Tag: space

Diminutive and mysterious, the Pentagon’s X-37B set to launch again

It’s an itty-bitty spaceplane, not quite 30 feet long and under 10 feet tall, with a pair of stubby wings and a rounded, bulldog-like nose. But despite its diminutive size — it looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle — the Pentagon’s most mysterious spacecraft, known as the X-37B, has built an outsize reputation.

Is it a secretive Pentagon weapon? Is it stealthy? Does it sneak up to satellites? What exactly does it do in space? And why is it up there for so long?

The Pentagon won’t say. And the veil of secrecy over the X-37B continues ahead of its launch Sunday at 8:14 p.m. Eastern on its seventh mission. But this time there are some clues that at least something is different.

The drone, which flies without anyone on board, is to be launched for the first time on SpaceX’s powerful Falcon Heavy, which is more powerful than the rockets that have launched it in the past. That’s led to speculation that the mission will be in a much higher orbit, which appears to be the case according to recent documents. SpaceX won the $130 million contract for the launch in 2018.

Still, what it might do in that higher orbit remains unknown.

The mission has “a wide range of test and experimentation objectives,” is the Pentagon’s official statement. “These tests include operating the reusable spaceplane in new orbital regimes, experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies.”

The reference about “space domain awareness” could mean that it will be keeping an eye on other satellites, potentially watching for threats. Having a better sense of what is going on in the vastness of space — where adversaries’ spacecraft are and what they are doing — has become a key mission of the U.S. Space Force. “Our space systems are threatened by a variety of growing antisatellite capabilities, and the joint force is threatened by increasingly sophisticated adversary space-based systems intended to target the joint force,” Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s chief of space operations, said in a statement to Congress earlier this year.

At least one part of the mission is known. The vehicle will “expose plant seeds to the harsh radiation environment of long-duration spaceflight” in an experiment for NASA. In the past, the Pentagon has also used the X-37B to test some of its cutting edge technologies, including a small solar panel designed to transform solar energy into microwaves, a technology that one day could allow energy harnessed in space to be beamed back to Earth.

The Boeing built X-37B has also been used to deploy small satellites, but what those did was also a mystery.

Keep reading

A CELESTIAL OBJECT “TOO LARGE TO EXIST” HAS BEEN DETECTED BY ASTRONOMERS, UPENDING PAST THEORIES ON PLANETARY FORMATION

Researchers say the discovery of a planet too large for its nearest star is challenging existing theories about the dynamics of planetary formation, according to recent findings.

The discovery, reported by researchers at Penn State University, involves a massive planet orbiting LHS 3154, a star that is around nine times smaller than our Sun, and thereby also much cooler.

By comparison, the newly named planet, LHS 3154b, which orbits it is more than 13 times the size of Earth, which planetary scientists say should not be possible.

Put into context, the mass ratio of the planet to its host star is greater than 100 times that of Earth and the Sun, making LHS 3154b the largest planet ever discovered orbiting an ultracool dwarf star and, more fundamentally, a planet too large to easily fit within current models about how such celestial objects form.

Suvrath Mahadevan, the Verne M. Willaman Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State, said he and his colleagues were surprised by the discovery.

“We wouldn’t expect a planet this heavy around such a low-mass star to exist,” Mahadevan said in a press release describing the new findings.

Generally, once a star is formed, gas and dust surrounding it will form a protoplanetary disk, which will eventually form planets over long periods. However, the disk around LHS 3154 does not have enough solid mass to facilitate planetary formation in the case of an object like LHS 3154b, Mahadevan says.

“But it’s out there,” he adds, “so now we need to reexamine our understanding of how planets and stars form.”

Keep reading

Space becomes new theater of war: Israel shoots down a ballistic missile that was traveling 62 miles ABOVE Earth

Space has become the new theater of war after Israel  shot down a rocket soaring ‘outside of Earth’s atmosphere.’

The Israel Defense (IDF) revealed last week that its Arrow missile defense system took down an ‘aerial threat’ allegedly fired by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

While details are sparse, the accepted boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space is 62 miles above the surface, known as the Kármán line.

IDF said the Arrow intercepted a surface-to-surface missile in the Red Sea fired towards its territory after the rocket traveled nearly 1,000 miles from Yemen.

Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree claimed it was the third attack the group had launched at Israel and vowed there would be more to come until ‘Israeli aggression’ stopped, referring to the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Keep reading

Ancient-human fossils sent to space: scientists slam ‘publicity stunt’

On a bright Friday morning last week, a Virgin Galactic spacecraft travelled 88 kilometres above Earth to the edge of space. On board were two Virgin Galactic pilots, an instructor and three passengers — and the remains of two ancient-human relatives that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago in southern Africa.

