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Tag: Space and Astronomy

  • Soyuz spacecraft docked to International Space Station springs ‘fairly significant’ coolant leak | CNN

    Soyuz spacecraft docked to International Space Station springs ‘fairly significant’ coolant leak | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A planned spacewalk by the Russian space agency Roscosmos has been called off following the discovery of a coolant leak coming from the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, which is currently docked to the International Space Station.

    NASA’s Rob Navias, speaking on the NASA TV broadcast, called it a “fairly significant” leak. Live images during the broadcast showed liquid spewing out from the Soyuz. Navias said the leak was first observed around 7:45 p.m. ET Wednesday.

    The Soyuz spacecraft is docked to the Russian segment of the space station.

    The crew is safe, and all systems of the space station and the ship are operating normally, according to Roscosmos, in a statement in Russian released Thursday morning on Twitter. (CNN translated the statement.)

    “The crew reported that the warning device of the ship’s diagnostic system went off, indicating a pressure drop in the cooling system,” according to Roscosmos. “A visual inspection confirmed the leak, after which it was decided to interrupt the planned extravehicular activities by the crew members of the ISS Russian Segment Sergey Prokopiev and Dmitry Petelin.”

    Navias said the cause of the coolant leak is “unknown and the effect at this point unknown as Russian managers continue to look over the data and consult with both NASA managers and engineers” and outside experts. He said the astronauts inside the space station were “never in any danger.”

    Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina, using the camera on Russia’s Nauka module on the space station, “photographed and filmed the outer surface of the ship,” according to Roscosmos. “The data was transmitted to Earth, and the specialists have already begun to study the images.”

    “No decisions have been made regarding the integrity of the Soyuz MS-22 or what the next course of action will be,” Navias added, wrapping up NASA-TV coverage of the canceled spacewalk.

    Roscosmos added that the situation will be analyzed before a decision is made about what comes next.

    NASA took a similar tone in a Thursday statement: “NASA and Roscosmos will continue to work together to determine the next course of action following the ongoing analysis.”

    The Soyuz MS-22 ferried NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and two Russian cosmonauts to the space station on September 21 and is scheduled to bring them back to Earth in late March.

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  • Historic moon mission ends with splashdown of Orion capsule | CNN

    Historic moon mission ends with splashdown of Orion capsule | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The Artemis I mission — a 25½-day uncrewed test flight around the moon meant to pave the way for future astronaut missions — came to a momentous end as NASA’s Orion spacecraft made a successful ocean splashdown Sunday.

    The spacecraft finished the final stretch of its journey, closing in on the thick inner layer of Earth’s atmosphere after traversing 239,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) between the moon and Earth. It splashed down at 12:40 p.m. ET Sunday in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico’s Baja California.

    This final step was among the most important and dangerous legs of the mission.

    But after splashing down, Rob Navias, the NASA commentator who led Sunday’s broadcast, called the reentry process “textbook.”

    “I’m overwhelmed,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Sunday. “This is an extraordinary day.”

    The capsule is now bobbing in the Pacific Ocean, where it will remain until nearly 3 p.m. ET as NASA collects additional data and runs through some tests. That process, much like the rest of the mission, aims to ensure the Orion spacecraft is ready to fly astronauts.

    “We’re testing all of the heat that has come and been generated on the capsule. We want to make sure that we characterize how that’s going to affect the interior of the capsule,” NASA flight director Judd Frieling told reporters last week.

    A fleet of recovery vehicles — including boats, a helicopter and a US Naval ship called the USS Portland — are waiting nearby.

    The spacecraft was traveling about 32 times the speed of sound (24,850 miles per hour or nearly 40,000 kilometers per hour) as it hit the air — so fast that compression waves caused the outside of the vehicle to heat to about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius).

    “The next big test is the heat shield,” Nelson had told CNN in a phone interview Thursday, referring to the barrier designed to protect the Orion capsule from the excruciating physics of reentering the Earth’s atmosphere.

    The extreme heat also caused air molecules to ionize, creating a buildup of plasma that caused a 5½-minute communications blackout, according to Artemis I flight director Judd Frieling.

    INTERACTIVE: Trace the path Artemis I will take around the moon and back

    As the capsule reached around 200,000 feet (61,000 meters) above the Earth’s surface, it performed a roll maneuver that briefly sent the capsule back upward — sort of like skipping a rock across the surface of a lake.

    There are a couple of reasons for using the skip maneuver.

    “Skip entry gives us a consistent landing site that supports astronaut safety because it allows teams on the ground to better and faster coordinate recovery efforts,” said Joe Bomba, Lockheed Martin’s Orion aerosciences aerothermal lead, in a statement. Lockheed is NASA’s primary contractor for the Orion spacecraft.

    “By dividing the heat and force of reentry into two events, skip entry also offers benefits like lessening the g-forces astronauts are subject to,” according to Lockheed, referring to the crushing forces humans experience during spaceflight.

    Another communications blackout lasting about three minutes followed the skip maneuver.

    As it embarked on its final descent, the capsule slowed down drastically, shedding thousands of miles per hour in speed until its parachutes deploy. By the time it splashed down, Orion was traveling about 20 miles per hour (32 kilometers per hour).

    While there were no astronauts on this test mission — just a few mannequins equipped to gather data and a Snoopy doll — Nelson, the NASA chief, has stressed the importance of demonstrating that the capsule can make a safe return.

    The space agency’s plans are to parlay the Artemis moon missions into a program that will send astronauts to Mars, a journey that will have a much faster and more daring reentry process.

    The Orion capsule captures a view of the lunar surface, with Earth in the background lit in the shape of a crescent by the sun.

    Orion traveled roughly 1.3 million miles (2 million kilometers) during this mission on a path that swung out to a distant lunar orbit, carrying the capsule farther than any spacecraft designed to carry humans has ever traveled.

    A secondary goal of this mission was for Orion’s service module, a cylindrical attachment at the bottom of the spacecraft, to deploy 10 small satellites. But at least four of those satellites failed after being jettisoned into orbit, including a miniature lunar lander developed in Japan and one of NASA’s own payload that was intended to be one of the first tiny satellites to explore interplanetary space.

    On its trip, the spacecraft captured stunning pictures of Earth and, during two close flybys, images of the lunar surface and a mesmerizing “Earth rise.”

    Nelson said if he had to give the Artemis I mission a letter grade so far, it would be an A.

    “Not an A-plus, simply because we expect things to go wrong. And the good news is that when they do go wrong, NASA knows how to fix them,” Nelson said. But “if I’m a schoolteacher, I would give it an A-plus.”

    With the success of the Artemis I mission, NASA will now dive into the data collected on this flight and look to choose a crew for the Artemis II mission, which could take off in 2024.

    Artemis II will aim to send astronauts on a similar trajectory as Artemis I, flying around the moon but not landing on its surface.

    The Artemis III mission, currently slated for a 2025 launch, is expected to put boots back on the moon, and NASA officials have said it will include the first woman and first person of color to achieve such a milestone.

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  • Study: Without more data, a black hole’s origins can be “spun” in any direction

    Study: Without more data, a black hole’s origins can be “spun” in any direction

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    Newswise — Clues to a black hole’s origins can be found in the way it spins. This is especially true for binaries, in which two black holes circle close together before merging. The spin and tilt of the respective black holes just before they merge can reveal whether the invisible giants arose from a quiet galactic disk or a more dynamic cluster of stars.

    Astronomers are hoping to tease out which of these origin stories is more likely by analyzing the 69 confirmed binaries detected to date. But a new study finds that for now, the current catalog of binaries is not enough to reveal anything fundamental about how black holes form.

    In a study appearing in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, MIT physicists show that when all the known binaries and their spins are worked into models of black hole formation, the conclusions can look very different, depending on the particular model used to interpret the data. 

    A black hole’s origins can therefore be “spun” in different ways, depending on a model’s assumptions of how the universe works.

    “When you change the model and make it more flexible or make different assumptions, you get a different answer about how black holes formed in the universe,” says study co-author Sylvia Biscoveanu, an MIT graduate student working in the LIGO Laboratory. “We show that people need to be careful because we are not yet at the stage with our data where we can believe what the model tells us.”

    The study’s co-authors include Colm Talbot, an MIT postdoc; and Salvatore Vitale, an associate professor of physics and a member of the Kavli Institute of Astrophysics and Space Research at MIT.

    A tale of two origins

    Black holes in binary systems are thought to arise via one of two paths. The first is through “field binary evolution,” in which two stars evolve together and eventually explode in supernovae, leaving behind two black holes that continue circling in a binary system. In this scenario, the black holes should have relatively aligned spins, as they would have had time — first as stars, then black holes — to pull and tug each other into similar orientations. If a binary’s black holes have roughly the same spin, scientists believe they must have evolved in a relatively quiet environment, such as a galactic disk.

