Image (Credit): The Soyuz rocket carrying the Luna-25 lander launched from Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome. (Agence France-Presse)
Russia’s Luna-25 mission has begun with the successful lift-off of the Soyuz 2.1 rocket yesterday (2:11 a.m. on Friday Moscow time or Thursday at 7:10 pm EDT). After its planned arrival on August 21, Luna-25 will be searching for water at the lunar south pole.
The mission was off and then on again over the years as Russia became super cautious with its return to the Moon. The country’s invasion of Ukraine led to the loss of European partners as well as sanction-related shortages, so Russia has no one to blame but itself. Science was pushed aside as it bullied its neighbors.
One can only wonder whether Russia knows how to start anew. Even the name of the mission, Luna, is a Cold War leftover. It would be the same as NASA restarting the Apollo program rather than the more comprehensive and Mars-focused Artemis mission.
There is plenty of room on the Moon for multiple national missions. Moreover, similar to the International Space Station, it would be beneficial for US and Russian scientists to share data and ideas. It would just be easier if Russian rockets were only focused on the Moon rather than Ukrainian cities.
Image (Credit): Galaxy NGC 6684 captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully)
This week’s image is from NASA/European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the glowing galaxy NGC 6684, which is around 44 million light-years from Earth.
This oddly shaped galaxy is explained on the ESA’s website:
Lenticular galaxies like NGC 6684 (lenticular means lens-shaped) possess a large disc but lack the prominent spiral arms of galaxies like the Andromeda Galaxy. This leaves them somewhere between elliptical galaxies and spiral galaxies, and lends these galaxies a diffuse, ghostly experience. NGC 6684 also lacks the dark dust lanes that thread through other galaxies, adding to its spectral, insubstantial appearance.
The length of Mars’ day is shortening by three-quarters of a millisecond each year as the planet’s rotation spins up, according to new results from NASA’s InSight lander…Planetary scientists are not entirely sure why this is happening, but it is likely related to the redistribution of Mars’ mass, which can have an effect on the planet’s rotation like an ice skater pulling in their arms to spin faster. This redistribution might be caused by the accumulation of ice on Mars’ polar caps, experts believe, or by the surface itself slowly rebounding from residing under the weight of immense glaciers that existed at equatorial latitudes during the world’s most recent ice ages, which ended about 400,000 years ago.
NASA has left the door open for changing the scope of Artemis 3, currently set to be the first crewed lunar landing of the program, if key elements suffer major delays. Speaking at an Aug. 8 briefing at the Kennedy Space Center, Jim Free, NASA associate administrator for exploration systems development, said the Artemis 3 mission still has a formal launch date of December 2025 but that he was monitoring potential delays in hardware needed for the mission. “We may end up flying a different mission if that’s the case,” he said. “If we have these big slips out, we’ve looked at if can we do other missions.” Artemis 3 could also change based on the outcome of Artemis 2, he added.
One of the oldest known objects in the universe is wandering around the Milky Way. Star cluster M92, a densely packed ball of stars roughly 27,000 light-years from Earth, is about 13.8 billion years old, researchers report in a paper submitted June 3 to arXiv.org. The newly refined age estimate makes this clump of stars nearly the same age as the universe. Refining the ages of clusters like M92 can help put limits on the age of the universe itself. It can also help solve cosmic conundrums about how the universe evolved.
Image (Credit): Spock singing in the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. (Paramount+)
If you are following Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, then you may have already encountered episode 9 of the second season, titled “Subspace Rhapsody.” Should you have missed it, then you are in for a treat because this is the first Star Trek musical episode. And it is fun.
For just a taste, check out this clip with an emotional Spock singing his heart out. I do not want to give to much away and spoil the episode if you are not that far along in the series, but let’s just say Spoke is have relationship issues. You must admit that Ethan Peck has a nice voice, as do his crew mates singing other pieces.
The whole thing has the feeling of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer singing episode, which is fine with me given that I believe it was one of the better episodes of that show.
By the way, Spock also had a small singing part in the original series. In that case, he sang a serenade accompanied by a harp. It’s a short piece, yet enough to show that Mr. Peck beats Mr. Nimoy as a singer.
Last season, Strange New Worlds had the cast caught up in a children’s story. I did not find that one to be as enjoyable, but it was another attempt to have some fun with the series. I like the effort to keep it fresh.
Maybe another ballad could be fit into an episode down the road – maybe something similar to what The Orville did in its final two episodes. That too created two of the more memorable episodes of that series.
“While NASA’s programs are very popular and highly visible, we really don’t spend much on our space agency. In 2022, the U.S. treasury took in revenues of $4.9 trillion and then charged up another $1.4 trillion so it could spend a whopping $6.3 trillion. Of that largesse NASA received an historically generous appropriation of $24 billion. Still, that was just 0.35% of federal spending.”
Our Awesome Universe 