Video: 00:03:03
After five years of intensive refurbishment works, the Headquarters of the European Space Agency has reopened its doors on rue Mario Nikis in Paris, France. As flexible as it is ultra-modern, ‘ESA HQ Mario Nikis’ is the very embodiment of a European organisation at the cutting edge of high technology and is resolutely open to the city it calls home.
Join us on 23 March to hear about ambitious new ideas for space exploration from ESA's 315th Council, taking place in the freshly renovated ESA HQ Mario Nikis building in Paris.
Relativity Space’s Terran 1 rocket on Launch Complex 16 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Credit: Relativity Space
Relativity Space will try a third time to launch a 3D-printed rocket from Cape Canaveral Wednesday night, and weather forecasters predict a 95% chance of favorable conditions for the late-night test flight.
The three-hour launch window at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station opens Wednesday at 10 p.m. EDT (0200 UTC Thursday). Relativity Space will try to make history by launching the first 3D-printed, methane-fueled rocket into orbit, following two scrubbed launch attempts March 8 and March 11.
Delays and aborts are not uncommon in launches of new rockets. Relativity Space shifted the timing for the Terran 1 rocket from the afternoon hours until an overnight launch window for the next countdown Wednesday night.
Relativity Space got within a half-second of launching the Terran 1 rocket on the second launch attempt March 11.
The company said the countdown automatically aborted when a computer detected an apparent issue with the rocket’s “stage separation automation” just a half-second before liftoff. Ground teams uplinked new software to the rocket to fix the glitch, then tried again to launch the Terran 1 rocket later in the launch window March 11. But the countdown stopped again at T-minus 45 seconds when computers detected a slightly low pressure in the second stage kerosene fuel tank.
The Artemis 2 moon rocket's core stage is nearly fully assembled aside from the engines, according to NASA. The launcher will send astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024.
Alpha Centauri is our closest stellar neighbor, a binary star system located just 4.376 light-years away. Despite its proximity, repeated astronomical surveys have failed to find hard evidence of extrasolar planets in this system. Part of the problem is that the system consists of two stars orbiting each other, which makes detecting exoplanets through the two most popular methods very challenging. In 2019, Breakthrough Initiatives announced they were backing a new project to find exoplanets next door – the Telescope for Orbit Locus Interferometric Monitoring of our Astronomical Neighbourhood (TOLIMAN, after the star’s ancient name in Arabic).
This low-cost mission concept was designed by a team from the University of Sydney, Australia, and aims to look for potentially-habitable exoplanets in the Alpha Centauri system using the Astrometry Method. This consists of monitoring a star’s apparent position in the sky for signs of wobble, indicating that gravitational forces (like planets) are acting on it. Recently, the University of Sydney signed a contract with EnduroSat, a leading microsatellites and space services provider, to provide the delivery system and custom-built minisatellite that will support the mission when it launches.
Alpha Centauri consists of a G-type primary star (similar to our Sun) and a K-type (orange dwarf) secondary. Because of its binary nature, it has been very difficult to discern possible signals from this system that could be the result of exoplanets. This includes the Transit Method, where astronomers monitor stars for periodic dips in luminosity that may indicate planets passing in front of the star (transiting) relative to the observer. But since the stars also make transits, dips in luminosity are very common.
Annotated specifications for the Telescope for Orbit Locus Interferometric Monitoring of our Astronomical Neighbourhood (TOLIMAN) space telescope. Credit: Tuthill et al. (2018)
Similarly, the way the stars co-orbit each other significantly affects their movement back and forth (aka. radial velocity). This makes it very difficult to detect planets that could be orbiting them, as indicated by how their gravitational influence affects the star’s movement (the Radial Velocity Method). However, this same method confirmed the existence of a rocky planet (Proxima b) orbiting within Proxima Centauri’s habitable zone in 2016. Two more have been found since, including an innermost Mars-sized rocky planet and an outermost gas giant (possibly with rings!)
The luminous, hot star Wolf-Rayet 124 (WR 124) is prominent at the center of the James Webb Space Telescope’s composite image combining near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths of light from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team
A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a rare glimpse of a massive star 15,000 light-years away shedding a halo of gas and dust, seeding the cosmos with elements necessary for forming other stars, planets, and the building blocks of life.
The colorful vista captured by the Webb telescope combines observations from the observatory’s instruments sensitive to different wavelengths of light in the near-infrared and mid-infrared portion of the spectrum. It shows a Wolf-Rayet star, a class of extremely hot, luminous stars that eject gargantuan amounts of gas and dust from their outer layers before ending their lives in a supernova explosion.
Webb’s view of a star known as WR 124, located in the constellation Sagitta, shows a cloud of gas cooling as it streams away into interstellar space, the void between the stars. Webb’s infrared instruments are able to detect the thermal emissions from the gas and dust, material that is difficult to see with observatories seeing visible light.
