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.
Image (Credit): Russian Soyuz capsule outside the International Space Station. (Spacefacts.de)
Fortunately, we now know the source of the leak in the extra Soyuz Crew Return Vehicle attached to the International Space Station (ISS). However, we do not know the cause of this radiator coolant leak, which creates risk should the capsule be used early next year to bring two cosmonauts and an astronaut back to Earth. Hence, it may be better to bring another capsule up to the ISS for the change in crew and send the damaged one back empty for repairs.
The ISS doesn’t technically have an escape pod. Instead, a Crew Return Vehicle more or less serves this purpose. It has been used more than once to host astronauts and cosmonauts fleeing space junk, so maybe it’s time to think over these procedures again. You would think a $100 billion orbiting space station could ensure the survival of its passengers.
Image (Credit): Roscosmos head Yuri Borisov. (Dogruso.com)
“Say hello to the entire American team. They proved themselves to be very worthy in this situation and lent us a helping hand…You set an example for the whole world on how to work together in the most challenging and difficult situation. Let many politicians learn from you.“
-Statement by Yuri Borisov, head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, on Tuesday praising Russia-U.S. cooperation at the International Space Station (ISS) following a major coolant leak from a Soyuz crew capsule. The transcript was quoted in The Moscow Times. The ISS remains one of the limited areas where the U.S. and Russia are still cooperating given the situation in Ukraine.
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.
Image (Credit): A trasch bag lying beneath the Apollo Lunar Module in 1969. (NASA)
Back in July 2019, Vox had a great article about the waste astronauts left behind on the Moon. In the article, “Apollo Astronauts Left Their Poop on the Moon. We Gotta Go Back for That Shit.,” we learn about approximately 96 bags of human waste left behind on the moon. The topic is relevant today because (1) we are talking about returning to the Moon under the Artemis mission and (2) we probably want to learn more about the lifespan of this waste before we continue to deposit it on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere. So maybe it is time to revisit the poop.
Earlier, The Atlantic had another article that listed much more human debris on the Moon than just the 96 bags (of urine, feces, and vomit, mind you). Here is the incomplete list:
more than 70 spacecraft, including rovers, modules, and crashed orbiters;
5 American flags;
2 golf balls;
12 pairs of boots;
TV cameras;
film magazines;
96 bags of urine, feces, and vomit;
numerous Hasselbad cameras and accessories;
several improvised javelins;
various hammers, tongs, rakes, and shovels;
backpacks;
insulating blankets;
utility towels;
used wet wipes;
personal hygiene kits;
empty packages of space food;
a photograph of Apollo 16 astronaut Charles Duke’s family;
a feather from Baggin, the Air Force Academy’s mascot falcon, used to conduct Apollo 15’s famous “hammer-feather drop” experiment;
a small aluminum sculpture, a tribute to the American and Soviet “fallen astronauts” who died in the space race—left by the crew of Apollo 15;
a patch from the never-launched Apollo 1 mission, which ended prematurely when flames engulfed the command module during a 1967 training exercise, killing three U.S. astronauts;
a small silicon disk bearing goodwill messages from 73 world leaders, and left on the moon by the crew of Apollo 11;
a silver pin, left by Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean;
a medal honoring Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin; and
a cast golden olive branch left by the crew of Apollo 11.
In the 2022 movie Moonshot, we sent Martian trash back to Earth. But that was not the case with the Moon. And now China and Russia are clamoring to do the same in the near future. Will the Moon someday be marked with more trash heaps than craters?
One might argue that explorers throughout time have had to leave something behind. Think of the piles of trash as well as corpses left on the top of Mount Everest. The great sea explorers also left plenty of men, material, and ships at the bottom of the sea where they would remain unclaimed.
But the interesting part of the Vox story is the potential of life remaining in that trash and even producing new life. If such biological material can seed new life, then who can say whether the Earth was simply a rest stop for aliens on their way somewhere else, and we are the product of their poop.
One more thing. If we do manage to let the Earth slip away from us and flip into another Venusian nightmare, the Moon poop may be the only human biology for a future alien to analyze. We sent the Voyager and other spacecraft out into the void with recordings and data, but no one thought about adding a biological component. Well, now we have that surviving piece on the Moon should it be needed. If we can figure out what a Tyrannosaurus was eating millions of years ago, maybe future visitors can figure out what the astronauts were eating in 20th century Texas.
Intense stuff, and worth reading about when you have a moment.
Our Awesome Universe 