A proposed NASA mission to Uranus would shed light on the mysterious ice giant as well as a type of exoplanet that's among the most common in the universe, researchers say.
Space News & Blog Articles
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Juice one step closer to launch
Video: 00:04:54
After many years of study, development, building and testing, ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, has finally arrived at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. At the end of 2022 the spacecraft underwent its final thermal vacuum test at an Airbus Defence and Space facility in Toulouse, as well as its final software verification tests, whereby it was controlled from the ESOC mission control centre in Darmstadt, Germany.
Soon, an Ariane 5 will lift Juice into orbit and send it on its journey to explore the largest planet in our Solar System and its three icy moons, Europa, Callisto and in particular Ganymede. By exploring and studying the Jovian system, the mission neatly fullfills its role in ESA’s Cosmic Vision programme, teaching us about our Universe and the origins of life.
Ingenuity helicopter aces 43rd Mars flight, its longest in 10 months
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter conducted its 43rd Mars flight on Thursday (Feb. 16), covering 1,280 feet (390 meters) of Red Planet ground.
Binoculars deal spotted: 34% off Celestron Nature DX ED 8x42
Save over $71 on the Celestron Nature DX ED 8x42 binoculars, ideal for outdoor use and being on-the-go.
NSYNC's Lance Bass talks about canceled space mission, new podcast (exclusive)
Lance Bass almost made it to the International Space Station in 2002. Twenty years later, the NSYNC star told Space.com, he still wants to visit the orbiting complex to do science.
Spaceflight doubleheader! Watch SpaceX launch 2 rockets 9 hours apart on Friday
SpaceX plans to launch two orbital missions less than nine hours apart on Friday (Feb. 17), and you can watch the back-to-back action live.
Earth from Space: Liverpool Land, Greenland
Image: The Liverpool Land peninsula, on the east coast of Greenland, is featured in this Copernicus Sentinel-2 image.
First launch of Japan’s H3 rocket aborted moments before liftoff
The first launch of Japan’s H3 rocket was aborted moments before liftoff Thursday (U.S. time). Credit: JAXA
Japan’s first H3 rocket, nearly a decade in development, was moments from liftoff Thursday (U.S. time) when the launch vehicle detected a problem and cut off the countdown just before sending a command to ignite two strap-on solid-fueled boosters.
The H3 rocket’s two hydrogen-fueled main engines ignited about 6.3 seconds before liftoff, sending a plume of exhaust out of the flame trench at the Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan. But the H3’s dual solid rocket boosters did not light when the countdown cluck struck zero.
“During the automatic countdown sequence of the rocket, the first stage vehicle system detected an abnormality and did not send out the solid rocket booster (SRB-3) ignition signal, so today’s launch was canceled,” the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said in a statement.
JAXA officials did not provide any more details on the problem that prevented the 187-foot-tall (57-meter) H3 rocket from taking off Thursday at 8:37 p.m. EST (0137 GMT Friday). The launch team began preparations to drain cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen from the two-stage rocket as engineers analyzed data to find the cause of the abort.
The H3 rocket’s countdown was running on a computer-controlled sequencer, which checks numerous parameters in the final moments before launch to ensure engines, avionics, and other systems are ready for liftoff.
Live coverage: SpaceX ready to launch 51 more Starlink satellites
Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on the Starlink 2-5 mission with 51 Starlink internet satellites. Text updates will appear automatically below; there is no need to reload the page. Follow us on Twitter.
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Japan's new H3 rocket aborts 1st-ever launch attempt
Japan's powerful new H3 rocket aborted its first-ever launch attempt on Thursday (Feb. 16), remaining on the pad because one of its solid rocket boosters failed to ignite as planned.
Inmarsat satellite poised to provide connectivity over Atlantic Ocean
Artist’s illustration of the Inmarsat 6 F2 communications satellite with solar arrays and its L-band antenna deployed in orbit. Credit: Inmarsat
A large European-built communications satellite owned by London-based Inmarsat is set to ride a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit Friday night from Cape Canaveral, kicking off a mission to connect ships and airplanes across the Atlantic Ocean and the U.S. East Coast through 2040.
With a wingspan as side as a Boeing 767 jetliner and a body the size of a double-decker bus, the Inmarsat 6 F2 spacecraft will be parked in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the Earth, using a dual-band communications payload provide in-flight WiFi on aircraft, broadband services to ships, and connectivity for U.S. military and other government users.
“It is one of the world’s largest spacecraft in terms of weight and power, but inside of it, I think the thing that makes it unique is all the signal processing that goes on,” said Peter Hadinger, Inmarsat’s chief technology officer.
