NASA’s auditing body, the Office of Audits, has produced a report detailing the agency’s commitment to replacing the International Space Station (ISS) with one or more commercial space stations once the orbiting lab is retired. Despite still being scheduled for 2024, all indications are that the ISS’s operational life will be extended to 2030, which is when the agency is assuming it’ll be able to hand off human occupation of an on-orbit science facility to a private company.
This audit basically details the current costs of maintenance and operation of the ISS, and also explains why it thinks that there will still be an essential need for a research facility that can provide a test bed for prolonged human exposure to space, as well as for development and demonstration of tech key to helping people explore deep space, including the establishment of a more permanent presence on the moon and exploration of Mars.
The conclusion is that NASA hopes to see a commercial station operation by 2028 in order to give a period of two years of overlap before the anticipated retirement and de-orbiting of the ISS. That timeline presents clear risks, however, in part because of “limited market demand, inadequate funding, unreliable costs estimates and still-evolving requirements.”
The good news is that recently a lot of companies seem to be interested in pursuing the development of commercial orbital destinations. A partnership between Nanoracks, its parent company Voyager Space,and Lockheed Martin aims to produce one by 2027. Blue Origin hopes to launch its Orbital Reef station with Sierra Space and Boeing by 2030 at the latest, while Axiom is already progressing with its plan to send up modules that will attach to the ISS before separating and self-orbiting as its own station by 2028.
You can read the NASA Office of Audits report in full below:
There could be more rainfall than snow in the Arctic in as little as 30 years because of the world's changing climate, according to a new study that predicts the transition will happen decades earlier than previously anticipated.
The change is expected to happen sometime between 2050 and 2080, says research led by the University of Manitoba and published in the journal Nature Communications. Previously, the transition to a rain-dominated Arctic was expected to happen somewhere between 2070 and 2090.
Lead author Michelle McCrystall, a postdoctoral fellow at the university's Centre for Earth Observation Science, said more than 50 per cent of precipitation in the Arctic falling as rain instead of snow will have "global implications" and a "very direct impact" on Indigenous people throughout the Arctic.
The biggest precipitation changes, she added, will happen during the fall. Predominant snowfall and snow precipitation is still expected in the winter months, even by the end of the century.
Some regions will make the transition earlier than others, she explained, based on their temperatures and proximity to the North Pole.
Michelle McCrystall, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Manitoba, led the study. She says the Arctic is likely to become dominated by rainfall events if the world stays on its current trajectory, and that it will have a "very direct impact" on Indigenous people. (Michelle McCrystall)
McCrystall said the 2050 to 2080 range in which the transition could happen reflects the variability of all the data that was used, but the average points to it happening, more specifically, around the year 2070.
Animal starvation
McCrystall said more rain in the Arctic would also lead to more rain-on-snow events — when rain falls onto an existing snowpack and freezes, forming ice layers either on the snow or within it — which would be "very damaging" for foraging mammals like reindeer, caribou and muskox.
Because of that ice, foraging animals will have a harder time reaching the grassland that lies beneath it.
"It can cause a huge starvation and die off in a lot of these populations," she said.
Mark Serreze, a co-author of the study and the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said in a statement "the Arctic is changing so fast that Arctic wildlife might not be able to adapt.
"It's not just a problem for the reindeer, caribou and muskox, but for the people of the North that depend on them as well."
The mounted head of a muskox looks out over two Arctic exhibits at the Military Museums in Calgary in Feb. 2016. Foraging animals, like muskox, will have trouble reaching food sources below layers of ice in the snow caused by more frequent rain in the Arctic, said McCrystall. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)
Kent Moore, a professor of atmospheric physics at the University of Toronto, who is outside of the research team, told CBC News that rain-on-snow events would also cause "incredible" stress on hairy animals like muskox.
"If it rains and then it freezes, then they get a kind of frozen ice on their body, and that can be very, very stressful for them. They can lose heat more rapidly."
Transition likely to happen in our lifetime, study predicts
Moore said he's not surprised the Arctic will see more rainfall in the future, but he is surprised when the researchers predict the transition to more rain than snow is going to happen.
"A couple of decades is pretty significant," he said. "Animals have to adapt quick, but we also have to adapt quicker. And that's always a challenge, that adaptation," he said.
Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center, who is also not one of the study's authors, said a difference of a few decades means that this transition is more likely to happen in the lifespan of current generations.
"It becomes, for a lot of people, not something that maybe my children or grandchildren will see, but something I may very well live to see," he said, adding that he, too, was not surprised by the new prediction.
Rising sea levels, thawing permafrost
Meier and McCrystall both said an increase in Arctic rainfall would contribute to rising sea levels, particularly because it will cause more glaciers along the coast of Greenland to fall into the water.
Rain fell on the summit of Greenland — a location where precipitation has previously always fallen as snow or ice — for the first time on record this year.
In this Aug. 2019 file photo, large icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland. McCrystall said warmer temperatures and more rainfall in the Arctic means that more glaciers along the coast of Greenland will fall into the water. (Felipe Dana/The Associated Press)
The rain could also lead to permafrost thaw, said McCrystall.
"With more warming and more rainfall, that kind of percolates through the soil and will allow the soil to warm up," she said. Permafrost stores carbon, she pointed out, and if it thaws "you'll get a lot more greenhouse gases that will be emitted into the atmosphere."
