Space Stories: Chinese Space Partnerships, Approaching Comet, and European Rocket Shortage

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Chinese space program poster. (Asia Times)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—SpaceNews.com: “China Looks to Build Space Partnerships with Gulf Nations“

China is aiming to grow cooperation with emerging space nations including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Space was named as one of a number of priority areas for the next three to five years during the first China-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Summit held in Riyadh earlier this month. “China stands ready to work with GCC countries on remote sensing and communications satellite, space utilization, aerospace infrastructure, and the selection and training of astronauts,” according to the text of the keynote speech made by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the summit, Dec. 9. The GCC intergovernmental group comprises Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar.

—Newsweek: “Once-in-a-Lifetime Cosmic Event Could Be Visible to the Naked Eye“

A comet zooming through the solar system could soon be visible to the naked eye from Earth in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime event. And some astronomical predictions indicate that the object may never return to our cosmic neighborhood. C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is currently located around 100 million miles away from Earth and will make a close approach to our planet in early February 2023.

—Atalayar.com: “Europe Runs out of Rockets for Autonomous Access to Space“

Overnight, the European Space Agency (ESA) headed by Austrian Josef Aschbacher has been left without any capacity to position its own satellites in outer space. Neither Aschbacher nor his director of space transport, the Swiss Daniel Neuenschwander, have any space vector model to fulfil their commitments to the European Union to renew the Copernicus constellation and place their Sentinel environmental monitoring satellites in orbit. Much less is ESA in a position to meet the growing global demand for launch services that is knocking on its doors, those of the United States, China and India.

Space Stories: ISS Leak, Revamped Space Council, and Asteroid Space Stations

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): International Space Station. (Canadian Space Agency)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—CBS News: “Soyuz Ferry Ship Temperatures Remain Within Limits Despite Major Coolant Leak“

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.

—SpaceNews.com: “White House Revamps Membership of National Space Council Advisory Group“

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.

—Phys.org: “Rubble Pile Asteroids Might be the Best Places to Build Space Habitats“

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.

Space Stories: Bezos on the Moon, Strange Oort Objects, and Europe Visits Venus

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s rending of the Blue Origin lunar cargo lander. (Blue Origin)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Reuters: “Bezos’ Space Company Teams with Lockheed, Boeing for NASA Moon Lander Pitch“

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin is partnering with Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin Corp to pitch a lunar lander to NASA as the agency seeks to send humans to the moon again, the companies announced on Tuesday. The joint moon lander proposal, led by Blue Origin, marks the companies’ second attempt to win a coveted moon lander contract as NASA seeks more options for getting astronauts to the lunar surface under its multibillion dollar Artemis program.

—Western University: “‘Unexpected’ Space Traveller Defies Theories About Origin of Solar System“

Researchers from Western have shown that a fireball that originated at the edge of the Solar System was likely made of rock, not ice, challenging long-held beliefs about how the Solar System was formed. Just at the edge of our Solar System and halfway to the nearest stars is a collection of icy objects sailing through space, known as the Oort Cloud. Passing stars sometimes nudge these icy travellers towards the Sun, and we see them as comets with long tails. Scientists have yet to observe any objects in the Oort Cloud directly, but everything detected so far coming from its direction has been made of ice. Theoretically, the very basis of understanding our Solar System’s beginnings is built upon the foundation that only icy objects exist in these outer reaches and certainly, nothing made of rock.

—Universe Today: “ESA’s Upcoming Mission Will Tell us if Venus is Still Volcanically Active“

The EnVision mission is ESA’s fifth medium-class mission to Venus. It’s being planned in a partnership between NASA and ESA, and NASA will be providing the synthetic aperture radar instrument, which will map the surface (much as Magellan did). In addition to the two radars, the orbiter will carry spectrometers to study the atmosphere and surface. They will monitor trace gases in the atmosphere and analyze surface composition. The idea is to look for surface changes that might be linked to signs of active volcanism. Along with the VERITAS and DAVINCI missions, EnVision should reveal all we need to know about volcanic activity on Venus.

