Space News & Blog Articles

NASA says it’s finished with having to do full-scale dress rehearsals for the first liftoff of its moon-bound Space Launch System rocket. But it’s not finished with having to make fixes.

“At this point we’ve determined that we’ve successfully completed the evaluations and the work that we intended to complete for the dress rehearsal,” Thomas Whitmeyer, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development, told reporters today.

NASA’s assessment came after a dress rehearsal that reached its climax on June 20 with the loading of the 322-foot-tall rocket’s supercooled propellant tanks. The rehearsal, which followed some less-than-fully-successful trial runs in April, marked a milestone for launch preparations because it was the first time that the team at Kennedy Space Center in Florida had fully loaded all of the tanks and proceeded into the terminal launch countdown.

Mission managers had hoped to get as far into the countdown as the engine start sequence at T-minus-9.34 seconds. But during this week’s rehearsal, launch controllers encountered a hydrogen leak in a quick-disconnect attachment that’s part of the fueling system. The team tried to fix the leak by warming up the attachment, and then cooling it back down to realign a seal, but the fix didn’t work. In the end, the count was stopped at T-minus-29 seconds.

Even though the rehearsal at Launch Complex 39B ended slightly earlier than originally planned, NASA officials said they were satisfied with the objectives that were achieved — including practicing the procedure for unloading propellant from the rocket. “Our Artemis launch team has worked quickly to adapt to the dynamics of propellant loading operations,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, Artemis launch director at Kennedy Space Center, said in a news release.

Remember Mechazilla, that tall launch tower at the SpaceX Starbase in Texas that will stack Starships and “catch” spent Super Heavy boosters? SpaceX began constructing an identical launch tower at Cape Canaveral in Florida, where Starships will also be launching from soon. This tower is taking shape alongside SpaceX’s Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) facilities at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Once complete, the launch tower will stand about 146 meters (~480 ft) in height, making it the second-tallest space-related structure on the East Coast, second to NASA’s massive Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB).

Like the launch tower at Boca Chica, the assembly process is moving rapidly and could be finished in just a few months. However, the crews have adopted a different building strategy based on the lessons learned from Boca Chica. When assembling Mechazilla, the construction crews stacked all nine of the tower’s prefabricated sections before integrating all of its hardware (like the tower’s “T-Rex” robotic arms). While this approach allowed for rapid assembly, it also led to several months of additional, highly complicated work.

For the launch tower at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX is taking a different approach to minimize the disruption to the surrounding launch complex. SpaceX has been assembling and outfitting the first six of the nine prefabricated tower sections for the past three months before stacking them together. These sections are already equipped with almost everything they’ll need to catch and stack Starships, such as railings, elevator shafts, walkways, fuel lines, and other preinstalled components. SpaceX is also busy assembling the launch pad’s orbital launch mount, where Starships and Super Heavy boosters are placed between launches.

The ground crews will still need to connect this hardware once the tower is assembled, but this post-stack work should take much less time. They are also making progress on the giant robotic arms (the two catching/lifting arms and the refueling arm) that will eventually be installed on the tower. The components for these “chopstick arms” are already arriving at the Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX will also need to install a new tank farm near the tower to accommodate its stores of liquid methane – the propellant used by the Starship and Super Heavy launch system – since LC-39A is not equipped for methane fueling.

A lot of work needs to be done before “Starbase Florida” is up and running, but they are making significant progress. In addition, the optimized process they are following for the launch tower’s construction will ensure that all the work around the launch pads will cause minimal disruption to their ongoing launch efforts – consisting of Falcon rockets regularly deploying new batches of Starlink satellites. As the busiest launch complex in the world, SpaceX also hopes to avoid disrupting NASA missions and other launch providers.

The Orion Nebula is a well-known feature in the night sky and is visible in small backyard telescopes. Orion is a busy place. The region is known for active star formation and other phenomena. It’s one of the most scrutinized features in the sky, and astronomers have observed all kinds of activity there: planets forming in protoplanetary disks, stars beginning their lives of fusion inside collapsing molecular clouds, and the photoevaporative power of massive hot stars as they carve out openings in clouds of interstellar gas.

But supernova explosions are leaving their mark on the Orion Nebula too. New research says supernovae explosions in recent astronomical history are responsible for a mysterious feature first formally identified in the night sky at the end of the 19th century. It’s called Barnard’s Loop, and it’s a gigantic loop of hot gas as large as 300 light-years across.

In 1894, American astronomer and astrophotographer E.E. Barnard published his observations of Orion in Popular Astronomy. Remarkably, he was experimenting with the lens from a “cheap, oil-projecting lantern”—in his words—that he used at the Lick Observatory. In his article, he explained what he’d found. “On my drawing, I have marked a portion of the nebulosity, from one degree to two degrees east of Tau, with dots, as it is so feeble at this point that I cannot be certain of it.” He added that “It is brightest near 56 and 60 Orionis.” (Barnard also acknowledged that he wasn’t the first to see it.)

