Space News and Discussions

weatheriscool
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China ready to launch first crew to new space station
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-china-rea ... ation.html
by Ludovic Ehret and Poornima Weerasekara
A Long March-2F rocket will carry the first crew to China's new space station.
The first crew for China's new space station prepared to blast off this week for the latest step in Beijing's ambitious programme to establish itself as a space power.

The mission is China's first crewed spaceflight in nearly five years, and a matter of prestige for the government as it prepares to mark the 100th birthday of the ruling Communist Party on July 1 with a propaganda blitz.

A Long March-2F rocket carrying three astronauts in the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft is slated to lift off from a base in northwest China's Gobi desert on Thursday, according to experts with knowledge of the matter.

They plan to spend three months on the Tiangong station, China's longest crewed space mission to date, with spacewalks among their tasks.
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Yuli Ban
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If we ever encounter aliens, they will resemble AI and not little green martians
By Seth Shostak
I’m an astronomer at the Seti Institute, a non-profit research organization in California’s Silicon Valley. My colleagues and I look for extraterrestrial life, including intelligent beings – or in the vernacular, aliens. It’s exciting times for people like me, because extra-terrestrial life is being widely discussed now in the lead-up to the Pentagon’s highly anticipated report on so-called unexplained aerial phenomena.

Yet I should say straight away that I am not expecting any big revelations out of the report. I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that aliens are present in our galaxy. But I don’t believe they’re hanging out in our airspace. Not now, and not in historic times.

Any aliens that trek to our planet are unlikely to be carbon-based life forms, either hirsute or hairless. Their cognitive abilities will probably not be powered by a spongy mass of cells we’d call a brain. They will probably have gone beyond biological smarts and, indeed, beyond biology itself. They won’t be alive.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
weatheriscool
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Mystery of Betelgeuse's dip in brightness solved
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-mystery-b ... tness.html
by ESO
When Betelgeuse, a bright orange star in the constellation of Orion, became visibly darker in late 2019 and early 2020, the astronomy community was puzzled. A team of astronomers have now published new images of the star's surface, taken using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), that clearly show how its brightness changed. The new research reveals that the star was partially concealed by a cloud of dust, a discovery that solves the mystery of the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse.

Betelgeuse's dip in brightness—a change noticeable even to the naked eye—led Miguel Montargès and his team to point ESO's VLT toward the star in late 2019. An image from December 2019, when compared to an earlier image taken in January of the same year, showed that the stellar surface was significantly darker, especially in the southern region. But the astronomers weren't sure why.
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Computer trouble hits Hubble Space Telescope, science halted

by Marcia Dunn
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-hubble-sp ... alted.html
The Hubble Space Telescope has been hit with computer trouble, with all astronomical viewing halted, NASA said Wednesday.

The orbiting observatory has been idle since Sunday when a 1980s-era computer that controls the science instruments shut down, possibly because of a bad memory board.

Flight controllers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland tried to restart the computer Monday, but the same thing happened. They're now trying to switch to a backup memory unit. If that works, the telescope will be tested for a day, before the science instruments are turned back on and observations can resume.

For now, the cameras and other instruments are in a so-called safe mode.
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China sends three astronauts to new space station in first crewed mission for five years
Thursday 17 June 2021

China has launched its first crewed mission in five years, sending three people to its new space station.

The astronauts are travelling in the Shenzhou-12 spaceship which was launched by a Long March-2F Y12 rocket.

They blasted off at 2.22am UK time from the launch centre on the edge of the Gobi Desert in the north of China.

There to see them off were the commander of China's manned space programme, military personnel and children waving flags and singing patriotic songs.

The trio - Nie Haisheng, 56, Liu Boming, 54, and Tang Hongbo, 45 - waved as they entered the elevator which took them to the spaceship.
https://news.sky.com/story/china-sends- ... s-12334514
"We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams."

