Image (Credit): Soyuz M-23 capsule approaching the ISS. (NASA)
Yesterday, Russia’s M-23 capsule has safely arrived at the International Space Station (ISS). It was carrying supplies but no crew. Now the M-22 crew has a safe way to return to Earth when the are ready.
SpaceX and NASA are targeting no earlier than Monday, February 27 for Falcon 9’s launch of Dragon’s sixth operational human spaceflight mission (Crew-6) to the International Space Station from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The instantaneous launch window is at 1:45 a.m. ET (6:45 UTC), with a backup opportunity available on Tuesday, February 28 at 1:22 a.m. ET (6:22 UTC).
Things are starting to return to normal up there. Boring is welcome at this point.
Image (Credit): SpaceX Crew 6 mission on the launchpad. (SpaceX)
Image (Credit): JWST images of six candidate massive galaxies 500-800 million years after the Big Bang. (NASA)
I was reading the recent news that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) astonished astronomers again. We continue to get big benefits from this relatively new distant telescope.
The latest news involves massive compact galaxies that should not be there if our theories about galaxy formation are valid. The researchers behind this latest finding state the six observed galaxies were from a period about 600 million years after the Big Bang.
Lead researcher Ivo Labbe of Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology said in a statement:
The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science…It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.
The more we look the more we learn, and the more theories we can toss out the window.
You can read more about this finding in the study published in the journal Nature.
Image (Credit): Launch of Russia’s Soyuz M-23 mission to the ISS. (NASA)
Yesterday, Russia launched the uncrewed Soyuz M-23 mission from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (it was actually “today” in Russian time). The spacecraft will replace the damaged M-22 capsule attached to the International Space Station (ISS). As a result, the earlier M-22 crew of Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, will return in this replacement capsule.
NASA noted that the M-22 capsule will be studied by the Russian upon its return in March:
The damaged Soyuz MS-22 is scheduled to undock from the station in late March and return to Earth for an uncrewed parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan, and post-flight analysis by Roscosmos.
Given recent leaks on two Russian spacecraft, let’s hope the M-23 mission goes without a hitch. Fingers crossed.
SpaceX will also be shipping a new crew up to the ISS next week, so the space traffic continues even with these hiccups.
Image (Credit): Globular cluster M92 captured by the JWST. (NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Pagan (STScI))
This week’s image was captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and shows globular cluster M92 located about 27,000 light-years away within our Milky Way galaxy.
Detail of the globular cluster M92 captured by Webb’s NIRCam instrument. This field of view covers the lower left quarter of the right half of the full image. Globular clusters are dense masses of tightly packed stars that all formed around the same time. In M92, there are about 300,000 stars packed into a ball about 100 light-years across. The night sky of a planet in the middle of M92 would shine with thousands of stars that appear thousands of times brighter than those in our own sky. The image shows stars at different distances from the center, which helps astronomers understand the motion of stars in the cluster, and the physics of that motion
Images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal that China’s Zhurong rover remains stationary on the Red Planet as China remains silent on the status of its spacecraft. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured images of the rover on March 11, 2022, a second on Sept. 8, 2022 and finally Feb. 7, 2023. The images were published Feb. 21 by the HiRISE Operations Center.
Astronomers have discovered what appear to be massive galaxies dating back to within 600 million years of the big bang, suggesting the early universe may have had a stellar fast-track that produced these “monsters.” While the new James Webb Space Telescope has spotted even older galaxies, dating to within a mere 300 million years of the beginning of the universe, it’s the size and maturity of these six apparent mega-galaxies that stunned scientists. They reported their findings Wednesday in the journal Nature.
A decades-old Soviet era piece of space junk has crashed back to Earth after over 40 years in orbit, improbably crash landing back in its home country, Russia. The abandoned Soviet Vostok-2M Blok E rocket stage, weighing more than 3,000 pounds, “made an uncontrolled reentry over Novaya Zemlya at 1016 UTC Feb 20 after 42.7 years in orbit,” tweeted Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and group leader at the Chandra X-ray Center Science Data Systems.
Our Awesome Universe 
