The Chairwoman of the UAE Space Agency and the Mission to Mars

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s image of UAE’s Hope probe orbiting Mars. (UAE Space Agency)

You may want to visit Time magazine and view the article “The Woman Who Took the UAE to Mars.” It summarizes Sarah Al Amiri’s efforts related to the United Arab Emirates’ mission to Mars as well as her plans for the country’s space agency, which she now heads as Chairwoman.

Prior to becoming Chairwoman, Ms. Amiri was deputy project manager of a mission to map the Martian atmosphere. Her team, which was 80 percent female, developed the Hope probe to accomplish this goal. The probe was launched aboard a Japanese rocket in July 2020 and now orbits Mars. The data obtained from this mission is being shared openly to assist others studying the Martian atmosphere.

Another mission mentioned in the Time article by Chairwoman Amiri is a tour of seven asteroids as well as a flyby of Venus. A UAE space page defines the mission in this way:

The spacecraft will undertake a 3.6 billion-kilometre, five-year journey, which will see it perform gravity assist manoeuvres by orbiting first Venus, then Earth in order to build the velocity required in order to reach the main asteroid belt, located beyond Mars…The mission will study seven main belt asteroids…The mission will make its first close planetary approach orbiting Venus in mid-2028, followed by a close orbit of Earth in mid-2029. It will make its first fly-by of a main asteroid belt object in 2030, going on to observe a total of seven main belt asteroids before its final landing on an asteroid 560 million kilometres from Earth in 2033. This will make the Emirates the fourth nation to land a spacecraft on an asteroid.

What was not mentioned in the story but is available via another UAE government page is plans for several other space endeavors, including:

  • Sending a rover to the Moon in 2024. The rover’s name is Rashid, named in honor of the late Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, former Ruler of Dubai.
  • Establishing a settlement on Mars by 2117, and building a Mars Science City within the UAE to make this Martian mission possible.

A Day in Astronomy: Orbiting Mercury

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s image of MESSENGER orbiting Mercury (NASA).

On this day in 2011, NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) probe became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. NASA prepared the 10-year summary below explaining MESSENGER’s accomplishments from the time it was launched on August 3, 2004 through August 1, 2014. The probe later impacted the surface of Mercury on April 30, 2015.

NASA issued this high-level summary of the mission:

The MESSENGER spacecraft fundamentally changed our understanding of Mercury during its four-year orbital exploration of the planet, returning nearly 300,000 photographs and a wealth of information from its instruments. The formatted data totaling more than 10 terabytes reside in NASA’s Planetary Data System archive. Among the major findings were that Mercury harbors water ice and organic compounds at its north pole, that volcanism played a major role in shaping the planet’s surface, and that Mercury’s surface materials are more volatile-rich and chemically reduced than expected.

Image (Credit): 10-Year Summary of MESSENGER’s activities as of August 1, 2014. (NASA)

Pic of the Week: Spanish Dancer Galaxy

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Spanish Dancer Galaxy (Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA)

This week’s image, from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, is nicknamed the Spanish Dancer Galaxy. Here is a little more on from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab):

Located in the constellation Dorado and lying around 70 million light-years away, NGC 1566 is a grand-design spiral galaxy with two arms that appear to wind around the galactic core, just like the arms of a dancer as they spin around and around in a furious twirl. This image was taken from Chile at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, using the Dark Energy Camera. The galaxy’s face-on view to us, its location, and its composition make it a trove of observational opportunities for astronomers across many fields of astronomy.

NGC 1566 is home to stars at all stages of stellar evolution. In this image, the bright blue color that outlines the arms of the galaxy arises from young, brightly burning stars. Darker spots within these arms are dust lanes. The arms are rich in gas, and form large-scale areas that provide the perfect environment for new stars to form. Closer to the center of the galaxy are cooler, older stars and dust, all evident by the redder color in the image. This galaxy has even been host to an observed stellar end-of-life event, when a supernova, named SN2010el, burst onto the scene in 2010.

The center of NGC 1566 is dominated by a supermassive black hole. The distinct and highly luminous nucleus of the galaxy is known as an active galactic nucleus. The light from the nucleus changes on timescales of only hundreds of days, making its exact classification difficult for astronomers. 

A Space Telescope Goes Dark

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Picture of the completely integrated mirrors and detectors before final packaging. (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics)

You may have heard of Germany’s black hole-hunting telescope called the extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Arraye (eROSITA). It was launched in 2019 as part of a larger Russian-German mission called the “Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma” (SRG) observatory and placed in the L2 Lagrange Point.

The eROSITA has three primary goals:

  • to detect the hot intergalactic medium of 50-100 thousand galaxy clusters and groups and hot gas in filaments between clusters to map out the large scale structure in the Universe for the study of cosmic structure evolution,
  • to detect systematically all obscured accreting Black Holes in nearby galaxies and many (up to 3 Million) new, distant active galactic nuclei and
  • to study in detail the physics of galactic X-ray source populations, like pre-main sequence stars, supernova remnants and X-ray binaries.

Well, similar to other joint Russian space missions, the telescope’s work was put on hold because of continuing events in Ukraine. The German government had this to say:

[Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR)] and the German Space Agency at DLR have been cooperating with Russian institutions on a number of research projects, in some cases with the participation of other German research organisations and universities, and international partners.

Against the backdrop of the aggressive attack on Ukraine, the DLR Executive Board is taking the following measures:

  • All collaboration activities with Russian institutions on current projects or projects in the planning stage will be terminated.
  • There will be no new projects or initiatives with institutions in Russia.

Where necessary, DLR will enter into coordination with other national and international partners.

We are slowly blocking our view of the bigger universe because of the reckless actions of a few. Hopefully, we can open up our eyes again shortly.

Exoplanet or Star?

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image(Credit): Kepler-854b (NASA Exoplanet Exploration).

Phys.org had a good story on the reclassification of objects captured by the NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope once believed to be exoplanets. New evidence indicates three “exoplanets” – Kepler-854b, Kepler-840b, and Kepler-699b – are actually stars (hence, the NASA image above will need to be modified).

The article notes that the three objects are too large to be considered planets, being between two and four times the size of Jupiter. The results were part of a study from the Astronomical Journal. A fourth exoplanet, Kepler-747 b, might also be a star.

After updated information indicated Kepler-854b was about three times the size of Jupiter, one of the study authors said, “There’s no way the universe can make a planet of that size…It just doesn’t exist.”

While the team reviewed about 2,000 Kepler exoplanets to find these four questionable items, it is likely that more will be found in the future among other reported exoplanets. Fortunately, that still leaves us with plenty of real exoplanets to study.