McCrystall said that increase in carbon creates a negative impact, because carbon emissions contribute to the further warming of the atmosphere.
"Changes that happen in the Arctic don't really stay within the Arctic," she said.
Though she doesn't see her research as a call to action, McCrystall wants to see people putting more pressure on politicians to make tangible changes that will have big impacts in the fight against climate change.
The research team, which also included members from University College London, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Lapland and the University of Exeter, said that if the world is able to remain below 1.5 C of global warming, the transition to a rainfall-dominated precipitation might not happen in some Arctic regions.
But, if the world remains on its current trajectory, the transition is likely.
A spacewalk planned for Tuesday to replace a faulty antenna on the International Space Station has been postponed for 48 hours, after mission control concluded that the position of orbital debris cited for the delay posed no risk to the repair operation, NASA said.
Two U.S. astronauts were originally due to venture outside the space station on Tuesday morning to begin their work, despite what NASA officials acknowledged was a slightly elevated risk level from debris scattered in low-Earth orbit by a Russian anti-satellite missile test this month.
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But about five hours before the outing was to have begun, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced the spacewalk had been temporarily called off after mission control was alerted that the U.S. military’s Space Surveillance Network had detected debris that could collide with the space station. The origin of the debris was not made clear in the NASA announcement.
On Tuesday afternoon, NASA said its evaluation of the situation “determined the orbit of the debris does not pose a risk to a scheduled spacewalk” or space station operations.
The antenna repair was rescheduled for Thursday, with astronauts Tom Marshburn, 61, and Kayla Barron, 34, set to begin their planned 6-1/2-hour spacewalk starting at 7:10 a.m. EST (1210 GMT).
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A NASA spokesman, Gary Jordan, said there was no information available about the size of the debris, its proximity to the space station, which is orbiting about 250 miles (402 km) above the Earth, or whether one or more objects were involved.
“We have no indications that this is related” to the Russian missile test weeks earlier, Jordan added in an email to Reuters.
The planned “extravehicular activity,” or EVA, will mark the fifth spacewalk for Marshburn, a medical doctor and former flight surgeon with two previous trips to orbit, and a first for Barron, a U.S. Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer on her debut spaceflight for NASA.
Their objective is to remove a faulty S-band radio communications antenna assembly, now more than 20 years old, and replace it with a new spare stowed outside the space station.
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According to plans, Marshburn will work with Barron while positioned at the end of a robotic arm operated from inside the station by German astronaut Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency, with help from NASA crewmate Raja Chari.
The four arrived at the station on Nov. 11 in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, joining two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut already aboard the space laboratory.
Four days later, Russia fired a missile into one of its own defunct satellites in an unannounced space weapons test, generating a large orbital debris field that prompted an emergency aboard the space station. All seven crew members scrambled to take shelter in their docked spaceships to allow for a quick getaway until the immediate danger passed, according to NASA.
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The residual debris cloud from the blasted satellite has since dispersed, according to Dana Weigel, NASA deputy manager of the space station program.
But NASA calculates that remaining fragments continue to pose a “slightly elevated” background risk to the orbiting platform as a whole, and a 7% higher risk of spacewalkers’ suits being punctured, as compared to before Russia’s missile test, Weigel told reporters on Monday.
Although NASA has yet to fully quantify hazards posed by more than 1,700 larger fragments it is tracking around the station’s orbit, the 7% higher risk to spacewalkers falls “well within” fluctuations previously seen in “the natural environment,” Weigel said. (Reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Gerry Doyle and Peter Cooney)
Illustration of the DART spacecraft with the Roll Out Solar Arrays (ROSA) extended. Each of the two ROSA arrays in 8.6 meters by 2.3 meters. Credit: NASA
NASA’s latest launch into outer space is going to make an impact. In fact, that’s its entire mission.
DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), which launched at 10:21 p.m. PST on November 23 out of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, is NASA’s first planetary defense mission. This mission will demonstrate asteroid deflection via kinetic impact. The goal is to collide with the target to see how the orbit changes. It’s a test run to see if such a plan is feasible should we find an asteroid on a collision course with Earth one day.
Cristina Thomas, an assistant professor of astronomy and planetary sciences at Northern Arizona University and lead of the DART Observations Working Group, is excited to see the effects of the impact. She and her international team have been working for years to obtain a precise pre-impact orbit of Dimorphos, the satellite asteroid, around Didymos, the primary asteroid in a near-Earth asteroid system.
Near-Earth, of course, is relative; the planet is in no danger from Didymos. However, an asteroid heading toward Earth is possible, and scientists throughout the world are working on ways to identify these potential threats and how to mitigate them. If this mission goes according to plan, this technique, called kinetic impact deflection, could be an important piece of a planetary defense system.
“DART is a critical next step for planetary defense,” Thomas said. “It is, on the surface, a simple test, but we will not completely understand what will happen until we do it.”
Using data from 2003, when the satellite was discovered, through early 2021, the working group has been able to precisely constrain the characteristics of the orbit and the position of Dimorphos in the orbit at the time of impact in fall 2022. They take repeated images of the same object, which shows dips in brightness when the satellite passes in front of or behind the primary. The timing of these brightness dips, called mutual events, allows the scientists to determine the orbital period of the satellite.