The glowing cloud of gas and dust surrounding WR 124 spans 10 light-years across.
“A history of the star’s past episodes of mass can be read in the nebula’s structure,” officials from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb, wrote in a press release. “Rather than smooth shells, the nebula is formed from random, asymmetric ejections. Bright clumps of gas and dust appear like tadpoles swimming toward the star, with tails streaming out behind them, blown back by the stellar wind. ”
An image of a crater rim near the moon's south pole shows how NASA's ShadowCam instrument is shining new light on the darker regions of our celestial neighbor.
A video of a fireball streaking across the sky likely shows a Chinese rocket section that burned up in the atmosphere above Texas on March 7.
A camera aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket caught Earth as a beautiful blue marble in a striking new video filmed from orbit.
The UN's final IPCC report warns that drastic action must be taken immediately, but staving off disaster is within humanity's grasp.
"Star Wars Jedi: Survivor" just got new plot details, gameplay images and screenshots ahead of its release in April.
Four big asteroids hit Earth in the past million years alone, according to a new study, suggesting that the space-rock danger is higher than previously thought. But not everyone agrees with the result.
Careful scrutiny of the debris from the impact of NASA's DART mission into Dimorphos has not found any evidence for water ice on the asteroid, nor the residue of thruster fuel from the spacecraft.
The Hakuto-R moon lander entered lunar orbit late Monday night (March 20), notching a huge milestone for the Japanese company ispace and private spaceflight in general.
An organic compound that's part of the RNA molecules that transmit genetic information in cells has been discovered in samples from the asteroid Ryugu, suggesting the stuff of life came from space.
Jupiter will meet up with the moon before joining Mercury in late March, after which it will disappear in the glare of the sun until it reappears in May.
ESA's Gaia mission has been collecting data on millions of space objects like stars and asteroids to build an extensive cosmic record. Now, to take it up a notch, it needs your eyes.
Our galaxy is still actively making stars. We’ve known that for a while, but sometimes it’s hard to understand the true scale in astronomical terms. A team from Japan is trying to help with that by using a novel machine-learning technique to identify soon-to-be star-forming regions spread throughout the Milky Way. They found 140,000 of them.
The regions, known in astronomy as molecular clouds, are typically invisible to humans. However, they do emit radio waves, which can be picked up by the massive radio telescopes dotted around our planet. Unfortunately, the Milky Way is the only galaxy close enough where we can pick up those signals, and even in our home galaxy; the clouds are so far spread apart it has been challenging to capture an overall picture of them.
The upper band shows the distribution of the molecular cloud star-forming regions in one quadrant of the galaxy The lower band shows infrared data collected by Spitzer.
Credit – National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Nobeyama Radio Observatory
Therefore a team from Osaka Metropolitan University thought – machine learning to the rescue. They took a data set from the Nobeyama radio telescope located in Nagano prefecture and looked for the prevalence of carbon monoxide molecules. That resulted in an astonishing 140,000 visible molecular clouds in just one quadrant of the Milky Way.
As a next step, the team looked deeper into the data and figured out how large they were, as well as where they were located in the galactic plane. Given that there are four more quadrants to explore, there’s a good chance there are significantly more to find.
The highly-anticipated Dragonfly robotic rotocraft mission to Saturn’s moon Titan is scheduled to launch in 2027. When it arrives in the mid-2030s, it will hover and zoom around in the thick atmosphere of Titan, sampling the air and imaging the landscape. What could be more exciting than that!?
Well, actually … there’s more: Dragonfly will also be equipped with a mass spectrometer that will help it search for the chemistry of life in this alien world. Astrobiologists want to know if Titan has the same type of chemistry on its surface that Earth did in its early history, which could have helped give rise to life on our planet.
A near-infrared mosaic image of Saturn’s moon Titan shows the sun reflecting and glinting off of Titan’s northern polar seas. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/University of IdahoTitan, the second largest moon in our Solar System, is the only known moon with an atmosphere. It is the most Earth-like place we know of, as it has rain, lakes, and oceans. But at Titan’s frigid surface temperatures — roughly -180 degrees Celsius (-292 degrees Fahrenheit) — liquid methane and ethane dominate Titan’s hydrocarbon equivalent of Earth’s water. But this complex carbon-rich chemistry, as well as Titan’s interior ocean make it an ideal destination to study the prebiotic chemical processes that could lead to the formation of life.
Dragonfly’s Mass Spectrometer (DraMS) is designed to help scientists remotely study the chemistry at work on Titan, measuring samples of Titan’s surface materials to look for evidence of what is called prebiotic chemistry, the chemical steps that lead to the formation of life.
“We want to know if the type of chemistry that could be important for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth is taking place on Titan,” said Dr. Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, in a NASA press release.
All Rights Reserved. 2024. SpaceZE.com
