as a tennis court.

NASA and the European Space Agency, along with the Canadian Space Agency, are gearing up to launch the James Webb Space Telescope after many long years of development with countless expensive setbacks and delays. NASA has debuted a new video series titled "Elements of Webb," which informs viewers why engineers behind the next-generation space telescope chose to use the materials the JWST is constructed of.

Additionally, the video explains that the JWST is "one hundred times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope but at half the weight" and is designed to look back further in time than another other space telescope. The JWST is designed to see the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, and hopefully, with its discoveries, researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of the formation of the universe and the events that took place right after the Big Bang occurred.

NASA's Perseverance rover is back online exploring its surroundings and doing what it does best, take samples of the Martian terrain.

In a new post on NASA's official Twitter for the Perseverance Mars Rover, the rover writes in first-person that it has looked inside "something no one's ever seen". The post continues and explains that a small patch of rock was abraded to remove its surface layer so observations could be made for what was inside. In a separate post, two more images were released that show some layered rocks may have formed by water millions of years ago.

The rover continued and said that these could hold clues about the history of the rocks and, therefore, the geological evolution of the area. Perseverance is tasked with examining viable areas for inspection and finding rocks such as these are essentially gold mines of information for researchers back on Earth that are trying to understand Mars' history. Perseverance is also taking samples that are stored on the rover until they are transported back to Earth.

NASA has published a new image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and this time around, we are taking a look at "cosmic ribbons".

The image has been published on the NASA website and showcases DEM L249, that's located in the Large Magellanic Cloud. DEM L249 is the result of the death of a white dwarf star through the massive stellar explosion called a supernova, and the leftover remnants of this explosion are believed to be ribbons of gas.

NASA explains that white dwarf stars are usually stable, but in the event of the white dwarf having a companion star, dubbed a "binary system", the white dwarf's gravitational pull can rip enough matter from its neighboring star that it reaches critical mass and explodes. Astronomers investigated DEM L249 and found that the gas was much hotter than the remnants of a typical Type 1a supernova, which leads the researchers to suspect that the white dwarf star that exploded was much larger the previously anticipated.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has observed a solar flare occurring on the Sun.

The update has been published to NOAA's SPWC website and states that a long-duration M2 X-ray solar flare occurred at 1702 UTC (12:02 ET) on 9 November 2021. The update goes on to describe that the event took place on the northwest limb of the Sun, facing away from Earth, and that the flare was associated with a coronal mass ejection (CME) burst.

Additionally, the SPWC writes that the CME that was associated with the flare is currently under analysis, but early indicators suggest that it poses no danger to Earth. The M2 flare is categorized as a "minor" flare, with R1 (Radio Blackout) being the lowest level of classification on the five-level scale - R5 being the most extreme. Officials warn that X-rays from the flare may cause a radio blackout over the Americas - a map can be found below.

The position humanity has been in since its existence will be fundamentally changed forever once a space agency identifies the next Earth.

Every ten years National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine release a report that has analyzed the most compelling science goals and presents a program that will give an idea of how government space agencies, such as NASA, can invest in technologies, space-based activities that would achieve discoveries in the recommended areas.

The report boils down astronomy's conundrums into three key scientific challenges for the next ten years; finding an Earth-like habitable world, understanding black holes, and galaxy evolution. The report recommends that to find an exoplanet that is habitable and Earth-like, NASA needs to build a new telescope that features all of the necessary instruments to detect and inspect exoplanets for atmospheric readings, in hopes of identifying any fingerprints of life. Axios reports that this telescope would cost around $11 billion and would be launched sometime in 2040.

Heinz is looking to the future of human space travel and has asked the question - "will there be Heinz Tomato Ketchup on Mars?". The answer is yes, or at least it is "yes" for the time being.

Heinz has stepped out of the box and thought years down the line when humans are attempting to grow foods on other planets and to test out if it's possible to grow tomatoes in harsh conditions, Heinz partnered with astrobiologists at the Florida Institute of Technology's Aldrin Space Institute to grow tomatoes in the same conditions as Mars. The team used the same premium tomatoes that are found in normal Heinz products but grew them in very harsh conditions. The end result is a product that "Heinz Tomato Ketchup Marz Edition".

While the product itself won't be available to purchase, it has provided quite a lot of scientific value as the project has successfully demonstrated that tomatoes could one day be harvested on Mars, as well as pioneering into a relatively new field of research for Martian botany. Dr. Andrew Palmer, from the Aldrin Space Institute and the lead of the team behind the research, said, "Before now, most efforts around discovering ways to grow in Martian-simulated conditions are short-term plant growth studies."