“This is essentially thinking of the satellite Dimorphos as a clock, which will return to its position in front of or behind Didymos at consistent intervals,” Thomas said. “Our working group will begin observations again in the months prior to the DART impact. We want to have the most complete picture of the current orbit before we change it through impact.”
Thomas were in California for the launch, and she and her team will continue to do observations after the collision to determine the change in the orbital period caused by the spacecraft’s impact.
What is DART?
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test is the world’s first full-scale planetary defense test, demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection technology. DART is a focused mission, proving that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and intentionally collide with it (called a kinetic impact) at roughly 4 miles per second (6 kilometers per second). Its target is the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos (Greek for “two forms”), which orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos (Greek for “twin”). As part of NASA’s larger planetary defense strategy, DART will simultaneously test new technologies and provide important data to enhance modeling and predictive capabilities and help scientists better prepare for an asteroid that might pose a threat to Earth, should one be discovered.
It feels a bit like a headline ripped from the plotline of the 2013 flick “Gravity” - NASA astronauts suddenly find themselves having to worry more about the threat of space debris whipping around Earth at over 17,000 miles per hour.
Just two weeks after the current crew of the International Space Station had to take emergency shelter in the Russian Soyuz and SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules that are docked to the ISS, NASA has now postponed a planned spacewalk because of the threat.
One source of the increased threat is Russia’s recent anti-satellite missile test that created hundreds, if not thousands, of new pieces of debris in low-earth orbit. On November 15 it was reported that Russia blasted one of its own defunct satellites to smithereens, a move that drew global condemnation.
“It was dangerous. It was reckless. It was irresponsible,” US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said.
Two NASA astronauts were scheduled to venture outside the ISS on Tuesday for a spacewalk to repair a bad antenna system, but a last minute warning late Monday led to a change of plans
“NASA received a debris notification for the International Space Station,” reads a statement from the space agency. “Due to the lack of opportunity to properly assess the risk it could pose to the astronauts, teams have decided to delay the spacewalk until more information is available.”
To be clear, we don’t yet know if the debris notification is directly related to the new field of junk created by the Russian missile test. However, the fact is that there’s a lot more debris orbiting Earth at or near the same relative altitude as the ISS than there was a few weeks ago as a result of the test.
NASA says the “space station schedule and operations are able to easily accommodate the delay of the spacewalk.”
Whenever it finally takes place, the spacewalk is expected to take 6.5 hours for NASA astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron to replace an S-band Antenna Subassembly (SASA) with a spare.
And in case you were wondering: No, the antenna was not hit by space debris, at least not so far as we know.
Comet C/2021 A1 Leonard photographed from Indiana on November 28, 2021. | Credits: Paul Macklin/ Spaceweathergallery.com 
It just might be that early Christmas present the skywatchers were waiting for. After months of eager anticipation, this year’s most promising comet — Comet Leonard — is finally drawing closer to Earth and could potentially become visible to binocular and even naked eyes.
"There are chances to easily see this comet by the naked eye, even if under less than optimal conditions," says astronomer Gianluca Masi, who is with the Virtual Telescope Project based in Italy. And true enough, it was sighted in Italy on Monday night/ Tuesday early hours.
Even if not with a naked eye (yet!) you can see the luminous Lenny with a pair of binoculars. As of now, quite a few astrophotographers have managed to snap some pretty shots of Leonard sporting a smart green coma with an impressive extended tail.
What makes Leonard so special?
When it was discovered on January 3, 2021, by Greg Leonard, the senior research specialist at Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona Comet C/2021 A1 was heading in the direction of our planet from deep space with the potential to be the brightest comet of 2021. Now with no other comet to beat our superstar, Comet Leonard (as it is better known eponymously after its discoverer) is all set to claim the title of being the brightest comet of this year.
If it lives up to the predictions, then Leonard will pass near Earth in December when it is likely to be visible with binoculars or possibly even without them. It has a rather long journey after saying “hello” to us Earthlings. It is headed to make a close pass by the Sun and then back out to deep space in January.
But then, astronomers and most skygazers know by now to not set too many expectations on comets. The notoriously fickle celestial bodies can decide halfway through the transition to not make an appearance and just disintegrate. Disappointment in bold letters. We hope Leonard doesn’t disappoint us — it has taken about 35,000 years of hurtling through space to come this close to us. A chance for us to witness a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event.
Can you see it from India?
As of now, Comet Leonard is below the horizon from India. Given its current magnitude, it will be visible with the help of a binocular with a 40-50mm aperture or a small telescope. You can spot it in the early hours of the day. TheSkyLive website and the comet’s Twitter handle can tell you the exact timings as per your zone. The Sky Live tells us that it is set to rise at 1:48 a.m, will be in transit at around 8:58 a.m. and will set at about 4:12 p.m IST — give or take a few minutes to factor in atmospheric conditions.
For clarity sake, the rise and set times are defined as the time at which the upper limb of the comet touches the horizon, considering the effect of the atmospheric refraction.
So set your alarm clocks and look into the skies. Smoggy haze notwithstanding, you just might be able to this huge snowball from space hurtling through the skies above you.
Xenobots are the world’s first AI-designed biological robots that can self-repair and self-replicate.
