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Hello, everyone, and welcome back. This week holds a ton of updates from around the world, so without further ado, let’s jump right in.
Starship Grounded While Feds Investigate Damage
Last week, SpaceX made a historic first launch attempt with its colossal super-heavy lift vehicle, Starship. Unfortunately, the rocket experienced a malfunction, leading to its total loss in an explosion over the Gulf of Mexico. But it didn’t take long after takeoff for some very different damage reports to surface—of rocks, debris, and chunks of concrete raining down out of the sky, some miles away from where Starship launched.
It soon became apparent that SpaceX didn’t have a deluge or channel system at that launch site to manage the heat from Starship’s rocket exhaust. With nowhere else to go, the rocket exhaust vaporized some of the launch pad, hurling much of the rest into the air at ludicrous speed. Regulators announced this week that SpaceX is barred from attempting further Starship launches while federal investigators inspect the crater where its launch pad used to be.
Emirati Lander Captures Deimos in Close-Up
NASA and JAXA may be planning a mission to the Martian moon Phobos in a few years, but Deimos has company knocking on the proverbial door right now. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Mars Mission entered Martian orbit on Feb. 9, but the probe (dubbed Hope) hasn’t taken images of the far side of Deimos until this week.
Phobos and Deimos are both tiny, but Deimos is the smaller and more distant of the two, with a radius of just 3.9 miles and an orbit some 14,500 miles from Mars. Deimos is tidally locked to Mars, meaning the same side of the Moon always faces the planet. Consequently, this is the first time we’ve had such a clear view of Deimos’, erm, derrière. That is, if you can find it in yourself to call this grey, OpenGL 2.0-lookin’ potato “clear.”
Credit: UAE Space Agency
“The findings to date suggest that both of Mars’ satellites may have formed from debris left over from an impact on Mars,” said Christopher Edwards, EMIRS instrument scientist from Northern Arizona University, in a press release. “These early findings are exciting and have big implications for understanding the formation of moons in our solar system. Differentiating between the captured asteroid and coalesced Mars debris hypotheses is something to which EMM is well positioned to make significant contributions.”
It’s been theorized that Phobos and Deimos might be C-type or D-type asteroids, but Hope found no strong evidence of carbon or other organic materials, which astronomers would expect to find if either Moon had originated in the asteroid belt. Astronomers generally believe that Earth’s Moon formed in the wake of a giant impact with a Mars-sized body, nicknamed Theia (Theia was the mother of Selene in Greek mythology). The entire northern hemisphere of Mars is much lower than the southern hemisphere, implying one or more major impact events in the planet’s past. We don’t know if an impact deformed Mars early in its lifespan, but the joint Mars sample return mission a few years from now could tell us more.
Hakuto-R Lander Presumed Dead on Lunar Impact
After its Hakuto-R launch went off exactly as planned, it looked as if the Japanese company ispace would become the first private company to deploy a lander on the Moon successfully. Unfortunately, ispace announced this week that an unexpected acceleration seconds before touchdown may have wrecked its historic moment. Hakuto-R is unresponsive and presumed destroyed.
“Shortly after the scheduled landing time, no data was received indicating a touchdown,” ispace said in a statement. “ispace engineers monitored the estimated remaining propellant reached at the lower threshold and shortly afterward, the descent speed rapidly increased. After that, the communication loss happened. Based on this, it has been determined that there is a high probability that the lander eventually made a hard landing on the Moon’s surface.”
Credit: ispace
Preliminary evidence suggests the Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander (M1) failed to detect how far above the surface it was. This could explain the failure to maintain approach speed.
ispace’s overall announcement was upbeat, considering the circumstances. Hakuto-R fulfilled some mission objectives, and ispace hopes to learn lessons from this experience to apply to its planned Mission 2 and Mission 3. Mission 2 calls for a second lunar landing with ispace’s micro-rover to capture lunar regolith for NASA. Mission 3 would debut the company’s ‘Series 2’ lander design and two lunar communication relay satellites.
Chang’e 8 to Build ‘Lunar Soil Bricks’ With In-Situ Resources
Space agencies and aerospace startups worldwide are casting their gaze outward in a new space race toward establishing a long-term human presence off-world. But the prohibitive cost of lugging bulk raw materials to orbit—let alone the Moon or Mars—makes it almost a no-brainer to plan on in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). The latest ISRU project announcement comes from China: According to a Communist Party-owned publication, China’s upcoming Chang’e 8 mission will bring “a robot tasked with making ‘lunar soil bricks'” to the Moon.