    Black hole binaries can also form through “dynamical assembly,” where two black holes evolve separately, each with its own distinct tilt and spin. By some extreme astrophysical processes, the black holes are eventually brought together, close enough to form a binary system. Such a dynamical pairing would likely occur not in a quiet galactic disk, but in a more dense environment, such as a globular cluster, where the interaction of thousands of stars can knock two black holes together. If a binary’s black holes have randomly oriented spins, they likely formed in a globular cluster.

    But what fraction of binaries form through one channel versus the other? The answer, astronomers believe, should lie in data, and particularly, measurements of black hole spins.

    To date, astronomers have derived the spins of black holes in 69 binaries, which have been discovered by a network of gravitational-wave detectors including LIGO in the U.S., and its Italian counterpart Virgo. Each detector listens for signs of gravitational waves — very subtle reverberations through space-time that are left over from extreme, astrophysical events such as the merging of massive black holes.

    With each binary detection, astronomers have estimated the respective black hole’s properties, including their mass and spin. They have worked the spin measurements into a generally accepted model of black hole formation, and found signs that binaries could have both a preferred, aligned spin, as well as random spins. That is, the universe could produce binaries in both galactic disks and globular clusters.

    “But we wanted to know, do we have enough data to make this distinction?” Biscoveanu says. “And it turns out, things are messy and uncertain, and it’s harder than it looks.”

    Spinning the data

    In their new study, the MIT team tested whether the same data would yield the same conclusions when worked into slightly different theoretical models of how black holes form.

    The team first reproduced LIGO’s spin measurements in a widely used model of black hole formation. This model assumes that a fraction of binaries in the universe prefer to produce black holes with aligned spins, where the rest of the binaries have random spins. They found that the data appeared to agree with this model’s assumptions and showed a peak where the model predicted there should be more black holes with similar spins.

    They then tweaked the model slightly, altering its assumptions such that it predicted a slightly different orientation of preferred black hole spins. When they worked the same data into this tweaked model, they found the data shifted to line up with the new predictions. The data also made similar shifts in 10 other models, each with a different assumption of how black holes prefer to spin.

    “Our paper shows that your result depends entirely on how you model your astrophysics, rather than the data itself,” Biscoveanu says.

    “We need more data than we thought, if we want to make a claim that is independent of the astrophysical assumptions we make,” Vitale adds.

    Just how much more data will astronomers need? Vitale estimates that once the LIGO network starts back up in early 2023, the instruments will detect one new black hole binary every few days. Over the next year, that could add up to hundreds more measurements to add to the data.

    “The measurements of the spins we have now are very uncertain,” Vitale says. “But as we build up a lot of them, we can gain better information. Then we can say, no matter the detail of my model, the data always tells me the same story — a story that we could then believe.”

    This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

    ###

     

    Additional background

    Paper: “Spin it as you like: the (lack of a) measurement of the spin tilt
    distribution with LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA binary black holes”

    https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2022/12/aa45084-22/aa45084-22.html

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    Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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  • The messy death of a star

    The messy death of a star

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    Newswise — Around 2500 years ago, a star ejected most of its gas, forming the beautiful Southern Ring Nebula, NGC 3132, chosen as one of the first five image packages from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

    A team of nearly 70 astronomers from 66 organisations across Europe, North, South and Central America, and Asia have used the JWST images to piece together the messy death of this star. 

    “It was nearly three times the size of our Sun, but much younger, about 500 million years old. It created shrouds of gas that have expanded out from the ejection site, and left a remnant dense white dwarf star, with about half the mass of the Sun, but approximately the size of the Earth,” says Professor Orsola De Marco, lead author on the paper, from Macquarie University’s Research Centre for Astronomy, Astrophysics and Astrophotonics. 

    “We were surprised to find evidence of two or three companion stars that probably hastened its death as well as one more ‘innocent bystander’ star that got caught up in the interaction,” she says. 

    The study was based on the JWST images supplemented by data from the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile, the San Pedro de Mártir Telescope in Mexico, the Gaia Space Telescope, and the Hubble Space Telescope.  

    It paves the way for future JWST observations of nebulae, providing insight into fundamental astrophysical processes including colliding winds, and binary star interactions, with implications for supernovae and gravitational wave systems.

    The paper is published today in Nature Astronomy https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01845-2 

    “When we first saw the images, we knew we had to do something, we must investigate! The community came together and from this one image of a randomly chosen nebula we were able to discern much more precise structures than ever before. The promise of the James Webb Space Telescope is incredible,” says De Marco, who is also president of the International Astronomical Union Commission on Planetary Nebulae. 

    Astronomers gathered online and developed theories and models around the mid-infrared image to reconstruct just how the star had died. 

    Shining at the centre of the nebula is an ultra-hot central star, a white dwarf that has burned up its hydrogen. “This star is now small and hot, but is surrounded by cool dust,” said Joel Kastner, another team member, from the Rochester Institute of Technology USA. “We think all that gas and dust we see thrown all over the place must have come from that one star, but it was tossed in very specific directions by the companion stars.”

    There are also a series of spiral structures moving out from the centre. These concentric arches would be created when a companion orbits the central star while it is losing mass. Another companion is further out and is also visible in the picture.

    Looking at a three-dimensional reconstruction of the data, the team also saw pairs of protuberances that may occur when astronomical objects eject matter in jet form. These are irregular and shoot out in different directions, possibly implying a triple star interaction at the centre. 

    De Marco says: “We first inferred the presence of a close companion because of the dusty disk around the central star, the further partner that created the arches and the super far companion that you can see in the image. Once we saw the jets, we knew there had to be another star or even two involved at the centre, so we believe there are one or two very close companions, an additional one at middle distance and one very far away. If this is the case, there are four or even five objects involved in this messy death.”

    NASA image and caption

    Catalogued as NGC 3132 the Southern Ring Nebula is the death shroud of a dying sun-like star some 2,500 light-years from Earth. Composed of gas and dust the stunning cosmic landscape is nearly half a light-year in diameter, explored in unprecedented detail by the James Webb Space Telescope. 

    In this NIRCam image the bright star near centre is a companion of the dying star. In mutual orbit, the star whose transformation has ejected the nebula’s gas and dust shells over thousands of years is the fainter stellar partner. Evolving to become a white dwarf, the faint star appears along the diffraction spike extending toward the 8 o’clock position. 

    Reported in Nature Astronomy today

    All images and detailed analysis available from the Space Telescope Science Institute here.

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    Macquarie University

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  • Study may improve bone and muscle health monitoring during spaceflight

    Study may improve bone and muscle health monitoring during spaceflight

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    Newswise — Bed rest is often used to simulate the effects of microgravity, such as during space flight, on the body’s bones and muscles. New research published in The FASEB Journal examined the effects of 10 days of bed rest on various markers of musculoskeletal health in 10 young male volunteers.

    “During space flight, changes occur over a period of weeks to months, first in the muscle and then in the bone,” the authors wrote. Their experiments over just 10 days suggested a possible early involvement of the molecule irisin in muscle and bone adaptation to microgravity-simulated conditions.

    Results indicated that irisin may help to prevent the onset of atrophy and aging of skeletal muscle, and that low irisin blood levels could represent an early prognostic marker of muscle atrophy in microgravity environments.

    URL upon publication: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1096/fj.202201005RR

     

     

    About the Journal

    The FASEB Journal publishes high quality and impactful multidisciplinary research covering biology and biomedical sciences at every level of organization: atomic, molecular, cell, tissue, organ, organismic, and population. The journal’s scope includes the spectrum of biological and biomedical sciences as well as interdisciplinary research cutting across multiple fields and extending in related areas. The FASEB Journal welcomes manuscripts on basic and translational research as well as on pre-clinical and early clinical research.

    About Wiley

    Wiley is one of the world’s largest publishers and a global leader in scientific research and career-connected education. Founded in 1807, Wiley enables discovery, powers education, and shapes workforces. Through its industry-leading content, digital platforms, and knowledge networks, the company delivers on its timeless mission to unlock human potential. Visit us at Wiley.com. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

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    Wiley

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  • Inexpensive Airborne Testbeds Could Study Hypersonic Technologies

    Inexpensive Airborne Testbeds Could Study Hypersonic Technologies

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    Newswise — Miniature satellites known as CubeSats are taking on larger roles in space missions that might previously have been carried out by more expensive conventional spacecraft. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are envisioning a still larger mission for CubeSats as airborne testbeds for technologies that are being developed for future generations of hypersonic vehicles.

