Chang'e 5
on the moon
Best map of Milky Way reveals a billion stars in motion
The best available map of the Milky Way just got better. The latest update from the Gaia space observatory — which is tracking more than 1 billion stars in the Galaxy — provides not just a static image but a picture of how stars will move over time. The data will underpin studies that range from the origins and evolution of the Galaxy to locating its dark matter.
the return of Hayabusa2 to Earth, bringing pieces of asteroid for analysis
China’s Chang'e-5 probe completes drilling, sealing of lunar samples
The Chang'e-5 spacecraft has sealed up soil samples obtained from beneath the Moon’s surface, and is ready to continue collecting more samples from the surface, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said Wednesday.
Mitochondrial Changes Key to Health Problems in Space
Living in space isn’t easy. There are notable impacts on the biology of living things in the harsh environment of space. A team of scientists has now identified a possible underlying driver of these impacts: the powerhouse of the cell, called mitochondria, experiences changes in activity during spaceflight.
Recently published in the journal Cell, these results used data collected over decades of experimental research on the International Space Station, including samples from 59 astronauts. Studies such as these are critical to understanding the effects of low gravity, radiation, confined spaces, and more as NASA sends astronauts deep into space for extended missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
“We’ve found a universal mechanism that explains the kinds of changes we see to the body in space, and in a place we didn’t expect,” said Afshin Beheshti the lead author on the paper and a researcher with KBR, which provides contract support to NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “Everything gets thrown out of whack and it all starts with the mitochondria.”
The Search for Dark Matter Is Dramatically Expanding
Ever since astronomers reached a consensus in the 1980s that most of the mass in the universe is invisible — that “dark matter” must glue galaxies together and gravitationally sculpt the cosmos as a whole — experimentalists have hunted for the nonluminous particles.
They first set out in pursuit of a heavy, sluggish form of dark matter called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP — the early favorite candidate for the cosmos’s missing matter because it could solve another, unrelated puzzle in particle physics. Over the decades, teams of physicists set up ever larger targets, in the form of huge crystals and multi-ton vats of exotic liquids, hoping to catch the rare jiggle of an atom when a WIMP banged into it.
But these detectors have stayed quiet, and physicists are increasingly contemplating a broader spectrum of possibilities. On the heavy end, they say the universe’s invisible matter could clump into black holes as heavy as stars. At the other extreme, dark matter could spread out in a fine mist of particles thousands of trillions of trillions of times lighter than electrons.
NASA Contacts Voyager 2 Using Upgraded Deep Space Network Dish
On Oct. 29, mission operators sent a series of commands to NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft for the first time since mid-March. The spacecraft has been flying solo while the 70-meter-wide (230-foot-wide) radio antenna used to talk to it has been offline for repairs and upgrades. Voyager 2 returned a signal confirming it had received the “call” and executed the commands without issue.
The call to Voyager 2 was a test of new hardware recently installed on Deep Space Station 43, the only dish in the world that can send commands to Voyager 2. Located in Canberra, Australia, it is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), a collection of radio antennas around the world used primarily to communicate with spacecraft operating beyond the Moon. Since the dish went offline, mission operators have been able to receive health updates and science data from Voyager 2, but they haven’t been able to send commands to the far-flung probe, which has traveled billions of miles from Earth since its 1977 launch.
Among the upgrades to DSS43, as the dish is known, are two new radio transmitters. One of them, which is used to talk with Voyager 2, hasn’t been replaced in over 47 years. Engineers have also upgraded heating and cooling equipment, power supply equipment, and other electronics needed to run the new transmitters.
The successful call to Voyager 2 is just one indication that the dish will be back online in February 2021.
A bright millisecond-duration radio burst from a Galactic magnetar
Magnetars are highly magnetized young neutron stars that occasionally produce enormous bursts and flares of X-rays and γ-rays1.
Of the approximately thirty magnetars currently known in our Galaxy and
the Magellanic Clouds, five have exhibited transient radio pulsations2,3. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration bursts of radio waves arriving from cosmological distances4, some of which have been seen to repeat5,6,7,8. A leading model for repeating FRBs is that they are extragalactic magnetars, powered by their intense magnetic fields9,10,11.
However, a challenge to this model is that FRBs must have radio
luminosities many orders of magnitude larger than those seen from known
Galactic magnetars. Here we report the detection of an extremely intense
radio burst from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154 using the Canadian
Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) FRB project. The fluence
of this two-component bright radio burst and the estimated distance to
SGR 1935+2154 together imply a burst energy at 400 to 800 megahertz of
approximately 3 × 1034 erg, which is three orders of
magnitude higher than the burst energy of any radio-emitting magnetar
detected thus far. Such a burst coming from a nearby galaxy (at a
distance of less than approximately 12 megaparsecs) would be
indistinguishable from a typical FRB. However, given the large gaps in
observed energies and activity between the brightest and most active FRB
sources and what is observed for SGR 1935+2154-like magnetars, more
energetic and active sources—perhaps younger magnetars—are needed to
explain all observations.
Microbial space travel on a molecular scale
Galactic cosmic and solar UV radiation,
extreme vacuum, temperature fluctuations: how can microbes exposed to
these challenges in space survive? An international team around Space
Biochemistry group at the University of Vienna investigated how the
space-surviving microbes could physically survive the transfer from one
celestial body to another. Their study provides a deeper understanding
of molecular mechanisms of microbial survivability in outer space. The
results are published in the high-impact journal “Microbiome”.
concept Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) engine for NASA
NASA’s SOFIA Discovers Water on Sunlit Surface of Moon
NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places.
SOFIA has detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere. Previous observations of the Moon’s surface detected some form of hydrogen, but were unable to distinguish between water and its close chemical relative, hydroxyl (OH). Data from this location reveal water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million – roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water – trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface. The results are published in the latest issue of Nature Astronomy.
“We had indications that H2O – the familiar water we know – might be present on the sunlit side of the Moon,” said Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Now we know it is there. This discovery challenges our understanding of the lunar surface and raises intriguing questions about resources relevant for deep space exploration.”
As a comparison, the Sahara desert has 100 times the amount of water than what SOFIA detected in the lunar soil. Despite the small amounts, the discovery raises new questions about how water is created and how it persists on the harsh, airless lunar surface.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft Collects Significant Amount of Asteroid Bennu
Captured on Oct. 22, this series of three images shows that the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) head on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is full of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu. The image series also shows that some of these particles are slowly escaping the sampler head. Analysis by the OSIRIS-REx team suggests that bits of material are passing through small gaps where the head’s mylar flap is slightly wedged open. The mylar flap (the black bulge visible in the 9 o’clock position inside the ring) is designed to keep the collected material locked inside, and these unsealed areas appear to be caused by larger rocks that didn’t fully pass through the flap. Based on available imagery, the team suspects there is plentiful sample inside the head, and is on a path to stow the sample as quickly as possible.
The images were taken by the spacecraft’s SamCam camera
as part of the sample verification procedure following the spacecraft’s
Oct. 20 sample collection attempt.The TAGSAM system was developed by
Lockheed Martin Space to acquire a sample of asteroid material in a
low-gravity environment.
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