“It’s an incredibly advanced signal processor that’s capable of forming beams on the Earth and moving them around in real-time, creating channels as we need them, moving the spacecraft’s power to where it’s required on the face of the Earth,” Hadinger told Spaceflight Now in a pre-launch interview. “And that makes it a very capable spacecraft because we can take all the spacecraft’s energy and put it where it’s needed on a moment-by-moment basis.”
Inmarsat 6 F2 is the twin of another satellite, Inmarsat 6 F1, that launched in December 2021 on a Japanese H-2A rocket. Both Inmarsat 6 satellites were built by Airbus, use electric propulsion for their in-orbit maneuvers, and host L-band and Ka-band communications payloads targeted at different segments in the mobile communications market.
Watch live: Japan’s new H3 rocket ready for first test flight
Japan is set to test its new flagship launch vehicle, the H3, with a demonstration flight Thursday night from the Tanegashima Space Center, debuting a rocket that is less expensive, more capable, and more flexible than the country’s previous generation of launchers.
Covered in orange foam insulation, the first H3 rocket rolled out to its launch pad on the eve of liftoff, moving into position on Launch Pad No. 2 at Tanegashima, a spaceport overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the southwestern end of the Japanese island chain.
Launch engineers plan to load cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the expendable two-stage rocket in the hours before liftoff. The H3 has a six-minute, 20-second launch window opening at 8:37:55 p.m. EST Thursday (0137:55 GMT Friday), or 10:37 a.m. Japan Standard Time.
Japan’s space agency started development of the H3 rocket in 2013, with a goal of slashing in half the cost per launch of Japan’s workhorse H-2A rocket, which has been in service since 2001. The new rocket has a cheaper, lighter, and more powerful version of the hydrogen-fueled engine that flies on the H-2A rocket, and flies with two or three main engines instead of a single powerplant on the core stage of the H-2A.
What Would Happen if the Solar System Gained a Super-Earth?
In this era of exoplanet discovery, astronomers have found over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets, with thousands more awaiting confirmation and many billions more waiting to be discovered. These exoplanets exist in a bewildering spectrum of sizes, compositions, orbital periods, and just about every other characteristic that can be measured.
Learning about them has also shed light on our Solar System. We used to think of it as an archetypal arrangement of planets since it’s all we had to go on. But now we know we might be the outlier because we have no Super-Earth.
Super-Earths are a class of planets that are common around other stars. They’re defined by mass alone, between 2 to 10 Earth masses. Even though planet-hunters have found over 1500 of them, our Solar System doesn’t have one. Since our Solar System lacks one of these representative types, it’s difficult for planetary scientists to understand the Super Earths in other systems.
NASA’s Exoplanet Discoveries Dashboard shows how many of each planet type we’ve discovered. About 30% of them are Super-Earths, though selection bias affects the results. Image Credit: NASAOur Solar System’s architecture is quite a bit different than what astronomers see around other stars, too. Systems like Kepler-11 have multiple planets in compact systems on long-term stable orbits much closer to the star. Interactions between planets this tightly packed should contribute to orbital instability, but Kepler-11’s planets have the potential to be stable for billions of years. The smallest planet in the system, Kepler-11 f, is still 2.5 times more massive than Earth.
The Kepler-11 system is an example of a compact system. The orbits of planets b to f would fit inside Mercury’s orbit, with g just outside. The planets are too close to the star to be in the habitable zone. Image Credit: By NASA / Tim Pyle – New Planetary System image:[1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12888530Other systems like HD 20782 have planets with extreme orbital eccentricities. HD 20782 b has one of the most eccentric orbits known. Its eccentricity is 0.97, extremely high since an eccentricity of 1.00 is an escape orbit. (For comparison, Earth’s eccentricity is 0.016, where 0 is a circular orbit.) As a result, HD 20782 b experiences wild temperature swings as it travels from the inner solar system to the outer system on its 585-day orbit.
![The Kepler-11 system is an example of a compact system. The orbits of planets b to f would fit inside Mercury's orbit, with g just outside. The planets are too close to the star to be in the habitable zone. Image Credit: By NASA / Tim Pyle - New Planetary System image:[1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12888530](https://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1439px-Kepler-11_System-1024x769.jpg)
The Mass of a Single Star (other than the Sun) has Been Directly Measured for the First Time
How do you measure an object’s weight from a distance? You could guess at its distance and therefore derive its size. Maybe you could further speculate about its density, which would eventually lead to an estimated weight. But these are far from the exact empirical studies that astrophysicists would like to have when trying to understand the weight of stars. Now, for the first time ever, scientists have empirically discovered the weight of a distant single star, and they did so using gravitational lensing.