    Development of hypersonic vehicles able to travel through the Earth’s atmosphere at Mach 5 or faster – five times the speed of sound – is attracting substantial new government and industry funding. But test facilities needed to evaluate thermodynamic, aerodynamic, acoustic, and other issues critical to operating in that harsh environment are limited, in high demand, and costly to use.

    Georgia Tech researchers want to eliminate that roadblock by building hardened CubeSats that could use re-entry from space to generate the conditions needed to evaluate hypersonic technologies. The small satellites, with their key systems protected from the heat of re-entry, would be launched into the upper atmosphere from the International Space Station or a “rideshare” rocket to provide several minutes of testing at velocities of up to Mach 25.

    “We are looking at the feasibility of building what would be an inexpensive flying wind tunnel,” said Krish Ahuja, Regents Professor of Aerospace Engineering and division chief for aerospace and acoustics in the Aerospace, Transportation, and Advanced Systems Laboratory of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the project’s principal investigator. “We could gather pretty much any data that would be needed for hypersonic research and provide a new way to conduct studies that now can be quite difficult to do.”

    Initial Study Suggests Developing 6U Vehicle

    Based on a six-month feasibility study that included collaborators from Georgia Tech’s School of Aerospace Engineering and two private companies, Ahuja believes it would be worthwhile to pursue design of a 6U test vehicle to evaluate the concept. (A 6U CubeSat is about the size of the system unit of a desktop computer). If that proves promising, larger vehicles could be constructed with more capable instrumentation, guidance, and even propulsion.

    The goal of the project’s first year is to understand what would be required to develop and launch the flying testbeds – and recover them after flight. Design and development of the new test vehicles must overcome significant challenges related to controlling the flight duration, speed, altitude, and orientation of the vehicle during data collection. Systems to communicate with the ground and track the vehicle’s trajectory must also be developed. Also, part of the first-year goal is creation of a roadmap showing the development and test process.

    “Ongoing work will include a ‘system-of-systems’ analysis of the concept to model its performance and interaction with other support systems to assess its capability to conduct scientific research,” Ahuja said. “Our initial calculations indicate that a 6U CubeSat could be hardened with a thermal protection system for hypersonic conditions to help conduct limited feasibility experiments. This will be a building block for future systems that would be larger and able to conduct the testing we envision.”

    Initial testing is likely to involve free fall of the test vehicle, but subsequent tests would include control surfaces that would provide steering to prevent tumbling and other undesired effects. Multiple CubeSats could also be operated together.

    Possible New Capabilities for Small Satellites

    CubeSats, so-called because they are designed in standard cube sizes, aren’t normally designed to be recovered after a mission; when their work is done, they simply burn up in the atmosphere. Because Ahuja wants to study effects on materials and capture data from on-board instruments, the flying wind tunnel satellites will need to be recovered using parachutes that would drop them into a recovery zone, perhaps in the desert Southwest.

    “Getting them down at the right location will require good guidance and control, good telemetry, and a propulsion system,” he said. “The challenge will be to make these very small and inexpensive. To get the information we need, we will have to bring the testbed safely to the ground.”

    The high temperatures generated by re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere could be useful for more than simulating hypersonic conditions. Ahuja believes the heat could be used to operate a proprietary device that could provide steering for the CubeSats, which normally don’t have propulsion systems.

    Much of current research on hypersonic flight depends on data from computational fluid dynamics simulations, which need validation from testing. Beyond the information gained from the testbed, Ahuja believes the small spacecraft could make big contributions by providing a real-world anchor for the analysis tools that researchers are using for a variety of hypersonic vehicles.

    A New Approach to Hypersonic Testing is Needed

    Hypersonic testing is typically done in short-duration wind tunnels or high-temperature testbeds, meaning high-speed and high-temperature conditions are difficult to achieve simultaneously and at test durations relevant to hypersonic vehicles. In addition, there are few existing facilities where such testing can be done, and they are in high demand. The new testbed is expected to provide about three minutes of testing per flight.

    Currently, there is a critical need to understand how much and what kind of thermal protection system is needed to protect hypersonic vehicles at high velocities where friction can produce temperatures of more than 4,000 degrees F. Additionally, there are questions about acoustic effects and how uneven heating will spread across a vehicle and potentially damage its structure.

    “The airflow across a hypersonic vehicle can be both turbulent and laminar, different on different parts of the vehicle,” said Ahuja. “These wide variations of the flow properties can produce large variation in temperatures over the vehicle surface, which is highly undesirable with respect to vehicle’s structural integrity. As such, we need to understand what is happening to the material as a result of temperature changes over time. This thermal loading cannot be studied in conventional wind tunnels, which normally offer fractions of seconds of run time at hypersonic conditions, because it takes a while for those conditions to become steady.”

    Acoustic loading can also dramatically affect the structural integrity of a hypersonic vehicle, and that likewise requires time to evaluate. “Acoustic loading of the kind that could generate a crack in a structure that develops over time,” he said. “We could create and study these conditions with our flying testbed.”

    Funding from GTRI’s Independent Research and Development (IRAD) program has supported the initiative so far, and by gathering enough data from the initial studies, Ahuja hopes to attract collaborators to help implement the new test approach.

    “There is so much enthusiasm for this that I believe our chances of success are high,” he said. “By launching from another space system, we won’t have to worry about the initial launch propulsion. This could address a lot of challenges in conducting hypersonic research.”

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    Georgia Institute of Technology

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  • Astronauts will give the space station a power boost during Saturday spacewalk | CNN

    Astronauts will give the space station a power boost during Saturday spacewalk | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The International Space Station will receive a power boost during a spacewalk on Saturday, as NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio install a solar array outside the floating laboratory.

    The spacewalk is on track to begin at 7:25 a.m. ET and will last for about seven hours, with live coverage streaming on NASA’s website.

    During the event, Cassada will serve as extravehicular crew member 1 and will wear a suit with red stripes, while Rubio will wear an unmarked white suit as extravehicular crew member 2. The duo conducted their first spacewalk together in November. Against the backdrop of spectacular views of Earth, the team assembled a mounting bracket on the starboard side of the space station’s truss.

    This hardware allows for the installation of more rollout solar arrays, called iROSAs, to increase electrical power on the space station.

    The first two rollout solar arrays were installed outside the station in June 2021. The plan is to add a total of six iROSAs, which will likely boost the space station’s power generation by more than 30% once all are operational.

    Two more arrays were delivered to the space station on November 27 aboard the 26th SpaceX Dragon commercial resupply mission, which also carried dwarf tomato seeds and other experiments to the orbiting laboratory.

    The arrays were rolled up like carpet and are 750 pounds (340 kilograms) and 10 feet (3 meters) wide.

    During Saturday’s spacewalk, Cassada and Rubio will install a solar array to increase capacity in one of the space station’s eight power channels, located on the station’s starboard truss.

    Once the array is unfurled and bolted into place by the astronauts, it will be about 63 feet (19 meters) long and 20 feet (6 meters) wide.

    The spacewalking duo will also disconnect a cable to reactivate another power channel that recently experienced “unexpected tripping” on November 26.

    “By isolating a section of the impacted array, which was one of several damaged strings, the goal is to restore 75% of the array’s functionality,” according to a release from NASA.

    Cassada and Rubio will go on another spacewalk on December 19 to install a second roll-out solar array on another power channel, located on the station’s port truss.

    The original solar arrays on the space station are still functioning, but they have been supplying power there for more than 20 years and are showing some signs of wear after long-term exposure to the space environment. The arrays were originally designed to last 15 years.

    Erosion can be caused by thruster plumes, which come from both the station’s thrusters and the crew and cargo vehicles that come and go from the station, as well as micrometeorite debris.

    The new solar arrays are being placed in front of the original ones. It’s a good test for the new solar arrays, because this same design will power parts of the planned Gateway lunar outpost, which will help humans return to the moon through NASA’s Artemis program.

    The new arrays will have a similar 15-year life expectancy. However, since the degradation on the original arrays was expected to be worse, the team will monitor the new arrays to test their true longevity, because they may last longer.

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  • ZTF makes first discovery of a rare cosmic “lunch”

    ZTF makes first discovery of a rare cosmic “lunch”

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    Newswise — The universe can be a violent place. Stars die or collide with each other and black holes devour everything that gets too close. These and other events produce flashes of light in the night sky that astronomers call transients. The Zwicky Transient Facility is currently one of the largest transient surveys astronomers use to study the ever-changing universe. The survey is also a treasure trove of rare, strange, and unusual events that often astronomers discover by chance. 