China Daily reported that Chang’e 8’s probe would help the CNSA investigate the mineral composition of lunar regolith. The quality and composition of in situ materials like regolith impacts how easily we can turn Moon dust into bricks. This, in turn, will have downstream effects on how quickly the China National Space Administration (CNSA) can complete other objectives, like getting a 3D printing lunar robot up and running on-site. Ideally, the agency wants to put shovels in regolith within five years to start building a base on the Moon.
Unfortunately, CNSA officials confirmed this week that regolith probably spelled the end for its Zhurong Mars rover. The long, bitter Martian winter froze more than one Mars rover entirely to death, including our own. But where Perseverance woke up when the sun began to return, Zhurong is not so lucky.
Winter on Mars is no joke: here, transparent CO2 ice cracks into pieces over Martian regolith.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
“We have not had any communication from the rover since it entered hibernation,” a CNSA representative told a Chinese state news channel Tuesday. “We are monitoring it every day and believe it has not woken up because the sunlight has not yet reached the minimum level for power generation.”
“According to our analysis,” the official continued, “the biggest possibility is that because of unpredictable accumulation of Martian dust, its power generation capacity was reduced, and it was too low to wake itself up.”
NASA Learns New Spell: ‘Transmute Lunar Dirt to Oxygen’
Speaking of ISRU and regolith, NASA announced this week that it has successfully extracted oxygen from lunar soil for the first time. According to NASA, scientists used a laser to melt simulated lunar soil, which off-gassed carbon monoxide (CO).
Lifting raw materials into low-earth orbit is difficult enough, and LEO is a relative cakewalk compared to the delta-v required to land on the Moon or Mars. For example, according to Wikipedia, the SpaceX Falcon Heavy is rated for 63,800 kg to LEO, but just 16,800 kg to trans-Mars injection.
“This technology has the potential to produce several times its own weight in oxygen per year on the lunar surface, which will enable a sustained human presence and lunar economy,” said Aaron Paz, NASA senior engineer and CaRD (Carbothermal Reduction Demonstration) project manager at Johnson Space Center.
A CaRD reactor.
Credit: NASA/Brian Sacco
NASA plans to test its ISRU skills with a similar device on the actual Moon in a pair of upcoming missions. Its upcoming Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will also melt regolith. But instead of being part of a static lunar lander, the agency will attach the module to a rover that can move across the lunar surface. The Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) will do the same, beginning in 2023.
Russia Signs on to Support the ISS Through 2028
For the benefit of all humanity, Russian space agency Roscosmos has agreed to participate in the International Space Station project through 2028, NASA wrote with perhaps just the tiniest bit tinged with relief. Other members of the ISS consortium will support the station through 2030. The announcement is a welcome gesture of good faith, after direct threats to the station last year by Dmitry Rogozin, bombastic former leader of Roscosmos, in retaliation for international censure over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The ISS was never intended to stay in flight forever; NASA plans to deorbit the station in January of 2031. But before it does, the agency is moving toward becoming “one of many” public and private entities with a presence in low-earth orbit. NASA treats the change as essential to its directive of extending human exploration to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Updates from the JWST
One of the benefits of Webb’s gigantic mirror is that its resolution is absolutely without equal. This outstanding clarity allows us to look far outward into the cosmos and, therefore, far backward in time. This week, Webb scientists announced new deep-sky observations of a galactic cluster formed just 650 million years after the Big Bang. Astronomers also published some surprising findings from Webb about a “hot Jupiter” exoplanet named Wasp 39 b with a puzzling—and deeply unpleasant—atmospheric chemistry.
But for all its benefits, Webb still has some significant drawbacks. One of them is that parking it where we did (specifically, at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point) means we can’t easily service the telescope when things inevitably go wrong. With truly poetic timing, just after the telescope started up, it sustained a direct micrometeoroid impact that left a permanent gouge in one of its mirrors.
