Space News and Discussions

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Yuli Ban
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China will aim to alter the orbit of a potentially threatening asteroid with a kinetic impactor test as part of plans for a planetary defense system.

China is drafting a planetary defense plan and will conduct technical studies and research into developing systems to counter the threats posed by near Earth asteroids, Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), told China Central Television (CCTV). 

At the same time, CNSA will establish an early warning system and develop software to simulate operations against the near Earth objects and test and verify basic procedures.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
weatheriscool
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New double neutron star millisecond pulsar discovered
https://phys.org/news/2022-04-neutron-s ... ulsar.html
by Tomasz Nowakowski , Phys.org
An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a rare double neutron star millisecond pulsar. The newfound binary pulsar, designated PSR J1325−6253, consists of two neutron stars orbiting one another every 1.8 days. The finding is detailed in a paper published April 14 on arXiv.org.

The most rapidly rotating pulsars, those with rotation periods below 30 milliseconds, are known as millisecond pulsars (MSPs). It is assumed that they are formed in binary systems when the initially more massive component turns into a neutron star that is then spun-up due to accretion of matter from the secondary star.

Some pulsars consist of two neutron stars (dubbed double neutron star systems—DNS). They are one of the most important classes of objects used to test and understand numerous astrophysical and fundamental physics phenomena, including general relativity in the strong-field regime.
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Scientists model landscape formation on Titan, revealing an Earth-like alien world
https://earth.stanford.edu/news/scienti ... #gs.ygohir
by Danielle Tucker, Stanford University

Saturn's moon Titan looks very much like Earth from space, with rivers, lakes, and seas filled by rain tumbling through a thick atmosphere. While these landscapes may look familiar, they are composed of materials that are undoubtedly different—liquid methane streams streak Titan's icy surface and nitrogen winds build hydrocarbon sand dunes.

The presence of these materials—whose mechanical properties are vastly different from those of silicate-based substances that make up other known sedimentary bodies in our solar system—makes Titan's landscape formation enigmatic. By identifying a process that would allow for hydrocarbon-based substances to form sand grains or bedrock depending on how often winds blow and streams flow, Stanford University geologist Mathieu Lapôtre and his colleagues have shown how Titan's distinct dunes, plains, and labyrinth terrains could be formed.

Titan, which is a target for space exploration because of its potential habitability, is the only other body in our solar system known to have an Earth-like, seasonal liquid transport cycle today. The new model, published in Geophysical Research Letters April 25, shows how that seasonal cycle drives the movement of grains over the moon's surface.
weatheriscool
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China Announces Plan for Kinetic Asteroid Redirect

By Jessica Hall on April 26, 2022 at 11:30 am
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/334 ... d-redirect
In 2021, NASA announced that they were going to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid — on purpose. But this was no “hold my beer” moment; the reason pour faire le smashy-smash was a live-fire demo of “Earth’s first planetary defense system.” A big enough asteroid can wreck the day of every living human, on and off planet. So, twenty years after the 1998 box office sunburn Armageddon, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). Now, Chinese state media reports that China has a plan to step up with its own asteroid redirect mission.

Space Day is a pretty big deal in China. So, this year’s Space Day was an auspicious day to announce this mission of shared global guardianship. During an interview on China Central Television, China National Space Administration (CNSA) deputy head Wu Yanhua detailed a sweeping new asteroid defense initiative.

First, Wu said, China will build out a “near-Earth asteroid monitoring and defense system” to protect from asteroid impacts. Such a system would include an early warning array, along with other relevant defense tech, which is TBD. But Wu also floated an ambitious plan to have an asteroid-redirecting spacecraft in the sky no later than Space Day, 2025.
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I respect Lord Rees and agree with him on many issues.

But on this particular subject I couldn't disagree more. We need more humans in space!

-----

Leave space missions to billionaires and robots, says astronomer royal

Sat 30 Apr 2022 08.00 BST

The world’s space agencies should scrap plans to send astronauts to the moon and Mars and leave them to explorers and billionaires who can privately fund and risk such adventures, the astronomer royal says.

Lord Martin Rees said technical improvements and more sophisticated artificial intelligence meant robotic missions were becoming ever more capable of exploration, and even construction, in space, making it unnecessary for space agencies to front far-flung human missions.

“We should not have publicly funded programmes to send people to the moon, still less to Mars,” said Rees. “It’s hugely risky, hugely expensive, and there’s no practical or scientific benefit to sending humans. It’s a pretty bad bargain for the taxpayer.”

His comments prompted a robust defence from some experts, who stressed that government-backed spacefaring is a way to project soft power and provided huge inspiration, adding that the private sector could turn space into the “wild west”.

But Rees argues we should encourage and cheer on explorers and billionaire entrepreneurs who want to leave Earth in search of adventure in the spirit of Shackleton and Scott – both of whom died on Antarctic expeditions. The SpaceX founder, Elon Musk, has long enthused about moving to Mars, noting “there’s a good chance of death”.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... omer-royal
weatheriscool
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Russia says it's pulling out of International Space Station over sanctions
Source: Axios
Russia says its pulling out of the International Space Station over sanctions meant to punish the country for Vladimir Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Bloomberg reports, citing state media outlets Tass and RIA Novosti.