    “Our new search technique helps us to quickly identify rare cosmic events in the ZTF survey data. And since ZTF and upcoming larger surveys such as Vera Rubin’s LSST scan the sky so frequently, we can now expect to uncover a wealth of rare, or previously undiscovered cosmic events and study them in detail”, says Igor Andreoni, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Astronomy at UMD and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. 

    AT2022cmc is a peculiar case of what is known as a tidal-disruption event or TDE. TDEs happen with a star approaching a black hole is violently ripped apart by the black hole’s gravitational tidal forces—similar to how the Moon pulls tides on Earth but with greater strength. Then, pieces of the star are captured into a swiftly spinning disk orbiting the black hole. Finally, the black hole consumes what remains of the doomed star in the disk. 

    In some extremely rare cases such as AT2022cmc, the supermassive black hole launches “relativistic jets”—beams of matter traveling close to the speed of light—after destroying a star. Discovered in Feb 2022, astronomers led by Andreoni followed up AT2022cmc and observed it with multiple facilities at multiple wavelengths. The analysis is now published in the journal Nature. 

    “The last time scientists discovered one of these jets was well over a decade ago,” said Michael Coughlin, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and co-lead on the paper. “From the data we have, we can estimate that relativistic jets are launched in only 1% of these destructive events, making AT2022cmc an extremely rare occurrence. In fact, the luminous flash from the event is among the brightest ever observed.”

    The novel data-crunching method – equivalent to searching through a million pages of information every night –  allowed Andreoni and colleagues to conduct a rapid analysis of the ZTF data and identify the AT2022cmc TDE with relativistic jets. They quickly started follow-up observations that revealed an exceptionally bright event across the electromagnetic spectrum, from the X-rays to the millimeter and radio.

    ESO’s Very Large Telescope revealed that AT2022cmc was at a cosmological distance of 8.5 billion light years away. The Hubble Space Telescope optical/infrared images and radio observations from the Very Large Array pinpointed the location of AT2022cmc with extreme precision. 

    The researchers believe that AT2022cmc was at the center of a galaxy that is not yet visible because the light from AT2022cmc outshone it, but future space observations with Hubble or James Webb Space Telescopes may unveil the galaxy when the transient eventually disappears.

    It is still a mystery why some TDEs launch jets while others may not. From their observations, Andreoni and his team concluded that the black holes in AT2022cmc and other similarly jetted TDEs are likely spinning rapidly so as to power the extremely luminous jets. This suggests that a rapid black hole spin may be one necessary ingredient for jet launching—an idea that brings researchers closer to understanding the physics of supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies billions of light years away.

    Before AT2022cmc, only a couple of possible jetted TDEs were known, primarily discovered by gamma-ray space missions, which detect the highest-energy forms of radiation produced by these jets. With their new method, astronomers can now search for such rare events in ground-based optical surveys. 

    “Astronomy is changing rapidly,” Andreoni said. “More optical and infrared all-sky surveys are now active or will soon come online. Scientists can use AT2022cmc as a model for what to look for and find more disruptive events from distant black holes. This means that more than ever, big data mining is an important tool to advance our knowledge of the universe.”

    The paper, “A very luminous jet from the disruption of a star by a massive black hole,” is published in Nature on November 30, 2022.
    DOI: DOI : 10.1038/s41586-022-05465-8

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  • New era begins with China’s launch of crewed mission to its space station | CNN

    New era begins with China’s launch of crewed mission to its space station | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Three astronauts lifted off to China’s nearly completed space station on Tuesday, marking the beginning of the country’s long-term presence in space.

    It’s a major achievement for China’s ambitious space program, which has explored the far side of the moon and Mars. The milestone also means the aging International Space Station’s role as the sole venue for continuous human occupancy in Earth’s orbit is coming to an end.

    The three astronauts launched aboard the Shenzhou-15 spacecraft at 11:08 p.m. local time (10:08 a.m. ET) on Tuesday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, Inner Mongolia. The Shenzhou-15 spacecraft is expected to dock with the Tiangong Space Station about 6.5 hours after launch.

    The arrival of the three astronauts — Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu — will mark the first crew rotation on the space station, with two teams overlapping for five to 10 days before the Shenzhou-14 crew, who landed at the station in June, returns to Earth.

    The Shenzhou-15 mission will finish the orbital outpost’s construction, expected by the end of December, and launch the first stage of “its application and development,” Ji Qiming, assistant to the China Manned Space Agency director, said at a press conference on Monday, according to state media Xinhua.

    During the mission, according to state media, the crew will also conduct more than 40 experiments and tests in the fields of space science research, space medicine and space technology, as well as three to four extravehicular activities — performed by astronauts in space suits.

    Once construction is completed, the space station is expected to last for 15 years. China plans to launch two crewed missions and two cargo missions to the station every year, according to the CMSA.

    Tiangong, which means heavenly palace, is smaller than the International Space Station but similar in its modular design. The new space station will typically house three rather than six astronauts.

    Officials at NASA have said it will retire the ISS, which is a collaboration between the US, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency, in 2030.

    However, Russia has threatened to quit the ISS starting in 2024, which would make operating the ISS difficult, said Dr. Stefania Paladini, a reader in economics and global security at Birmingham City University in the United Kingdom.

    “There is no clarity about the future of the ISS after 2024. While the US seems committed to extend its life until 2030, Russia threatened to withdraw its participation after that date, (which would) make it extremely challenging to continue flying the ISS,” said Paladini, author of “The New Frontiers of Space: Economic Implications, Security Issues and Evolving Scenarios.”

    “The Chinese Space Station may … end up remaining the only human presence in Earth’s orbit for a while.”

    The new space station is expected to host around 1,000 scientific experiments during its life span.

    Most of the experiments taking place on board the Tiangong will involve research originating from China, but the country has invited experiments from international researchers, including how cancer tumors react to zero gravity.

    China’s astronauts have long been excluded from the ISS, due to US political objections and legislative restrictions. However, CMSA astronauts have trained with their counterparts at the European Space Agency.

    It’s not clear whether China would welcome astronauts from other countries to its space station, but Molly Silk, a doctoral researcher at the University of Manchester in the UK focused on China’s space program, said she thought it very likely that international astronauts would visit in the coming years.

    “Several European astronauts have been learning Chinese in order to better cooperate with their Chinese counterparts, which suggests that a visit to the CSS could be on the cards. Pakistan has also been trying to coordinate with China to send their first astronaut to space,” she said.

    “This project demonstrates to the world that China has both the vision and capabilities to pull off such an immensely challenging feat. The CSS will not only allow for China and other nations to conduct experiments in space, but acts as an important checkpoint for China’s planned international research base on the moon.”

    Earlier this year, the space station’s two laboratory modules — Wentian and Mengtian — docked along the Tianhe core cabin, the main living space for the astronauts.

    The Mengtian lab was launched by China’s massive Long March 5B rocket, remnants of which made an uncontrolled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere in early November.

    It was the fourth uncontrolled reentry for a Long March 5B rocket since China’s space agency started flying it two years ago, as the vehicle was designed without the necessary equipment to steer itself to a safe landing.

    Officials at NASA have slammed China for taking unnecessary risks. However, Tuesday’s launch involved China’s smaller Long March-2F rocket, used for human space flight, which experts have previously said is less likely to produce hazardous debris.

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  • Astrophysicists Hunt for Second-Closest Supermassive Black Hole

    Astrophysicists Hunt for Second-Closest Supermassive Black Hole

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    Newswise — Cambridge, Mass. – Two astrophysicists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have suggested a way to observe what could be the second-closest supermassive black hole to Earth: a behemoth 3 million times the mass of the Sun, hosted by the dwarf galaxy Leo I.

    The supermassive black hole, labeled Leo I*, was first proposed by an independent team of astronomers in late 2021. The team noticed stars picking up speed as they approached the center of the galaxy — evidence for a black hole — but directly imaging emission from the black hole was not possible.

    Now, CfA astrophysicists Fabio Pacucci and Avi Loeb suggest a new way to verify the supermassive black hole’s existence; their work is described in a study published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    “Black holes are very elusive objects, and sometimes they enjoy playing hide-and-seek with us,” says Fabio Pacucci, lead author of the ApJ Letters study. “Rays of light cannot escape their event horizons, but the environment around them can be extremely bright — if enough material falls into their gravitational well. But if a black hole is not accreting mass, instead, it emits no light and becomes impossible to find with our telescopes.”

    This is the challenge with Leo I — a dwarf galaxy so devoid of gas available to accrete that it is often described as a “fossil.” So, shall we relinquish any hope of observing it? Perhaps not, the astronomers say.

