Image (Credit): Example of an Earth-sized moon around a Neptune-sized moon around Jupiter. (Cool World Labs)
Hearing about the moonlet targeted by the DART spacecraft reminded me of a recent video discussing whether exomoons could have their own moons. It was a piece by Cool World Labs titled “Can Moons Have Moons?” It gets into the “Hill Sphere,” which is an astronomical body’s region in which it dominates the attraction of satellites. It can get pretty complex, as the drawing above demonstrates, but its an interesting concept that has yet to be proven in our own solar system or elsewhere. Given that Cool World Labs is already finding exomoons, it may be only a matter of time before we experience these submoons.
Previously, NASA’s Saturn-studying Cassini spacecraft had discovered Enceladus’ subsurface liquid water as well as the plumes of ice grains and water vapour that erupted from cracks in the moon’s icy surface.Analysis of the plumes had revealed that they contain almost all the basic requirements of life as we know it. But while the bioessential element phosphorus is yet to be identified directly, scientists have now found evidence of its availability in the ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust.
Maarten Schmidt, the Dutch-born American astronomer who explained the mysterious heavenly bodies known as quasars and in so doing helped create the modern picture of the universe, its structure and its history, died Sept. 17 at his home in Fresno, Calif. He was 92.
The space launch services giant was recently rejected for nearly $900 million dollars in rural connectivity funding from the Wireline Competition Bureau (a branch of the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC). SpaceX characterized that decision(opens in new tab) as “grossly unfair” in its Sept. 9 appeal to the regulator, which is under review.
Last week cosmonaut Valery Polyakov passed away at the age of 80 (1942 to 2022). He still holds the record for the longest single spaceflight in history when he was aboard the Mir space station for 437 days and 18 hours during one stay between 1994 and 1995. By the time he retired later in 1995, he had spent 678 days in space.
Russians have a history of long tours in space, including four cosmonauts from the last century who spent at least one year in a single tour:
Valery Polyakov – 437 days aboard Mir (1994-95)
Sergei Avdeyev – 379 days aboard Mir (1998-99)
Vladimir Titov – 365 days aboard Mir (1987-88)
Musa Manaro – 365 days aboard Mir (1987-88)
When U.S. astronaut Astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth with cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko from the International Space Station in 2016 after 340 days in space, the Russians were not so impressed according to a story in arsTECHNICA. The story notes cosmonaut Talgat Musabayev, serving as the head of the Kazakh space agency, stated, “Congratulations on your record. Of course it was already done 28 years ago.”
Image (Credit): The Soviet Mir space station. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of NASA’s DART spacecraft and the Italian Space Agency’s LICIACube prior to impact at the Didymos binary system. (NASA)
The Americans and Italians are putting on a show tomorrow night. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft is ready to strike Dimorphos, which is a moonlet to the asteroid Didymos. All of it should be captured by Italy’s Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids (LICIACub) in addition to DART’s own camera called the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO). Are you overwhelmed with acronyms yet?
The mission is a practice run on diverting an asteroid. While we are not threatened by this pair of asteroids, we may be threatened by others in the future, so what we learn here is critical.
You can view the impact later tomorrow via this NASA site starting at 6pm ET (the collision is expected at 7:14pm ET).
Extra: Here is another DART site to watch from The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Image (Credit): NASA live broadcast for the DART mission. (NASA)
Update: The mission was a success. The video showing the DART spacecraft approaching the dirty potato called Dimorphos was impressive. The actual moonlet shown below is considerably different than the smooth asteroid in the artist’s rendering above.
Image (Credit): Moonlet Dimorphos as the DART spacecraft approaches. (NASA)
Image (Credit): The Knight performs on season eight of The Masked Singer. (Fox)
“The Masked Singer is the most extraordinary experience I’ve ever had. Well, I mean, the wardrobe was impossible. You can’t see, you can’t breathe, you can’t hear, you can’t think. There was no oxygen in there. I had a panic thinking, “Wait a minute, I can’t breathe. And I’m supposed to sing.” You know how you sing? You take a breath and air comes out. That’s how you sing, and I couldn’t get a breath. It was incredible.”
-William Shatner’s response to a question from EntertainmentWeekly Entertainment, “Speaking of your busy schedule, in the last year, you went to space and appeared on The Masked Singer. Be honest, which experience was wilder for you?” Jeff Bezos may not be too happy to hear this after he flew Mr. Shatner to the edge of space last year on one of his Blue Origin rockets. Maybe he should have added a Karaoke machine to the flight.
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