The year was 1948 when Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann proposed the idea of an autonomous robot capable of using raw materials to reproduce itself. Today, Neumann’s vision is finally realized with one major twist: the self-replicating robot isn’t made of aluminum, plastics, spur gears or sprockets. The parent robot and its babies, a new lineage of organism called Xenobots, are entirely biological. “It was exciting to see that we could [make] this Von Neumann machine, but using cells instead of robot parts,” says co-author Sam Kriegman, computer scientist at the Wyss Institute at Harvard and co-author of the Xenobots paper published today in PNAS.
“People have philosophized about this forever,” says Joshua Bongard, senior author and computer scientist at the University of Vermont. “But now you can actually do experiments to create biological machines, or machines that make biology, which in turn make machines.”
It’s okay to be confused. The researchers liberally refer to Xenobots as “machines” even though Xenobots don’t contain a single mechanical component. Science may be moving faster than our framework for talking and even thinking about this new category of machine life. “I think it challenges us to see that there may not be a clear dividing line between machine and organism,” says Bongard.
Artificial Intelligence
The self-replicating Xenobot was first “conceived” by an artificial intelligence (AI) program working on UVM's supercomputer. The AI ran an evolutionary algorithm capable of testing billions of biological body shapes in a simulation. The goal was to discover which configuration of cells is capable of self-replication. The AI rendered a winning design: a cluster of cells shaped like Pac-Man from the 1980s arcade game.
Biologist Douglas Blackiston took the AI’s blueprint and used microcautery electrodes and surgical forceps to hand-sculpt the Xenobots, creatures made up of clusters of 4,000-5,000 frog cells swimming in a petri dish. Random frog cells added to the dish give the parent Xenobots raw material to make babies inside their Pac-Man-shaped mouths. The Xenobabies grow into parent Xenobots. By adding frog cells, self-replication continues generation after generation.
Biological Intelligence
Sculpting a bespoke shape out of stem cells is the “programming” that instructs cell clusters to develop a certain way. Shaping a cluster of frog cells in this specific configuration programs them to become a new self-replicating life form. “This is an AI designing life, or designing a robot, whatever you want to call it,” says Blackiston. “These are things that are not under the purview of [natural] selection.”
New Definitions For Intelligence
Robots made of traditional robot parts that perform quite well in controlled environments often fail in the real world. “Once you move through the world, it's unpredictable, things are messy,” says Kriegman, who was delighted by the possibility of using robotics materials that have biological intelligence built in. “Doug came up with the notion of building robots out of biological stuff,” says Kriegman. “You get this intelligence for free. And we were off to the races.”
When asked if Xenobots are intelligent, Blackiston has reservations. Of the two computer scientists and two biologists on the research team, Blackiston is more comfortable calling Xenobots programmed engineered organisms with intelligence happening at the design and programming level but not in the actual Xenobot. “My opinion is that they're not intelligent,” says Blackiston. Though he agrees with the rest of the team that their work challenges scientific definitions. “[Definitions] are being driven into extinction because of these technologies,” says Bongard. “Xenobots are a product of AI and AI itself is helping to drive to extinction our standard definitions of intelligence.”
Intelligent Design
Definitions aside, Blackiston thinks society will have to grapple with many of the applications for, and implications of, this new technology—like the question of artificial intelligence designing replacement parts for humans. “What if an AI tinkers around and figures out it can design a better heart than the one that evolution has given us?” Asks Blackiston, who thinks it’s possible AI could give us blueprints to create superior organs to our current models. “I think we’re going to see these questions popping up all over the medical and environmental space in the next 10-15 years.”
Blackiston surgically shaping the first generation of AI-designed Xenobot:
Xenobots collect frog cells and shaping them into Xenobabies:
On a winter morning in 2013, a meteor the size of a four-story building screamed across the country, exploding near the city of Chelyabinsk and injuring more than 1,600 people amid widespread property damage.
The chunk of rock and iron, which was 60 feet across, served as a violent reminder that Earth, bombarded daily with tons of space-going debris, periodically intersects with large planet killers—and a significant portion of those remain undocumented.
After years of study and discussion, NASA has launched its first effort to spare Earth the kind of calamity that extinguished the dinosaurs, crashing a space probe into an asteroid to alter its speed and course. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) lifted off Nov. 23 local time aboard a SpaceX rocket from California and will cruise for 10 months to a binary asteroid system.
The idea is that if humans have adequate time to react—decades of notice being preferable—enough energy can be transferred into a speeding rock to alter its trajectory and make it miss Earth, avoiding catastrophe up to and including an extinction-level event. (Though a popular subject in science fiction, it's worth noting that NASA's current toolkit of asteroid-nudging techniques does not include Morgan Freeman, Bruce Willis or nuclear weapons.)
Given the critical nature of the work, it's "not a stretch to suggest that DART may be one of the most consequential missions ever undertaken by NASA," Casey Dreier, an analyst with The Planetary Society, wrote in a November memo to members.
"This test is to demonstrate that this technology is mature enough so that it would be ready if an actual asteroid impact threat were detected," Lindley Johnson, NASA's planetary defense officer, said at a Nov. 4 news conference.
In September of next year—if all goes as planned—the DART craft will target Dimorphos, the smaller, 530-foot rocky body gravitationally tied to the larger Didymos, which is almost 2,600 feet across. The two rocks travel about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) apart, and Dimorphos orbits its larger sibling every 11 hours and 55 minutes, "just like clockwork," Johnson said.