What he's saying: “The decision has been taken already, we’re not obliged to talk about it publicly,” said general director Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, per state media.

“I can say this only — in accordance with our obligations, we’ll inform our partners about the end of our work on the ISS with a year’s notice.”
Rogozin has threatened on multiple occasions to pull out of the space station and let it fall back to Earth in an uncontrolled deorbit in protest of sanctions on Russia, Axios' Jacob Knutson reports.
Read more: https://www.axios.com/russia-internatio ... 560fa.html
weatheriscool
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Astronomers survey the least massive black holes at the center of galaxies in the local universe
May 2, 2022 by Labani Mallick, D. Wilkins, A. Fabian, J. García, M. Parker, J. Tomsick
Astronomers survey the least massive black holes at the center of galaxies in the local Universe
https://sciencex.com/news/2022-05-astro ... holes.html
Our research work has, for the first time, revealed the nature of the least massive supermassive black holes at the centers of nearby galaxies. We used high-quality X-ray data from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton observatory to closely study the temporal and spectral behaviors of a sample of active galactic nuclei hosting the smallest supermassive black holes at the center.

An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is the most luminous, compact region at the center of a galaxy, and the galaxy hosting an AGN is known as the active galaxy. Our universe is the home of countless mysterious objects. Supermassive black holes, sitting at the center of active galaxies, are examples of such exotic objects, and they can have masses of about 105 up to 1010 times that of the sun. However, most of our knowledge on the physical processes occurring in the AGN central engine is limited to active galaxies hosting supermassive black holes of mass greater than 106 times that of the sun, and we know very little about the low-mass end of AGNs, where the mass of the central supermassive black hole is 105 to 106 times the solar mass. The least massive AGNs can provide new insight into how supermassive black holes grow at the center of galaxies and are crucial for constraining the cosmological black hole growth models.
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NASA, Boeing say Starliner on track for May 19 launch
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-nasa-boei ... track.html
A rocket with Boeing's Starliner spacecraft aboard is rolled to the launch pad in August 2021 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Boeing's Starliner capsule is finally ready to reattempt a key test launch to the International Space Station on May 19, officials said Tuesday.

The uncrewed flight, named OFT-2, is a vital step towards certifying the spaceship for eventually carrying passengers, giving NASA a second taxi provider alongside SpaceX.

Aerospace giant Boeing, which was awarded a $4.2 billion contract for the purpose in 2014, initially attempted the test in 2019, but failed to rendezvous with the ISS after experiencing software glitches that caused flight anomalies.

The program has since experienced several delays. It was last supposed to fly in August 2021, but the mission was aborted just hours before launch because high humidity led to corrosion within Starliner's valves.
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First rays of sunlight for balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise III
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-rays-sunl ... atory.html
by Max Planck Society
Approximately a month before it begins its research flight in the stratosphere, the balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise III has looked at the Sun for the first time from its launch site at the Arctic Circle. In June, Sunrise III will take off from Esrange Space Center, the Swedish Space Agency's (SSC) balloon and rocket base in Kiruna (Sweden), and will climb to an altitude of about 35 kilometers. During its flight of several days, it will then take unique measurements of the Sun. In this way, processes in the chromosphere, the highly dynamic layer between the visible surface and the outer atmosphere of the Sun, will become visible more precisely than ever before. In the remaining weeks until launch, the technical and scientific teams from Germany, Spain, Japan, and the U.S. will prepare all systems and the scientific instruments for their mission and rehearse flight procedures and operations.
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caltrek
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A Possible Optical Counterpoint to Fast Radio Burst?
by Aas Nova
May 5, 2022

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-n ... dio-burst/

Extract:
(Sky & Telescope) What’s the mechanism behind millisecond-duration bursts of radio energy coming from outer space? A team of astronomers performed a systematic search of optical transients to see if they could match one radio burst with another object, which would help constrain where these bursts come from.

FANTASTIC, RADIANT, BAFFLING

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are energetic pulses of radio waves that burst onto the scene in 2007. Their origin is one of the biggest recent mysteries in astronomy. As new telescopes such as the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Telescope in Canada have come online, more FRBs have been found, but even with all of these new sources, we don’t yet know with certainty what causes them. Some FRBs repeat, some have been localized, and a few are accompanied by persistent radio emission. One of the most promising theories is that FRBs are caused by bursts from magnetars — super dense neutron stars that have extremely high magnetic fields — but no one is quite sure.

To see if any astronomical transients are coincident with FRB 180916B, the team searched through transients contained in the Open Supernova Catalog (OSC) and the Transient Name Server (TNS), both of which contain supernovae, unidentified transients, and some gamma-ray bursts. They discovered that one unidentified source, AT2020hur, seemed to line up with the location of FRB 180916B. The authors calculate that the probability that the sources are connected is 99.96%, meaning the alignment most likely didn’t happen by chance.

Though the possibility of FRBs having optical counterparts is exciting and could help us solve the mystery of these bursts, more observations of FRBs and their optical counterparts are needed to better understand what processes may be at work in these systems.
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