    “In our study, we suggested that a small amount of mass lost from stars wandering around the black hole could provide the accretion rate needed to observe it,” Pacucci explains. “Old stars become very big and red — we call them red giant stars. Red giants typically have strong winds that carry a fraction of their mass to the environment. The space around Leo I* seems to contain enough of these ancient stars to make it observable.”

    “Observing Leo I* could be groundbreaking,” says Avi Loeb, the co-author of the study. “It would be the second-closest supermassive black hole after the one at the center of our galaxy, with a very similar mass but hosted by a galaxy that is a thousand times less massive than the Milky Way. This fact challenges everything we know about how galaxies and their central supermassive black holes co-evolve. How did such an oversized baby end up being born from a slim parent?”

    Decades of studies show that most massive galaxies host a supermassive black hole at their center, and the mass of the black hole is a tenth of a percent of the total mass of the spheroid of stars surrounding it.

    “In the case of Leo I,” Loeb continues, “we would expect a much smaller black hole. Instead, Leo I appears to contain a black hole a few million times the mass of the Sun, similar to that hosted by the Milky Way. This is exciting because science usually advances the most when the unexpected happens.”

    So, when can we expect an image of the black hole?

    “We are not there yet,” Pacucci says. 

    The team has obtained telescope time on the space-borne Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico and is currently analyzing the new data.

    Pacucci says, “Leo I* is playing hide-and-seek, but it emits too much radiation to remain undetected for long.”

    ###

     

    About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

    The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask—and ultimately answer—humanity’s greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.

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  • NASA’s Orion spacecraft snaps a selfie on its journey beyond the far side of the moon | CNN

    NASA’s Orion spacecraft snaps a selfie on its journey beyond the far side of the moon | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    NASA released a selfie taken by the Orion capsule and close-up photos of the moon’s crater-marked landscape as the spacecraft continues on the Artemis 1 mission, a 25-and-a-half day journey that will take it more than 40,000 miles beyond the far side of the moon.

    Orion’s latest selfie — taken Wednesday, the eighth day of the mission, by a camera on one of the capsule’s solar arrays — reveals the spacecraft giving angles with a bit of moon visible in the background. The close-up photos were taken Monday as Orion made its closest approach to the moon, passing about 80 miles (129 kilometers) above the lunar surface.

    Should Orion complete its trek beyond the moon and back to Earth, it will be the furthest a spacecraft intended to carry humans has ever traveled. For now, the capsule is only carrying inanimate, scientific payloads.

    Orion is part of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to eventually establish a lunar outpost that can permanently host astronauts for the first time in history, in the hopes of one day paving a route to Mars.

    The Artemis I mission launched November 16, when NASA’s beleaguered and long-delayed Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket vaulted the Orion capsule to space, cementing the rocket as the most powerful operational launch vehicle ever built.

    As of Thursday afternoon, the capsule was 222,993 miles (358,972 kilometers) from Earth and 55,819 miles (89,831 kilometers) from the Moon, zipping along at just over 2,600 miles per hour, according to NASA.

    Orion is now about a day from entering a “distant retrograde orbit” around our closest neighbor — distant, because it will be at a very high altitude above the lunar surface, and retrograde, because it will circle the moon in the opposite direction from which the moon travels around Earth.

    The path is meant to “stress test” the Orion capsule, as Michael Sarafin, NASA’s Artemis mission manager, put it last week.

    According to NASA’s Artemis blog, the agency’s television coverage of the distant retrograde orbit insertion burn is scheduled for 4:30 p.m. ET Friday and the burn is scheduled to take place at 4:52 p.m. ET.

    After lapping the moon, the Orion capsule is expected to turn back toward Earth and make a gentle splashdown landing in the Pacific Ocean on December 11.

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  • Philippines and China tussle over retrieving rocket debris floating in disputed South China Sea | CNN

    Philippines and China tussle over retrieving rocket debris floating in disputed South China Sea | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The Philippines and China tussled on Sunday over Chinese rocket debris in the disputed South China Sea, raising tensions ahead of a scheduled visit by US Vice President Kamala Harris.

    A Chinese vessel allegedly blocked a Philippine naval boat twice before taking the debris it was towing off Thitu Island, which is occupied by the Philippines and known locally as Pag-asa Island, said Philippine Vice Admiral Alberto Carlos.

    In a statement issued Monday, Carlos said that the Chinese coast guard had “forcefully retrieved” floating debris off the waters. He said local personnel used a long-range camera and spotted the debris about 800 yards away from a sandbar on Sunday and set out to inspect it.

    The debris was described as “metallic” and similar to fragments recovered in other parts of the country two weeks ago, raising suspicions that it originated from a recent Chinese rocket launch, state-run Philippine News Agency (PNA) reported.

    Speaking at a regular press conference on Monday, Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also confirmed that Chinese maritime police ships found an unknown floating object in the disputed waters on Sunday.

    Mao denied any confrontation and told reporters “there was no so-called interception and seizure at the scene.”

    “After identifying it as the debris of a rocket fairing recently launched by China, local personnel first salvaged and towed the floating object. After friendly negotiations between the two sides, the Philippine side returned the floating object to the Chinese side on the spot, and Chinese personnel expressed their gratitude to the Philippine side,” Mao said Monday.

    The incident was reported Sunday, a day before a scheduled visit by Harris to the western province of Palawan where a Philippine military command in charge of defending and patrolling its waters on the edge of the South China Sea is located.

    This was not the first time China’s space debris was found near the Philippines. Debris retrieved in two different locations off the waters of Palawan and Occidental Mindoro may have come from a Long March 5B rocket that China launched in late October, the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) said in a statement on November 9.

    “In relation to this, PhilSA would like to reiterate its sustained efforts to promote and encourage accountability among nations for objects launched into space,” the statement said.

    China has been criticized repeatedly for allowing rocket stages to make uncontrolled reentry to Earth, with NASA last year accusing Beijing for “failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris” after parts of a Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean.

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  • The Tilt in our Stars: The Shape of the Milky Way’s Halo of Stars is Realized

    The Tilt in our Stars: The Shape of the Milky Way’s Halo of Stars is Realized

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    Newswise — Cambridge, Mass. – A new study has revealed the true shape of the diffuse cloud of stars surrounding the disk of our galaxy. For decades, astronomers have thought that this cloud of stars — called the stellar halo — was largely spherical, like a beach ball. Now a new model based on modern observations shows the stellar halo is oblong and tilted, much like a football that has just been kicked.

    The findings — published this month The Astronomical Journal — offer insights into a host of astrophysical subject areas. The results, for example, shed light on the history of our galaxy and galactic evolution, while also offering clues in the ongoing hunt for the mysterious substance known as dark matter.

    “The shape of the stellar halo is a very fundamental parameter that we’ve just measured to greater accuracy than was possible before,” says study lead author Jiwon “Jesse” Han, a PhD student at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “There are a lot of important implications of the stellar halo not being spherical but instead shaped like a football, rugby ball, or zeppelin — take your pick!”

    “For decades, the general assumption has been that the stellar halo is more or less spherical and isotropic, or the same in every direction,” adds study co-author Charlie Conroy, Han’s advisor, and a professor of astronomy at Harvard University and the Center for Astrophysics. “We now know that the textbook picture of our galaxy embedded within a spherical volume of stars has to be thrown out.”

    The Milky Way’s stellar halo is the visible portion of what is more broadly called the galactic halo. This galactic halo is dominated by invisible dark matter, whose presence is only measurable through the gravity that it exerts. Every galaxy has its own halo of dark matter. These halos serve as a sort of scaffold upon which ordinary, visible matter hangs. In turn, that visible matter forms stars and other observable galactic structure. To better understand how galaxies form and interact, as well as the underlying nature of dark matter, stellar haloes are accordingly valuable astrophysical targets. 

    “The stellar halo is a dynamic tracer of the galactic halo,” says Han. “In order to learn more about galactic haloes in general, and especially our own galaxy’s galactic halo and history, the stellar halo is a great place to start.”

    Fathoming the shape of the Milky Way’s stellar halo, though, has long challenged astrophysicists for the simple reason that we are embedded within it. The stellar halo extends out several hundred thousand light years above and below the star-filled plane of our galaxy, where our Solar System resides.

    “Unlike with external galaxies, where we just look at them and measure their halos,” says Han, “we lack the same sort of aerial, outside perspective of our own galaxy’s halo.”

