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Good morning, everyone, and welcome back to the Week in Space: your Friday morning source for space news from around the world. The European Space Agency (ESA) is on track to launch a spacecraft to Jupiter this coming week. A New Zealand aerospace startup scored a hat trick with the third successful test flight of its rocket-powered space plane. Chinese scientists announced plans for a deepwater neutrino detector more than thirty cubic kilometers in size. Meanwhile, NASA released another cool new Mars science widget, and the Webb telescope caught a striking new image of Uranus’ rings and polar storm. All this, and more, lies ahead.
But before we get started—we’d like to wish our fellow Trekkies a happy First Contact Day! Wednesday of this week marked the 40-year pre-anniversary of First Contact, when on April 5, 2063, the Vulcan ship T’Plana-Hath detected traces of Zefram Cochrane’s historic first space flight at warp speed. We’re definitely not on that timeline—no global Eugenics War here—but we can still celebrate the Star Trek universe. Live long and prosper.
NASA Announces Artemis II Lunar Mission Crew
Monday morning, NASA announced the identities of the four astronauts who will orbit the moon during the Artemis II lunar mission. The crew consists of three astronauts from NASA and one from the Canadian Space Agency. Reid Wiseman, a veteran of Expedition 41 to the International Space Station, will serve as commander of the mission. Victor Glover, who previously served as pilot and second-in-command of the SpaceX Crew-1 mission, will pilot this flight. Christina Hammock Koch, whose 328-day stay aboard the ISS holds the record for the longest mission by a woman, will be Mission Specialist 1. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, who will serve as Mission Specialist 2, will be making his first flight.
NASA astronauts Christina Hammock Koch, Reid Wiseman (seated), Victor Glover, and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Credit: NASA
“I could not be prouder that these brave four will kickstart our journeys to the Moon and beyond,” said Director of Flight Operations Norm Knight, of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. “They represent exactly what an astronaut corps should be: a mix of highly capable and accomplished individuals with the skills and determination to take on any trial as a team. The Artemis II mission will be challenging, and we’ll test our limits as we prepare to put future astronauts on the Moon. With Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy at the controls, I have no doubt we’re ready to face every challenge that comes our way.”
Hat Trick: Dawn Aerospace Successfully Tests Rocket-Powered Space Plane
Dawn Aerospace, of New Zealand, announced this week that it has completed a third successful test of its rocket-powered space plane, the Mk-II Aurora.
The vehicle is 14.7 feet (4.5 meters) long, with a combustion rocket engine that runs on kerosene and hydrogen peroxide. As you might expect for a vehicle of that size, it’s not meant for serving as a heavy-lift vehicle or launch platform.
“It’s only going to be capable of carrying a few kilograms of payload,” said Dawn Aerospace CEO Stefan Powell in an interview with Ars Technica. “So you’re not really launching anything. There’s no second stage you can carry with five kilograms.” Instead, Powell said that the goal of the Mk-II Aurora project is to conduct research flights in a poorly studied stratum of the atmosphere, between about 30 km and 100 km up.
“Above 30 km is too high for balloons and too low for satellites,” Powell said in the interview. “Some researchers refer to it as the ignore-o-sphere. We know it has large implications on climate models and weather models. […] So we’ll probably just start sticking some pretty basic data gathering payloads onboard just because they don’t weigh very much.”
With the Mk-II Aurora, the company eventually wants to fly the vehicle twice a day. Regular flights by the Mk-II and its successor, the Mk-III, could open the “ignore-o-sphere” for new types of atmospheric research and climate monitoring.“Using the same vehicle hundreds or even thousands of times,” said Powell, “means we don’t need a factory to produce rockets. We can operate a fleet of vehicles to access space daily. And we don’t have to pollute the ocean with rocket debris as we do it.”
China Plans Gigantic Deepwater Neutrino Telescope
Neutrinos are tiny, ultra-low-mass particles that come from high-energy events like a supernova, or from objects like blazars. Because they barely interact at all with regular, garden-variety matter, a wave of neutrinos can alert astronomers that a star has gone supernova—because they arrive before the light from the supernova. But to detect these elusive particles, we have to collect a ton of mass in one place, which leads to some truly gargantuan detectors. This week, a group of Chinese scientists announced plans for a deepwater neutrino telescope, with a volume of more than thirty cubic kilometers.
