Image (Credit): The stellar nursery 30 Doradus, nickname of the Tarantula Nebula, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. (webb.nasa.gov)
Given that 2022 was a busy year, I thought I would highlight the top astronomy stories on the site – the good and the bad covering space missions to TV shows. Unlike other websites, I waited until the new year to create the list just in case we were visited by extraterrestrials. In this way, we now have a full catalog of the 2022 happenings.
Here is the list in no particular order other than science first, politics and commercial space second, and entertainment third.
Temperatures in a Russian Soyuz crew ferry ship docked at the International Space Station — a lifeboat for three of the lab’s seven crew members — remain within safe limits despite a dramatic overnight leak in the spacecraft’s cooling system, officials said Thursday. The leak developed around 7:45 p.m. EST Wednesday amid preparations for a planned 6-hour and 40-minute spacewalk by cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin to move a radiator from the Rassvet module, where the Soyuz MS-22/68S spacecraft is docked, to the new Nauka laboratory module.
The White House announced the new membership of an advisory group of the National Space Council Dec. 16 with wholesale changes in the roster reflecting a new emphasis on climate change and workforce issues. Vice President Kamala Harris, chair of the National Space Council, announced a roster of 30 members of the Users’ Advisory Committee (UAG), the advisory group that supports the council on various space topics. Their membership on the committee is pending a formal appointment by the NASA administrator, a formality linked to NASA’s role in hosting the UAG.
There has long been a dream of building a massive rotating space station to call home, such as the one featured in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but the challenges of construction are huge, not to mention the logistics of lifting such large quantities of steel and other materials into space. A rotating station would need to be at least hundreds of feet across to make artificial gravity practical The bigger the better. So engineers have proposed spinning up asteroids as a kind of ready-built station. We would need to dig out the interior, but this would give us materials we could use.
On a recent episode of the Clear + Vivid podcast, Alan Alda interviewed NASA engineer Les Johnson about his efforts to develop a solar sail that can take us to the stars. He is the Principal Investigator for the NEA Scout, which was launched into space during the Artemis I mission and is now heading towards a near-Earth asteroid via solar sails (see above).
During the interview, Mr. Johnson discussed the NEA Scout as well as his hopes for future human travel to the stars using solar sails, noting that while slow, the sails can outperform modern rocket engines in the long-run. He also pointed out that a solar sail may be able to get us to Proxima Centauri, the closest neighboring star, in hundreds of years versus the 70,000 years it will take the Voyager spacecraft to travel that same distance. I like how he puts such a mission in perspective, pointing out it took hundreds of years to build some of the great cathedrals.
Messrs. Alda and Johnson also discussed the ethics of space travel considering astronauts will be spending generations in space with many humans never seeing either the Earth or the destination in their lifetime. Mr. Johnson said space lasers may be another option for interstellar travel at some point in the future, reducing the travel time to Proxima Centauri to 40-50 years. Given the time spans, he said it may make sense to initially send robots into space first.
Finally, the podcast covered missions closer to Earth, such as mining asteroids for water and minerals, as well as 3D printing to create what we need in space. It sounded a lot like the situation in find in the science fiction TV series The Expanse.
Overall, it was a great conversation worth a few minutes of your day. Check it out.
Extra: Mr. Johnson is also the author of several books, including the co-authored Saving Proxima. Here is a quick summary of that tale:
2072. At the lunar farside radio observatory, an old-school radio broadcast is detected, similar to those broadcast on Earth in the 1940s, but in an unknown language, coming from an impossible source—Proxima Centauri. While the nations of Earth debate making first contact, they learn that the Proximans are facing an extinction-level disaster, forcing a decision: will Earth send a ship on a multiyear trip to render aid?
Interstellar travel is not easy, and by traveling at the speeds required to arrive before disaster strikes at Proxima, humans will learn firsthand the time-dilating effects of Einstein’s Special Relativity and be forced to ponder ultimate questions: What does it mean to be human? What will it take to share the stars with another form of life? What if I return younger than my own children? The answers are far from academic, for they may determine the fate of not one, but two, civilizations.
Image (Credit): Artist’s version of the Chicxulub crater at the time of the meteorite’s impact. (NASA)
Yes, you have heard it all before – a “planet killer” asteroid is coming our way. Well, in this case it appears to be true, but the 1.1km to 2.3km asteroid will only cross our path rather than hit us, at least for now.
The asteroid, named the ever-boring 2022 AP7, is among the top 5 percent of the potentially hazardous asteroids ever found.’
Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science, and one of the authors of a recent paper on 2022 AP7, stated in The Guardian:
Any asteroid over 1km in size is considered a planet killer…The Earth’s surface would likely cool significantly from sunlight not getting to the planet. It would be a mass extinction event like hasn’t been seen on Earth in millions of years.
Fortunately, we should have a few centuries to watch this asteroid before we start worrying about a collision.
Let’s hope we have a Super DART spacecraft sweeping the solar system by then keeping us clear from this asteroid and any other.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Image (Credit): Asteroid Gaspra in the asteroid belt, visited by the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter. (NASA/JPL/USGS)
On this day in 1991, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft flew by asteroid Gaspra, which is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Galileo conducted a quick fly-by while flying towards Jupiter and its moons. The spacecraft also visited the asteroid Ida.
Asteroid Gasprawas first discovered back in 1916 by Russian astronomer G. N. Neujmin, who decided to name it after the Black Sea retreat of Gaspra, a Ukrainian spa town currently occupied by the Russians.
Here is some additional information from NASA about the asteroid, which has similar features to the asteroids now serving as moons to Mars (Phobos and Deimos):
A striking feature of Gaspra’s surface is the abundance of small craters. More than 600 craters, 100-500 meters (330-1650 feet) in diameter are visible here. The number of such small craters compared to larger ones is much greater for Gaspra than for previously studied bodies of comparable size such as the satellites of Mars. Gaspra’s very irregular shape suggests that the asteroid was derived from a larger body by nearly catastrophic collisions. Consistent with such a history is the prominence of groove-like linear features, believed to be related to fractures. These linear depressions, 100-300 meters wide and tens of meters deep, are in two crossing groups with slightly different morphology, one group wider and more pitted than the other. Grooves had previously been seen only on Mars’s moon Phobos, but were predicted for asteroids as well.
You car read more about the overall Galileo mission here.
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the Galileo spacecraft arriving at Jupiter. (NASA)
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