A 1966 NASA diagram illustrates the operation of the chest and backpacks of the Gemini 8 extravehicular spacesuit. (NASA)
Will Astronomers Be Ready for the Next ‘Oumuamua?
In a letter published February 6 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Marcos and his collaborators considered 339 known hyperbolic objects, using a computer model to rewind their orbits 100,000 years into the past. Of the fastest incoming objects, they found a cluster from the celestial vicinity of the constellation Gemini; these, they posited, are perhaps locals kicked inward from the outer solar system by a close encounter some 70,000 years ago with nearby Scholz’s star. But Marcos’s team also identified eight possible interstellar interlopers with inbound velocities that seem to stand apart, including 2013’s high-profile Comet ISON.
Like ‘Oumuamua, though, these candidates all dashed into and then out of inner solar system, putting them out of telescope range quickly—and none were studied as objects of potential interstellar origin. “The candidates cited in our work belong to the past, and as such they may not be observed in the future,” Marcos says.
The hope is to inspire other searches in past astronomical surveys to further scrutinize the orbital paths of these candidates or perhaps to find more.
New Horizons Captures Record-Breaking Images in the Kuiper Belt
The routine calibration frame of the “Wishing Well” galactic open star cluster, made by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on Dec. 5, was taken when New Horizons was 3.79 billion miles (6.12 billion kilometers, or 40.9 astronomical units) from Earth – making it, for a time, the farthest image ever made from Earth.
New Horizons was even farther from home than NASA’s Voyager 1 when it captured the famous “Pale Blue Dot” image of Earth. That picture was part of a composite of 60 images looking back at the solar system, on Feb. 14, 1990, when Voyager was 3.75 billion miles (6.06 billion kilometers, or about 40.5 astronomical units [AU]) from Earth. Voyager 1’s cameras were turned off shortly after that portrait, leaving its distance record unchallenged for more than 27 years.
LORRI broke its own record just two hours later with images of Kuiper Belt objects 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85 – further demonstrating how nothing stands still when you’re covering more than 700,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) of space each day.
In the featured image taken by Akatsuki’s IR2 camera, Venus’s night side shows a jagged-edged equatorial band of high dark clouds absorbing infrared light from hotter layers deeper in Venus’ atmosphere. The bright orange and black stripe on the upper right is a false digital artifact that covers part of the much brighter day side of Venus. Analyses of Akatsuki images and data has shown that Venus has equatorial jet similar to Earth’s jet stream.
NASA’s Long Dead ‘IMAGE’ Satellite is Alive!
Upon reviewing the data from January 20, 2018, I noticed a curve consistent with an satellite in High Earth Orbit (HEO) on 2275.905MHz, darn not ZUMA… This is not uncommon during these searches. So I set to work to identify the source.
A quick identity scan using ‘strf’ (sat tools rf) revealed the signal to come from 2000-017A, 26113, called IMAGE.
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So what was IMAGE? I did a little Googling and discovered that it had been ‘Lost in Space’ since December 18, 2005 after just dropping off the grid suddenly. The mission was designed to image the magnetosphere, more details about that can be found in the press kit.
The James Webb Space Telescope has emerged from the freezer
The $10 billion telescope underwent tests inside Chamber A at Johnson Space Center, which was built in 1965 to conduct thermal-vacuum testing on the Apollo command and service modules. Beginning in mid-July, after the telescope was cooled down to a temperature range of 20 to 40 Kelvin, engineers tested the alignment of Webb’s 18 primary mirror segments to ensure they would act as a single, 6.5-meter telescope. (They did).
Later, they assessed the fine guidance system of the telescope by simulating the light of a distant star. The Webb telescope was able to detect the light, and all of the optical systems were able to process it. Then, the telescope was able to track the “star” and its movement, giving scientists confidence that the Webb instrument will work once in space.
Webb still has a ways to go before it launches. Now that project scientists know that the optic portion of the instrument can withstand the vacuum of space, and the low temperatures at the Earth-Sun L2 point it will orbit in deep space, they must perform additional testing before a probable launch next year.
NASA Team First to Demonstrate X-ray Navigation in Space
The demonstration, which the team carried out with an experiment called Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology, or SEXTANT, showed that millisecond pulsars could be used to accurately determine the location of an object moving at thousands of miles per hour in space — similar to how the Global Positioning System, widely known as GPS, provides positioning, navigation, and timing services to users on Earth with its constellation of 24 operating satellites.
“This demonstration is a breakthrough for future deep space exploration,” said SEXTANT Project Manager Jason Mitchell, an aerospace technologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “As the first to demonstrate X-ray navigation fully autonomously and in real-time in space, we are now leading the way.”
This technology provides a new option for deep space navigation that could work in concert with existing spacecraft-based radio and optical systems.
Although it could take a few years to mature an X-ray navigation system practical for use on deep-space spacecraft, the fact that NASA engineers proved it could be done bodes well for future interplanetary space travel. Such a system provides a new option for spacecraft to autonomously determine their locations outside the currently used Earth-based global navigation networks because pulsars are accessible in virtually every conceivable fight regime, from low-Earth to deepest space.
This composite image of the Earth and Moon is made from data captured by OSIRIS-REx’s MapCam instrument on Oct. 2, 2017, when the spacecraft was approximately 3 million miles (5 million kilometers) from Earth, about 13 times the distance between the Earth and Moon. (Click here to see the geometry of the shot.) Three images (different color wavelengths) were combined and color-corrected to make the composite, and the Moon was “stretched” (brightened) to make it more easily visible.
after dozens of hours pretty sure the spacesuit is the best costume
err, this is amazing if the math holds up:
The Plasma Magnet Drive: A Simple, Cheap Drive for the Solar System and Beyond
The plasma magnet is a type of magsail that creates a kilometers wide, artificial magnetosphere that deflects the charged solar wind to provide thrust.
Unlike a classic magsail that generates the magnetic field with a large diameter electrical circuit, the plasma magnet replaces the circular superconducting coil by inducing the current flow with the charged particles of the solar wind. It is an upgraded development of Robert Winglee’s Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2), a drive that required injection of charged particles to generate the magnetosphere.
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The plasma magnet, as a space drive, has much better thrust to weight ratio than even the new X-3 Hall Effect ion engine currently in development. This ratio remains high when the power supply from solar array is added. Of more importance is that the plasma magnet is theoretically propellantless, providing thrust as long as the solar wind is flowing past the craft and power is supplied.
2018 is shaping up to be a very busy year in space exploration, with most of the action happening relatively close to Earth. There will be three launches to the Moon and one each toward Mars and Mercury. Two spacecraft will rendezvous with near-Earth asteroids and prepare to descend for samples. We’ll see the most distant ever planetary encounter with a tiny Kuiper belt object. And fifteen other spacecraft remain active in science missions at Venus, the Moon, Mars, Ceres, and Jupiter.
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