Happily, Webb’s honeycomb-like mirror assembly acts like a honeybee’s compound eye, in that we can use other mirrors (along with high-test image processing software) to correct for just this kind of damage. It is unclear how well the telescope can cope with problems in its CCD instruments. The telescope already does active cooling, to keep itself cold enough to see the longest wavelengths, just a few dozen degrees above absolute zero. After noticing a “discrepancy” in JWST data, NASA engineers chased it until they found what appeared to be a problem with Webb’s middle-infrared detector, MIRI. Agency spokespeople reassured in a blog post that the (very chilly) party isn’t over; we’ll let you know as soon as we learn more.
Scientists Manage to Wring More Power Out of Voyager 2
NASA experts have found a new way to reduce Voyager 2’s onboard power consumption, extending the probe’s useful life.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Voyager 2 uses three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), including the one shown here, that could put out about a kilowatt and a half total at launch. The plutonium inside the RTGs has a half-life of almost 90` years, but Voyager 2 has been in space for 46 years, and the spacecraft’s available power has significantly declined. Previously, NASA had planned to turn scientific instruments off as early as next year to save power for the most critical systems. Thanks to this new tweak, however, it should be possible to run all five instrument packages through 2026.
Until now, Voyager 2 kept a small amount of power in reserve to mitigate voltage fluctuations. After 45 years of monitoring Voyager 2, NASA has decided that this relatively small amount of electricity can be used for other purposes without risk to the spacecraft.
“Variable voltages pose a risk to the instruments, but we’ve determined that it’s a small risk, and the alternative offers a big reward of being able to keep the science instruments turned on longer,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager at JPL. “We’ve been monitoring the spacecraft for a few weeks, and it seems like this new approach is working.” If it does work, the agency may try to use the same approach on Voyager 1.
TESS Turns Five
Happy fifth birthday, TESS! The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite has found hundreds of confirmed exoplanets since its 2018 debut.
“The volume of high-quality TESS data now available is quite impressive,” said TESS project scientist Dr. Knicole Colón. “We have more than 251 terabytes just for one of the main data products, called full-frame images. That’s the equivalent of streaming 167,000 movies in full HD.”
Quasars May Form When Galaxies Collide
Quasars are mysterious, insanely high-energy deep-sky objects, also known as active galactic nuclei (AGNs), often home to supermassive black holes. AGNs can shine as brightly as a trillion suns, outshining even the largest galaxies. Not every galaxy has one—for example, the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its core, but not a quasar.
It’s thought that collisions between elderly galaxies could ignite a wave of stellar formation. A team of astronomers working on the Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma reports that galaxies with quasars are three times as likely as those without quasars to have collided with another galaxy.
M87: The Black Hole That Keeps on Giving
Astronomers working on the Global Millimeter VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) array, ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array), and the Greenland Telescope have released a new image of M87, the black hole at the center of nearby galaxy Messier 87.
M87, shown here in all the glorious clarity of your average Bigfoot photo.
Credit: ESO
“We know that jets are ejected from the region surrounding black holes,” says Ru-Sen Lu from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, “but we still do not fully understand how this actually happens. To study this directly, we need to observe the origin of the jet as close as possible to the black hole.”
By imaging M87 with multiple telescope arrays around the planet, astronomers could fine-tune their observations and improve detail resolution. This new data suggests the ring is thicker than previous imaging attempts and that more material than we thought is falling back down the black hole’s “gravity well.”
New Research Confirms Red Dwarf Stars’ Terrible Tempers
Red dwarf stars have a “Goldilocks zone” that lies much closer than that of stars like our own. However, these stars periodically unleash radiation flares that can wreak havoc on planets close enough to fall within that habitable zone. Even if a planet survives its red dwarf going supernova, its atmosphere could be destroyed or changed forever. New research shows that subsequent X-ray outbursts after a red dwarf goes supernova could permanently wreck the atmosphere of the star’s planets and have a lasting effect on planets up to 160 light-years out.
For reference, Alpha Centauri is less than five light years away.
Skywatchers Corner
We still have a few precious nights until mosquito season is in full swing, which makes this an excellent opportunity to get in some quality moongazing. The waxing Moon is illuminated right now, making it possible to pick out features on the dark part of the “disc” through a backyard telescope or even a good pair of binoculars.
There’s a ton of aerospace news this week, but skywatching is in a lull. April’s standout meteor shower, the Lyrids, peaked last weekend. So, to wrap up the column this week, we leave you instead with this deep zoom into our very own supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.
See you next week!
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