Image (Credit): Interior of NASA’s Mars Simulator, the Mars Dune Alpha. (NASA)
“They are about to embark on an analog mission that encompasses operations, logistics, and research of living and working on Mars. The importance of this study cannot be overstated…NASA scientists will learn critical insights on the physical and behavioral aspects of a mission on Mars.”
-Statement by Judith Hayes, NASA’s Chief Science Officer in the Human Health and Performance Directorate, as quoted in Universe Today. The four member “crew” entered the simulator last week and will live in the 1,700 square foot facility for the next year. The year-long mission is one of three planned by NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Texas.
Image (Credit): Interior of Galactic 01 after the successful launch. (Virgin Galactic)
Last Thursday, Virgin Galactic successfully brought paying customers to space, or at least to the edge of space. In this case, it was three Italians, an instructor, and two pilots. You can watch a video of the flight here.
Below is the statement by Virgin Galactic’s CEO:
Tourist flights (at $450,000 per seat) are expected to begin next month. It is too bad that this flight comes so close to the loss of the Titan submersible, but the show must go on.
I expect we might learn just as much about our home planet at the bottom of the sea than miles up in the atmosphere, but such learning will be dangerous and need the right people and skills. The rest is playful profits.
Earier today, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid Space Telescope was safely launched from Cape Canaveral on a Space X Falcon 9 rocket (though the original plan was to use a Russian Soyuz rocket until the invasion nixed that idea). The space telescope is destined for the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), which is an average distance of 1 million miles beyond Earth’s orbit. It will join the James Webb Space Telescope.
In addition to the 1.2 meter diameter telescope, the mission includes two scientific instruments: a visible-wavelength camera (the VISible instrument, VIS) and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer (the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, NISP).
The focus of the new space telescope will be to create a 3D map of the universe to better understand dark matter and dark energy. As noted on the ESA’s website, Euclid hopes to answer these questions:
What is the structure and history of the cosmic web?
What is the nature of dark matter?
How has the expansion of the Universe changed over time?
What is the nature of dark energy?
Is our understanding of gravity complete?
It is a tall order for this new telescope. Astronomer Isobel Hook from the UK’s Lancaster University put it this way to BBC News:
It will be like setting off on a ship before people knew where land was in different directions. We’ll be mapping out the Universe to try to understand where we fit into it and how we’ve got here – how the whole Universe got from the point of the Big Bang to the beautiful galaxies we see around us, the Solar System and to life.
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of Oumuamua, an asteroid from outside out solar system. (JPL/NASA)
On International Asteroid Day, I thought it was worth revisiting an earlier video from Cool Worlds Lab on the first detected asteroid from outside our solar system. The video, “‘Oumuamua: An Interstellar Visitor,” notes that scientists have never seen an asteroid within our solar system with these cigar-shaped dimension.
Scientists now believe that more that 10,000 of such alien comments are now present in our solar system. That may offer us an opportunity for a future mission to study such an asteroid and learn about another solar system (given that the asteroids tend to stick around for about 10 years). It may also give us a better idea as whether such asteroids could have introduced life into our solar system.
This is quite a bit to ponder on this day dedicated to pondering asteroids.
Image (Credit): Solar Flare X1 from AR2994 in ‘Motion.’ (Miguel Claro)
This week’s image is one of the finalist photos in the 2023 Astronomy Photographer of the Year shortlist held by the Royal Museums Greenwich. Check out the site for other fascinating finalist images.
Here is a little more about this solar flare image from photographer Miguel Claro taken in the Dark Sky Alqueva region, Évora district, Portugal:
“I was testing my new camera from Player One Apollo-M Max and photographing another region of the Sun, when I was notified by the SpaceWeatherLive app that an eruption was ongoing at 13.47 (UTC, Universal Time) with the release of an extraordinary X1-class solar flare [X class flares are the largest],” Miguel says.
“I had to immediately change my initial plans and pointed the telescope as quickly as possible to the limb where the flare departed from sunspot AR2994, already hidden behind the edge of the Sun. According to SpaceWeatherLive, ‘the explosion produced enough radiation for a strong shortwave radio blackout over the mid-Atlantic ocean and Europe’. Conditions were unstable, but I managed to make a short timelapse of about 27 minutes.”
Our Awesome Universe 