Everyone aboard VSS Unity — including the hominin remains — landed safely an hour after take-off. But the fossils’ journey has drawn extraordinary rebuke from archaeologists, palaeoanthropologists and other researchers. They say that it was an unethical publicity stunt that put priceless hominin fossils at risk, raising questions about the protection of cultural heritage in South Africa, as a government agency signed off on the mission.

“To treat ancestral remains in such a callous, unethical way — to blast them into space just because you can — there’s no scientific merit in this,” says Robyn Pickering, a geologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

Precious bones

Other fossils — including dinosaur bones — have been taken into space on various missions since the 1980s, but these are the first ancient-hominin remains to leave Earth. They belong to Australopithecus sediba, which lived around 2 million years ago1, and the roughly 250,000-year-old Homo naledi. Both species were found near Johannesburg in South Africa by teams led by Lee Berger, a palaeoanthropologist now at the National Geographic Society in Washington DC.

In July, the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) in Cape Town granted Berger an export permit to transport an A. sediba shoulder bone and a H. naledi finger bone to New Mexico, where Virgin Galactic’s spaceport is located, and aboard the company’s craft. The fossils were carried on the flight by Tim Nash, a South African businessman who was one of the passengers.

Berger’s application said that scientific studies might be conducted on the fossils, but that this was not the main aim of the request. “Major media partners will assist in using this once in a lifetime opportunity to bring awareness to science, exploration, human origins and South Africa and its role in understanding Humankind’s shared African ancestry,” it said.

Keep reading

A mysterious green comet is approaching Earth and could be visible to the naked eye soon. Here’s how to see it.

A mysterious green comet, called Comet Nishimura, could be visible to the naked eye in mid-September.

Also known as Comet C/2023 P1, the cosmic object could be more easily visible from September 7 and will reach its peak brightness on September 17 when it will be 78 million miles from Earth. 

The comet, which got its name from the Japanese astronomer Hideo Nishimura, currently has a green tail and is gaining in intensity as it heads toward the sun, NASA reported.

This is a crucial stage. The sun can make comets brighter by freeing more gas into their tails. But it can also break them up before they reach the Earth. 

Still, NASA is optimistic. “Will Comet Nishimura become visible to the unaided eye? Given the unpredictability of comets, no one can say for sure, but it currently seems like a good bet,” NASA said in a blog post. 

Backyard astronomers are encouraged to take their telescopes out to spot the comet in case it breaks up in the coming days, comet-tracking app SpaceWalk suggested on its blog. 

For the rest of us, it’s worth turning our attention to the skies from early September in the hours before dawn. The comet is almost aligned with the sun, so the best chance of catching it is right before our star rises.

Keep reading

Russia heads back to the Moon with Luna 25

Russia’s space agency successfully launched a robotic spacecraft Thursday on a journey to the Moon, the country’s first lunar explorer since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 sample return mission in 1976.

The Luna 25 mission lifted off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome, located in Russia’s Far East, at 7:10 pm ET (23:10 UTC). Heading east, a Soyuz-2.1b rocket propelled Luna 25 through an overcast cloud deck and into the stratosphere, then shed its four first-stage boosters about two minutes into the flight. A core stage engine fired a few minutes longer, and the Soyuz rocket jettisoned its payload shroud.

A third-stage engine fired next, then gave way to a Fregat upper-stage to place Luna 25 in orbit around Earth. The Fregat engine fired a second time to send the nearly 4,000-pound (1.8-metric ton) lunar probe on a roughly five-day trip toward the Moon. Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, declared the launch a success less than 90 minutes after liftoff, shortly after the Luna 25 spacecraft separated from the Fregat upper stage.

This is historic for Russia’s space program. Russia hasn’t launched a lunar mission in nearly 50 years and hasn’t had a mission successfully fly to any other planetary body since 1988, despite several attempts. Thursday’s launch was a major moment for Luna 25, but its departure from Earth on a reliable and proven Soyuz rocket was not the riskiest part of the mission. That will come in a couple of weeks when Luna 25 begins its powered descent toward the lunar surface.

Keep reading

Americans Love NASA, But Private Firms Do the Real Work in Space

Despite the successes of private space companies, many Americans cling to a notion of NASA as representing the country beyond the atmosphere. In fact, though, NASA relies on capabilities developed and owned by others. The Space Launch System [SLS] is supposed to restore the agency’s role, but it’s antiquated and clunky when compared to private competitors. Public opinion has yet to catch up with an innovation boom that has moved beyond misty memories of NASA in its moon-landing heyday.