The Sun has seen a lot more activity than what usually occurs recently as our solar star moves further into the most active part of its 11-year solar cycle.

Researchers are estimating that there will be a variation in the number of sunspots that appear on the surface of the Sun and that the activity will reach its peak sometime in 2025. As a result of the increase in solar activity, the Sun has been emitting flares and CMEs more often, some of which have impacted Earth directly, causing minor to moderate geomagnetic storms that create spectacular auroras in the night sky.

European Space Agency's astronaut Thomas Pesquet tweeted out an image of one of these auroras and said that the team was able to experience "the strongest auroras of the entire mission, over North America and Canada." The aurora that Pesquet witnesses was caused by a series of outbursts from the Sun that happened last week. The outbursts occurred in quick succession, with the second was traveling much faster than the first, resulting in the first being cannibalized and a larger cloud being created.

The Sun will eventually die, and it's unknown if humans will even be around to witness it, or hopefully, if they are around, be able to survive it.

The Sun, much like other stars like it, will eventually burn all of the hydrogen, which will cause the core of the star to begin to cool and contract. This interaction then causes a disruption between the inward pressure from gravity and the outward pressure created by the core fusion. As a result of this imbalance, an excess of hydrogen will enter the shell around the core, igniting it, causing the star's edges to swell massively and its mass to be launched off into directions all around it.

Eventually, the star's core will collapse and convert into a white dwarf, and an example of that process can be seen in the above image. Hubble has taken an image of the nebula named NGC 2438, and what can be seen in the image is the star's ejected material still continues to expand after a cataclysmic explosion.

On Monday, the four astronauts re-entered Earth with the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and were successfully retrieved after touching down.

NASA's Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide from Japan boarded the Crew Dragon capsule that was still docked at the International Space Station (ISS) since their arrival to journey back down to Earth just after 2 pm ET on Monday.

The team of astronauts spent 9 hours navigating through Earth's upper atmospheres before approaching the thicker lower levels of the atmosphere, where the capsule then deployed its thrusters and parachutes to slowly guide the craft to its landing location in the Gulf of Mexico. Before the astronauts entered the capsule for their ride home, they were asked not to use the Crew Dragon toilet due to issues with it. Instead, the astronauts were asked to use the "undergarments" that are provided in the suits, which are essentially, space adult diapers.

A new study from researchers who have investigated rock sediments from east India believes they have found evidence that suggests Earth's first continents rose out of the ocean far earlier than previously thought.

The researchers looked at samples derived from Singhbhum, near the city of Kolkata, and extracted the minerals zircon, which was then blasted by a laser to measure the number of elements released. With these results, the scientists were able to estimate the age of when the first continents rose out of the water, placing the date anywhere between 3.3 to 3.2bn years ago - 700 million years earlier than previously estimated.

Dr. Priyadarshi Chowdhury of Monash University, the study's lead author, said, "We have plate tectonics today to control the elevation. When two continents' [plates] collide, you form Himalayas, you form Alps." However, this wasn't the case when the first landmasses emerged. Researchers hypothesize that 300 to 400 million years of violent volcanic activity of a continual build-up of lava from the seafloor caused the first continents to rise. The lava "becomes so thick and it just floats up above the water ... like an iceberg floating on water".

A new paper that has yet to be peer-reviewed has revealed that gravitational wave detection, first proposed by Albert Einstein, can be detected much more frequently than previously thought.

The paper has appeared on the preprint server arXiv and explains that a team of researchers used the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which is renowned as the world's largest gravitational wave observatory, along with another gravitational wave instrument called Vigo, located in Italy to detect 35 of these events. Astronomers believe that the collision between two black holes engulfing each other or a black hole and a neutron star colliding is the source of these gravitational waves.

Susan Scott from the Australian National University, an astronomer and co-author of the paper, said, "These discoveries represent a tenfold increase in the number of gravitational waves detected by LIGO and Virgo since they started observing." Adding, "We've detected 35 events. That's massive! In contrast, we made three detections in our first observing run, which lasted four months in 2015-16." The majority of the detected events are believed to be a result of two black holes merging, creating a much larger black hole that's called a "supermassive black hole". There is a supermassive black hole located at the center of our Milky Way called Sagittarius A*.