One way to measure neutrinos is through Cherenkov radiation, which is released when charged particles move through water, heavy water, or ice. Japan’s Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector holds some 50,000 tons of ultrapure water—but that’s only (only!) about the size of a couple of Olympic pools. The new deepwater detector will use the same method, on a much larger scale.
Credit: Chinese Space Academy
According to lead researcher Chen Mingjun, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the facility will be the largest neutrino observatory in the world. “It will be a 30-cubic-kilometer detector,” said Chen, “comprising over 55,000 optical modules suspended along 2,300 strings.”
New NASA Mars Science Widget Uses Satellite Images to Show Mars in Vivid Detail
Thanks to a huge new interactive mosaic image of Mars, anyone and everyone can use a new NASA tool to zoom in and explore the surface of the Red Planet. Composed of 110,000 images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), this 5.7 trillion pixel (5.7 terapixel) mosaic is the highest-resolution global image of the Red Planet ever created.
The new global mosaic, shown in a detail example at left, is stitched together from images taken by MRO’s Context Camera, which captures the Martian surface in long strips. The process is revealed in the image at right, showing how portions of CTX images were combined.
Credit: Image and caption: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
“I wanted something that would be accessible to everyone,” said imaging scientist Jay Dickson, who led the project. “Schoolchildren can use this now. My mother, who just turned 78, can use this now. The goal is to lower the barriers for people who are interested in exploring Mars.”
Perseverance Captures Drifting Clouds on Mars
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Perseverance snapped the frames in this video on Sol 738—March 18, 2023. Where an Earthly sunset would be in tones of orange, on Mars, there’s particulate in the atmosphere that scatters light differently, resulting in the blue palette you see here.
Webb Telescope Captures Uranus’ Polar Storm, Concentric Rings
Out of all the wildly varying planets in our solar system, Uranus still manages to be an oddball. Because it orbits flipped right over onto its side, the planet’s poles face dead-on toward the sun (or out into deep space) for decades at a time. This means the gas giant also has extreme seasons. When Voyager 2 made its flyby in 1986, it was summer at Uranus’ south pole. It’s nigh unto winter there, now, and late spring at the north pole. In new images from the James Webb space telescope, we can see in unprecedented detail what Voyager 2 saw as an “almost featureless blue-green ball.”
Uranus has 13 known rings, and 11 of them are visible here. In a blog post, NASA experts explain that some of the rings are so bright with Webb that their glow makes them appear to merge into a larger ring.
Two of the fainter dusty rings (one of which is the diffuse zeta ring closest to the planet) hid in obscurity until the Voyager 2 flyby. In the future, NASA scientists expect that future JWST observations of Uranus will reveal the planet’s two faint outer rings, discovered with Hubble during the 2007 ring-plane crossing.
NASA Creates ‘Moon to Mars’ Program Office
NASA has launched a new “Moon to Mars” program office to manage and develop technologies that will assist with our return to the lunar surface, toward the ultimate goal of putting human explorers on the surface of Mars.
The new office is expected to coordinate hardware development, mission integration, and risk management for a number of separate vehicles and technology platforms, including the Gateway lunar station, Orion spacecraft, and Space Launch System (SLS) itself. As my colleague Adrianna Nine points out, the Moon to Mars office was mandated by the 2022 NASA Authorization Act. Returning to the Moon is seen as a test run for an eventual crewed flight to Mars.
During Artemis I, the Orion capsule snapped this iconic selfie, with the Moon and Earth in the background. Next time, they’re sending people.
Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
“The Moon to Mars Program Office will help prepare NASA to carry out our bold missions to the Moon and land the first humans on Mars,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “The golden age of exploration is happening right now, and this new office will help ensure that NASA successfully establishes a long-term lunar presence needed to prepare for humanity’s next giant leap to the Red Planet.”
Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Jeannie Schulz, widow of Peanuts gang creator Charles M. Schulz, met at NASA’s Washington HQ on Wednesday, April 5, 2023. Schulz is holding the Snoopy plushie that flew on Artemis I as a zero gravity indicator. Snoopy’s next step: heading to his ‘forever home’ where he will be displayed with loving honor at the Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA.
