Space News and Discussions

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Virgin Galactic completes first spaceflight in over two years, in step toward finishing development
Published Sat, May 22 202111:45 AM EDTUpdated 4 Hours Ago

Virgin Galactic took a step closer to completing development of its space tourism system on Saturday, successfully flying its first spaceflight in more than two years.

The company’s spacecraft, named VSS Unity, was carried up to an altitude of about 44,000 feet by a carrier aircraft called VMS Eve. The aircraft then released the spacecraft, which fired its rocket engine and accelerated to more than three times the speed of sound.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/22/virgin- ... unity.html

[wjfox]

[Yuli Ban]

[weatheriscool]

China's Mars rover starts roaming the Red Planet

China's Mars rover drove from its landing platform and began exploring the surface on Saturday, state-run Xinhua news agency said, making the country only the second nation to land and operate a rover on the Red Planet.

The launch last July of the Tianwen-1 Mars probe, which carried the Zhurong rover, marked a major milestone in China's space programme.

Tianwen-1 touched down on a vast northern lava plain known as the Utopia Planitia a week ago and beamed back its first photos of the surface a few days later.

https://phys.org/news/2021-05-china-mar ... g-red.html

[Time_Traveller]

Firefly Aerospace picks SpaceX rocket to launch Blue Ghost moon lander in 2023

By Rahul Rao 1 day ago



The space launch company Firefly Aerospace announced this week that when its Blue Ghost lander launches to the moon in 2023, it will do so on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

"Firefly is excited to fly our Blue Ghost spacecraft on the highly reliable Falcon 9, which will deliver NASA instruments and technology demonstration payloads that support NASA science goals and NASA's Artemis program," Shea Ferring, Firefly's senior vice president of spacecraft, said in a statement Thursday (May 20). The Falcon 9 will be able to carry Blue Ghost to the moon without forcing the lander to expend much of the fuel it might need for the actual touchdown, Ferring added.

Firefly has yet to launch anything, though in June, the Austin, Texas-based company hopes to begin testing its own rocket for small satellite launches: Firefly Alpha. Nonetheless, the company has been active in designing lunar landers, and it's paid off; in February, NASA awarded Firefly a $93.3 million contract to deliver Blue Ghost to the moon.

https://www.space.com/firefly-aerospace ... ander-2023

[wjfox]

[Time_Traveller]

Observations shed more light on the properties of pulsar PSR J0740+6620

May 24, 2021



An international team of astronomers has carried out X-ray observations of a massive millisecond pulsar known as PSR J0740+6620. Results of the observational campaign, presented in a paper published May 14 on the arXiv pre-print repository, deliver important information regarding the properties of this pulsar.

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation. The most rapidly rotating pulsars, with rotation periods below 30 milliseconds, are known as millisecond pulsars (MSPs).

Astronomers assume 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.

PSR J0740+6620 is an isolated-rotation-powered MSP spinning at approximately 346 Hz as it orbits with a binary companion. Previous studies reported that it contains a high-mass neutron star—at least two times more massive than our sun.

https://phys.org/news/2021-05-propertie ... 06620.html

[weatheriscool]

Warp drives: Physicists give chances of faster-than-light space travel a boost
https://www.space.com/physicists-give-w ... Yx7IULG3zo
By Mario Borunda about 6 hours ago

An artist's interpretation of utilizing a wormhole to travel through space, Thorne kick-started a serious discussion among scientists about whether or wormhole travel is possible.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Mario Borunda, Associate Professor of Physics, Oklahoma State University

The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km). The fastest ever spacecraft, the now- in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of 450,000 mph. It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but it would take the solar probe about 6,633 years to reach Earth’s nearest neighboring solar system.

[Time_Traveller]

Oldest spiral galaxy in the universe captured in fuzzy photo

1 day ago



Astronomers have identified the oldest known spiral galaxy in the universe, which was formed around 12.4 billion years ago, after rediscovering a fuzzy, forgotten photo taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

The new galaxy, named BRI 1335-0417, measures 15,000 light-years across, making it a third as big as our spiral-shaped home galaxy, the Milky Way. The galaxy formed around 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang, making it the earliest example of a spiral galaxy. It beats the previous oldest spiral, detected in 2019, by around 1.1 billion years. The oldest known galaxy in existence remains GN-z11, which formed around 400 million years after the Big Bang, as previously reported by Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Researchers discovered the ancient galaxy after finding a photo of it in the ALMA archive. To the untrained eye the image may look blurry, but it actually contains a surprising amount of detail for such a distant galaxy.

https://www.livescience.com/oldest-spir ... verse.html