This Sunday, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) will announce the four astronauts that will be blasting off to fly around the moon for the Artemis II mission, one of whom will be a Canadian astronaut.
The Artemis II mission will be the first crewed mission to orbit the moon in half a century, and the inclusion of a Canadian astronaut on the mission will make Canada the second country to have an astronaut fly around the moon.
In November 2024, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida will launch the four astronauts into space for the Artemis II mission. They will pilot the Orion spacecraft around the Earth and then around the moon before returning home.
It’s the second step of a project that started last year with the unmanned Artemis I mission. The Artemis missions help to test the launch system and the spacecraft itself. The end goal is for scientists to construct a Lunar Gateway at the moon — a space station that could serve as a jumping off point for further deep space exploration.
There are currently four active Canadian astronauts, but we won’t know until Sunday who will be the first Canadian astronaut to fly around the moon.
THE CANDIDATES
Joshua Kutryk
Kutryk was born in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta and grew up on a cattle farm in eastern Alberta. He is a member of the Canadian Armed Forces, and has been deployed in Libya and Afghanistan in the past.
He worked as an experimental test pilot and fighter pilot in Cold Lake, Alberta before he was recruited by the CSA. He worked on numerous test flight projects as well as on improving the safety of fighter jets such as the CF-18.
Kutryk made it to the top 16 candidates for the CSA in 2009, but wasn’t selected until CSA’s 2017 recruitment campaign.
Sidey-Gibbons comes from Calgary, Alberta, and first worked with the CSA while studying mechanical engineering at McGill University, where she conducted research on flame propagation in microgravity in collaboration with the agency.
Before joining CSA, she lived and worked in the U.K. as an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Her research there focused on how to develop low-emission combusted for gas turbine engines.
She was selected by the CSA in 2017 as a recruit along with Kutryk, and obtained the official title of astronaut in January 2020.
Jeremy Hansen
Hansen was born in London, Ontario and spent his childhood first on a farm near Ailsa Craig, Ontario, and then Ingersoll, Ontario. He is married with three children.
By age 17, he had already obtained glider and private pilot licences through the Air Cadet Program. He is a member of the Canadian Armed Forces and served as a CF-18 fighter pilot before becoming an astronaut.
Hansen graduated as an astronaut in 2011, after being selected as one of two recruits for the CSA in 2009. He currently represents the CSA at NASA and works at the Mission Control Center, serving as the point of connection between the ground and the International Space Station (ISS). He also helps to train astronauts at NASA, the first Canadian to do so.
David Saint-Jacques
Saint-Jacques grew up in Saint-Lambert, Quebec, near Montreal, and is married with three children.
Before joining the CSA, he worked as a medical doctor in Puvirnituq, Nunavik, an Inuit community in northern Quebec. He also works as an adjunct professor of family medicine at McGill University. As a biomedical engineer, he has worked in France and Hungary, and helped to develop optics systems for telescopes and arrays used at observatories in Japan, Hawaii and the Canary Islands.
He was selected as a recruit in 2009 by the CSA and graduated in 2011 from the NASA astronaut program. He has since worked with the Robotics Branch of the NASA Astronaut Office, as a support astronaut for various ISS missions and as the mission control radio operator for a number of resupply missions for the ISS.
In December 2018, Saint-Jacques flew to the ISS to complete a 204-day mission, which is the longest mission any Canadian astronaut has carried out in space to date. During this time, he became the fourth CSA astronaut to conduct a spacewalk and the first CSA astronaut to catch a visiting spacecraft using the Canadarm2.
A new study suggests that predatory dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex, did not have permanently exposed teeth as depicted in films such as Jurassic Park, but instead had scaly, lizard-like lips covering and sealing their mouths.
“As any dentist will tell you, saliva is important for maintaining the health of your teeth. Teeth that are not covered by lips risk drying out and can be subject to more damage during feeding or fighting, as we see in crocodiles, but not in dinosaurs,” said co-author Kirstin Brink, Assistant Professor of Palaeontology at the University of Manitoba.
She added: “Dinosaur teeth have very thin enamel and mammal teeth have thick enamel (with some exceptions). Crocodile enamel is a bit thicker than dinosaur enamel, but not as thick as mammalian enamel. There are some mammal groups that do have exposed enamel, but their enamel is modified to withstand exposure.”
The researchers point out that their study doesn’t say that no extinct animals had exposed teeth — some, like sabre-toothed carnivorous mammals, or marine reptiles and flying reptiles with extremely long, interlocking teeth, almost certainly did.
Boeing's debut Starliner spacecraft launch carrying its first-ever crew of astronauts to the International Space Station is being postponed again, and is not expected to fly until 21 July at the earliest.
