Image (Credit): Launch of the Progress 92 cargo craft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. (NASA)
Russia launched another cargo mission to the International Space Station ((SS) yesterday. A Soyuz rocket launched the Progress 92 spacecraft towards the space station at 3:32 pm ET from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The spacecraft will dock with the ISS tomorrow afternoon, ensuring critical supplies are available to the crew member.
In the meantime, you can watch a Fourth of July message from NASA’s Expedition 73 Flight Engineers Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, and Jonny Kim.
Image (Credit): The spiral galaxy UGC 11397 as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. J. Koss, A. J. Barth)
This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It is an image of the spiral galaxy UGC 11397, which is located about 250 million years light-years away.
At the time the light we are now seeing left UGC 11397, the Earth was a very different place. It was dealing with the Permian–Triassic mass extinction, also called the Great Dying. During this period about 94 percent of marine species and 70 percent of terrestrial vertebrate families disappeared from the planet.
What sets UGC 11397 apart from a typical spiral lies at its center, where a supermassive black hole containing 174 million times the mass of our Sun grows. As a black hole ensnares gas, dust, and even entire stars from its vicinity, this doomed matter heats up and puts on a fantastic cosmic light show.
Material trapped by the black hole emits light from gamma rays to radio waves, and can brighten and fade without warning. But in some galaxies, including UGC 11397, thick clouds of dust hide much of this energetic activity from view in optical light. Despite this, UGC 11397’s actively growing black hole was revealed through its bright X-ray emission — high-energy light that can pierce the surrounding dust. This led astronomers to classify it as a Type 2 Seyfert galaxy, a category used for active galaxies whose central regions are hidden from view in visible light by a donut-shaped cloud of dust and gas.
Image (Credit): NASA Astronaut Terry Virts. (NASA)
It is a disaster. You know, NASA’s budget overall is cut by a quarter — this is proposed — and the science budget is cut by half. Here in Houston — you know, I’m from Houston — it’s going to be a disaster. Thousands and thousands of people are going to lose their jobs. They’re already having profoundly negative effects on the space station’s science ability — the ability to do science on the International Space Station that I helped build and commanded. They are going to cut important space probes. I saw there’s going to be 41 space missions that are canceled. There’s over a dozen space missions that are currently in operation, things like New Horizons, Juno and others that are costing pennies on the dollar. These things are super cheap. We’ve already paid all the expense. We should just keep them operating, and they’re going to cancel those. It’s just a disaster.
-Statement by former NASA astronaut Terry Virts, who last week announced his plans to run the U.S. Senate in Texas to replace incumbent Senator John Cornyn. He made this statement after being asked “What is your take on the White House’s proposed NASA budget?” during an interview with Space.com.
A second “new star” has unexpectedly appeared in the night sky, less than two weeks after a near-identical point of light first burst into view without warning. The first nova, dubbed V462 Lupi, was initially spotted June 12 shining in the Lupus constellation, after its progenitor star suddenly became more than 3 million times brighter than normal. Then, on June 25, multiple astronomers detected another nova, dubbed V572 Velorum, within the Vela constellation, according to EarthSky.org. Astronomers normally expect to see a classical nova once a year at most, and more than one of these explosions shining simultaneously is almost unheard of.
Legacy aerospace giants scored a win Tuesday when the U.S. Senate passed President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill that earmarks billions more for NASA’s flagship Artemis program. The $10 billion addition to the Artemis architecture, which includes funding for additional Space Launch System rockets and an orbiting station around the moon called Gateway, is a rebuke to critics who wished to see alternative technologies used instead. Among those critics are SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who Musk proposed as the next NASA administrator.
NASA has extended recovery efforts for its stricken Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft to mid-July, but is warning that if the probe remains silent, the mission could end. Contact with the small satellite was lost the day after its launch on February 26. Controllers were initially able to receive engineering data from the vehicle, but the telemetry indicated power system issues, and the spacecraft eventually fell silent.
I’m glad to hear that NASA is working with Netflix to expand the amount of space stories available to the public.
This summer Netflix will make NASA+ live programming available to its customers, meaning more of the public can watch interviews with astronauts, the launch of space missions, and the happenings aboard the International Space Station (ISS). NASA also has plenty of entertaining videos about astronomy, various space missions, and more.
Of course, all of this is already available to the public for free on NASA’s website, but maybe this can draw in those eager viewers searching around for something to watch and not already aware of the website.
Any attempts to bring more attention to NASA’s amazing science and ongoing discoveries is good publicity as well as great programming.
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