Space Stories: Eruptions on Mars, World’s Largest Radio-Astronomy Observatory, and Saudi Space Hotels

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Image of the planet Mars. (NASA)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—University of Arizona: “Giant Mantle Plume Reveals Mars is More Active Than Previously Thought“

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, scientists from the University of Arizona challenge current views of Martian geodynamic evolution with a report on the discovery of an active mantle plume pushing the surface upward and causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The finding suggests that the planet’s deceptively quiet surface may hide a more tumultuous interior than previously thought…Mantle plumes are large blobs of warm and buoyant rock that rise from deep inside a planet and push through its intermediate layer – the mantle – to reach the base of its crust, causing earthquakes, faulting and volcanic eruptions. The island chain of Hawaii, for example, formed as the Pacific plate slowly drifted over a mantle plume.

—Nature.com: “‘Great Scientific Step Forward’: Construction of World’s Largest Radio Observatory is Finally Under Way“

After 30 years of planning and negotiations, construction begins this week on the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world’s largest radio-astronomy observatory. The giant instrument — to be built across sprawling sites in Australia and Africa — will collect the radio signals emitted by celestial objects and will hopefully shed light on some of the most enigmatic problems in astronomy, such as the nature of dark matter and how galaxies form.

—UAE in Space: “Saudi Arabia in Talks over Plans for Next-Generation Space Stations“

Saudi Arabia is in talks with other nations over plans for the next generation of space stations, which could one day serve as floating hotels among the stars. Mohammed bin Saud Al Tamimi, governor of the Communications, Space and Technology Commission, said he sees space commodities as a “huge opportunity”. He was speaking remotely on the first day of the Abu Dhabi Space Debate, a major conference that addressed the new geopolitics of space and emerging trends. Mr Al Tamimi said that the Kingdom would be announcing its national space strategy early next year.

Space Stories: Hungarians in Space, A Constantly Manned Chinese Space Station, and Lunar Water

Posted on by onespaceman2000

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—SpaceNews.com: “Hungary to spend $100 million on private astronaut mission to ISS“

The Hungarian government plans to spend $100 million to send an astronaut to the International Space Station in two years through a deal with Axiom Space. In a presentation at the European Space Agency’s ministerial council meeting Nov. 22, Péter Szijjártó, Hungarian foreign minister, said the country was in the middle of a process to select an astronaut to fly on a month-long mission to the ISS in late 2024 or early 2025. Axiom Space announced in July it signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Hungary regarding that country’s Hungarian to Orbit (HUNOR) program, which would fly a Hungarian astronaut to space on a future Axiom Space mission. That announcement, though, provided few details about when that person would fly.

—Associated Press: “Chinese Spaceship with 3 Aboard Docks with Space Station“

Three Chinese astronauts docked early Wednesday with their country’s space station, where they will overlap for several days with the three-member crew already onboard and expand the facility to its maximum size. Docking with the Tiangong station came at 5:42 a.m. Wednesday, about 6 1/2 hours after the Shenzhou-15 spaceship blasted off atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center...The station’s third and final module docked earlier this month, one of the last steps in China’s effort to maintain a constant crewed presence in orbit.

—UniverseToday.com: “Tiny Cubesat Will Shine an Infrared ‘Flashlight’ Into the Moon’s Shadowed Craters, Searching for Water Ice“

A tiny spacecraft is ready to head out for a big job: shining a light on water ice at the Moon’s south pole. Lunar Flashlight is a cubesat about the size of a briefcase, set to launch on December 1 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, sharing a ride with the Hakuto-R Mission to the Moon. The tiny 14 kg (30 lb) spacecraft will use near-infrared lasers and an onboard spectrometer to map the permanently shadowed regions near the Moon’s south pole, where there could be reservoirs of water ice.