A Boeing Starliner landing system is tested for reliability in White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico. Photo credit: NASA/Boeing
Steve Stich, manager of Commercial Crew Program at NASA, confirmed the delay in a media teleconference on Wednesday. Officials from the space agency and Boeing need more time to assess the capsule, and to avoid conflicts with upcoming flights scheduled to the ISS.
Boeing's Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission has suffered repeated setbacks, and was originally slated to fly in April. "We've deliberated and decided that the best launch attempt is no earlier than July 21st," Stitch said.
"Where we're at right now is really getting through the certification work… it is a large amount of work which has been going on for well over a year. There's 600 components that have to be qualified on the Starliner for NASA and Boeing to review jointly [and] over 70 hazard reports. And then a total of what we call 370 verifications," he added.
They are both paying close attention to the parachute system on the Starliner deployed to land the spacecraft safely back on Earth. Ground tests will examine the parachute's ability to launch properly and slow the Starliner to splash down safely for the return of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will fly and spend eight days docked to the ISS in the CFT.
Joel Montalbano, manager of NASA's International Space Station Program, said that activities onboard the ISS are jam packed over the next few months. The Soyuz MS-23 currently docked to the space station will be relocated to another module. Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts will also be performing separate spacewalks to adjust for incoming solar arrays and retrieve hardware.
There are also upcoming cargo deliveries as well as the Axiom-2 mission, the second private crewed mission to the ISS, which will send the first Saudi Arabian woman, Rayyanah Barnawi, to space. Barnawi's crewmates include Ali Alqarni, a second Saudi representative, Peggy Whitson, a NASA veteran, and John Shoffner, an investor and pilot.
All that means is Boeing will have to find a flight slot after these events.
"We're very close," said Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of the CST Starliner at Boeing. He said the company was working hard to inspect the spacecraft's hardware, build the service module, refurbish the crew module, and verify its flight software.
"Most of the areas that needed to be completed are going to be completed by the end of April. In the one area that Steve talked about, which is the parachute, the verification closure notice and the hazard report will poke out into May," he said.
The next major milestone will be loading the propellant into the spacecraft about 40 days prior to its launch. ®
A giant hole 20 times larger than the Earth has ripped through the Sun, unleashing 1.8 million mile-per-hour solar winds towards our planet that could potentially disrupt communication channels on Friday.
The gaping 'coronal hole' is the second to appear in one week, after the first hole was spotted on March 23. That hole was 30 times the size of Earth, and released solar winds that triggered beautiful auroras as far south as Arizona. Both holes were captured by Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which studies the sun.
Explaining what a coronal hole is and how it impacts us, Dubai Astronomy Group CEO Hasan Al Hariri explains, “Coronal holes and the dark spots on the sun are related. This is the place where explosions happen; they happen deep in the Sun and come up all the way to the surface (corona level).
The Sun is made up of layers of atmosphere, with the upper layer called the Coronal layer. Then there are many layers beneath it. Some of these layers are visible, but there are unseen layers as well which can only be seen in X-rays. [This is] where the Coronal action is visible.”
He adds, “[These] are basically part of the Sun's atmosphere where magnetic fields are entangled. Then, when a breakup happens, it unleashes a huge amount of energy to outer space. There are telescopes called SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) and TRACE (Transition Region and Coronal Explorer), which observe the Sun in great detail. There is [also] a Parker Solar Probe which is already around the Sun.”
Hariri explains this coronal hole unleashes huge amounts of energy as particles. This energy appears as heat and light, “but the particles are called solar winds, [and these] have very high speed and creates magnetic field which leads to fluctuation and vibration impacting things on the Earth.”
“These particles are charged either positive or negative. When it reaches the Earth, our planet’s magnetic field deflects most of it but some of these get trapped in the magnetic field and they start appearing on the poles as aurora boreale. It’s like a curtain of greenish light in the atmosphere.
Something else also happens here. When the solar wind [pushes], the magnetic field begins to oscillate. It starts creating electrical charges inside power cables and disturbing the equipments and satellites.”
Elucidating on some of the components of solar activities, experts explain that solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are both solar phenomena involving the release of magnetic energy, but they differ in their characteristics.
“Solar flares are sudden bursts of radiation associated with a brightening of the solar atmosphere, while CMEs are large-scale eruptions of solar material into space,” says Sarath Raj, Project Director – Amity Dubai Satellite Ground Station and AmiSat, Amity University Dubai.
Solar flares can impact satellites, spacecraft operations and aviation
He also highlights solar flares can have various other impacts on the Earth, including emitting high-energy radiation such as X-rays and gamma rays.
These can be categorised based on their intensity, with the lowest being A-class, followed by B, C, M, and X, the most powerful; with these being subject to more classifications.
