Space Stories: New Horizon Questions, A Dark Spot on Neptune, and Prioritizing Exoplanets

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Image (Credit): NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Space.com : “NASA’s New Horizons Mission Faces an Uncertain Future (op-ed)“

With its budget being trimmed for 2024, NASA is making some weighty decisions… and one includes drastically trimming New Horizons funds by replacing the current science staff with a new team in an effort to save about $3 million—a rounding error in terms of the planetary science budget...As it stands, New Horizons will exit the Kuiper Belt around 2028 and should continue operating until 2050.

—ScienceDaily : “Mysterious Neptune Dark Spot Detected from Earth for the First Time“

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have observed a large dark spot in Neptune’s atmosphere, with an unexpected smaller bright spot adjacent to it. This is the first time a dark spot on the planet has ever been observed with a telescope on Earth. These occasional features in the blue background of Neptune’s atmosphere are a mystery to astronomers, and the new results provide further clues as to their nature and origin.

—Universe Today : “TESS has Found Thousands of Possible Exoplanets: Which Ones Should JWST Study?“

We will soon have more than 10,000 worlds where life might be able to survive. It’s an amazing idea, but with so many exoplanets we don’t have the resources to search for life on all of them. So how do we prioritize our search? That’s the focus of a recent paper on the pre-print server arxiv. In it, the team strives to identify the “best in class” candidates for exoplanets that could be further studied by the spectroscopic cameras of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Their list could not only help astronomers find evidence of life but also help us understand the range of atmospheres exoplanets have.

Space Quote: The Changing Competition in Space and Elsewhere

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Image (Credit): 3D view of a crater on the Moon generated from images captured by Chandrayaan 2 orbiter’s Terrain Mapping Camera in 2019. (ISRO)

“…a comparison with India is illuminating: India’s economy was about half the size of Russia’s when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Today, India’s economy is 50 percent bigger than Russia’s. Forget about keeping pace with the United States: Russia can’t keep up with India.”

-Editorial in The Washington Post by David Von Drehle titled “India’s Brilliant Moon Landing Illuminates Russia’s Drastic Decline.” India’s steady progress on space missions, including Chandrayaan 2 back in 2019 (shown above), has occurred during Russia’s slow decline and current situation. This cannot be lost on Russia as its cosmonaut traveled to the International Space Station this weekend aboard an American rocket. Around the world, space programs are moving on without Russia, which was the leading nation at the start of the Space Age.

A New Crew Departs for the ISS

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Image (Credit): ISS crew preparing for August 26, 2023 launch. (Terry Renna/AP Photo)

A new crew departed Earth for the International Space Station (ISS) at 3:27am ET today from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The crew includes:

  • NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli,
  • ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen,
  • JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and
  • Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov.

The new crew should be onboard the ISS tomorrow morning, bringing the number of occupants at the station to 11 until 4 crew members return to Earth in a few days.

Russia is probably happy to have attention back on the ISS rather than the Moon for the moment. It has not been a good week for the Russian space program.

You can read more about the new crew members at this NASA site.

A Day in Astronomy: Launch of the Spitzer Space Telescope

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Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the Spitzer Space Telescope. (NASA/JPL)

On this day in 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope to conduct infrared astronomy. Spitzer continued to operate until January of 2020.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noted some of the triumphs of the space telescope, including:

  • revealing a system of seven Earth-size planets around a star 40 light-years away;
  • creating an unprecedented map of the Milky Way;
  • directly observing light from a planet outside our solar system;
  • directly identifying molecules in the atmospheres of exoplanets; and
  • revealing Saturn’s largest ring.

An impressive list of accomplishments for any telescope.

You can read more about Spitzer at this NASA mission website as well as this JPL website.

Pic of the Week: Another View of the Far Side of the Moon

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Image (Credit): Lunar surface as captured by India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft. (ISRO)

This week’s image is an shot of the far side of the Moon captured by India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, which landed on the Moon yesterday. This was part of a set of photos posted to Twitter by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The various images were used by the spacecraft as it attempted to find a safe landing spot, which it fortunately found.