Space News & Blog Articles

The International Space Station (ISS) is about to get a little bigger.

On July 21, the Russian Space Agency launched the station’s newest module into orbit aboard a Proton-M rocket. The module, dubbed Nauka (which means science), is the station’s first new module since 2016, aside from some new docking ports and airlocks. The Nauka module includes several important additions that will enhance the station’s capabilities.

One of Nauka’s primary systems is its guidance and navigation abilities, which will provide additional attitude control capabilities to the ISS. At 13 meters long, the module’s interior contains new research facilities and storage space. The module also provides additional sleeping quarters for station crew. This is an important addition, since the United States recently re-established its human spaceflight capabilities with two new spacecraft: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, and the upcoming Boeing Starliner, slated for another test flight later this year. The addition of both new vehicles alongside the Russian Soyuz vehicle means that bigger crews can visit the station at once, and Nauka will provide these larger crews with a home.

Nauka is also carrying one other new piece of technology: a robotic arm built by the European Space Agency. A counterpart to the Canadarm 2 already on station, the European arm is 11 meters long and is designed to ‘walk’ around the Russian segment of the ISS (which the Canadarm can’t reach), carrying out repairs and upgrades as necessary.

Artist’s Rendering of Nauka attached to the Station. Credit: NASA.

Nauka’s development was a troubled process, and it has gone through years of problems and delays. It was first built as a backup to the Zarya module – the first component of the ISS ever launched in 1998. Nauka was set to join its twin in orbit in 2007, but failed to launch then, and was delayed again several times for various reasons, including fuel leaks, expired warranties, and most recently, pandemic delays.

Launching satellites is an expensive business – at least for now.  But satellites are necessary in astronomy for one major reason – it gets telescopes above the atmosphere.  The Earth’s atmosphere and its associated weather patterns are a massive hindrance to collecting good images.  If a stray cloud passes in front of the observational target once over the course of a few days, it could ruin the entire image.  Which is why some of the most striking astronomical pictures come from space-based observatories like Hubble. But now, a team of researchers from Durham, Toronto, and Princeton Universities has come up with a new way to get above that atmosphere that doesn’t involve a launch into orbit. They want to use a balloon.

The project, called the Superpressure Balloon-born Imaging telescope (SuperBIT), uses a helium filled balloon the size of a football stadium to raise a .5m telescope to a 40km altitude.  At that height, the instrument is above 99.5% of the Earth’s atmosphere, and is capable of snapping incredible photos similar to those captured by Hubble.

Balloons can also serve as a rocket launch pad, as is discussed in this UT video

The telescope technology itself is nothing special, but the ability to attach it to a balloon is.  In the past such a large balloon would lose pressure quickly, making any sustained observational mission a moot point.  However, NASA recently developed a “superpressure” balloon that is able to hold its helium for months, allowing the entire assembly to stay aloft for long enough to collect good, clear data on an observational target.

That data will be help by the stabilization array attached to the balloon platform.  In a previous test flight in 2019, the telescope only varied by less than 1/36000 of a degree over the course of an hour.  Extreme accuracy is necessary for long exposure times, and SuperBIT seems to pass that test.

SuperBIT balloon in flight back in 2016.
Credit – Richard Massey / Durham University

Another advantage it has over telescope based systems is that it eventually will in fact come down.  Hubble has been using mostly the same imaging equipment for the last 30+ years, making its optics system a virtual dinosaur by modern day standards.  Just how difficult it is to repair a space-based telescope is clear from Hubble’s story.  With balloon based observational platforms, there will always be the ability to launch an upgraded version a few months after the last iteration was in the air.

Solar sails have been receiving a lot of attention lately.  In part that is due to a series of high profile missions that have successfully proven the concept. It’s also in part due to the high profile Breakthrough Starshot project, which is designing a solar sail powered mission to reach Alpha Centauri. But this versatile third propulsion system isn’t only useful for far flung adventures – it has advantages closer to home as well.  A new paper by engineers at UCLA defines what those advantages are, and how we might be able to best utilize them.

The literal driving force behind some solar sail projects are lasers.  These concentrated beams of light are perfect to provide a pushing force against a solar sail.  However, they are also useful as weapons if scaled up too much, vaporizing anything in its path.  As such, one of the main design constraints for solar sail systems is around materials that can withstand a high power laser blast, yet still be light enough to not burden the craft it is attached to with extra weight.