“These types of radiation can be dangerous to humans in space and interfere with electronic devices and radio communications. Additionally, when a solar flare reaches the Earth's magnetic field, it can cause a geomagnetic storm, which can create auroras at lower latitudes than usual,” Raj adds.
It’s explained that stronger geomagnetic storms can disrupt power grids, leading to blackouts and other electrical disturbances. “Furthermore, solar flares can damage or disrupt satellites in orbit, which can affect crucial infrastructure such as satellite communications and navigation systems. Finally, solar flares can also have an impact on aviation by interfering with radio communications and GPS systems, potentially causing delays and other issues,” he adds.
"Something like this has happened earlier", Hariri notes. "In the 1990s, power was cut off in Canada. Transformers were burnt. Connections with the satellites were lost as those were damaged. In modern times, we depend on satellites for so many things.
So, the safest thing to do to protect the satellites is to switch [them] off so that no charges are created inside. Then [they] can be turned on once the solar winds have subsided.”
“The impact of these on the Earth’s atmosphere is still a part of ongoing research. But the particles (of the solar wind) can sometimes deposit as ice sheets on the poles. [The relationship] between solar activity and the Earth’s atmosphere is still an important subject of study for researchers,” says Hariri.
One of the largest black holes ever recorded has been discovered using a new technique that could spot thousands more of the insatiable celestial monsters in the coming years, according to astronomers.
The ultramassive black hole, one of just four ever observed, is more than 30 billion times the mass of the Sun, a new study said.
It is the first black hole ever observed using a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which light travelling towards us from a distant galaxy appears to magnify and bend inwards, giving away the presence of a dark giant.
An uncommon celestial cluster dotted the sky over Vancouver last night.
A planetary alignment including Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, and Mars, was seen over the city Tuesday (March 28) night.
Though planetary alignments aren't rare, alignments involving so many planets aren't common either.
Vancouver locals snapped photos of the astronomical spectacle.
When is the next planetary alignment visible in Vancouver?
According to the educational astronomy app Star Walk, Earth-dwellers will have plenty more opportunities to see clusters of planets in the sky this year. The next chance to spot Mercury, Uranus, Venus, and Mars lined up will be on April 11.
However, the next most noteworthy planetary alignment won't take place until Sept. 8, 2040. On this night, stargazers will be able to see five planets– Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn– with the naked eye, along with the crescent Moon between Venus and Saturn.
The next major alignment will occur 40 years later on March 15, 2080, with six planets– Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and Uranus– all visible in the morning sky. It will also feature the "great conjunction" of Saturn and Jupiter.
There is one exciting celestial event that will take place over a century later. On May 19, 2161, all the planets in the solar system, including Earth, will end up on one side of the Sun which means earthlings can observe every planet in the sky.
As for 2023, here is when you can spot the next planetary alignment in Vancouver:
April 11 - Mercury, Uranus, Venus, Mars; small evening alignment with 35-degree sky sector
April 24 - Mercury, Uranus, Venus, Mars; small evening alignment with 40-degree sky sector
May 29 - Mercury, Uranus, Jupiter, Saturn; small morning alignment with 70-degree sky sector
June 17 - Mercury, Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune; large morning alignment with 95-degree sky sector
July 26 - Mercury, Venus, Mars; mini evening alignment with 15-degree sky sector
August 24
at sunset: setting Mercury and Mars, rising Saturn; mini alignment with 175-degree sky sector
at night: Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn; small alignment with 80-degree sky sector
Atmospheric balloons are important tools for gathering information high above the earth in zones where people wouldn’t survive unless they wear pressurized suits.
When Lake Country’s Nolan Koblischke heard the American government was shooting down balloons suspected of spying, he was more than a little curious. The George Elliot Secondary graduate has sent one of those balloons into the atmosphere himself as a student at UBC Okanagan.
Atmospheric balloons are important tools for gathering information high above the earth in zones where people wouldn’t survive unless they wear pressurized suits. Most balloons collect climate data through radios, cameras and satellite navigation equipment—and are incapable of spying.
Koblischke, a fourth-year physics student, and Leonardo Caffarello are part of a UBCO physics and engineering team that launched a balloon to the stratosphere from a space centre in the Swedish Arctic last fall. The team, sponsored by School of Engineering Professor Jonathan Holzman, launched the balloon for a physics experiment to observe cosmic rays.
Koblischke said many people might be surprised at just how much you can learn from a balloon.
What are scientists learning from these atmospheric balloons?
These atmospheric balloons are a powerful and versatile tool for scientific research and exploration. Our balloon was launched in collaboration with Canadian and European agencies, so we were joined by other university and government agency teams from different countries.