Traveling at about 15,000 mph, the craft, which weighs 1,344 pounds and is 59 feet across, is to collide head-on with Dimorphos to both slow the rock by a fraction of a second and to adjust its orbital period around the larger asteroid by several minutes.
"It's all about measuring the momentum transfer: How much momentum do we put into the asteroid by hitting it with the spacecraft?" said Andy Cheng, lead investigator for the mission at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which built and manages the spacecraft.
Didymos was discovered 25 years ago and has been well-analyzed (insofar as asteroids and comets go). Its course isn't predicted to meet Earth in the future, but its relatively close trajectory gives scientists a good test platform to observe with telescopes from about 6.8 million miles away.
DART will use laser targeting and other high-resolution technologies to autonomously choose its impact point. As it races toward the rock, the craft's camera will send images back to Earth. A small cube-satellite released from the main craft before impact will also record images from a safe distance. One big unknown: The smaller body's surface composition and topography, which are too small to ascertain from Earth.
For more than 15 years, NASA has been under Congressional orders to catalog near-Earth objects (NEOs) larger than 140 meters (460 feet), the size at which an asteroid strike would cause enormous devastation. "While no known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years, less than half of the estimated 25,000 NEOs that are 140 meters and larger in size have been found to date," according to NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
The 2013 Chelyabinsk incident caused Washington to take notice, with funding for planetary defense rising by more than 4,000% to $200 million annually over the past decade, thanks to ample support from both the Obama and Trump administrations, Dreier said.
The challenges for spotting these potential planet killers are daunting, however. Earth-based telescopes are limited in range, objects approaching from the direction of the sun can't be seen, many asteroids reflect almost zero light, and all travel ludicrously fast—43,000 mph or 12 miles per second, on average.
Moreover, not all are local. In 2017, astronomers spied the first large visitor from outside the solar system, a 400-meter, cigar-shaped oddity called Oumuamua that looped around the sun at a blistering 196,000 mph on its way back out into interstellar space.
NASA plans additional testing of its trajectory-altering techniques once it has data from DART's destruction at Dimorphos, assuming the mission is successful.
A "gravity tractor" is another idea under active consideration, the concept being to attach a spacecraft to an asteroid to enlarge its mass and slowly change its orbit.
Still, observation is critical to preventing a repeat of the fate that befell the dinosaurs. NASA and other scientists are laboring under last year's loss of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which played a key role in radar assessments of near-Earth objects, helping researchers to determine their size and orbits. Says Johnson, the earth's defender at NASA: "The key to planetary defense is finding them well before they are an impact threat."
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The James Webb Space Telescope inside a clean room at the Guiana Space Center. Credit: Stephen Clark / Spaceflight Now
NASA engineers have cleared teams at the Guiana Space Center in South America to begin loading 63 gallons of fuel and oxidizer into the James Webb Space Telescope, after extra testing showed the observatory suffered no damage during a processing incident in the clean room earlier this month.
During a “consent to fuel” review held Wednesday, Nov. 24, mission managers gave approval to begin the propellant loading process at the French Guiana spaceport the following day.
“Additional testing was conducted this week to ensure the observatory’s health following an incident that occurred when the release of a clamp band caused a vibration throughout the observatory,” NASA said in a statement Wednesday.
The start of propellant loading keeps the $9.7 billion James Webb Space Telescope on track for liftoff Dec. 22 aboard a European Ariane 5 rocket. The half-hour launch window opens at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT; 9:20 a.m. French Guiana time).
The propellant loading operations inside the S5B fueling cell at the Guiana Space Center will take about 10 days to complete, according to NASA. The 10-day period includes steps to prepare, purge, and pressurize elements within the spacecraft bus, the lower section of the 35-foot-tall (10.66-meter) observatory.
The propellant loading itself will occur over several hours on two separate days, mission team members told Spaceflight Now.
The Webb telescope’s spacecraft bus, built by Northrop Grumman, will be filled with 42 gallons (159 liters) of hydrazine and 21 gallons (79.5 liters) of dinitrogen tetroxide, a mix of storable fuel and oxidizer to feed the mission’s 20 rocket thrusters.
Four of the small engines — a primary and redundant thruster in two pods — will consume fuel and oxidizer for major course correction maneuvers. Webb has eight more thruster modules, each with two small engines to nudge the observatory with a single pound of thrust, providing pointing control in concert with spinning reaction wheels inside the spacecraft.
Ground teams wearing self-contained protective suits will be inside the clean room during loading of the toxic propellants. Technicians will also load helium pressurant into the spacecraft.
Webb’s spacecraft bus provides propulsion, electrical power, and communications for the observatory.
NASA announced last week that Webb’s launch was delayed from Dec. 18 to Dec. 22 after managers ordered additional testing on the spacecraft.
The space agency said a “sudden, unplanned release” of a clamp band sent a vibration through the observatory Nov. 9, when technicians were mating Webb to its launch vehicle adapter, a device that connects the observatory with the upper stage of the Ariane 5 rocket.
The adapter’s high-tension clamp band system secures the spacecraft to the rocket until the command to separate Webb about a half-hour after liftoff.
RUAG Space, a Swiss company that specializes in building rocket structures and other components, supplied the payload adapter system for the Ariane 5 rocket and Webb, according to posts on the company’s social media pages.
The processing work inside the S5 payload facility at the Guiana Space Center is being performed under the “overall responsibility” of Arianespace, the French launch services provider for the Ariane 5 program. The European Space Agency, a junior partner on Webb, is paying for the launch as part of its contribution to the mission.