-H.G Wells.
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Boeing’s Second Starliner Test Flight to Launch in July, NASA Says

By Ryan Whitwam on June 17, 2021 at 10:01 am
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/323 ... -nasa-says
For several years, SpaceX and Boeing were neck-and-neck in the race to send astronauts into space, but then Boeing encountered a few setbacks. That has left SpaceX as the sole private space firm launching both people and cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). Boeing has been toiling throughout the pandemic to get its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft ready for a do-over test flight, and NASA believes that will happen next month.

The Starliner looks like a larger, more luxurious version of the Apollo command module. It has room for a crew of seven, but it has yet to carry anyone. In late 2019, Boeing attempted an uncrewed test similar to the one SpaceX aced several months before. A software glitch caused the spacecraft to end up in the wrong orbit, unable to rendezvous with the space station. Following this partial failure, NASA decided Boeing should attempt the validation flight again and formed an Independent Review Team to ensure Boeing made the necessary changes to the Starliner.
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NASA reports trouble with Hubble Space Telescope
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-nasa-hubb ... scope.html
This photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on August 25, 2020 shows Jupiter and its moon Europa, captured when the planet was 653 million kilometers (405 million miles) from Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope, which has been peering into the universe for more than 30 years, has been down for the past few days, NASA said Friday.

The problem is a payload computer that stopped working last Sunday, the US space agency said.

It insisted the telescope itself and scientific instruments that accompany it are "in good health."

"The payload computer's purpose is to control and coordinate the science instruments and monitor them for health and safety purposes," NASA said.

An attempt to restart it on Monday failed.

NASA said initial evidence pointed to a degrading computer memory module as the source of the computer problem.
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Insane to imagine physical interactions on this scale.

------

Astronomers discover largest known spinning structures in the universe

By Charles Q. Choi 6 days ago

Tendrils of galaxies up to hundreds of millions of light-years long may be the largest spinning objects in the universe, a new study finds.

Celestial bodies often spin, from planets to stars to galaxies. However, giant clusters of galaxies often spin very slowly, if at all, and so many researchers thought that is where spinning might end on cosmic scales, study co-author Noam Libeskind, a cosmologist at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany, told Space.com.

But in the new research, Libeskind and his colleagues found that cosmic filaments, or gigantic tubes made of galaxies, apparently spin. "There are structures so vast that entire galaxies are just specks of dust," Libeskind said. "These huge filaments are much, much bigger than clusters."

Previous research suggested that after the universe was born in the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago, much of the gas that makes up most of the known matter of the cosmos collapsed to form colossal sheets. These sheets then broke apart to form the filaments of a vast cosmic web.

Using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the scientists examined more than 17,000 filaments, analyzing the velocity at which the galaxies making up these giant tubes moved within each tendril. The researchers found that the way in which these galaxies moved suggested they were rotating around the central axis of each filament.

https://www.space.com/largest-spinning- ... discovered


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Space tourism startup test flies its gigantic balloon 20 miles over Florida that is on track to carry explorers to the stratosphere in 2024

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech ... orbit.html
Space tourism startup Space Perspective successfully completed its first unmanned test flight Friday of a gigantic balloon that will soon take humans to the edge of space.

The company launched a prototype of its stratospheric balloon 20 miles over Florida at 5:23am ET, putting in on schedule for the first commercial flight in 2024.

Its Neptune Once spaceship test vehicle took off from the Space Coast Air and Spaceport in Cape Canaveral and hit its planned altitude of 108,409 feet where it hovered for six hours before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico.

With this flight, Space Perspective became the first space launch operator to fly from the Space Coast Spaceport, and put its on track for its first crewed test flight in 2023.
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Take 2: Spacewalking astronauts install new solar panel

by Marcia Dunn
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-spacewalk ... panel.html
Spacewalking astronauts equipped the International Space Station with the first in a series of powerful new solar panels Sunday, overcoming suit problems and other obstacles with muscle and persistence.

It took two spacewalks for French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough to install and unfurl the panel to its full 63 feet (19 meters) in length.

The solar wing unrolled like a red carpet once the final set of bolts was released, relying solely on pent-up energy. The slow but steady extension took 10 minutes, with station cameras providing live TV views.

"It is beautiful," Pesquet called out.
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