Each team flying on the balloon had a different research objective and experiment. For instance, an Italian team was testing solar panels in the upper atmosphere to be used on satellites, a German space agency team was studying stratospheric chemistry and a Hungarian team was testing radiation sensors. We even saw an experiment to carry a telescope for atmosphere-free observations of space. Besides these applications, most balloons are used for weather purposes.
Is this the first time your project has left the ground?
No, the group was originally formed a few years ago by Caffarello and competed against other university teams in the Canadian Stratospheric Balloon Experiment Design Challenge. The UBCO student-led project was one of two experiments selected to fly onboard a high-altitude research balloon launched by the Canadian Space Agency in August 2019. The balloon was airborne at about 120,000 feet for 10 hours.
The project was working on a cosmic ray detection system and they were looking for different cosmic particles across the lower atmosphere. Caffarello has since graduated but led our team on the latest iteration of this experiment that took place in Sweden last fall.
Can you explain what you learned from the experiment last fall?
Our experiment was an innovative endeavour to detect cosmic rays in the stratosphere that Caffarello and I launched from the Esrange Space Center above the arctic circle in Sweden. We learned how to devise and construct an experiment that can withstand the severe conditions of near vacuum and extreme temperatures. We also gathered valuable data during the flight such as temperatures, pressure and images that proved that certain components of our experiment could work. Lastly, we realized that research requires perseverance and collaboration.
One of the most challenging moments was when we found an issue while preparing for the launch, a sudden failure during a pressure test. We worked until 4 am for three nights in a row, culminating in an all-nighter, to brainstorm solutions and design parts on the spot. Although we did not fully fix the problem, we remained resilient and worked diligently to resolve what we could and we were successfully approved for launch.
Cosmic rays sound dangerous
Cosmic rays can cause cancer by damaging DNA, but the chances are very small so you don’t need to lose sleep over it. Thankfully, our atmosphere blocks most of the highest energy cosmic rays, hence why we needed a balloon to get our experiment above much of the atmosphere, to try to detect more cosmic rays. You might have heard that you receive radiation when flying equivalent to a chest x-ray—cosmic rays are the reasons why.
What’s next for students at UBCO? Any more high-flying projects?
Yes, we have a student team called the UBCO StratoNeers who are currently participating in the Canadian Stratospheric Balloon Experiment Design Challenge. It’s the same competition Caffarello participated in back in 2019
The StratoNeers are testing hardware protective techniques to mitigate the occurrence of bit flips due to cosmic radiation in computer binary code. This experiment would provide new insights into protective techniques to safely store data onboard satellites, rovers and space telescopes.
Do you worry someone will shoot down your balloons?
We weren’t worried about our balloon being shot down. It did drift into Norway but thankfully the Norwegians didn’t mind.
Leonardo Caffarello, left, and Nolan Koblischke pose in front of their atmospheric balloon as it’s prepared for launch.
This illustration shows the ingredients of a long gamma-ray burst, the most common type. The core of a massive star (left) has collapsed, forming a black hole that sends a jet of particles moving through the collapsing star and out into space at nearly the speed of light. Radiation across the spectrum arises from hot ionized gas (plasma) in the vicinity of the newborn black hole, collisions among shells of fast-moving gas within the jet (internal shock waves), and from the leading edge of the jet as it sweeps up and interacts with its surroundings (external shock). Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
On Sunday, Oct. 9, 2022, a pulse of intense radiation swept through the solar system so exceptional that astronomers quickly dubbed it the BOAT—the brightest of all time.
The source was a gamma-ray burst (GRB), the most powerful class of explosions in the universe.
The burst triggered detectors on numerous spacecraft, and observatories around the globe followed up. After combing through all of this data, astronomers can now characterize just how bright it was and better understand its scientific impact.
"GRB 221009A was likely the brightest burst at X-ray and gamma-ray energies to occur since human civilization began," said Eric Burns, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He led an analysis of some 7,000 GRBs—mostly detected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Russian Konus instrument on NASA's Wind spacecraft—to establish how frequently events this bright may occur. Their answer: once in every 10,000 years.
The burst was so bright it effectively blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, which means they could not directly record the real intensity of the emission. U.S. scientists were able to reconstruct this information from the Fermi data. They then compared the results with those from the Russian team working on Konus data and Chinese teams analyzing observations from the GECAM-C detector on their SATech-01 satellite and instruments on their Insight-HXMT observatory. Together, they prove the burst was 70 times brighter than any yet seen.
Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the cosmos. Astronomers think most occur when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel, collapses under its own weight, and forms a black hole, as illustrated in this animation. The black hole then drives jets of particles that drill all the way through the collapsing star at nearly the speed of light. These jets pierce through the star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays (magenta) as they stream into space. They then plow into material surrounding the doomed star and produce a multiwavelength afterglow that gradually fades away. The closer to head-on we view one of these jets, the brighter it appears. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Burns and other scientists presented new findings about the BOAT at the High Energy Astrophysics Division meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Waikoloa, Hawaii. Observations of the burst span the spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays, and include data from many NASA and partner missions, including the NICER X-ray telescope on the International Space Station, NASA's NuSTAR observatory, and even Voyager 1 in interstellar space. Papers describing the results presented appear in a focus issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The signal from GRB 221009A had been traveling for about 1.9 billion years before it reached Earth, making it among the closest-known "long" GRBs, whose initial, or prompt, emission lasts more than two seconds. Astronomers think these bursts represent the birth cries of black holes formed when the cores of massive stars collapse under their own weight. As it quickly ingests the surrounding matter, the black hole blasts out jets in opposite directions containing particles accelerated to near the speed of light. These jets pierce through the star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays as they stream into space.
With this type of GRB, astronomers expect to find a brightening supernova a few weeks later, but so far it has proven elusive. One reason is that the GRB appeared in a part of the sky that's just a few degrees above the plane of our own galaxy, where thick dust clouds can greatly dim incoming light.
The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 revealed the infrared afterglow (circled) of the BOAT GRB and its host galaxy, seen nearly edge-on as a sliver of light extending to the burst's upper right. This animation flips between images taken on Nov. 8 and Dec. 4, 2022, one and two months after the eruption. Given its brightness, the burst's afterglow may remain detectable by telescopes for several years. Each picture combines three near-infrared images taken at wavelengths from 1 to 1.5 microns and is 34 arcseconds across. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Levan (Radboud University); Image Processing: Gladys Kober
"We cannot say conclusively that there is a supernova, which is surprising given the burst's brightness," said Andrew Levan, a professor of astrophysics at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands. Since dust clouds become more transparent at infrared wavelengths, Levan led near- and mid-infrared observations using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope—its first use for this kind of study—as well as the Hubble Space Telescope to spot the supernova. "If it's there, it's very faint. We plan to keep looking," he added, "but it's possible the entire star collapsed straight into the black hole instead of exploding." Additional Webb and Hubble observations are planned over the next few months.
As the jets continue to expand into material surrounding the doomed star, they produce a multiwavelength afterglow that gradually fades away.
"Being so close and so bright, this burst offered us an unprecedented opportunity to gather observations of the afterglow across the electromagnetic spectrum and to test how well our models reflect what's really happening in GRB jets," said Kate Alexander, an assistant professor in the department of astronomy at the University of Arizona in Tucson. "Twenty-five years of afterglow models that have worked very well cannot completely explain this jet," she said. "In particular, we found a new radio component we don't fully understand. This may indicate additional structure within the jet or suggest the need to revise our models of how GRB jets interact with their surroundings."
The jets themselves were not unusually powerful, but they were exceptionally narrow—much like the jet setting of a garden hose—and one was pointed directly at us, Alexander explained. The closer to head-on we view a jet, the brighter it appears. Although the afterglow was unexpectedly dim at radio energies, it's likely that GRB 221009A will remain detectable for years, providing a novel opportunity to track the full life cycle of a powerful jet.
X-rays from the initial flash of GRB 221009A could be detected for weeks as dust in our galaxy scattered the light back to us. This resulted in the appearance of an extraordinary set of expanding rings. Images captured over 12 days by the X-ray Telescope aboard NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory were combined to make this movie, shown here in arbitrary colors. Credit: NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester)
The burst also enabled astronomers to probe distant dust clouds in our own galaxy. As the prompt X-rays traveled toward us, some of them reflected off of dust layers, creating extended "light echoes" of the initial blast in the form of X-ray rings expanding from the burst's location. The X-ray Telescope on NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory discovered the presence of a series of echoes. Detailed follow-up by ESA's (the European Space Agency's) XMM-Newton telescope, together with Swift data, revealed these extraordinary rings were produced by 21 distinct dust clouds.
"How dust clouds scatter X-rays depends on their distances, the sizes of the dust grains, and the X-ray energies," explained Sergio Campana, research director at Brera Observatory and the National Institute for Astrophysics in Merate, Italy. "We were able to use the rings to reconstruct part of the burst's prompt X-ray emission and to determine where in our galaxy the dust clouds are located."
GRB 221009A is only the seventh gamma-ray burst to display X-ray rings, and it triples the number previously seen around one. The echoes came from dust located between 700 and 61,000 light-years away. The most distant echoes—clear on the other side of our Milky Way galaxy—were also 4,600 light-years above the galaxy's central plane, where the solar system resides.
Lastly, the burst offers an opportunity to explore a big cosmic question. "We think of black holes as all-consuming things, but do they also return power back to the universe?" asked Michela Negro, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.
