Image (Credit): The Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud. (NASA, ESA, CSA, and M. Zamani (ESA). Science: M. K. McClure (Leiden Observatory), F. Sun (Steward Observatory), Z. Smith (Open University), and the Ice Age ERS Team)
This week’s image is from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It shows Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud where both stars and planets are born. Here is more about the image from NASA:
A Webb image of the central region of the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud, which resides 630 light-years away. This image primarily shows blue smoky wisps on a dark background. The left top side additionally features orange and white wisps. Just below them are four bright points of light. Three are orange and one is a mix of white and orange. Each of these points have Webb’s signature 8-point diffraction spikes emanating around them in long, thick orange lines, so that they look like huge snowflakes. Scattered throughout the image are distant stars or galaxies in shades of red, orange and blue, seen as tiny blobs.
Image (Credit): April 20, 2023 launch of the Starship. (SpaceX)
We know that the April 20th Starship launch did a fair amount of damage to the Boca Chica, Texas launch site, so no one expected a second attempt in 30 days.
Now SpaceX is proposing a second launch as early as June 15, but asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a 6-month window just to be safe. Why the FCC? The Observerreports that the rocket is being billed as a satellite launcher for now.
We are still awaiting the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) “mishap” investigation report on Starship’s earlier failure mid flight. All Starship launches have been halted until the investigation is complete.
SpaceX will also need some time to repair the launch facility. Hopefully, it plans to water-cool the engine blast this time. Once is folly, but twice is mismanagement.
NASA has pulled the plug on its Lunar Flashlight project, which was designed to look for sources of ice on our nearest neighbor. The agency spent the last few months trying, and failing, to get the craft to generate the necessary amount of thrust to get the small satellite to its intended destination. Officials say that the issue was likely caused by debris buildup in the fuel lines, which prevented the CubeSat from working to its full potential.
NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has taken new images that reveal that some of the red planet’s ancient rivers were much wilder than scientists previously thought. “It’s the first time we’re seeing environments like this on Mars,” Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance’s deputy project scientist, said in a NASA release. Scientists studying rock formations, features, and valleys on Mars, so far, have found evidence to suggest Mars was once covered by water.
Rocket Lab USA, Inc., a leading launch and space systems company, is preparing for the second of two dedicated Electron launches to deploy a constellation of storm monitoring satellites for NASA. The launch, called ‘Coming To A Storm Near You,’ is scheduled for lift-off no earlier than 17:30 on May 22nd NZST from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula. The launch follows on from the successful ‘Rocket Like a Hurricane’ Electron launch on May 8th 2023, which deployed the first two CubeSats of NASA’s TROPICS constellation. The ‘Coming To A Storm Near You’ launch will deploy the final two TROPICS CubeSats, completing the constellation.
Image (Credit): Pluto in colorized infrared. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/ZLDoyle)
“New Horizons can still do great science for the rest of its time in the Kuiper belt. But stopping it next year is both premature scientifically and unwise from the standpoint of fiscal policy. I am very concerned about this, and it is fair to say that I am in good company.”
-Statement by Alan Stern, New Horizons’s principal investigator, as printed in The Guardian regarding NASA’s decision to reduce funding for the New Horizons spacecraft next year even though another four to five years exploration of the Kuiper Belt had been planned. While the spacecraft will still perform some basic functions related to monitoring “space weather,” it will not have a new destination for the time being.
Image (Credit): Saturn’s Death Star-like moon Tethys. (NASA)
So Saturn now has 145 moons due to the discovery of 62 new moons, which is 50 more than the next closest competitor, Jupiter, with 95 moons. You can thank the University of British Columbia (UBC) for the new moon count.
The new discoveries come from a process used by UBC astronomers called ‘shift and stack’:
Shifting a set of sequential images at the rate that the moon is moving across the sky results in enhancement of the moon’s signal when all the data is combined, allowing moons that were too faint to be seen in individual images to become visible in the stacked image. The team used data taken using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) on top of Mauna Kea, Hawaii between 2019 and 2021. By shifting and stacking many sequential images taken during three hour spans, they were able to detect moons orbiting Saturn down to about 2.5 kilometres in diameter.
So, as you can read, some of these moons are pretty small. As of today, NASA was still showing 124 moons around Saturn, and another site, theplanets.org, is showing only 62 moons total around the planet. It appear the space agency and others will need to update their pages to show the new mini-moons.
For some reason I doubt the counting is over, just like identified dwarf planets, that seem to range from 5 to 19 at the moment, depending on the source.
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