Space News and Discussions

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The longest lunar eclipse in centuries will happen this week, NASA says

by Maddie Capron
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-longest-l ... -week.html
You can see the longest partial lunar eclipse in hundreds of years this week.

The "nearly total" lunar eclipse is expected overnight Thursday, Nov. 18, to Friday, Nov. 19, NASA said.

"The Moon will be so close to opposite the Sun on Nov 19 that it will pass through the southern part of the shadow of the Earth for a nearly total lunar eclipse," NASA said on its website.

The eclipse will last 3 hours, 28 minutes and 23 seconds, making it the longest in centuries, Space.com reported.

Only a small sliver of the moon will be visible during the eclipse. About 97% of the moon will disappear into Earth's shadow as the sun and moon pass opposite sides of the planet, EarthSky reported.

The moon should appear to be a reddish-brown color as it slips into the shadow, NASA reported.
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caltrek
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NASA Seeks Ideas for a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
November 19, 2021

https://www.courthousenews.com/nasa-see ... -the-moon/

Introduction:
BOISE, Idaho (AP via Courthouse News) — If anyone has a good idea on how to put a nuclear fission power plant on the moon, the U.S. government wants to hear about it.

NASA and the nation’s top federal nuclear research lab on Friday put out a request for proposals for a fission surface power system.

NASA is collaborating with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory to establish a sun-independent power source for missions to the moon by the end of the decade.

“Providing a reliable, high-power system on the moon is a vital next step in human space exploration, and achieving it is within our grasp,” Sebastian Corbisiero, the Fission Surface Power Project lead at the lab, said in a statement.

If successful in supporting a sustained human presence on the moon, the next objective would be Mars. NASA says fission surface power could provide sustained, abundant power no matter the environmental conditions on the moon or Mars.
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NASA 911 for Asteroids
by Miriam Kramer
November 23, 2021

https://www.axios.com/asteroid-redirect ... c3619.html

Introduction:
(Axios) SpaceX is set to launch a NASA spacecraft on a mission to learn how to change the course of an asteroid in deep space.

Why it matters: The mission — called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) — will test the technology needed to redirect a dangerous asteroid if one is ever found on course with Earth.

Driving the news: The SpaceX Falcon 9 is expected to launch DART to space at 1:21 a.m. ET Wednesday.
  • NASA will air live coverage of the launch starting at 12:30 a.m. ET Tuesday, for all you night owls.
How it works: Once in space, DART will make its way to a tiny asteroid called a "moonlet" named Dimorphos that orbits the larger asteroid Didymos.
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Space Law Hasn’t Been Changed Since 1967 – but the UN Aims to Update Laws and Keep Space Peaceful
by Michelle L. D. Hanlon and Greg Autry

https://theconversation.com/space-law-h ... ful-171351

Introduction:
(The Conversation) On Nov. 15, 2021, Russia destroyed one of its own old satellites using a missile launched from the surface of the Earth, creating a massive debris cloud that threatens many space assets, including astronauts onboard the International Space Station. This happened only two weeks after the United Nations General Assembly First Committee formally recognized the vital role that space and space assets play in international efforts to better the human experience – and the risks military activities in space pose to those goals.

The U.N. First Committee deals with disarmament, global challenges and threats to peace that affect the international community. On Nov. 1, it approved a resolution that creates an open-ended working group. The goals of the group are to assess current and future threats to space operations, determine when behavior may be considered irresponsible, “make recommendations on possible norms, rules and principles of responsible behaviors,” and “contribute to the negotiation of legally binding instruments” – including a treaty to prevent “an arms race in space.”

We are two space policy experts with specialties in space law and the business of commercial space. We are also the president and vice president at the National Space Society, a nonprofit space advocacy group. It is refreshing to see the U.N. acknowledge the harsh reality that peace in space remains uncomfortably tenuous. This timely resolution has been approved as activities in space become ever more important and – as shown by the Russian test – tensions continue to rise.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty

Outer space is far from a lawless vacuum.

Activities in space are governed by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which is currently ratified by 111 nations. The treaty was negotiated in the shadow of the Cold War when only two nations – the Soviet Union and the U.S. – had spacefaring capabilities.
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Mysterious Chernobyl Fungus Could Protect Future Astronauts
by Scott Allan Johnston
November 22, 2021

https://www.inverse.com/science/chernobyl-fungus-iss

Introduction:
(Inverse) A LACK OF EFFECTIVE radiation shielding is one of the biggest challenges still to be overcome if humans are to embark on long-term voyages into deep space. On Earth, the planet’s powerful magnetosphere protects us from the deadliest forms of radiation — those produced by solar flares, and galactic cosmic rays arriving from afar — that stream through the Solar System.

Astronauts on the International Space Station, some 408km above the Earth, receive elevated levels of radiation but are close enough to Earth that they still receive some shielding, and can stay in orbit for up to a year. The same can’t be said for astronauts traveling further out, to the Moon, for example, or, someday, to Mars. Future deep space voyagers will need to bring their own shielding with them — or, as a new paper suggests — grow it along the way.