Her team was able to probe the dust rings with NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer to glimpse how the prompt emission was organized, which can give insights into how the jets form. In addition, a small degree of polarization observed in the afterglow phase confirms that we viewed the jet almost directly head-on.
Together with similar measurements now being studied by a team using data from ESA's INTEGRAL observatory, scientists say it may be possible to prove that the BOAT's jets were powered by tapping into the energy of a magnetic field amplified by the black hole's spin. Predictions based on such models have already successfully explained other aspects of this burst.
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NASA missions study what may be a 1-In-10,000-year gamma-ray burst (2023, March 29)
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MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian space capsule safely returned to Earth without a crew Tuesday, months after it suffered a coolant leak in orbit.
The Soyuz MS-22 leaked coolant in December while attached to the International Space Station. Russian space officials blamed the leak on a tiny meteoroid that punctured the craft’s external radiator. They launched an empty replacement capsule last month to serve as a lifeboat for the crew.
The damaged capsule safely landed Tuesday under a striped parachute in the steppes of Kazakhstan, touching down as scheduled at 5:45 p.m. (7:45 a.m. EDT) 147 kilometers (91 miles) southeast of Zhezkazgan under clear blue skies.
Space officials determined it would be too risky to bring NASA’s Frank Rubio and Russia’s Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin back in the Soyuz in March as originally planned, as cabin temperatures would spike with no coolant, potentially damaging computers and other equipment, and exposing the suited-up crew to excessive heat.
The three launched in September for what should have been a six-month mission on the International Space Station. They now are scheduled to return to Earth in September in a new Soyuz that arrived at the space outpost last month with no one on board, meaning the trio will spend a year in orbit.
Also on the station are NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, the United Arab Emirates’ Sultan Alneyadi, and Russia’s Andrey Fedyaev.
A similar coolant leak was spotted in February on the Russian Progress MS-21 cargo ship docked at the space outpost, raising suspicions of a manufacturing flaw. Russian state space corporation Roscosmos ruled out any defects after a check and concluded that both incidents resulted from hits by meteoroids,
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Standing at the foot of a rocky sandstone cliff, biologist Michelle Wainstein inspected her essentials: latex gloves, two long cotton swabs, glass vials, and tubes filled with buffer solution. She placed them in a blue dry bag, rolled it up, and clipped it to a rope wrapped around her waist. It was late afternoon, and she was slick with dirt and sweat from navigating the dense terrain. Her destination lay across the frigid river: two small logs of otter fecal matter resting on a mossy boulder. In she plunged.
The river, the Green-Duwamish in Washington State, trickles out of the Cascade Range and empties 150 kilometers downstream into Puget Sound. The last eight kilometers of the run—known as the lower Duwamish—is so polluted the US Environmental Protection Agency designated it a Superfund site in 2001. For a century, Seattle’s aviation and manufacturing industries routinely dumped waste chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) into the water.
“A lot of the river is still really polluted,” says Jamie Hearn, the Superfund program manager at Duwamish River Community Coalition. “The mud is thick and black, and you can smell it.”
Despite the pollution, river otters are everywhere along the waterway, even in the most contaminated areas near the river’s mouth. “I would be walking the docks looking for scat,” remembers Wainstein, “and a couple of times we were lucky enough to see moms with their pups.”
For several weeks in the summer of 2016 and 2017, Wainstein surveyed otter poop she collected from a dozen sites along the river. Comparing contaminant concentrations in the otters’ poop between the river’s industrial and rural zones, Wainstein uncovered the lingering legacy of the region’s toxic past. The poop from otters in the lower Duwamish contained nearly 26 times more PCBs and 10 times more PAHs than poop from their cousins in cleaner water upstream. PCBs disrupt hormonal and neurological processes and affect reproduction in mammals. Both PCBs and PAHs are human carcinogens.
The discovery that otters along the lower Duwamish are living with such high levels of contamination upends a common narrative: that river otters’ return to a once-degraded landscape is a sign that nature is healing.
In Singapore, where smooth-coated otters have reappeared in canals and reservoirs, they have been embraced as new national mascots. “It plays into that rhetoric that government agencies want to project,” says environmental historian Ruizhi Choo, “that we’ve done such a good job that nature is coming back. That image of a city in nature is the new marketing branding.”
In Europe, the once-common Eurasian otter similarly began reappearing in the late 20th century following successful river cleanup campaigns. Conservationist Joe Gaydos at the SeaDoc Society thinks that this phenomenon has helped form the mental link between otters and ecosystem health.
“The number of animals is our first indicator,” Gaydos says. But few seem to ask the next question: are those animals healthy?
As Wainstein’s study suggests, perhaps not. The otters she analyzed in the lower Duwamish have some of the highest concentrations of PCBs and PAHs ever recorded in wild river otters. Previous research has found a correlation between PCB exposure and health risks in wild river otters, including increased bone pathologies, reproductive and immunological disorders, organ abnormalities, and hormonal changes.