    Complicating matters further, the stellar halo has proven to be quite diffuse, containing only about one percent of the mass of all the galaxy’s stars. Yet over time, astronomers have succeeded in identifying many thousands of stars that populate this halo, which are distinguishable from other Milky Way stars due to their distinctive chemical makeup (gaugeable by studies of their starlight), as well as by their distances and motions across the sky. Through such studies, astronomers have realized that halo stars are not evenly distributed. The goal has since been to study the patterns of over-densities of stars — spatially appearing as bunches and streams — to sort out the ultimate origins of the stellar halo.

    The new study by CfA researchers and colleagues leverages two major datasets gathered in recent years that have plumbed the stellar halo as never before.

    The first set is from Gaia, a revolutionary spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency in 2013. Gaia has continued compiling the most precise measurements of the positions, motions, and distances of millions of stars in the Milky Way, including some nearby stellar halo stars.

    The second dataset is from H3 (Hectochelle in the Halo at High Resolution), a ground-based survey conducted at the MMT, located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona, and a collaboration between the CfA and the University of Arizona. H3 has gathered detailed observations of tens of thousands of stellar halo stars too far away for Gaia to assess.

    Combining these data in a flexible model that allowed for the stellar halo shape to emerge from all the observations yielded the decidedly non-spherical halo — and the football shape nicely dovetails with other findings to date. The shape, for example, independently and strongly agrees with a leading theory regarding the formation of the Milky Way’s stellar halo. 

    According to this framework, the stellar halo formed when a lone dwarf galaxy collided 7-10 billion years ago with our far-larger galaxy. The departed dwarf galaxy is amusingly known as Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE), where “Gaia” refers to the aforementioned spacecraft, “Sausage” for a pattern appearing when plotting the Gaia data and “Enceladus” for the Greek mythological giant who was buried under a mountain — rather like how GSE was buried in the Milky Way. As a consequence of this galactic collisional event, the dwarf galaxy was ripped apart and its constituent stars strewn out into a dispersed halo. Such an origin story accounts for the stellar halo stars’ inherent unlikeness to stars born and bred in the Milky Way.

    The study’s results further chronicle just how GSE and the Milky Way interacted all those eons ago. The football shape — technically called a triaxial ellipsoid — reflects the observations of two pileups of stars in the stellar halo. The pileups ostensibly formed when GSE went through two orbits of the Milky Way. During these orbits, GSE would have slowed down twice at so-called apocenters, or the furthest points in the dwarf galaxy’s orbit of the greater gravitational attractor, the hefty Milky Way; these pauses led to the extra shedding of GSE stars. Meanwhile, the tilt of the stellar halo indicates that GSE encountered the Milky Way at an incident angle and not straight-on.

    “The tilt and distribution of stars in the stellar halo provide dramatic confirmation that our galaxy collided with another smaller galaxy 7-10 billion years ago,” says Conroy. 

    Notably, so much time has passed since the GSE-Milky Way smashup that the stellar halo stars would have been expected to dynamically settle into the classical, long-assumed spherical shape. The fact that they haven’t likely speaks to the broader galactic halo, the team says. This dark matter-dominated structure is itself probably askew, and through its gravity, is likewise keeping the stellar halo off-kilter.

    “The tilted stellar halo strongly suggests that the underlying dark matter halo is also tilted,” says Conroy. “A tilt in the dark matter halo could have significant ramifications for our ability to detect dark matter particles in laboratories on Earth.”

    Conroy’s latter point alludes to the multiple dark matter detector experiments now running and planned. These detectors could increase their chances of capturing an elusive interaction with dark matter if astrophysicists can adjudge where the substance is more heavily concentrated, galactically speaking. As Earth moves through the Milky Way, it will periodically encounter these regions of dense and higher-velocity dark matter particles, boosting odds of detection.

    The discovery of the stellar halo’s most plausible configuration stands to move many astrophysical investigations forward while filling in basic details about our place in the universe.

    “These are such an intuitively interesting questions to ask about our galaxy: ‘What does the galaxy look like?’ and ‘What does the stellar halo look like?’,” says Han. “With this line of research and study in particular, we are finally answering those questions.”

     

    ###

    About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

    The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask—and ultimately answer—humanity’s greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.

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  • Apple invested $450 million in a satellite-powered SOS system. We tested it out | CNN Business

    Apple invested $450 million in a satellite-powered SOS system. We tested it out | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    When Apple announced at its closely-watched September product launch event that it would soon introduce an Emergency SOS feature powered by a network of satellites orbiting above Earth, Brooklyn probably wasn’t the secluded location most had in mind for using it.

    But on a rainy afternoon last week, I found myself trying to stay connected to one of the satellites from Prospect Park as part of a demo of the upcoming feature. I stepped out from under a giant oak tree and the rain started to come down harder. Then I moved my device slightly to the right and quickly regained access to the signal and continued messaging with an emergency dispatcher.

    The rain wasn’t the issue; it was the foliage limiting my phone’s view of the sky.

    On Tuesday, Apple

    (AAPL)     will launch the Emergency SOS via Satellite feature for those with an iPhone 14 in the United States and Canada, with plans to roll it out in the UK, France, Germany and Ireland next month. The free feature promises to let iPhone users contact dedicated dispatchers in emergency situations via satellites when a cell phone network is unavailable.

    Hikers, emergency responders and intrepid travelers may be well versed in the existing world of satellite phones, which provide voice, SMS, and data services anywhere on Earth. Now Apple is attempting to do the same with its iPhones, as part of a broader pitch this year to consumers that its devices don’t just help them live better, but also live safer. In the process, it could make its pricey products seem a bit more indispensable in an uncertain economic environment that has some rethinking expenses.

    Apple recently invested $450 million in Globalstar, a global satellite service, and other providers to support the development of 24 low-orbit satellites flying 16,000 mph at a higher altitude than the International Space Station. The investment is part of Apple’s Advanced Manufacturing Fund, which has previously been used for glass production with Corning and laser technology for facial recognition.

    During my test with an iPhone 14 provided by Apple, I attempted to call 911 but was automatically redirected to Emergency SOS via Satellite dispatchers for the purposes of the demo. When the device was unable to connect to cellular service, a small green icon appeared at the bottom right of the call screen to initiate a text conversation with emergency services.

    I was prompted to fill out a questionnaire and tapped through a handful of short multiple choice questions; I noted I was lost but not injured. Nearly 20 seconds later, I received confirmation that my geo-location coordinates were sent to a dispatcher, along with my medical ID, emergency contact information and the answers to my questions. I was told to keep responses short, likely to cut down on the amount of data needed to transfer to the satellite and back down to a dispatcher. I was also asked to identify nearby landmarks and where I entered the park. My total exchange lasted about four minutes.

    Apple said the size of messages was greatly condensed so the satellite can more efficiently route them to ground stations located all over the world. Once received, texts are sent to local emergency services or a relay center with Apple-trained emergency specialists who can send help.

    But even in a city, I lost access to the satellite several times when I wasn’t in clear view of the sky. A grayscale circle with a green signal image showed up when connected but turned yellow when conditions were poor and red when connectivity was lost. I walked about 200 feet away from my original location to find a satellite. Once there, I held the device naturally in my hand; Apple said there’s no need to raise or wave it around.

    When it works, the lifesaving potential for such a feature is obvious. But there are some caveats. To start, it’s text only; users will need to physically have the device in their hands to start an exchange, which may not always be possible if injured. The tool does, however, work with the iPhone 14 and Apple Watch’s crash detection feature, so it could automatically dial emergency services or send coordinates to a dispatcher when a user is unconscious or unable to reach their iPhone.

    For now, Emergency SOS via satellite only works in English, Spanish, and French, although the dispatchers have professional interpretation services available for many more languages. Apple said it also may not work in all areas, such as in places above 62° latitude, including northern parts of Canada and Alaska.

    For iPhone 14 users who want to see how the tool works, and test out the process for searching for a satellite, a demo is now available in Settings under “Emergency SOS via satellite.” Apple said the feature is available for free for two years and then it will reevaluate the offering based on what it’s learned about usage during that time.

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  • First-time NASA spacewalkers venture outside the space station | CNN

    First-time NASA spacewalkers venture outside the space station | CNN

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    Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



    CNN
     — 

    Things are about to get busy on the International Space Station as the first in a series of end-of-the-year spacewalks kicked off Tuesday morning.

    First-time spacewalkers and NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Frank Rubio began their excursion outside the space station at 9:14 a.m. ET, with live coverage on NASA’s website. The event is expected to last for about seven hours.

    Cassada is wearing the spacesuit with red stripes as extravehicular crew member 1, while Rubio is in the unmarked suit as extravehicular crew member 2.