According to the paper, published in pre-print format on BioRxiv earlier this month, a special type of fungi that thrives in high radiation environments called Cladosporium sphaerospermum could form a living shield around astronauts in space. The fungus not only blocks radiation but actually uses it to grow, through a process call radiosynthesis: it pulls energy from radiation, just as most plants pull energy from sunlight via photosynthesis.

These radiation-loving fungi survive on Earth in extreme places, like the site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. In space, they do just as well. In 2019, researchers flew some of the fungi to the ISS, watching how it grew over a period of 30 days, and measuring the amount of radiation that passed through it, as compared to a control sample with no fungi.

The experiment showed that radiation levels beneath a 1.7mm thick bed of fungus were about 2.17 percent lower than the control. Not only that, but the fungus grew about 21 percent faster than it does on Earth, meaning that the fungi’s ability to act as a protective shield for astronauts could actually grow more robust the longer a mission lasts.
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One in Five Early Galaxies May Be Hiding in Space Dust
November 23, 2021

https://www.futurity.org/hidden-galaxie ... t-2661682/

Introduction:
(Futurity) Astronomers have discovered two previously invisible galaxies 29 billion light-years away from Earth.

The discovery suggests that up to one in five such distant galaxies remain hidden from our telescopes, camouflaged by cosmic dust. The new knowledge changes perceptions of our universe’s evolution since the Big Bang.

The two galaxies have been invisible to the optical lens of the Hubble Space Telescope, hidden behind a thick layer of cosmic dust that surrounds them. But with the help of the giant ALMA radio telescopes (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) in Chile’s Atacama Desert, which can capture radio waves emitted from the coldest, darkest depths of the universe, the two invisible galaxies suddenly appeared.

The two hidden galaxies have been named REBELS-12-2 and REBELS-29-2. The light from the two invisible galaxies has traveled about 13 billion years to reach us on Earth. The two are now located 29 billion light years away due the universe’s expansion.

“We were looking at a sample of very distant galaxies, which we already knew existed from the Hubble Space Telescope. And then we noticed that two of them had a neighbor that we didn’t expect to be there at all. As both of these neighboring galaxies are surrounded by dust, some of their light is blocked, making them invisible to Hubble,” explains Pascal Oesch, an associate professor at the Cosmic Dawn Center at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
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New Russian Module Launched to International Space Station
November 24, 2021

https://www.courthousenews.com/new-russ ... e-station/

Introduction:
MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian rocket blasted off successfully on Wednesday to deliver a new docking module to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz rocket lifted off as scheduled at 6:06 p.m. (1306 GMT) from the Russian launch facility in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, carrying the Progress cargo ship with the Prichal (Pier) docking module attached to it.

The craft successfully entered a designated orbit nine minutes after the launch and is set to dock at the station on Friday, hooking up to the new Russian Nauka (Science) laboratory module that was added to the station in July.

The new spherical module with six docking ports will allow potential future expansion of the Russian segment of the station.

Earlier this week, the Russian crew on the station started training for Prichal’s arrival, simulating the use of manual controls in case the automatic docking system fails.
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To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
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Beads of glass in meteorites help scientists piece together how solar system formed
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-beads-gla ... piece.html
by University of Chicago
Ever since scientists started looking at meteorites with microscopes, they've been puzzled—and fascinated—by what's inside. Most meteorites are made of tiny beads of glass that date back to the earliest days of the solar system, before the planets were even formed.

Scientists with the University of Chicago have published an analysis laying out how these beads, which are found in many meteorites, came to be—and what they can tell us about what happened in the early solar system.

"These are big questions," said UChicago alum Nicole Xike Nie, Ph.D.'19, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science and first author of the study. "Meteorites are snapshots that can reveal the conditions this early dust experienced—which has implications for the evolution of both Earth and other planets."
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Astronomers observe a new type of binary star long predicted to exist
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-astronome ... -star.html
by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have observed a new type of binary star that has long been theorized to exist. The discovery finally confirms how a rare type of star in the universe forms and evolves.

The new class of stars, described in this month's issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was discovered by postdoctoral fellow Kareem El-Badry using the Shane Telescope at Lick Observatory in California and data from several astronomical surveys.

"We have observed the first physical proof of a new population of transitional binary stars," says El-Badry. "This is exciting; it's a missing evolutionary link in binary star formation models that we've been looking for."

A New Type of Star

When a star dies, there's a 97 percent chance it will become a white dwarf, a small dense object that has contracted and dimmed after burning through all its fuel.

But in rare instances, a star can become an extremely low mass (ELM) white dwarf. Less than one-third the mass of the Sun, these stars present a conundrum: if stellar evolution calculations are correct, all ELM white dwarfs would seem to be more than 13.8 billion years old—older than the age of the universe itself and thus, physically impossible.
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