Space Stories: Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is Back, Reclaiming More Water on the ISS, and Directly Imaging an Exoplanet

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—NASA: “NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Phones Home“

The 52nd flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is now in the official mission logbook as a success. The flight took place back on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California lost contact with the helicopter as it descended toward the surface for landing. The Ingenuity team expected the communications dropout because a hill stood between the helicopter’s landing location and the Perseverance rover’s position, blocking communication between the two. 

—Phys.org: “NASA Achieves Water Recovery Milestone on International Space Station“

Astronauts on interplanetary missions will be a bit less thirsty after a new NASA system succeeded at reclaiming 98% of waste water aboard the International Space Station (ISS) by converting things like urine into a drinkable state. Future crewed deep space missions that will last months or even years will be very different from any that have come before. Until now, astronauts have either carried their own supplies along or relied on regular visits from cargo ships. As to waste products, these were simply disposed of in a variety of ways. Unfortunately, deep space missions don’t have that luxury.

—SCI.News: “Astronomers Directly Image Jupiter-Like Exoplanet around Nearby Young Star“

AF Leporis is a bright F8V star located about 87.5 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Lepus. Also known as AF Lep, HD 35850, HIP 25486 and HR 1817, the star has an age of 24 million years and a mass of 1.2 solar masses. The star hosts a young exoplanet, AF Leporis b (AF Lep b), which is located about 8 times the Earth-Sun distance and is among the first ever discovered using a technique called astrometry. This method measures the subtle movements of a host star over many years to help astronomers determine whether hard-to-see orbiting companions, including planets, are gravitationally tugging at it.

ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope Safely Launched

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: ESA

Earier today, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid Space Telescope was safely launched from Cape Canaveral on a Space X Falcon 9 rocket (though the original plan was to use a Russian Soyuz rocket until the invasion nixed that idea). The space telescope is destined for the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), which is an average distance of 1 million miles beyond Earth’s orbit. It will join the James Webb Space Telescope.

In addition to the 1.2 meter diameter telescope, the mission includes two scientific instruments: a visible-wavelength camera (the VISible instrument, VIS) and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer (the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer, NISP). 

The focus of the new space telescope will be to create a 3D map of the universe to better understand dark matter and dark energy. As noted on the ESA’s website, Euclid hopes to answer these questions:

  • What is the structure and history of the cosmic web?
  • What is the nature of dark matter?
  • How has the expansion of the Universe changed over time?
  • What is the nature of dark energy?
  • Is our understanding of gravity complete?

It is a tall order for this new telescope. Astronomer Isobel Hook from the UK’s Lancaster University put it this way to BBC News:

It will be like setting off on a ship before people knew where land was in different directions. We’ll be mapping out the Universe to try to understand where we fit into it and how we’ve got here – how the whole Universe got from the point of the Big Bang to the beautiful galaxies we see around us, the Solar System and to life.

Space Stories: Launch of the Euclid Space Telescope, Mercury Flyby, and a Super Hot Brown Dwarf

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope. (ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—NASA/JPL: “NASA to Provide Coverage for Launch of ESA ‘Dark Universe’ Mission“

The ESA (European Space Agency) and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 11:11 a.m. EDT (8:11 a.m. PDT) Saturday, July 1, to launch the Euclid spacecraft. Euclid is an ESA mission with contributions from NASA that will shed light on the nature of dark matter and dark energy, two of the biggest modern mysteries about the universe.

—Sky&Telescope: “BepiColombo Mission Makes Third Mercury Flyby“

An intrepid space mission had another brief glimpse of its final destination this week, as the European Space Agency’s BepiColombo flew past Mercury for a third time. The team confirms that the spacecraft is in good health post flyby, and that all instruments performed as planned. “Everything went very smoothly with the flyby and the images from the monitoring cameras taken during the close-approach phase of the flyby have been transmitted to the ground,” said Ignacio Clerigo (ESA) in a recent press release. “While the next Mercury flyby isn’t until September 2024, there are still challenges to tackle in the intervening time.”

—Phys.org: “Discovery of a Brown Dwarf Hotter than the Sun“

An international team of astronomers has discovered a planet-like object that is hotter than the sun. Their report has been accepted for publication in the journal Nature Astronomy and is currently available on the arXiv pre-print server. Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars and do not qualify for the category of either a planet or a star. In this new effort, the researchers have identified one that orbits a star so closely that its temperature is hotter than our sun.

$10 Billion for Some Martian Rocks?

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Image (Credit): Hole left by the Perserverance rover as it collected its 14th sample of Martian rock. (NASA)

A recent ARS Technica article, “NASA’s Mars Sample Return Has a New Price Tag—and it’s Colossal,” discusses the potential plans to retrieve rocks from the Martian surface at a total cost of $10 billion. This has the potential to crowd out other important NASA projects and may need to be reconsidered at a time of budget constraints.

NASA has been seeking innovative solutions from the private sector to lower the retrieval costs, but the mission may be on hold for some time. Getting rocks from the Moon and even an asteroid seems easy by comparison.

Maybe NASA needs to seen another private sector solution – a study of Martian rocks on the surface of Mars. It may be easier to land a laboratory and conduct long-term experiments in situ rather than attempting a journey back to Earth. It is something to consider for now and may give us quicker access to the rocks.

Of course, we can always wait until Elon Musk lands on the Red Planet and retrieves them.

Pic of the Week: The Ongoing Perseverance Rover Mission

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this mosaic of a hill nicknamed “Pinestand.”
(NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)

This week’s image comes from NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance as it explores the to Jezero Crater. The photo was posted last month. It has been a little while since we directly our attention at the Red Planet.

The image shows what may be the result of a fast-moving river some time in the past. In the NASA write-up accompanying the photo above, we read:

“Pinestand” is an isolated hill bearing sedimentary layers that curve skyward, some as high as 66 feet (20 meters). Scientists think these tall layers may also have been formed by a powerful river, although they’re exploring other explanations, as well.

“These layers are anomalously tall for rivers on Earth,” [postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California Libby] Ives said. “But at the same time, the most common way to create these kinds of landforms would be a river.”