In our more modern times, we simply point our browsers and gorgeous images of Barnard’s Loop quickly pop up on our screens.

Astronomers’ understanding of Barnard’s Loop has progressed along with our observational power and our growing knowledge of everything in nature.

Neutron stars are dense remnants of large stars. They are the collapsed cores of stars formed during a supernova explosion. While we know generally how they form, we are still learning how they evolve, particularly when they are young. But that’s starting to change thanks to large sky surveys, which have allowed astronomers to observe a neutron star that could be little more than a decade old.

The neutron star in question is known as VT 1137-0337. It is in a dwarf galaxy about 400 million light-years away, and it was first seen in 2018 as part of the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS). VLASS is a seven-year project to create a radio map of the sky. When finished it will have mapped about 80% of the sky over the course of three separate runs. After first capturing an image of VT 1137-0337 in 2018, it saw the neutron star again in 2019, 2020, and 2022. So we know it isn’t just a transient radio burst of some kind. Based on observations, the object is most likely a pulsar wind nebula. As the neutron star rotates, its magnetic field and energy beams sweep through the surrounding nebula, causing gas in the nebula to ionize and emit radio light.

VLA images of the location of VT 1137-0337 in 1998 (left) and 2018 (right). Credit: Dong & Hallinan, NRAO/AUI/NSF

What’s interesting about VT 1137-0337 is that it wasn’t seen in an earlier VLA sky survey known as Faint Images of the Radio Sky at Twenty-Centimeters (FIRST), made in 1998. So somewhere between 1998 and 2018 the neutron star appeared. On the face of it, that would make VT 1137-0337 less than twenty years old, but it could be a bit older. It’s possible the neutron star existed in 1998, but the surrounding nebula was still dense enough to block radio light from reaching us. But given the rate at which supernova remnants expand, the fog should have cleared within 60 to 80 years, which means even the oldest estimates make it decades old, not centuries or millennia. VT 1137-0337 is a very young neutron star, and quite possibly as young as 14.

The radio energy from VT 1137-0337 is 10,000 times more powerful than that of the Crab Nebula, which was created by a supernova in 1054 A.D. This means it has a much more powerful magnetic field. So powerful that VT 1137-0337 could be in the process of becoming a magnetar. Magnetars are highly magnetic neutron stars that are likely the cause of fast radio bursts (FRBs).

BepiColombo’s stunning close pass by Mercury on Thursday provides a prelude of what’s to come.

Welcome (briefly) to Mercury, with a planetary flyby hinting at more to come. The joint European Space Agency/Japanese Aerospace Agency’s BepiColombo spacecraft treated us to just that on Thursday, June 23rd, passing just 200 kilometers from the surface of the innermost world at 9:44 Universal Time (UT). During that brief encounter, BepiColombo got a brief glimpse of its final destination.

“We have completed our second of six Mercury flybys and will be back this time next year for our third before arriving in Mercury orbit in 2025,” Says Emanuela Bordoni (ESA-BepiColombo Deputy Spacecraft Operations Manager) in a recent ESA press release.

The spacecraft approached Mercury from the planet’s night side, then began imaging the cratered surface about five minutes after closest approach as the Sun rose over the illuminated terrain below. The images were taken courtesy of the three monitoring cameras (MCAM) aboard the spacecraft.

The Long Road to Mercury

Tea is useful for all kinds of things, including caffeinating plenty of writers worldwide. There are also many varieties of it, some of which advocates claim to have superpowers regarding the health benefits they grant. Kombucha is one of those – originally thought to have originated in China, it has become adopted worldwide in no small part because of innumerable, dubious “health benefits” of the drink. But now, scientists did find one potential health benefit, at least to bacteria – eating kombucha culture would help them survive on Mars.

According to a study by researchers of the Biology and Mars Experiment (BIOMEX) at the University of Göttingen and the University of Minas Gerais found that a type of bacteria known as Komagataeibacter survived being exposed to Mars-like conditions on the outside of the international space station for a year and a half.

That exposure occurred as part of a mission to the ISS in 2014, where the BIOMEX team sent kombucha cultures to the station. Kombucha as a drink is actually created by fermenting tea using kombucha cultures. The cultures themselves are made up of a symbiotic mixture of yeast and bacteria, and it was these cultures that were sent to the ISS.  

After the samples were sent back to Earth, they were allowed to grow for another two and a half years before being analyzed by the BIOMEX team. At the end, the team ran a series of bioinformatic analyses on the culture and found that, while most of the symbiotic culture had died, the Komagataeibacter had survived.

That was interesting to the team, who had initially been searching for one particular material that Komagataeibacter happens to produce – cellulose. Cellulose has been suggested as a potential biomarker on alien worlds. The finding that the bacteria that produced cellulose survived in such an environment lends credibility to that theory.