‘Coherent’ Radio Signal Could Be Evidence of an Exoplanet’s Atmosphere
Over the last few decades, scientists have become increasingly good at teasing data about both stars and their planets from subtle signals picked up by telescopes. Many of you are likely familiar with gravitational microlensing, which is the process of using short, faint dips in a star’s visible light to calculate the characteristics of an orbiting planet. Another method for investigating exoplanets is to examine the interactions between a planetary and a stellar magnetic field. For example, when solar flares let go, they release a burst of radio activity.
Recently, scientists located a small, Earth-sized planet with such a method—though the world in question, YZ Ceti b, isn’t a likely vacation spot. What makes this latest detection interesting is that the scientists were able to use this method to spot an Earth-sized planet at all. In order to “see” the interaction between the magnetic field of the star and that of a planet, the researchers needed a candidate star with close-orbiting planets. YZ Ceti, a red dwarf in the constellation Cetus, proved to fit the bill.
Artist image of radio waves emanating from a planet’s atmosphere, after being struck by a solar flare.
Credit: NASA
YZ Ceti b is so close to its star that it makes an orbit every two days. While red dwarf stars are only a fraction the size of a G-type star like our own sun, YZ Ceti b is still way too close to support any kind of life as we understand it. Scientists have theorized for years that stars with close-orbiting planets might exhibit evidence of regular magnetic field interactions, but we’d never traced this kind of regular, repeatable pattern back to a star known to host extrasolar planets. YZ Ceti is believed to be the first. YZ Ceti b, in turn, is thought to be the first known rocky extrasolar planet to sport an extrasolar magnetic field.
Earth’s ‘Snowball’ Phase May Not Have Been So Snowy After All
Conventional wisdom says that our planet went through a “snowball Earth” phase about 700 million years ago, during which most of our lush and green planet looked more like Hoth. But in a black shale formation in China, an international team of scientists found evidence that the snowball might have been more like a slushball.
During the Marinoan glaciation, the Nantuo Formation in South China was at a higher latitude, which is thought to have been covered in ice. However, fossilized algae deposits within the formation suggest that instead of glaciers, there may have been open water at middle latitudes during the period in question.
Starship Will Carry Biggest Lunar Rover to the Moon
The biggest lunar rover yet will hitch a ride on Starship when the rocket makes its debut trip to the Moon.
Put the top down while you’re on the Moon! What a FLEX indeed.
Credit: Astrolab
Astrolab announced Friday that it had reached an agreement with SpaceX regarding the transport of its Flexible Logistics and Exploration (FLEX) rover. Per the agreement, my colleague Adrianna Nine writes, SpaceX will use its super-tall Starship rocket and corresponding Super Heavy booster to bring FLEX to the Moon once Starship (and, by extension, SpaceX) is ready—which may be as soon as 2026.
JUICE Jupiter Probe to Launch Next Thursday
The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer probe (or JUICE, for short) is scheduled to lift off next Thursday at 8:15 AM EDT (1215 GMT) on April 13. The probe will launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket, from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
ESA’s JUICE Jupiter probe, being attached to the Ariane spacecraft’s nose cone
Credit: ESA – M. Pédoussaut
JUICE will reach orbit around Jupiter in 2031. Once it arrives, the 6.6-ton (6 metric tons), solar-powered probe will make close passes by three of Jupiter’s four big Galilean moons: Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. Astronomers believe all three moons possess oceans of liquid water beneath their icy shells. (Io is Jupiter’s fourth Galilean moon. Wracked by volcanism, it’s of keen interest to scientists. However, JUICE won’t get the chance to study Io quite so closely.)
In 2035, JUICE will move from its Jovian orbit to an orbit around Ganymede. In a blog post, ESA officials note that the move will make JUICE the first probe ever to orbit a moon other than that of Earth. The mission, they say, will “characterize these moons as both planetary objects and possible habitats, explore Jupiter’s complex environment in-depth, and study the wider Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giants across the universe.”
Skywatchers Corner
To start April on a lovely note, NASA skywatching expert Preston Dyches has an outstanding rundown of what to look for in this month’s night skies.
The moon is full tonight (Friday). Here are the moon phases for the rest of the month:
Credit: NASA
That’s all for this week. ¡Hasta luego!
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