Even so, the contamination is not manifesting in physically obvious ways. “They’re not washing up on shore with tumors all over their bodies,” Wainstein says, and neither is their population dwindling. “They’re not setting off this direct alarm with a big change in their ability to survive.”
The otters’ ability to bear such a heavy contaminant burden suggests that a population resurgence alone may not reflect the quality of an environment. They just become as toxic as the environments they inhabit.
However, their localized bathroom habits, mixed diet of fish, crustaceans, and mammals, and persistence in the face of pollution make them useful indicators of environmental contamination.
River otters have played this role before. Following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, river otters lingered in oil-drenched waterways, allowing scientists like Larry Duffy at the University of Alaska Fairbanks to track the effectiveness of the oil cleanup. In 2014, scientists in Illinois discovered dieldrin in otter organ tissue even though the insecticide had already largely been banned for 30 years. In these cases, the collection of long-term pollution data was made possible by the creatures’ resilience in contaminated waterways. Wainstein wants to similarly use the Green-Duwamish River otters as biomonitors of the Superfund cleanup over the next decade.
Watching workers dismantle a portion of the river’s levied banks to make channels for salmon, Wainstein thinks about the seabirds, shorebirds, and small mammals, like beaver and mink, that were driven out by industrial contamination. She wonders if one day the rumbling machinery dredging up clawfuls of sediment from the riverbed will be taken over by the piercing cries of marbled murrelets, the croaks of tufted puffins, and the bubbling twittering of western snowy plovers.
“How long will it take? And will it actually work?” she says of the cleanup effort. The otters might hold the answer.
Oliver Dearden is a supervising producer for All Things Considered. He line produces the show, working with producers and editors to get the show on air each day. Before ATC, Dearden was a producer with Weekend Edition and Morning Edition, and a senior producer for BBC radio.
Five of the sun’s eight major planets will be lined up on the western horizon this Tuesday just after sunset.
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The astronomical delight will comprise Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Uranus — all in a visible line from the horizon to the crescent moon.
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NASA astronomer Bill Cooke says the best way to get a glimpse is to stand somewhere with a clear view of the western horizon.
The planets will stretch from the horizon to halfway up the night sky.
Mercury and Jupiter (the first and fifth planets from the sun) will dip below the horizon around 30 minutes after sunset, that is 7:37 p.m. on Tuesday.
The five-planet spread can be seen anywhere on Earth.
Venus, Mars and Jupiter will be the brightest, particularly Venus, and Mars will be closest to the moon. Mercury and Uranus will be the dimmest, so a set of binoculars will be useful.
Uranus is the rarest seen of the planetary lineup.
An asteroid dubbed "city killer" for its size will pass harmlessly between the moon and the Earth Saturday evening.
The asteroid 2023 DZ2 will pass at a distance of over 100,000 miles, less than half the distance between the Earth and the moon. It's about 160 feet long — about the size of an airliner. An asteroid that size could cause significant damage if it hit a populated area, hence its nickname.
"While close approaches are a regular occurrence, one by an asteroid of this size (140-310 ft) happens only about once per decade, providing a unique opportunity for science," NASA Asteroid Watch tweeted.
Astronomers from the International Asteroid Warning Network, established about 10 years ago to coordinate international responses to potential near-Earth object impact threats, will be monitoring and learning from this asteroid.
NASA Asteroid Watch called the opportunity "good practice" in case "a potential asteroid threat were ever discovered."
Near-Earth objects are asteroids or comets that pass close to the Earth's orbit, and they generally come from objects that are affected by other planets' gravity, moving them into orbits that push them close to Earth, according to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.
The European Space Agency maintains a risk list of 1,460 objects, which catalogs every object with a non-zero chance of hitting Earth over the next 100 years. Asteroid 2023 DZ2, which is in orbit around the sun, is not on the risk list.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
(Bloomberg) — A brilliant display of northern lights touched off by a massive geomagnetic storm was visible to a wide swath of the world Friday, and the aurora could linger through Saturday in many places if the weather is clear.
Red, purple and green streamers of the aurora borealis dazzled viewers in North America on Friday and were seen much farther south than normal, with people in California, Arizona and Texas reporting they could see it, according to AccuWeather, Inc. Typically, the spectacular display is only visible in northern locales like Alaska, North Dakota, Canada and Iceland.
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The display was touched off by a severe geomagnetic storm that peaked about 12:04 a.m. Friday, according to the US Space Weather Prediction Center, and if the weather is clear, more could be in store on Saturday.