    The astronauts will assemble a mounting bracket on the starboard side of the space station’s truss. The hardware that will be installed during the spacewalk was delivered to the space station on November 9 aboard a Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft, which safely delivered its cargo despite only one of its two solar arrays deploying after launch.

    This hardware will allow for the installation of more rollout solar arrays, called iROSAs, to give the space station a power boost. The first two rollout solar arrays were installed outside the station in June 2021. Six iROSAs total have been planned and will likely boost the space station’s power generation by more than 30% once all are operational.

    During two more spacewalks on November 28 and December 1, a two-astronaut crew will unroll and install another pair of solar arrays once the mounting hardware is in place. The solar arrays will be delivered on the next SpaceX Dragon commercial resupply mission, currently slated for launch on November 21.

    Spacewalks are part of the space station crew’s routine as they maintain and upgrade the aging orbital laboratory, but Tuesday’s spacewalk is NASA’s first since March. The agency’s spacewalks came to a halt after European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer ended his first spacewalk with water in his helmet.

    A thin layer of moisture that exceeded the normal, expected amount was discovered in Maurer’s helmet once he returned to the airlock after a nearly seven-hour spacewalk. Maurer quickly shed the helmet, in an event deemed “a close-call” by NASA, and water samples, suit hardware and the spacesuit itself were returned to Earth for investigation. Officials at NASA determined the suit didn’t experience any hardware failures.

    “The cause for the water in the helmet was likely due to integrated system performance where several variables such as crew exertion and crew cooling settings led to the generation of comparatively larger than normal amounts of condensation within the system,” according to NASA in a blog post update.

    “Based on the findings, the team has updated operational procedures and developed new mitigation hardware to minimize scenarios where integrated performance results in water accumulation, while absorbing any water that does appear. These measures will help contain any liquid in the helmet to continue to keep crew safe.”

    Officials at NASA gave the “go” for spacewalks to resume after concluding the review in October.

    The investigation team has developed techniques to manage temperatures in the suit and added new absorption bands to the helmet, said Dina Contella, operations integration manager for the International Space Station Program.

    The thin orange pieces have been placed in different parts of the helmet, which has already been tested on orbit by the astronauts inside the space station.

    “We’ve taken several different models of this up and the crew on board sloshed water around, essentially tried to inject water into the helmet at the same rate that would be kind of a worst, worst case. And we found that these pads were very, very effective,” Contella said.

    Tuesday’s spacewalk will allow the crew to test the new pads as they work outside of the space station before the more complex solar array installation spacewalks within the next couple of weeks.

    Meanwhile, a Russian spacewalk is scheduled to take place on Thursday. Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin will begin their walk at 9 a.m. ET to work on the outside of the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module. The duo will prepare a radiator for transfer from the Rassvet module to Nauka during their seven-hour spacewalk, which will also stream live on NASA’s website.

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  • NASA Scientists Present Theory About Why We Haven’t Met Other Intelligent Life. It’s Crushing.

    NASA Scientists Present Theory About Why We Haven’t Met Other Intelligent Life. It’s Crushing.

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    NASA scientists have explained in a new paper why they believe it’s likely we haven’t ever encountered intelligent extraterrestrial life — and it’s heartbreaking.

    All intelligent life, they argue, has likely destroyed itself before reaching a sophisticated enough point in evolution to support such an encounter. And the same fate likely awaits humans unless we take action, they believe.

    The “Great Filter” theory — as in “filtering out” various forms of life — argues that other civilizations, possibly several, have existed during the life of the universe. But they all destroyed themselves before they could make contact with Earth, noted the paper, “Avoiding the ‘Great Filter’: Extraterrestrial Life and Humanity’s Future in the Universe.”

    The scientists fear that all intelligent life, such as humans, have deeply ingrained dysfunctions that may “snowball quickly into the Great Filter,” they wrote.

    But there’s still a bit of hope for humans — provided we can learn and take steps to avoid our own extinction, noted the paper by a team of researchers based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California.

    “The key to humanity successfully traversing such a universal filter is… identifying [destructive] attributes in ourselves and neutralizing them in advance,” astrophysicist Jonathan Jiang and his coauthors wrote in the paper that appeared online on Oct. 23.

    The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed.

    Whatever seems likely to wipe out humans would conceivably also threaten intelligent life on other planets, the authors argue. The likely culprits — which could be impacted by humans or other intelligent life forms — include nuclear war, pandemic, climate change, and uncontrolled artificial intelligence, the authors note.

    The trick, the biggest challenge of all, will be to work together to survive, the researchers said.

    “History has shown that intraspecies competition and, more importantly, collaboration, has led us towards the highest peaks of invention. And yet, we prolong notions that seem to be the antithesis of long-term sustainable growth: Racism, genocide, inequity, sabotage,” the writers warn.

    Check out the full paper here.

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  • North Korean ‘peace’ dogs cause political spat in South Korea | CNN

    North Korean ‘peace’ dogs cause political spat in South Korea | CNN

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    Seoul, South Korea
    CNN
     — 

    A pair of dogs gifted by North Korea are the center of a political dispute in South Korea after the country’s former President said he was giving them up over an apparent lack of legal and financial support from his successor to care for the animals.

    The two white Pungsan hunting dogs, Gomi and Songgang, were presented to then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at peace talks in 2018.

    The dogs have lived with Moon ever since, including after he was succeeded as President by Yoon Suk Yeol in May – even though they are legally owned by the state.

    On Monday, Moon’s office said in a statement that he was turning the dogs over to the Presidential Archives, accusing President Yoon of blocking a discussion to provide a legal basis for the former president to keep them.

    “Unlike the Presidential Archives and the Ministry of Interior, Presidential Office seems to be against leaving care of the Pungsan dogs to former President Moon,” the statement from Moon’s office said.

    “Looking at recent media reports the Presidential Office has no good will for a simple resolution of this issue. Are they hoping to leave the blame to Moon? Or because they feel responsible for these pet animals? We are flabbergasted to see malice of the current administration that is on display at a petty issue as this.”

    The Ministry of the Interior and Safety confirmed the government was in talks with Moon to provide monthly subsidies totaling 2.5 million won ($1,800) for the animals.

    President Yoon, who already has four dogs and three cats, denied blocking Moon from keeping the dogs in a statement from his office Monday, saying discussions between relevant ministries were ongoing.

    “It is not true that former President Moon Jae-in tried to come up with a basis for raising the Pungsan dogs but the presidential office objected,” the statement said.

    Dogs have historically been a symbol of thawing ties between the Koreas. In 2000, Kim Jong Il gave two Pungsan puppies – named Uri and Duri – to Kim Dae-jung. The South Korean leader returned the favor with two Jindo dogs named Peace and Reunification.

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  • Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth

    Astronomers Discover Closest Black Hole to Earth

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    Newswise — Black holes are the most extreme objects in the Universe. Supermassive versions of these unimaginably dense objects likely reside at the centers of all large galaxies. Stellar-mass black holes — which weigh approximately five to 100 times the mass of the Sun — are much more common, with an estimated 100 million in the Milky Way alone. Only a handful have been confirmed to date, however, and nearly all of these are ‘active’ – meaning they shine brightly in X-rays as they consume material from a nearby stellar companion, unlike dormant black holes which do not. 

    Astronomers using the Gemini North telescope on Hawai‘i, one of the twin telescopes of the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF’s NOIRLab, have discovered the closest black hole to Earth, which the researchers have dubbed Gaia BH1. This dormant black hole weighs about 10 times the mass of the Sun and is located about 1600 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, making it three times closer to Earth than the previous record holder, an X-ray binary in the constellation of Monoceros. The new discovery was made possible by making exquisite observations of the motion of the black hole’s companion, a Sun-like star that orbits the black hole at about the same distance as the Earth orbits the Sun. 

    “Take the Solar System, put a black hole where the Sun is, and the Sun where the Earth is, and you get this system,” explained Kareem El-Badry, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, and the lead author of the paper describing this discovery. “While there have been many claimed detections of systems like this, almost all these discoveries have subsequently been refuted. This is the first unambiguous detection of a Sun-like star in a wide orbit around a stellar-mass black hole in our Galaxy.”

    Though there are likely millions of stellar-mass black holes roaming the Milky Way Galaxy, those few that have been detected were uncovered by their energetic interactions with a companion star. As material from a nearby star spirals in toward the black hole, it becomes superheated and generates powerful X-rays and jets of material. If a black hole is not actively feeding (i.e., it is dormant) it simply blends in with its surroundings.  

    “I’ve been searching for dormant black holes for the last four years using a wide range of datasets and methods,” said El-Badry. “My previous attempts — as well as those of others — turned up a menagerie of binary systems that masquerade as black holes, but this is the first time the search has borne fruit.”