UT video discussing what a solar sail is.

For the missions that graduate student Ho-Ting Tung and Dr. Artur Davoyan of UCLA’s Mechanical Engineering Department envision that weight is miniscule.  They expect any sailing spacecraft to weigh less than 100 grams.  That 100 grams would include a sail array that measures up to 10 cm square.

With such small masses and large area comes the huge benefit of solar sailing – the maximum speed achievable by this propulsion technology is leaps and bounds faster than the two more traditional technologies – chemical and electrical propulsion.  The study focused on two types of orbital maneuvers normally performed by those other propulsion systems – one where the sail moved around in Earth’s orbit, and one where it traveled between planets.

Schematic showing how to use laser acceleration to reach the outer solar system much more quickly than conventional methods.
Credit – Tung & Davoyan

Planet Earth is currently experiencing an unprecedented warming trend. Average global temperatures are rising at an accelerated rate in response to greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activity. These rising temperatures, in turn, result in the release of additional greenhouse gases (like methane), leading to positive feedback loops that threaten to compound the problem further.

This scientific consensus is based on multiple lines of evidence, all of which indicate the need for swift action. According to new research led by members of the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team (N-SLCT) at the University of Hawaii at Manao (UHM), a new Lunar cycle that will begin by the mid-2030s will amplify sea levels already rising due to climate change. This will mean even more coastal flooding during high tides and coastal storms in the near future.

The study that describes their findings, titled “Rapid increases and extreme months in projections of United States high-tide flooding,” was published last month in Nature Climate Change. The research was led by Phil Thompson, an assistant professor at UHM’s Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, and included members from UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of South Florida, NASA JPL, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

NOAA projections on coastal floods in 2021. Credit: NOAA

Also known as “nuisance floods” (or sunny day floods), high tide floods (HTFs) are already a problem in many coastal cities around the world. These occur when tides reach anywhere from 0.5 to 0.6 m (1.75 to 2 ft) above the daily average for high tides, leading to flooded shorelines, streets, storm drains, and basements in coastal communities. According to reports by the NOAA, more than 600 of these floods occurred in 2019 alone.

Similar reports indicated that between May 2020 and April 2021, coastal communities in the US saw twice as many HTFs as they did in 2000. In addition, 14 locations along the Southeast Atlantic and Gulf coastlines tied or broke their records for the number of HTF days by a factor of 4 to 11 over what they experienced in 2000, and the number of HTF events is now accelerating at 80% of NOAA water level stations along the East and Gulf Coasts.

Space is full of hazards.  The Earth, and it’s atmosphere, does a great job of shielding us from most of them.  But sometimes those hazards are more powerful than even those protections can withstand, and potentially catastrophic events can result.  Some of the most commonly known potential catastrophic events are solar flares.  While normal solar activity can be deflected by the planet’s magnetic field, resulting in sometimes spectacular auroras, larger solar flares are a danger to look out for.  So it’s worth celebrating a team of researchers from the International Space Science Institute which found a way to better track these potentially dangerous natural events.

Extremely large coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are relatively rare, and when they do happen they normally aren’t pointed at Earth.  This was the case in 2012, when a massive solar flare missed Earth, but could have knocked out power grids and destroyed satellites on an entire hemisphere of the planet.

UT Video discussing the severity of solar storms.

Flares as large as the one in 2012 are relatively easy to detect using conventional sensing methods, because of their size but also their positioning.    These sensors can watch for signs of brightening on the Sun’s surface that are indicative of a solar flare, or watch the flare itself as it passes out of the sun into the blackness of space.    Unfortunately the same sensing techniques are not able to detect the most important kind of CMEs – those that are aimed right for us but don’t cause any brightening.  

These CMEs, which don’t produce any telltale signs on the Sun’s surface, are known as “stealth” CMEs.  Usually we only notice these when they actually hit the Earth, and don’t have a good indication of where they formed on the Sun.  However, the researchers used data collected on four stealth CMEs by NASA’s STEREO spacecraft that did in fact track them back to their origins on the Sun.  

Anton Petrov’s video discussing the 2012 solar flare.
Credit – Anton Petrov YouTube Channel

When they subsequently analyzed those origin points with other data collected simultaneously, they noticed a changing brightening pattern that appeared for all four stealth CMEs.  They believe these changes are indicative of the stealth CME’s formation, allowing scientists precious time to detect and prepare for a potential massive CME hit once similar patterns are detected.