Space News and Discussions

[weatheriscool]

Russia to U.S.: Lift sanctions on space sector or we'll exit space station

2 hrs ago

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The head of Russia's space agency on Monday suggested Moscow would withdraw from the International Space Station in 2025 unless Washington lifted sanctions on the space sector that were hampering Russian satellite launches.

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, was addressing parliamentarians ahead of a summit in Geneva later this month between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden.

Rogozin said Moscow was struggling to launch some of its satellites because of U.S. sanctions which meant Russia could not import certain microchip sets needed for its space programme.

"We have more than enough rockets but nothing to launch them with," Rogozin said, in a rare admission by a senior Russian official that Western sanctions are seriously impeding the development of a given industry.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ru ... NjUV?pfr=1

Thankfully because of Elon musk reusable rockets we won't need russia anymore. Russia will be screwing themselves.

[weatheriscool]

Scientists identify a rare magnetic propeller in a binary star system
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-scientist ... inary.html
by Jessica Sieff, University of Notre Dame

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have identified the first eclipsing magnetic propeller in a cataclysmic variable star system, according to research forthcoming in the Astrophysical Journal.

The star system, referred to as J0240, is only the second of its kind on record. It was identified in 2020 as an unusual cataclysmic variable—a binary system consisting of a white dwarf star and a mass-donating red star. Normally, the compact white dwarf star collects the donated gas and grows in mass. In J0240, however, the fast-spinning, magnetic white dwarf rejects the donor's gas and propels it out of the binary system.

[weatheriscool]

Jeff Bezos and His Brother Will Fly on First Blue Origin Flight
June 7, 2021 by Brian Wang

Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark will join the auction winner on New Shepard’s first human flight on July 20th, 2021.

Ever since Jeff Bezos was five years old, he has dreamed of traveling to space. On July 20th, he will take that journey with his brother. The greatest adventure, with his best friend.

It is a gutsy move. Nextbigfuture salutes Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark for taking the risk associated with a Blue Origin rocket flight.

I wish the Bezos brothers good luck and a safe flight.

This flight will be made weeks after Bezos steps down from his role as CEO of Amazon. Bezos likely had to step down as CEO of Amazon in order to take the risk for this flight.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/06/j ... light.html

This takes balls I'll say that much.

[weatheriscool]

See the First Images NASA’s Juno Took As It Sailed by Ganymede
Jun 08, 2021
JunoCam Ganymede - adjusted
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/see-the-f ... y-ganymede

The spacecraft flew closer to Jupiter’s largest moon than any other in more than two decades, offering dramatic glimpses of the icy orb.

The first two images from NASA Juno’s June 7, 2021, flyby of Jupiter’s giant moon Ganymede have been received on Earth. The photos – one from the Jupiter orbiter’s JunoCam imager and the other from its Stellar Reference Unit star camera – show the surface in remarkable detail, including craters, clearly distinct dark and bright terrain, and long structural features possibly linked to tectonic faults.

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

CHIME telescope detects more than 500 mysterious fast radio bursts in its first year of operation

by Abby Abazorius, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-chime-tel ... radio.html

To catch sight of a fast radio burst is to be extremely lucky in where and when you point your radio dish. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are oddly bright flashes of light, registering in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum, that blaze for a few milliseconds before vanishing without a trace.

These brief and mysterious beacons have been spotted in various and distant parts of the universe, as well as in our own galaxy. Their origins are unknown, and their appearance is unpredictable. Since the first was discovered in 2007, radio astronomers have only caught sight of around 140 bursts in their scopes.

Now, a large stationary radio telescope in British Columbia has nearly quadrupled the number of fast radio bursts discovered to date. The telescope, known as CHIME, for the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, has detected 535 new fast radio bursts during its first year of operation, between 2018 and 2019.

[Time_Traveller]

Spaceport Cornwall signs agreement with US company

22 hours ago

Spaceport Cornwall has signed a memorandum of understanding with a US company to explore future opportunities.

The Sierra Nevada Corporation wants to make spaceflight "globally accessible".

Its spaceplane Dream Chaser, run by subsidiary Sierra Space, is designed to launch vertically to low-Earth obit and land on a spaceport or runway.

Melissa Thorpe, head of Spaceport near Newquay, said she was "delighted" to welcome Sierra Space ahead of the G7.

Spaceport Cornwall is working towards launching the first satellites into space in spring 2022.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-57417590

[weatheriscool]

Europe will join the space party at Planet Venus

Jonathan Amos
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57416589

You wait ages for a mission to Venus and then three come along at once.

The European Space Agency has just selected a probe called Envision to go study the second planet from the Sun.

Esa made the announcement one week after its American counterpart, Nasa, chose two Venus projects of its own, known as Veritas and Davinci+

The destination isn't the only overlap; Europe and the US will both be contributing to each other's efforts in the form of hosted instrumentation.

"All three of the missions are highly complementary," Dr Philippa Mason, an Envision science team-member from Imperial College London, UK, told BBC News.

[weatheriscool]

ALMA discovers earliest gigantic black hole storm

by National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-alma-earl ... -hole.html

Researchers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) discovered a titanic galactic wind driven by a supermassive black hole 13.1 billion years ago. This is the earliest example yet observed of such a wind to date and is a telltale sign that huge black holes have a profound effect on the growth of galaxies from the very early history of the universe.

At the center of many large galaxies hides a supermassive black hole that is millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun. Interestingly, the mass of the black hole is roughly proportional to the mass of the central region (bulge) of the galaxy in the nearby universe. At first glance, this may seem obvious, but it is actually very strange. The reason is that the sizes of galaxies and black holes differ by about 10 orders of magnitude. Based on this proportional relationship between the masses of two objects that are so different in size, astronomers believe that galaxies and black holes grew and evolved together (coevolution) through some kind of physical interaction.

[caltrek]

Europe Picks Categories for Three Flagship Space Missions
June 11, 2021

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/06 ... e-missions

Introduction:

(Science) The biggest space missions gestate for the longest time. Today, the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed the three broad science themes it wants to pursue for large-scale missions of €1 billion or more that would launch between 2035 and 2050. They include a close look at icy moons around Jupiter and Saturn, dissecting the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets, and new ways to study the formation of the universe’s first stars, galaxies, and black holes. “We must start planning the science and the technology we’ll need for the missions we want to launch decades from now,” Günther Hasinger, ESA’s director of science, said in a statement.