A coronal mass ejection, an explosion of magnetic fields and plasma from the sun’s atmosphere, hit Earth early Friday with more force than initially forecast. These events can disrupt Earth’s magnetic field causing auroral displays, as well as disrupting satellites, communication and electric grids.
Read more: A Swedish Resort Lets You See the Northern Lights From Your Room
The US Space Weather Prediction Center had originally expected a G2 level storm Friday on its five-step scale, the event measured in at G4, one of the strongest triggered on Earth since 2017.
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In addition to the dazzling auroral displays, a G4 storm can cause headaches for power grid operators and force spacecraft to adjust their orbits. The storm can also degrade satellite navigation, radio broadcasts and even cause pipelines to build up an electric charge. In early 2022, Elon Musk’s SpaceX lost 40 Starlink satellites because of a solar storm.
The impacts from the coronal mass ejection have trailed off, but energy coming from what scientists call a “coronal hole” will continue at least through Saturday and that could mean the aurora could be seen by viewers across Europe, Asia and North America through Sunday, the UK Met Office said on its website.
There are currently eight sunspot clusters visible on the side of the sun facing Earth, however another coronal mass ejection blasting toward us isn’t forecast, the UK Met Office said.
NASA's car-sized Perseverance rover is vigilantly sleuthing the Martian surface for past signs of life. It also snaps wondrous views of the planet's extraterrestrial skies.
The space agency released an eerie view of the dark Mars sky this week. It's gloomy, just before sunrise. Martian clouds hang in the air. Sunlight illuminates the distant atmosphere. It could be a view on Earth. But it's a vista tens of millions of miles away.
The Perseverance rover is currently rumbling through the Jezero Crater, home to a dried-up river delta and a place planetary scientists believe once hosted a lake. "This delta is one of the best locations on Mars for the rover to look for signs of past microscopic life," NASA said.
As Mars, once a wet world harboring oceans, began to dry up, microscopic life might have persisted in Jezero's moist clays and soil. If so, it's possible remnants of organic material — potentially evidence of past life — may have been left over or preserved. Such remnants could be an element, or a substance, or a chain of molecules. The Perseverance rover has indeed found organic materials, like carbon, in the Jezero crater – but this itself isn't nearly evidence of past life.
PRINCE GEORGE – If you thought there’s been some strange goings on overhead these past few years, you wouldn’t actually be wrong. Astrophysicists around the world have their eyes on the sky, and It’s got nothing to do with UFOs or unidentified balloons. Instead, researches have set their sights on the sun, studying the increase in Solar activity and Coronal Mass Ejections, and the impact of that activity here on Earth.
The most recent magnetic explosion on the sun’s surface, was one of the strongest events on recent solar records, earning it a classification of G4 on the rating scale for geomagnetic storms. What’s more, this latest solar blast, snuck past space weather forecasters, and caught the physics community off-guard. A storm of this severity, while beautiful , appearing as ribbons of dazzling greens and reds from the ground, Magnetic storms like this can wreak havoc in the upper atmosphere, where they pose a major risk for satellites.
If you’re hoping for a view of the Northern Lights, the over-night hours of Friday, into early Saturday morning are your best bet, According to forecasts from Enviroment and Climate Change Canada, cloud cover in our region could see a break between 10pm and midnight, and will further dissipate over the weekend.
On Saturday, the 2023DZ2 will come within a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
A large asteroid will safely zoom between Earth and the Moon on Saturday, a once-in-a-decade event that will be used as a training exercise for planetary defence efforts, according to the European Space Agency.
The asteroid, named 2023 DZ2, is estimated to be 40 to 70 metres (130 to 230 feet) wide, roughly the size of the Parthenon, and big enough to wipe out a large city if it hit our planet.
At 19:49 GMT on Saturday, it will come within a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon, said Richard Moissl, the head of the ESA’s planetary defence office.
Though that is “very close”, there is nothing to worry about, he told AFP news agency.
Small asteroids fly past every day, but one of this size coming so close to Earth only happens about once every 10 years, he added.
The asteroid will pass 175,000km (109,000 miles) from Earth at a speed of 28,000 kilometres per hour (17,400 miles per hour). The Moon is roughly 385,000km (239,228 miles) away.
An observatory in La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands, first spotted the asteroid on February 27.
Last week, the United Nations-endorsed International Asteroid Warning Network decided it would take advantage of the close look, carrying out a “rapid characterisation” of 2023 DZ2, Moissl said. That means astronomers around the world will analyse the asteroid with a range of instruments such as spectrometers and radars.
The goal is to find out just how much we can learn about such an asteroid in only a week, Moissl said. It will also serve as training for how the network “would react to a threat” possibly heading our way in the future, he added.
The asteroid will again swing past Earth in 2026, but poses no threat of impact for at least the next 100 years – which is how far out its trajectory has been calculated.
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