RIP: Cosmonaut Valery Vladimirovich Polyakov

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Image (Credit): Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov. (NASA)

Last week cosmonaut Valery Polyakov passed away at the age of 80 (1942 to 2022). He still holds the record for the longest single spaceflight in history when he was aboard the Mir space station for 437 days and 18 hours during one stay between 1994 and 1995. By the time he retired later in 1995, he had spent 678 days in space.

Russians have a history of long tours in space, including four cosmonauts from the last century who spent at least one year in a single tour:

  • Valery Polyakov – 437 days aboard Mir (1994-95)
  • Sergei Avdeyev – 379 days aboard Mir (1998-99)
  • Vladimir Titov – 365 days aboard Mir (1987-88)
  • Musa Manaro – 365 days aboard Mir (1987-88)

When U.S. astronaut Astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth with cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko from the International Space Station in 2016 after 340 days in space, the Russians were not so impressed according to a story in arsTECHNICA. The story notes cosmonaut Talgat Musabayev, serving as the head of the Kazakh space agency, stated, “Congratulations on your record. Of course it was already done 28 years ago.” 

Image (Credit): The Soviet Mir space station. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

DART: Watch the Asteroid Impact

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Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of NASA’s DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos binary system. (NASA)

The Americans and Italians are putting on a show tomorrow night. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft is ready to strike Dimorphos, which is a moonlet to the asteroid Didymos. All of it should be captured by Italy’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids (LICIACub) in addition to DART’s own camera called the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO). Are you overwhelmed with acronyms yet?

The mission is a practice run on diverting an asteroid. While we are not threatened by this pair of asteroids, we may be threatened by others in the future, so what we learn here is critical.

You can view the impact later tomorrow via this NASA site starting at 6pm ET (the collision is expected at 7:14pm ET).

Extra: Here is another DART site to watch from The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Image (Credit): NASA live broadcast for the DART mission. (NASA)

Update: The mission was a success. The video showing the DART spacecraft approaching the dirty potato called Dimorphos was impressive. The actual moonlet shown below is considerably different than the smooth asteroid in the artist’s rendering above.

Image (Credit): Moonlet Dimorphos as the DART spacecraft approaches. (NASA)

Space Quote: Captain Kirk, The Singer

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Image (Credit): The Knight performs on season eight of The Masked Singer. (Fox)

“The Masked Singer is the most extraordinary experience I’ve ever had. Well, I mean, the wardrobe was impossible. You can’t see, you can’t breathe, you can’t hear, you can’t think. There was no oxygen in there. I had a panic thinking, “Wait a minute, I can’t breathe. And I’m supposed to sing.” You know how you sing? You take a breath and air comes out. That’s how you sing, and I couldn’t get a breath. It was incredible.”

-William Shatner’s response to a question from Entertainment Weekly Entertainment, “Speaking of your busy schedule, in the last year, you went to space and appeared on The Masked Singer. Be honest, which experience was wilder for you?” Jeff Bezos may not be too happy to hear this after he flew Mr. Shatner to the edge of space last year on one of his Blue Origin rockets. Maybe he should have added a Karaoke machine to the flight.

Artemis I Launch Set for September 27th

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Image (Credit): Artemis I mission patch. (NASA)

This time of year the weather tends to be troublesome in the Florida region, but NASA still hopes to try again with its Artemis I uncrewed launch to the Moon on September 27th.

Here are the updated mission facts:

  • Launch date: Sept. 27, 2022
  • Mission duration: 38 days, 23 hours, 49 minutes
  • Total distance traveled: 1.3 million miles
  • Re-entry speed: 24,500 mph (Mach 32)
  • Splashdown: Nov. 05, 2022

CNN reports that “Concerns over the weather system forming in the Caribbean put the weather conditions at only 20% favorable for a launch.” So don’t get your hopes too high, but at least NASA has resolved the hydrogen leak.

Fingers crossed.

Update: You can uncross those fingers. The launch is being delayed due to weather.

Pic of the Week: Interacting Galaxy Pair

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Image (Credit): Hubble image of colliding galaxies – NGC 169 (bottom) and IC 1559 (top). (ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, DOE, FNAL/DECam, CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, SDSS)

This week’s image comes again from the Hubble Space Telescope, which is keeping us entertained as the James Webb Space Telescope cycles through its required observations and spins off images from time to time.

While an earlier image appeared to show colliding galaxies, though it was believed to be an optical illusion, the collision above is real. Below is more on the image from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hubble site:

Galaxies can merge, collide, or brush past one another — each of which has a significant impact on their shapes and structures. As common as these interactions are thought to be in the Universe, it is rare to capture an image of two galaxies interacting in such a visibly dynamic way. This image, from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, feels incredibly three-dimensional for a piece of deep-space imagery. 

The subject of this image is named Arp 282, an interacting galaxy pair that is composed of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 (bottom) and the galaxy IC 1559 (top). If you’re interested in learning more about Seyfert galaxies, you can read about the Seyfert galaxy NGC 5728 here. Interestingly, both of the galaxies comprising Arp 282 have monumentally energetic cores, known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), although it is difficult to tell that from this image. This is actually rather fortunate, because if the full emission of two AGNs was visible in this image, then it would probably obscure the beautifully detailed tidal interactions occurring between NGC 169 and IC 1559. Tidal forces occur when an object’s gravity causes another object to distort or stretch. The direction of the tidal forces will be away from the lower-mass object and towards the higher mass object. When two galaxies interact, gas, dust and even entire solar systems will be drawn away from one galaxy towards the other by these tidal forces. This process can actually be seen in action in this image — delicate streams of matter have formed, visibly linking the two galaxies.