Space News and Discussions

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raklian
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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.
weatheriscool
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NASA Moon rocket test met 90% of objectives

https://phys.org/news/2022-06-nasa-moon-rocket-met.html
NASA's Artemis I Moon rocket sits at Launch Pad Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center, in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

NASA's fourth attempt to complete a critical test of its Moon rocket achieved around 90 percent of its goals, but there's still no firm date for the behemoth's first flight, officials said Tuesday.

Known as the "wet dress rehearsal" because it involves loading liquid propellant, it is the final item to cross off the checklist before the Artemis-1 mission slated for this summer: an uncrewed lunar flight that will eventually be followed by Moon boots on the ground, likely no sooner than 2026.

Teams at the Kennedy Space Center began their latest effort to complete the exercise on Saturday.

Their objectives were to load propellant into the rocket's tanks, conduct a launch countdown and simulate contingency scenarios, then drain the tanks.

Three previous bids, starting in March, were plagued by glitches and failed to fuel up the rocket with hundreds of thousands of gallons of supercooled liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
weatheriscool
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Scientists identify a possible source for Charon's red cap
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-scientist ... d-cap.html
by Southwest Research Institute
Southwest Research Institute scientists combined data from NASA's New Horizons mission with novel laboratory experiments and exospheric modeling to reveal the likely composition of the red cap on Pluto's moon Charon and how it may have formed. This first-ever description of Charon's dynamic methane atmosphere using new experimental data provides a fascinating glimpse into the origins of this moon's red spot as described in two recent papers.

"Prior to New Horizons, the best Hubble images of Pluto revealed only a fuzzy blob of reflected light," said SwRI's Randy Gladstone, a member of the New Horizons science team. "In addition to all the fascinating features discovered on Pluto's surface, the flyby revealed an unusual feature on Charon, a surprising red cap centered on its north pole."

Soon after the 2015 encounter, New Horizons scientists proposed that a reddish "tholin-like" material at Charon's pole could be synthesized by ultraviolet light breaking down methane molecules. These are captured after escaping from Pluto and then frozen onto the moon's polar regions during their long winter nights. Tholins are sticky organic residues formed by chemical reactions powered by light, in this case the Lyman-alpha ultraviolet glow scattered by interplanetary hydrogen molecules.
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weatheriscool
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Astronomers find imprint of the bubbles produced by the explosion of dying stars in our galaxy

by Heidelberg University
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-astronome ... stars.html
An international group of astronomers, led by Juan Diego Soler of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), have found the imprint of the bubbles produced by the explosion of dying stars in the structure of the gas that pervades our galaxy. They made this discovery by applying techniques from artificial intelligence to the HI4PI survey data, which provides the most detailed whole-sky distribution of atomic hydrogen in the Milky Way to date. The scientists analyzed the filamentary structure in the emission from atomic hydrogen gas. They inferred that it preserved a record of the dynamic processes induced by ancient supernova explosions and the rotation of the galaxy. Their results were published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Hydrogen is the main component of stars like the sun. However, the process that leads the diffuse clouds of hydrogen gas that spread through our galaxy to assemble into dense clouds from which stars ultimately form is not yet fully understood. A collaboration of astronomers headed by Juan Diego Soler from the INAF-IAPS (Istituto di Astrofisica e Planetologia Spaziali, an INAF research Institute in Rome) and the ECOgal project has now taken an important step in elucidating the life cycle of the raw material to form stars.

Soler processed data from the most detailed whole-sky survey of the emission from atomic hydrogen in radio waves, the HI4PI survey, which is based on observations obtained with the Parkes 64-meter Radio Telescope in Australia, the Effelsberg 100-meter Radio Telescope in Germany, and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank 110-meter Telescope (GBT) in the United States. "These archival observations of the hydrogen emission line at 21-cm wavelength contain information on the distribution of the gas in the sky and its velocity in the direction of observation, which combined with a model of the Milky Way rotation indicates how far are the emitting clouds," says Sergio Molinari from the INAF-IAPS, principal investigator of the ECOgal project.

To study the distribution of the galactic hydrogen clouds, Soler applied a mathematical algorithm commonly used in the automatic inspection and analysis of satellite images and online videos. Because of the size of these observations, it would have been impossible to do this analysis by eye. The algorithm revealed an extensive and intricate network of slender threadlike objects or filaments. Most of the filaments in the inner part of the Milky Way were found to be pointing away from the disk of our galaxy.
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NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spots rocket impact site on moon
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-nasa-luna ... ocket.html
by Mark Robinson, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Astronomers discovered a rocket body heading toward a lunar collision late last year. Impact occurred March 4, with NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter later spotting the resulting crater. Surprisingly the crater is actually two craters, an eastern crater (18-meter diameter, about 19.5 yards) superimposed on a western crater (16-meter diameter, about 17.5 yards).

