Image (Credit): Sierra Space employees in front of the new Dream Chaser. (Sierra Nevada)
“I am reminded of a comment made by Steve Jobs that every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. I think Dream Chaser is that product. This breakthrough shifts paradigms and redefines space travel. The Dream Chaser is not just a product; it’s a testament to human spirit, determination and the relentless pursuit of what lies beyond.”
-Statement by Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice in a company press release announcing the completion of the first Dream Chaser, said to be the “world’s sole commercial runway-capable spaceplane.” Its next stop is NASA’s Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio for environmental testing. It is basically an advanced version of the earlier space shuttles that will be launched on a rocket and return by landing on a runway. NASA plans to use the spaceplane to bring cargo to the ISS. As with the initial space shuttle, the reusable craft makes a lot of sense and should help with overall costs. Of course, it is not clear why we had to go without a shuttle for 12 years.
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.
Image (Credit): NASA’s 3D billboard display by Blunt Action at Kennedy Space Center. (NASA)
If you want to see something that is both fun and educational, check out the 30-foot 3D billboard display outside the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Merritt Island, Florida.
Created by Blunt Action, the billboard plays out the history of NASA’s space program from its origins with the Mercury missions all the way to the Artemis missions.
You can go to an article by Designboom to watch the space story play out, though I expect it is better in person.
However you decide to watch it, it is worth viewing.
The jeweled expanse, filled with faint, starlight-reflecting clouds, drifts through the night in the royal constellation of Cepheus. Far from your own neighborhood on planet Earth, these ghostly apparitions lurk along the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. Over two light-years across and brighter than the other spooky chimeras, VdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula, seen toward the bottom of the featured image. Within the reflection nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores collapsing in the early stages of star formation.
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.
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.
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.
