NASA Had a Busy Year

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Image (Credit): The introduction of the Artemis II crew, just one of many items highlighted in NASA’s new video summarizing 2023. (NASA)

This is the time of year for lists, so I wanted to highlight one of the more important lists, at least in the opinion of this writer. That’s right, we need to remember the important space milestones from this year.

Fortunately, NASA recently summed up its successes in 2023 with a new video titled NASA 2023: Nothing is Beyond Our Reach. The video highlights many of the Agency’s accomplishments this year, including the launch of the Psyche mission, the announcement of a crew for the Artemis II mission, and the OSIRIS-REx capsule retrieval.

It is quite a list. Luckily, NASA provided a list of links so you can read more about the various efforts:

Time to read up on 2023 before we dive into more activities in 2024.

Note: You can read a more detailed list of accomplishments at this NASA site.

Look What Lucy Found

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): A view of the newly discovered second asteroid behind asteroid Dinkinesh. (NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab)

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft encountered a surprise last Wednesday as it approached the target asteroid Dinkinesh, located in the asteroid belt. Instead of finding a single asteroid, it found a binary pair. Early data indicated that asteroid Dinkinesh is about 0.5 miles wide and its orbiting partner is only 0.15 miles wide.

Lucy did not have time to stick around, but it captured enough images during its fly by to keep astronomers busy for some time. The spacecraft was flying about 10,000 mph as it passed the pair.

Lucy’s primary mission is the Trojan asteroids (that is, asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun). And why are they of interest? NASA mission page tells us:

Planet formation and evolution models suggest that the Trojan asteroids are likely to be remnants of the same primordial material that formed the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), and thus serve as time capsules from the birth of our solar system over four billion years ago.

We may have many more surprises before Lucy finishes her 12-year mission.

Space Stories: Dinosaur Dust, Missing Stars, and SETI Signals

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The end of the dinosaurs. (NYT, Roger Harris/Science Source)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Royal Observatory of Belgium: “Dust Played a Major Role in Dinosaur Demise“

Fine dust from pulverized rock generated by the Chicxulub impact likely played a dominant role in global climate cooling and the disruption of photosynthesis following the event. This is suggested by a new study published in Nature Geoscience, in which researchers Cem Berk Cenel, Özgür Karatekin and Orkun Temel of the Royal Observatory of Belgium contributed.

—Express: “Astronomers Trying to Unravel Mystery of Three Stars that Suddenly Disappeared from Sky“

A team of Spanish astronomers is leading the investigation into one of stargazing’s most perplexing mysteries. Three bright stars photographed in the night sky above southern California in 1952 vanished just an hour later. Generations of scientists have sought to explain the rare phenomenon over the past half-century, but nothing has yet convinced the community. Researchers at the Centre for Astrobiology (CAB) in Madrid tried to solve the riddle of the “triple transient” that has “remained absent from telescope exposures for 71 years” in a new paper published online.

—Sci.News: “New Study Sets Clearer Bounds on Search for Technosignatures from Extraterrestrial Intelligences“

A stable-frequency transmitter with relative radial acceleration to a receiver will show a change in received frequency over time, known as a ‘drift rate.’ For a transmission from an exoplanet, astronomers must account for multiple components of drift rate: the exoplanet’s orbit and rotation, the Earth’s orbit and rotation, and other contributions. Understanding the drift rate distribution produced by exoplanets relative to Earth, can help scientists constrain the range of drift rates to check in a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project to detect radio technosignatures, and help them decide validity of signals-of-interest, as they can compare drifting signals with expected drift rates from the target star. In a new study, University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Megan Grace Li and colleagues modeled the drift rate distribution for over 5,300 confirmed exoplanets, using parameters from the NASA Exoplanet Archive.

A Day in Astronomy: Flyby of Asteroid Gaspra

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Image (Credit): Asteroid Gaspra as photographed by the Galileo spacecraft. (NASA)

On this day in 1991, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft conducted a flyby of asteroid Gaspra, an asteroid that orbits in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid is about 10.5 miles long. Gaspra was discovered in 1916 by Russian astronomer G. N. Neujmin, who named it after a famous Russian spa retreat in Crimea.

The Galileo spacecraft’s primary mission was to visit Jupiter and its moons, but it also conducted other observations along the way, including flybys of asteroids Gaspra and Ida.

Here are a few facts about the Galileo mission from NASA:

  • Galileo was the first spacecraft to orbit an outer planet.
  • It was the first spacecraft to deploy an entry probe into an outer planet’s atmosphere.
  • It completed the first flyby and imaging of an asteroid (Gaspra, and later, Ida).
  • It made the first, and so far only, direct observation of a comet colliding with a planet’s atmosphere (Shoemaker-Levy 9).
  • It was the first spacecraft to operate in a giant planet magnetosphere long enough to identify its global structure and to investigate its dynamics.

Space Stories: Distant Spacecraft Updates, Lucy Gets Ready for a Flyby, and Lunar Near-Earth Asteroids

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Image (Credit): Voyager II spacecraft instruments. (NASA)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Space.com: “NASA’s interstellar Voyager Probes Get Software Updates Beamed from 12 Billion Miles Away“

About 46 years after NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched on an epic journey to explore space, the probes’ antique hardware continues to receive tweaks from afar. One update, a software fix, ought to tend to the corrupted data that Voyager 1 began transmitting last year, and another set aims to prevent gunk from building up in both spacecraft’s thrusters. Together, these updates intend to keep the spacecraft in contact with Earth for as long as possible.

—NASA: “NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Preparing for its First Asteroid Flyby“

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is preparing for its first close-up look at an asteroid. On Nov. 1, it will fly by asteroid Dinkinesh and test its instruments in preparation for visits in the next decade to multiple Trojan asteroids that circle the Sun in the same orbit as Jupiter. Dinkinesh, less than half a mile, or 1 kilometer, wide, circles the Sun in the main belt of asteroids located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Lucy has been visually tracking Dinkinesh since Sept. 3; it will be the first of 10 asteroids Lucy will visit on its 12-year voyage. To observe so many, Lucy will not stop or orbit the asteroids, instead it will collect data as it speeds past them in what is called a “flyby.”

—UC San Diego: “How Could a Piece of the Moon Become a Near-Earth Asteroid? Researchers Have an Answer“

A team of astronomers has found a new clue that a recently discovered near-Earth asteroid, Kamooalewa, might be a chunk of the moon. They hypothesized that the asteroid was ejected from the lunar surface during a meteorite strike–and they found that a rare pathway could have allowed Kamooalewa to get into orbit around the sun while remaining close to the orbits of the Earth and the Moon. The research team details their findings in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment. Kamo`oalewa has been the object of several astronomy studies in recent years. As a result, a Chinese mission launching in 2025 is set to land on the asteroid and return samples to Earth.