Image (Credit): The Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (NASA/Kim Shiflett)
“On average we have a $250 to $260 million dollar annual maintenance gap…Unplanned failures can have mission impacts, and the last thing we want to do is affect Artemis or some other significant mission.”
-Statement by NASA Facilities and Real Estate Division Director Eric Weiser regarding the maintenance of NASA’s infrastructure, as reported in The Register. He went on to say, “What that means is, on average, we’re renewing our infrastructure around every 200 years… A better number would be 60 to 80 years, and to do that we simply need more funding.” I know maintenance expenditures are boring, but this is no different than defense or highways. You get what you pay for, and also what you maintain.
Image (Credit): The Zeeman crater as captured by Luna-25. (IKI RAS)
The first images from Russia’s Luna-25 mission have arrived. They show the far side of the Moon permanently hidden from those of us here on Earth.
The spacecraft is now orbiting the Moon, which was last done by the Russians back in 1976. The lander is expected to be on the lunar surface this Monday if all goes well.
For the sake of science (leaving politics out of it), let’s hope for a successful landing.
Image (Credit): “Cape Byron Lighthouse Moonrise” by Kevin Hennessey. (Australia Geographic)
The winners of the Australia Geographic astronomy photography contest have been named, and the photo above is one that won honorable mention in the Nightscapes Category, “Cape Byron Lighthouse Moonrise” by Kevin Hennessey.
Here is a little more about the impressive image:
The full moon rises behind the Cape Byron Lighthouse at the most easterly point of mainland Australia, silhouetting a group of spectators gathered at its base. Taken through a high-powered telescope from a distance of 5.1km away makes the moon appear extraordinarily large in this photo. The shooting location had to be accurate to within a couple of meters, determined with the help of the “Photopills” iPhone app, Google Earth and an aircraft-grade GPS.
Image (Credit): Aerial view of the damaged Arecibo Observatory after one of the main cables holding the receiver broke in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, on December 1, 2020. (Photo by Ricardo ARDUENGO / AFP)
After weathering hurricanes, earthquakes, budget cuts and a pandemic-induced shutdown, the iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico closed its doors on 14 August. After its main instrument collapsed two years ago, the site was supposed to shift from carrying out astronomy and other research to being a science education centre. But concrete plans for that have yet to materialize — and funding for current operations has run out.Scientists were disappointed that research would formally halt at the site, but they had hoped to keep some instruments running, both for the students who might use the educational centre and to continue the site’s astronomy legacy. Doubts now swirl, as equipment is taken offline and dismantled, that Arecibo will ever again study the sky.
In recent months, a torrent of observations of the cosmic smudges has delighted and confounded astronomers…The most straightforward explanation for the tornado-hearted galaxies is that large black holes weighing millions of suns are whipping the gas clouds into a frenzy. That finding is both expected and perplexing. It is expected because JWST was built, in part, to find the ancient objects. They are the ancestors of billion-sun behemoth black holes that seem to appear in the cosmic record inexplicably early. By studying these precursor black holes, such as three record-setting youngsters discovered this year, scientists hope to learn where the first humongous black holes came from and perhaps identify which of two competing theories better describes their formation: Did they grow extremely rapidly, or were they simply born big?
A team of astrophysicists from the University of Bordeaux and Observatoire Astronomique de l’Université de Genève is suggesting that some exoplanets may not have been too hot during their formative years to harbor life today. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group suggests that due to factors not considered in the past, some exoplanets may not have grown so hot that they lost the water in their atmospheres to evaporation into space.
Image (Credit): An imagined Martian settlement. (NASA)
Astronomy magazine has a good article titled “Predictions for the Next 50 Years of Astronomy.” Five astronomers provide their ideas about what we might experience in the field of astronomy in the 2070s.
For instance, S. Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and member of the U.S. National Science Board, had this prediction:
By the ’70s, I expect we’ll have human exploration taking place on multiple worlds in the solar system, with Antarctic-like, semipermanent bases scattered around the globes of at least Luna and Mars. I also expect we may by then have much larger and more powerful launch vehicles, even fusion-based or high-power electric propulsion, making trip times an order of magnitude shorter than today. Just think: Mars in a few weeks, Pluto and the Kuiper Belt in a year!
I just want to see the Moon landing get underway before any predictions about the Kuiper Belt, but it is all exciting and in many ways unknowable given what has happened in the last 50 years. For instance, how many people 50 years ago believed that we would have a catalog of thousands of exoplanets, many similar to Earth?
Of course, predictions are tough. Here is what some scientists were saying in the 1970s about the fate of our little planet, as reported by the American Enterprise Institute:
{Paul] Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
We have our issues today, but I am very happy that these earlier scientists did not have the gift of prophesy.
Our Awesome Universe 