Gravitational lensing is a technique that has been around for over 100 years at this point. First posited by Einstein as part of his General Theory of Relativity, gravitational lensing occurs when a massive object moves in front of a more distant source of light, and the light essentially bends around the massive object in the foreground. There are some spectacular examples of this in astronomy, most notably the features known as Einstein rings, where a black hole bends a star’s light.
One of the most well-known examples of its use in determining a star’s weight was an experiment on our own Sun. In 1919, Frank Dyson and Arthur Eddington saw the first confirmed instance of gravitational lensing during a solar eclipse. Their data was one of the first observational confirmations of Einstein’s General Theory and has shown the power of the technique to date.
The “Molten Ring” is one of the most complete Einstein Rings, and best example of gravitational lensing, ever discovered.Credit: NASA
However, so far, it has been tricky for astronomers to attempt to find an instance where they could isolate a single remote star and find the same lensing effect that Dyson and Eddington saw on the (admittedly much closer) Sun. So they’ve resorted to other tactics to discover the weights of stars, including using the gravitational mechanics of binary pairs to estimate the weights of each of them.
But with better telescopes come better observations, and observations by one telescope led to more precise observations of another during an extraordinary event – a lone white dwarf passed in front of a background star. The lone white dwarf, known as LAWD 37, is only about 15 light years from Earth – close enough to appear relatively clearly in observations. Gaia, the European Space Agency’s star cataloging telescope, tracked it along with a few billion other stars.
Virgin Galactic carrier plane flies for 1st time since 2021
Virgin Galactic's carrier plane VMS Eve conducted a test flight on Wednesday (Feb. 15), taking to the skies for the first time since October 2021.
3 mystery objects shot down by US likely weren't spy craft, Biden says
The three mysterious objects shot down recently by U.S. fighter jets were likely research or recreation objects lofted by private companies or academic institutions, President Joe Biden said.
Webb Sees Three Galaxy Clusters Coming Together to Form a Megacluster
As the successor to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, one of the main duties of the James Webb Space Telescope has been to take deep-field images of iconic cosmic objects and structures. The JWST’s next-generation instruments and improved resolution provide breathtakingly detailed images, allowing astronomers to learn more about the cosmos and the laws that govern it. The latest JWST deep-field is of a region of space known as Abell 7244 – aka. Pandora’s Cluster – where three galaxy clusters are in the process of coming together to form a megacluster.
The image was taken as part of the Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization (UNCOVER) program. The UNCOVER team relies on data obtained by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to observe Pandora’s Cluster for about 30 hours. Follow-up observations are then made with the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to provide precise distance measurements and other detailed information about the lensed galaxies’ compositions. The program aims to study early galaxies to gain new insights into galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe.
UNCOVER is a JWST Cycle 1 public Treasury survey that will obtain deep NIRCam multiband imaging and ultradeep low-resolution NIRSpec/PRISM spectroscopy of the Frontier Field Abell 2744. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/UNCOVER
Combining Webb’s powerful infrared instruments with a broad mosaic view of the clusters’ lensing effect, the UNCOVER team aimed to achieve a balance of depth and breadth that showcases the power of the JWST and the era of astronomy it is ushering in. The resulting image of Pandora’s Cluster contains an estimated 50,000 sources of near-infrared light and shows the powerful gravitational lens created by the combined mass of the clusters. This phenomenon occurs when massive objects (as predicted by General Relativity) alter the curvature of spacetime, causing light from more distant objects to become warped and amplified.
In this case, this lensing technique is being used by astronomers to view galaxies that existed when the Universe was young. These earliest (“First Light”) galaxies formed during the Cosmic Dark Ages, a period that began ca. 330,000 years after the Big Bang that is not observable in visible light (hence the name). These galaxies led to the Era of Reionization, which ended the Dark Ages about 1 billion years ago and led to the Universe becoming transparent. Said astronomer Rachel Bezanson, an astrophysicist at the University of Pittsburg and the co-principal investigator on the UNCOVER program:
Black holes may be the source of mysterious dark energy
Black holes may be the origin of dark energy, according to a study by a team of researchers led by the University of Hawaii.
NASA's heartbeat-detecting tech to help with Turkey earthquake relief effort
NASA-developed technology that can remotely detect the tiniest motions of the body caused by basic processes necessary for life will be used by disaster relief teams in earthquake-stricken Turkey.