Once fueled, Webb will be transferred to the final assembly building at the spaceport in French Guiana, where a crane will hoist the observatory on top of its Ariane 5 launcher.
The James Webb Space Telescope is folded up in launch configuration to fit inside the Ariane 5 rocket’s 17.7-foot-wide (5.4-meter) payload fairing. Once in space, the observatory will unfurl a power-generating solar panel and a high-gain communications antenna, then start a series of make-or-break deployments of its five-layer sunshield, which will open to the size of a tennis court.
Webb, designed to peer deeper into the cosmos than ever before, has 18 gold-coated beryllium mirror segments that will combine to create the largest telescope mirror ever sent into space, with a diameter of 21.3 feet (6.5 meters). Some of the mirrors are mounted on deployable wings that must fold into place to configure the telescope for science observations.
Then the telescope’s infrared detectors have to cool down to cryogenic temperatures, with parts of the instruments chilled to near absolute zero at a temperature of 7 Kelvin (minus 447.1 degrees Fahrenheit).
The telescope’s mirror segments each have tiny mechanical actuators to adjust focus and alignment. The design makes Webb the most expensive and most complex science mission ever launched into space.
“When you work on a $10 billion telescope, conservatism is the order of the day,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science mission directorate.
SpaceX and NASA Crew-3 mission finally launch into space after delays
After several delays, the SpaceX and NASA Crew-3 mission finally launched into space with four astronauts.
USA TODAY, Storyful
Michael Strahan, former football star and host of "Good Morning America," will be taking off with a crew of five other passengers on Dec. 9, amidst a global pandemic and rising cases of the new omicron variant.
Strahan won't be the first civilian in space. In September, the Inspiration4 launch sent four civilians (a physician's assistant, an aerospace worker, a professor and a billionaire) into orbit. In October, William Shatner became the oldest person to go into space, at the age of 90.
Civilian spaceflight launches have had a shining spotlight in a time when COVID devastated regions all over the globe. Some, like Prince William, have even criticized the obsession on spaceflight, saying billionaires and companies should focus more on addressing issues closer to Earth.
But could technology developed for space help us battle the pandemic?
An article released in September in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Medicine investigated how space-based technologies could be used to help manage and prevent pandemics.
When astronauts are in space, for example, their medical information is meticulously tracked, the paper says.
In fact, astronauts often run medical experiments in space to help researchers better understand how the human body reacts to the properties of space, according to Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA.
For the SpaceX Inspiration4 launch, McAlister said, civilians conducted a series of experiments, such as drawing blood in space, and shared the data with researchers on Earth.
"Telemedicine was actually developed by space agencies as well in order to provide care, monitor the care of astronauts," says Dr. Farhan Asrar, a medical doctor and global faculty member at the International Space University. Asrar was a contributor to the Nature Medicine article.
Similarly, Asrar points out, telemedicine can be used to monitor and assess COVID patients remotely without the risk of infecting healthcare workers.
Asrar says that wearable technology has already been used by Canadian astronauts to monitor several key parameters of health, such as blood pressure, temperature, breathing rate and heart rate, all of which were streamed hundreds of miles from Earth aboard the International Space Station.
These wearable devices can be used by healthcare workers to detect early on whether they are developing and spreading symptoms, the paper suggests.
Satellite imagery could contribute to pandemic planning and the distribution of vaccines against COVID-19, according to the paper.
Satellites launched into space have already helped plot disease transmission during the Ebola outbreak, the paper points out. In the fight against polio, satellite images found marginalized and previously unknown villages in Nigeria, assisting with eradication efforts.
"There are several parameters which you can monitor using satellites," Asrar says. "We can monitor temperatures that are ideal for these infectious conditions so that if an outbreak is occurring, you can use this technology to monitor the progression."
Asrar cites using satellite monitoring on mosquito populations as a potential way to predict outbreaks of malaria.
Isolation and developing techniques to preserve mental health
One more thing we can learn from astronauts is the science of managing isolation, the paper says.
Astronauts often have to be in space for days or months on end, with little or no contact with their loved ones. In a similar sense, social distancing guidelines have prevented people from gathering and made those with limited technological resources even more isolated, the paper points out.
In another article published in Nature in May of 2020, astronauts shared ways that they dealt with isolation in space, including having a carefully managed daily routine and structuring work around an inspiring mission.
Both research papers suggest that by understanding how astronauts cope with isolation, we can develop better techniques for preserving our mental health during the pandemic.
Is NASA aware of any Earth-threatening asteroids? Luckily there are no known asteroid threats to Earth for at least 100 years. But that doesn’t mean we’re not looking. Asteroid expert Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory breaks it down:
Video Transcript:
Is NASA Aware of Any Earth-Threatening Asteroids? We Asked a NASA Scientist.
No, there is no asteroid that we know of that is concerning in terms of impact hazard.
Now, we know that asteroid impacts have happened in the past and can certainly happen in the future. But we should keep in mind that those are rare events.
An asteroid impact that could cause serious regional damage only happens every few thousand years or longer.
Still, it’s a good idea to protect us against that possibility and the rule of the game is find asteroids before they find us.
And that’s why for over 20 years, NASA has been funding search programs to observe the sky pretty much every single night to find and track asteroids.
