Space News & Blog Articles

This next week will mark a scientifically valuable achievement for NASA’s Juno mission, as the pioneering spacecraft is slated to fly within 358 kilometers (222 miles) of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa on September 29 at 5:36 a.m. EDT (2:36 a.m. PDT) as part of its extended mission to explore the Jupiter system. A flyby this close to Europa’s surface will allow Juno to acquire some of the highest-resolution images ever taken of the icy moon. For context, the last mission to explore Europa in depth was NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, which got within 351 kilometers (218 miles) of the surface on January 3, 2000.

False color mosaic of Europa taken by the Galileo spacecraft during its first and fourteenth orbits in the Jupiter system, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute)

High-resolution images aren’t the only objective, as Juno is expected to gather data regarding Europa’s ionosphere, interior, surface composition, and the moon’s interaction with Jupiter’s magnetosphere. All this new data about Europa could be useful for future missions, to include NASA’s Europa Clipper, which is currently scheduled to launch in October 2024 and arrive at Jupiter in April 2030.

“Europa is such an intriguing Jovian moon, it is the focus of its own future NASA mission,” said Dr. Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, and the Principal Investigator of the Juno mission. “We’re happy to provide data that may help the Europa Clipper team with mission planning, as well as provide new scientific insights into this icy world.”

Along with gathering valuable scientific data during the close flyby, Juno’s trajectory will also be modified, decreasing the number of days the spacecraft takes to orbit Jupiter from 43 to 38. This flyby will also make Europa the second Galilean satellite to be explored by Juno during its extended mission, with the first being Ganymede in June 2021, and is also slated to make close flybys of Io in 2023 and 2024.

James Webb is currently experiencing problems with its MIRI instrument. The problem is due to increased friction in one of MIRI’s mechanisms in the Medium-Resolution Spectroscopy (MRS) mode. The observatory is otherwise healthy, but the team decided to stop observations using MRS mode until they find a solution.

A quick TLDR version of the most important space and astronomy news is here. Enjoy this week’s Space Bites!

SLS Passes Important Tanking Test

Artemis I rocket has passed a crucial test before its next launch attempt. Hopefully, it will happen on September 27th. Unless the weather interferes (which it might). The tanking test went well. The hydrogen leaks, which were the cause of the latest scrub, were dealt with. Some hydrogen still was leaking, but it was within spec. So, the team claimed the fueling test was a success.

If the weather will cause a scrub on September 27th, there is still a reserve date on October 2nd. But if the launch won’t happen, SLS will most likely be rolled back to the VAB. This will mean that there will be no launch until late October or possibly even November.

More about the SLS fueling test.

Until 1959, humans had only seen one side of the Moon. The Moon is tidally locked with Earth, and so we can only see one side from the Earth’s surface. It took the soviet Luna 3 spacecraft to capture a blurry image for humans to get their first glimpse of the lunar far side. Because of this, many people imagine that the Moon has always been this way. But as a recent study shows, that isn’t quite true.

Although the Moon is tidally locked with Earth, it isn’t physically locked to Earth. It is still a freely moving body that rotates on its axis. The Moon always shows the same side to Earth because its period of axial rotation and its orbital period is the same. But even this isn’t an exact match. The Moon’s rotation is essentially constant, but its orbit isn’t exactly circular. So the Moon moves along at a bit faster or slower rate depending on where it is in its orbit. This makes the moon appear to wobble back and forth slightly. There’s also the fact that the Moon’s rotational axis is tilted slightly relative to its orbital plane around the Earth, and the orbit itself is tilted slightly relative to the Earth’s equator. All of this together gives the Moon a small but complex wobbly dance as seen from Earth, known as libration. So over the course of a few years, we actually see slightly more than half the lunar surface, though this effect is too small to notice in our daily lives.

The appearance of the Moon through one synodic period. Note that in addition to rocking back and forth (libration) and side-to-side (nutation), the Moon appears to swell and shrink in size. Wikimedia Commons graphic in the public Domain.

But because the Moon is a freely moving body, its rotational axis can shift from other things as well. For example, geological activity such as the drift of continents, and the freezing or melting of polar caps cause shifts in our rotational axis. It even shifts the length of our days slightly. But the Moon isn’t really geologically active, and it doesn’t have weather patterns to freeze or melt polar caps. But it has been bombarded by asteroids over the years, and that brings us to this latest study.

The team looked at high-resolution gravity maps of the Moon taken by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL). These maps give us a good idea of the distribution of mass within the Moon, since the more mass you have in a given area, the higher the gravity. They also used a detailed map of lunar craters captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and its Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA). They then used computer models to “remove” the craters’ age layer by age layer.

SpaceX Founder and CEO Elon Musk recently took to Twitter and hinted that the much-anticipated Starship—currently undergoing upgrades in preparation for its upcoming maiden flight—could launch as soon as November.

Responding to a question from a curious Twitter account asking about updates for Starship’s orbital flight date, Musk responded, “Late next month maybe, but November seems highly likely. We will have two boosters & ships ready for orbital flight by then, with full stack production at roughly one every two months.” As usual, his tweet garnered thousands of likes and hundreds of retweets.

This comes only two days after Musk tweeted a 12-second video with the caption “7 engine static fire” showing a stationary and partially-assembled Starship firing its engines and kicking up clouds of sand and dust that enveloped the booster within seconds. He followed this tweet with a second one saying “Great for clearing dust!”

As stated, Musk wants to make humanity a multiplanetary species, especially on Mars, and he wants to use Starship to accomplish this goal. He came one step closer to this reality when his teams constructed a fully stacked Starship in Boca Chica, Texas in July 2021. When fully assembled, Starship is taller than any rocket ever built, surpassing the height of the Saturn V by 10 meters (33 feet), and is anticipated to produce more than twice the thrust of the Saturn V at nearly 7.7 million kilograms (17 million pounds) of force. SpaceX states on its website that Starship’s payload capacity to low Earth orbit will be over 100 tons, which is almost as much as the Saturn V (130 tons).

Musk has a long-standing reputation of being very active and open on his Twitter account regarding his aspirations for making humanity a multiplanetary species someday. On August 31, he said via his Twitter account that SpaceX is “aiming for up to 100 flights next year”, even as his private launch company has already launched a record-shattering 42 times in 2022 and is preparing for its 43rd launch this weekend. For context, SpaceX had 31 successful launches in 2021.

In a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers led by Monash University in Australia have verified the existence of a rare hexagonal structure of diamond called lonsdaleite, within ureilite meteorites from the inside of a dwarf planet that formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago.

Lonsdaleite is named after Dame Kathleen Lonsdale, a famous British pioneering crystallographer responsible for developing several X-ray methods for studying crystal structures, and was the first woman elected as a Fellow to the Royal Society in 1945. This study holds the potential for further unlocking the secrets of the formation of our solar system, and was conducted with collaboration from RMIT University, the Australian Synchrotron and Plymouth University, and CSIRO.

Professor Dougal McCulloch from RMIT, who is the Director of the RMIT Microscopy and Microanalysis Facility, and a co-author on the study, said the researchers predicted the structure of lonsdaleite allegedly makes it harder than regular diamonds.

“This study proves categorically that lonsdaleite exists in nature,” said McCulloch. “We have also discovered the largest lonsdaleite crystals known to date that are up to a micron in size – much, much thinner than a human hair.”

The research team says lonsdaleite’s uncommon structure could assist in developing new manufacturing methods for ultra-hard materials for mining.