“Most Americans continue to believe that the U.S. space agency NASA has a critical role to play, even as private space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are increasingly involved in space,” Pew Research reported earlier this month. “Overall, 65% of U.S. adults say it is essential that NASA continue to be involved in space exploration, the survey finds. A smaller share (32%) believe that private companies will ensure enough progress is made in space exploration, even without NASA’s involvement.”

The Biden administration is happy to play to such sentiments with its National Cislunar Science & Technology Strategy which heavily emphasizes “the NASA Artemis program, with its near-term mission to return humans to the Moon.” But the publication of that strategy last November was no accident, coinciding as it did with the successful test of the long-delayed Space Launch System and Orion crew capsule. Without the SLS, plans for NASA’s return to the moon are pipe dreams, since it has largely relied on others for reaching space since the 2011 retirement of the space shuttle program.

Keep reading

Scientist Finds ‘Evidence’ of Another Universe Before This One

Scientists believe that before our universe, another, previous cosmos existed. In a way, they are calling this process a cosmic cycle that repeats.“The next universe will be just like ours — but only in overall appearance, not in detail, of course…”A researcher may just have discovered conclusive evidence that another cosmos existed before this one. Not only that, but he also claims that ours is just the latest in an infinite series of universes. Professor Sir Roger Penrose argues that our known cosmos is the latest in a long line of previous universes, answering the question of what was ‘there’ before the Big Bang.

First spotted by astronomers in the mid-1960s, this radiation permeates the whole of space in the form of microwaves.

However, studies have shown that this radiation is not spread equally across the cosmos. Astronomers had argued that this inequality of distribution is due to the turbulence that existed when our universe was created.

According to Professor Sir Roger Penrose, a former College of late Professor Hawking, our universe still carries the scars of the events of our universe’s predecessor, which was destroyed some 14 billion years ago.

Prof Penrose, a researcher from the University of Oxford, is one of the world’s most distinguished theoretical physicists. He claims evidence suggests our universe is just the latest in an infinite series of universes, each emerging phoenix-like from its predecessor in a Big Bang.

Keep reading

Human-induced stem cells from Seattle now in space

Scientists are taking a deeper dive into the impacts of micro-gravity on the human body. Seattle’s Allen Institute is playing a key role in this experiment.

This particular mission,” Allen Institute for Cell Science scientist Brock Roberts said, “will provide yet another test for the fundamental capability of these stem cells.”

On Monday morning, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Dragon Spacecraft with four Axiom-2 crewmembers inside, docked at the International Space Station (ISS). Also on that flight are human-induced pluripotent stem cells produced by scientists at the Allen Institute. This is the first time cells from the Allen Institute have traveled to space.

The Axiom-2 crew members will spend eight days at the ISS. The four astronauts will conduct scientific experiments, which include observing the effects of micro-gravity on cell growth and development.

The stem cells are capable of many amazing things they can differentiate into many different tissues,” Roberts said. “They can proliferate indefinitely without changing their fundamental character, but we don’t know a lot about their ability to exist and preform all of those fascinating phenomenon in space, we we will find out about that.”

The stem-cell study is part of a series of NASA-funded experiments led by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Keep reading

Sabotage in Space: Russians Accuse Kiev of Targeting Civilian Satellites – Threaten ‘Appropriate Response’

From the bottom of the sea, high up to the Stratosphere: after the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed in a deep sea op, Russians state that the next target for sabotage may be up in space.

TASS reported how the Russian Foreign Ministry pointed to Ukraine’s attempts to influence Russian civilian communications satellites.

Foreign Ministry statement:

“The Kiev regime, with the participation of specialists from a number of foreign states, is attempting to influence Russian civilian communications satellites.

This is an outrageous violation of international law. The Russian side has the right to respond appropriately. All the necessary opportunities are available for this.”

Moscow has not clarified which foreign states would be aiding Kiev in this effort, nor was it clear the precise way in which Kiev is trying to disrupt these craft. Satellites have indeed become a much debated topic in this war.

TASS: “Western governments and private companies have provided Ukraine with satellite coverage for months.

Most notably, the Starlink satellites operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX have become important tools for the Ukrainian troops in the ongoing conflict with Russia.”

Russian diplomats have warned that these satellites may end up becoming a legitimate military target.

This new spatial development comes just as it surfaces that SpaceX is further limiting Starlink service in Ukraine.

Keep reading