And we’ve been doing a pretty good job at that. So far, we’ve discovered more than a million asteroids, including 95 percent of the asteroids that are greater than one kilometer and that could come close to the Earth.
Once we discover an asteroid, we project its motion into the future to assess the possibility of an impact with Earth.
We have a scale called Torino scale that helps us rank the risk coming from each asteroid. It goes from zero, which is lowest risk, to 10, which is highest risk.
And the good news is that for all the asteroids that we’ve discovered so far, the Torino scale is zero — so, lowest risk for the next hundred years.
So, is NASA aware of any Earth-threatening asteroids?
No. But we will keep searching the skies just in case.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — NASA launched a spacecraft Tuesday night on a mission to smash into an asteroid and test whether it would be possible to knock a speeding space rock off course if one were to threaten Earth.
The DART spacecraft, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in a $330 million project with echoes of the Bruce Willis movie “Armageddon.”
If all goes well, the boxy, 1,200-pound (540-kilogram) craft will slam head-on into Dimorphos, an asteroid 525 feet (160 meters) across, at 15,000 mph (24,139 kph) next September.
“This isn’t going to destroy the asteroid. It’s just going to give it a small nudge,” said mission official Nancy Chabot of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the project.
Dimorphos orbits a much larger asteroid called Didymos. The pair are no danger to Earth but offer scientists a better way to measure the effectiveness of a collision than a single asteroid flying through space.
Dimorphos completes one orbit of Didymos every 11 hours, 55 minutes. DART’s goal is a crash that will slow Dimorphos down and cause it to fall closer toward the bigger asteroid, shaving 10 minutes off its orbit.
The change in the orbital period will be measured by telescopes on Earth. The minimum change for the mission to be considered a success is 73 seconds.
The DART technique could prove useful for altering the course of an asteroid years or decades before it bears down on Earth with the potential for catastrophe.
A small nudge “would add up to a big change in its future position, and then the asteroid and the Earth wouldn’t be on a collision course,” Chabot said.
Scientists constantly search for asteroids and plot their courses to determine whether they could hit the planet.
“Although there isn’t a currently known asteroid that’s on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there,” said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA. “The key to planetary defense is finding them well before they are an impact threat.”
DART will take 10 months to reach the asteroid pair. The collision will occur about 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers) from Earth.
Ten days beforehand, DART will release a tiny observation spacecraft supplied by the Italian space agency that will follow it.
DART will stream video until it is destroyed on impact. Three minutes later, the trailing craft will make images of the impact site and material that is ejected.
An Italian telescope captured NASA's asteroid-smashing mission shortly after its launch into space this week.
A new image and video, taken by the Elena telescope located in Ceccano, Italy, shows NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, also known as DART, separated from the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket which launched the spacecraft from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Tuesday (Nov. 23 PST, or early Nov. 24 EST) . The mission sent DART on a 10-month-long journey to a binary asteroid system called Didymos.
Both DART and the booster can be seen in this image (above), which was taken remotely with a single 30-second exposure, astronomer Gianluca Masi said in a statement. Masi runs the Virtual Telescope Project 2.0, which includes the Elena telescope.
The image was taken remotely 10 hours after DART lifted off, Masi said.
NASA's DART spacecraft and a Falcon 9 second stage booster that launched it can be seen as two small dots at the center of this image capture a few hours after the mission's launch. (Image credit: The Virtual Telescope Project)
The robotic Elena telescope automatically tracked DART and the booster, both of which are visible at the center of the image as bright dots. The short white lines surrounding those two dots are stars in the background. When the image was taken, DART was about 93,000 miles (150,000 kilometers) from Earth, about half the distance between our planet and the moon, Masi said.
In addition to the static image, the telescope also captured a short video sequence, which shows the separated second-stage booster blinking. This blinking, Masi said, is caused by the booster spinning.
The pioneering DART mission will conduct a first-of-its-kind test that will show if and how a spacecraft can change the path of an asteroid by smashing into it. In September of next year, the spacecraft will ram into a 525-foot-wide (160 meters) asteroid "moonlet" known as Dimorphos, which orbits the larger space rock Didymos. The goal of the experiment is to alter Dimorphos' orbit around Didymos, shortening it by several minutes, to prove that such an intervention could divert the trajectory of a large asteroid if, in the future, one were to be on a path that threatened planet Earth.
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DART also carries a small cubesat called LICIACube, from Italy's space agency, which will be released 10 days ahead of DART's self-destructive impact and film the aftermath of the crash.
In 2024, the European Space Agency (ESA) will also send a larger surveyor spacecraft called Hera to the asteroid system that will analyze the crater and gather data about Didymos' and Dimorphos' physical structure and chemical composition. By then, astronomers will have known whether DART deflected Dimorphos, thanks to ground-based observations.
KOROLYOV /Moscow Region/, November 26. /TASS/. NASA and Roscosmos have begun talks on harmonizing technical standards of Crew Dragon spaceships with the Russian module and Russian spacecraft with the US segment on the International Space Station (ISS), Roscosmos Chief Dmitry Rogozin said at the Flight Control Center on Friday.
"NASA and Roscosmos have launched talks on harmonizing technical standards that will allow not only Crew Dragon or Russian spaceships to dock with the American segment but, in general, this docking is possible and will require an adapter," Rogozin said, replying to a question about whether US spacecraft would be able to dock to Russia’s new Prichal nodal module.