    The team originally identified the system as potentially hosting a black hole by analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft. Gaia captured the minute irregularities in the star’s motion caused by the gravity of an unseen massive object. To explore the system in more detail, El-Badry and his team turned to the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph instrument on Gemini North, which measured the velocity of the companion star as it orbited the black hole and provided precise measurement of its orbital period. The Gemini follow-up observations were crucial to constraining the orbital motion and hence masses of the two components in the binary system, allowing the team to identify the central body as a black hole roughly 10 times as massive as our Sun.

    “Our Gemini follow-up observations confirmed beyond reasonable doubt that the binary contains a normal star and at least one dormant black hole,” elaborated El-Badry. “We could find no plausible astrophysical scenario that can explain the observed orbit of the system that doesn’t involve at least one black hole.”

    The team relied not only on Gemini North’s superb observational capabilities but also on Gemini’s ability to provide data on a tight deadline, as the team had only a short window in which to perform their follow-up observations. 

    “When we had the first indications that the system contained a black hole, we only had one week before the two objects were at the closest separation in their orbits. Measurements at this point are essential to make accurate mass estimates in a binary system,” said El-Badry. “Gemini’s ability to provide fast-turnaround observations was critical to the project’s success. If we’d missed that narrow window, we would have had to wait another year.” 

    Astronomers’ current models of the evolution of binary systems are hard-pressed to explain how the peculiar configuration of Gaia BH1 system could have arisen. Specifically, the progenitor star that later turned into the newly detected black hole would have been at least 20 times as massive as our Sun. This means it would have lived only a few million years. If both stars formed at the same time, this massive star would have quickly turned into a supergiant, puffing up and engulfing the other star before it had time to become a proper, hydrogen-burning, main-sequence star like our Sun. 

    It is not at all clear how the solar-mass star could have survived that episode, ending up as an apparently normal star, as the observations of the black hole binary indicate. Theoretical models that do allow for survival all predict that the solar-mass star should have ended up on a much tighter orbit than what is actually observed.

    This could indicate that there are important gaps in our understanding of how black holes form and evolve in binary systems, and also suggests the existence of an as-yet-unexplored population of dormant black holes in binaries. 

    “It is interesting that this system is not easily accommodated by standard binary evolution models,” concluded El-Badry. “It poses many questions about how this binary system was formed, as well as how many of these dormant black holes there are out there.”

    “As part of a network of space- and ground-based observatories, Gemini North has not only provided strong evidence for the nearest black hole to date but also the first pristine black hole system, uncluttered by the usual hot gas interacting with the black hole,” said NSF Gemini Program Officer Martin Still. “While this potentially augurs future discoveries of the predicted dormant black hole population in our Galaxy, the observations also leave a mystery to be solved — despite a shared history with its exotic neighbor, why is the companion star in this binary system so normal?”

    The International Gemini Observatory is operated by a partnership of six countries, including the United States through the National Science Foundation, Canada through the National Research Council of Canada, Chile through the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo, Brazil through the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovações, Argentina through the Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación, and Korea through the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute. These Participants and the University of Hawaii, which has regular access to Gemini, each maintain a “National Gemini Office” to support their local users.

    More information

    El-Badry, K., et al. (2022). “A Sun-like star orbiting a black hole” published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac3140

    NSF’s NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), the US center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the international Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC–Canada, ANID–Chile, MCTIC–Brazil, MINCyT–Argentina, and KASI–Republic of Korea), Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and Vera C. Rubin Observatory (operated in cooperation with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. The astronomical community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawai‘i, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that these sites have to the Tohono O’odham Nation, to the Native Hawaiian community, and to the local communities in Chile, respectively.

    Links

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    NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory

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  • Can Cosmic Inflation Be Ruled Out?

    Can Cosmic Inflation Be Ruled Out?

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    Newswise — Astrophysicists say that cosmic inflation – a point in the Universe’s infancy when space-time expanded exponentially, and what physicists really refer to when they talk about the ‘Big Bang’ – can in principle be ruled out in an assumption-free way.

    The astrophysicists, from the University of Cambridge, the University of Trento, and Harvard University, say that there is a clear, unambiguous signal in the cosmos which could eliminate inflation as a possibility. Their paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, argues that this signal – known as the cosmic graviton background (CGB) – can feasibly be detected, although it will be a massive technical and scientific challenge.

    “Inflation was theorised to explain various fine-tuning challenges of the so-called hot Big Bang model,” said the paper’s first author Dr Sunny Vagnozzi, from Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology, and is now based at the University of Trento. “It also explains the origin of structure in our Universe as a result of quantum fluctuations.

    “However, the large flexibility displayed by possible models for cosmic inflation which span an unlimited landscape of cosmological outcomes raises concerns that cosmic inflation is not falsifiable, even if individual inflationary models can be ruled out. Is it possible in principle to test cosmic inflation in a model-independent way?”

    Some scientists raised concerns about cosmic inflation in 2013, when the Planck satellite released its first measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the universe’s oldest light.

    “When the results from the Planck satellite were announced, they were held up as a confirmation of cosmic inflation,” said Professor Avi Loeb from Harvard University, Vagnozzi’s co-author on the current paper. “However, some of us argued that the results might be showing just the opposite.”

    Along with Anna Ijjas and Paul Steinhardt, Loeb was one of those who argued that results from Planck showed that inflation posed more puzzles than it solved, and that it was time to consider new ideas about the beginnings of the universe, which, for instance. may have begun not with a bang but with a bounce from a previously contracting cosmos.

    The maps of the CMB released by Planck represent the earliest time in the universe we can ‘see’, 100 million years before the first stars formed. We cannot see farther.

    “The actual edge of the observable universe is at the distance that any signal could have travelled at the speed-of-light limit over the 13.8 billion years that elapsed since the birth of the Universe,” said Loeb. “As a result of the expansion of the universe, this edge is currently located 46.5 billion light years away. The spherical volume within this boundary is like an archaeological dig centred on us: the deeper we probe into it, the earlier is the layer of cosmic history that we uncover, all the way back to the Big Bang which represents our ultimate horizon. What lies beyond the horizon is unknown.”

    In could be possible to dig even further into the universe’s beginnings by studying near-weightless particles known as neutrinos, which are the most abundant particles that have mass in the universe. The Universe allows neutrinos to travel freely without scattering from approximately a second after the Big Bang, when the temperature was ten billion degrees. “The present-day universe must be filled with relic neutrinos from that time,” said Vagnozzi.

    Vagnozzi and Loeb say we can go even further back, however, by tracing gravitons, particles which mediate the force of gravity.

    “The Universe was transparent to gravitons all the way back to the earliest instant traced by known physics, the Planck time: 10 to the power of -43 seconds, when the temperature was the highest conceivable: 10 to the power of 32 degrees,” said Loeb. “A proper understanding of what came before that requires a predictive theory of quantum gravity, which we do not possess.”

    Vagnozzi and Loeb say that once the Universe allowed gravitons to travel freely without scattering, a relic background of thermal gravitational radiation with a temperature of slightly less than one degree above absolute zero should have been generated: the cosmic graviton background (CGB).

    However, the Big Bang theory does not allow for the existence of the CGB, as it suggests that the exponential inflation of the newborn universe diluted relics such as the CGB to a point that they are undetectable. This can be turned into a test: if the CGB were detected, clearly this would rule out cosmic inflation, which does not allow for its existence.

    Vagnozzi and Loeb argue that such a test is possible, and the CGB could in principle be detected in future. The CGB adds to the cosmic radiation budget, which otherwise includes microwave and neutrino backgrounds. It therefore affects the cosmic expansion rate of the early Universe at a level that is detectable by next-generation cosmological probes, which could provide the first indirect detection of the CGB.

    However, to claim a definitive detection of the CGB, the ‘smoking gun’ would be the detection of a background of high-frequency gravitational waves peaking at frequencies around 100 GHz. This would be very hard to detect, and would require tremendous technological advances in gyrotron and superconducting magnets technology. Nevertheless, say the researchers, this signal may be within our reach in future.

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    University of Cambridge

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  • Baseline #13 – Sagittarius A*: Monster in the Milky Way

    Baseline #13 – Sagittarius A*: Monster in the Milky Way

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    In the center of the Milky Way there is a black hole more massive than 4 million Suns. It’s known as Sagittarius A*, or Sgr* A, and it’s hidden behind the dust of our galactic center. So how can astronomers see it? Join our host Summer Ash of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory as she talks about how radio astronomers captured the first direct image of the monster black hole in our backyard.

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    National Radio Astronomy Observatory

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