The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the rocket body had large masses at each end. Typically a spent rocket has mass concentrated at the motor end; the rest of the rocket stage mainly consists of an empty fuel tank. Since the origin of the rocket body remains uncertain, the double nature of the crater may indicate its identity.

No other rocket body impacts on the Moon created double craters. The four Apollo SIV-B craters were somewhat irregular in outline (Apollos 13, 14, 15, 17) and were substantially larger (greater than 35 meters, about 38 yards) than each of the double craters. The maximum width (29 meters, about 31.7 yards) of the double crater of the mystery rocket body was near that of the S-IVBs.
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BepiColombo Spacecraft Lines Up for Second Planet Mercury Flyby

https://scitechdaily.com/bepicolombo-sp ... ury-flyby/
By European Space Agency (ESA) June 21, 2022
BepiColombo First Mercury Flyby
Mercury Flyby

Key moments during BepiColombo’s second Mercury flyby on June 23, 2022. The spacecraft will skim the surface at an altitude of about 200 km (124 miles) at its closest approach, at 09:44 UTC (11:44 CEST). Credit: ESA

The primary purpose of the flyby is to use the planet’s gravity to fine-tune BepiColombo’s trajectory. Having been launched into space on an Ariane 5 from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou in October 2018, BepiColombo is making use of nine planetary flybys: one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury, together with the spacecraft’s solar electric propulsion system, to help steer into Mercury orbit against the enormous gravitational pull of our Sun.

Even though BepiColombo is in ‘stacked’ cruise configuration for these brief flybys, meaning many instruments cannot yet be fully operated, it can still grab an incredible taste of Mercury science to boost our understanding and knowledge of the Solar System’s innermost planet. A sequence of snapshots will be taken by BepiColombo’s three monitoring cameras showing the planet’s surface, while a number of the magnetic, plasma, and particle monitoring instruments will sample the environment from both near and far from the planet in the hours around close approach.
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Biofinder May Advance Detection of Extraterrestrial Life
June 17, 2022

Introduction:
(Nature) The “Search for life”, which may be extinct or extant on other planetary bodies is one of the major goals of NASA planetary exploration missions. Finding such evidence of biological residue in a vast planetary landscape is an enormous challenge. We have developed a highly sensitive instrument, the “Compact Color Biofinder”, which can locate minute amounts of biological material in a large area at video speed from a standoff distance. Here we demonstrate the efficacy of the Biofinder to detect fossils that still possess strong bio-fluorescence signals from a collection of samples. Fluorescence images taken by the Biofinder instrument show that all Knightia spp. fish fossils analysed from the Green River formation (Eocene, 56.0–33.9 Mya) still contain considerable amounts of biological residues. The biofluorescence images support the fact that organic matter has been well preserved in the Green River formation, and thus, not diagenetically replaced (replaced by minerals) over such a significant timescale. We further corroborated results from the Biofinder fluorescence imagery through Raman and attenuated total reflection Fourier-transform infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopies, scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM–EDS), and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM). Our findings confirm once more that biological residues can survive millions of years, and that using biofluorescence imaging effectively detects these trace residues in real time. We anticipate that fluorescence imaging will be critical in future NASA missions to detect organics and the existence of life on other planetary bodies.
Read more here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-14410-8
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weatheriscool
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Biofinder advances detection of extraterrestrial life
https://phys.org/news/2022-06-biofinder ... -life.html
by Marcie Grabowski, University of Hawaii at Manoa
An innovative scientific instrument, the Compact Color Biofinder, developed by a team of University of Hawai'i at Mānoa researchers, may change the game in the search for signs of extraterrestrial life.

Most biological materials, for example, amino acids, fossils, sedimentary rocks, plants, microbes, proteins and lipids, have strong organic fluorescence signals that can be detected by specialized scanning cameras. In a study published in Nature Scientific Reports recently, the research team reported that the Biofinder is so sensitive that it can accurately detect the bio-residue in fish fossils from the 34-56 million year-old Green River formation.

"The Biofinder is the first system of its kind," said Anupam Misra, lead instrument developer and researcher at the Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology at the UH Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST). "At present, there is no other equipment that can detect minute amounts of bio-residue on a rock during the daytime. Additional strengths of the Biofinder are that it works from a distance of several meters, takes video and can quickly scan a large area."

Though the Biofinder was first developed in 2012 by Misra, advances supported by the NASA PICASSO program culminated in the latest color version of the compact Biofinder.

Finding evidence of biological residue in a vast planetary landscape is an enormous challenge. So, the team tested the Biofinder's detection abilities on the ancient Green River fish fossils and corroborated the results through laboratory spectroscopy analysis, scanning electron microscopy and fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy.
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