The Prichal module’s docking completed the formation of the ISS Russian segment, the Roscosmos chief said.
The Prichal nodal module will also serve as a prototype for similar modules for the future Russian Orbital Service Station (ROSS) that will be the ‘joints’ of its space body, Rogozin said.
"This is one of the most important prototypes for creating the ROSS whose architecture will differ from the ISS. It should employ the principle of eternal service life: modules that use up their potential will be detached from the station and it will be augmented in a different direction with the help of such nodal modules that will serve as some joints of a new and large metal design engineering body," Rogozin said.
A Soyuz-2.1b carrier rocket with the Progress M-UM space freighter and the Prichal nodal module blasted off from Launch Pad No. 31 (‘Vostok’) of the Baikonur spaceport to the orbital outpost at 16:06 Moscow time on November 24. The flight to the orbital outpost took two days. The Prichal module docked with the Russian Nauka research lab on November 26.
The new module will boost the capabilities of Russian spaceships, including the latest Oryol spacecraft, to dock with the ISS. Overall, the new module will have five docking ports. The first docking of a manned spacecraft with the Prichal module is scheduled for March 18.
The spacecraft-module also delivered about 700 kg of various cargo to the ISS, including equipment and consumables, water purification, medical control including sanitary and hygienic supplies, maintenance and repair tools, as well as standard food rations for the 66th Main Expedition crew.
There will be some interesting lunar action this December as Venus makes a close approach.
The new moon will occur very early on Dec. 4 and will pass below Venus, less than three degrees away, then by Saturn and Jupiter successively Dec. 7 through Dec. 9. The close pass by Venus will be neat for anyone with a decent telescope – you’ll be able to see the moon as a thin crescent and a remarkably similar-looking thin crescent of Venus about one fiftieth the size of the moon.
By about Christmas Day, Venus will appear lower in the southwest just after sunset as it heads west to pass between us and the sun (inferior conjunction) on Jan. 8. Mercury will join Venus over the next two weeks as Mercury moves east and out from behind the sun. Their closest approach will be about three degrees on Dec. 28. By Jan. 8, Venus will be only 0.266 astronomical units (the Earth-sun mean distance) from Earth and just more than one minute of arc in apparent diameter – one thirtieth the size of the moon. This is discernible even with a pair of 7 x 30 binoculars as a reasonably large but very thin crescent. The convenient part is that, since Venus’ orbit is tipped to our own, it will pass about five degrees north of the sun and will be visible for a week or two both in the evening in the southwest and the morning in the southeast.
Something we’re all looking forward to: the winter solstice occurs at 0859 on Dec. 21 and the days begin to get longer.
One other neat thing about this month is that the new moon and lunar perigee – closest approach to Earth – occur only three hours apart on Dec. 4. As well, Earth’s perihelion – closest approach to the sun – occurs on Jan. 3. This means that on Dec. 4, the moon is just about as close as it gets to the Earth and the Earth is nearly as close as it gets to the sun. Since all three are in a nearly straight line all of the tidal effects add up. When two objects orbit each other gravitationally, they each have a gravitational field that decreases as the square of the distance away from each. That means that each body sees a slightly stronger pull of gravity on the side facing the other body and slightly weaker on the side opposite. Since Earth has liquid oceans, they will bulge slightly toward the moon when it’s overhead; on the side farthest away, they see a slightly lower pull from the moon so they bulge away from the moon.
As the TV advertisers say: “But, wait, there’s more!” The oceans also respond to the sun’s gravitational field in the same way. As far as I can figure out (and I’m hitting the limits on my long, long ago math degree), the tidal forces vary as the mass of the attracting body divided by the cube of its distance. If you look up all the mean values for the sun and the moon, you get values of 594 for the sun and 1,288 for the moon. Units are metric tons per cubic kilometre, whatever that actually means. Anyway, the ratio means that the sun exerts a tidal force on the Earth of about 46 per cent of that of the moon. For the Dec. 4 new moon, however, the tidal forces rise to 621 and 1,618 for sun and moon, respectively; this is a total of about 19 per cent greater tidal forces than average. The remaining complication is that the tidal bulges are at their peaks in the plane of Earth’s orbit; in our winter they’re near the Tropic of Capricorn sunward and the Tropic of Cancer away from the sun. That means we’ll see a big variation from day (lower) to night (higher). We seem to see the greatest range about two to three days after the new and full moon for reasons I don’t understand. But, I’d say we can expect some awesome tides the night of Dec. 6. We’ll see pretty much the same in early January too; a little more from the sun and a bit less from the moon.
The remaining complication is that the shape of our coastlines and ocean depths can hugely affect tides. Best examples: Bay of Fundy and Cook Inlet in Alaska (leads to Anchorage). In both cases, the shape and depths of each leads to a resonance period just about the same as the lunar tidal period so the water sloshes in and out like a kid on a swing in time with the moon’s pull. The whole subject is the sort of thing that highly nerdy careers are made of.
Bruce Fryer’s presentation on this and other subjects can be watched on YouTube by entering Sunshine Coast Astronomy in the search line. I found it excellent and will recommend any of the stuff on the channel. The next online Sunshine Coast Astronomy Club meeting is Dec. 10 at 7 p.m. Signup information will be available at sunshinecoastastronomy.wordpress.com.
