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Category: space – Page 646

Astronomers calculate genesis of Oort cloud in chronological order

A team of Leiden astronomers has managed to calculate the first 100 million years of the history of the Oort cloud in its entirety. Until now, only parts of the history had been studied separately. The cloud, with roughly 100 billion comet-like objects, forms an enormous shell at the edge of our solar system. The astronomers will soon publish their comprehensive simulation and its consequences in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The Oort cloud was discovered in 1950 by the Dutch Jan Hendrik Oort to explain why there continue to be new comets with elongated orbits in our solar system. The cloud, which starts at more than 3000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, should not be confused with the Kuiper belt. This is the rim of rock, grains and ice in which the dwarf planet Pluto is located and which orbits relatively close to the Sun at about 30 to 50 times the Earth-Sun distance.

Why NASA’s return to Venus could help save the Earth

The space agency is launching two missions to study Venus’ atmosphere and geological history.

“I did a lot of screaming and jumping up and down,” Grinspoon tells Inverse. “I scared my dog.”

On Wednesday, NASA selected both DAVINCI+ and another Venus mission, VERITAS, to study the planet’s atmosphere and geological history. It will mark a return to Venus after decades away.

By returning to Venus, it could answer questions both intriguing, like if Venus ever had the right conditions for life, and existential, like if Venus is a vision of our future.

Why Two Pounds Of Dirt From Mars Costs $9 Billion | So Expensive

The Perseverance rover began a two-year mission to collect Martian soil samples this year. It’s the first of three missions, jointly sponsored by NASA and ESA, aiming to bring Martian soil back to Earth in hopes of finding evidence of past life. The total costs of the missions will likely exceed more than $9 billion.

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Why two pounds of dirt from mars costs $9 billion | so expensive.

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Satellite operators meet 120 MHz C-band clearing target

TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite operators have cleared a portion of C-band in a key step toward giving the spectrum to U.S. wireless companies in December.

Work has now started on installing filters on ground antennas across the United States, so wireless operators can use the lower 120 MHz of C-band for 5G without interfering with satellite broadcast customers.

Intelsat and SES, the satellite operators with the largest share of the 500 MHz C-band in the U.S., will get more than $2 billion from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) if they can hand over the 120 MHz swath of frequencies by Dec. 5.

Episode 53 — New Book Takes Unique Angle On The Cold War, John Glenn, JFK and America’s Early Space Race With the Soviet Union

Great new, lively episode with historian and author Jeff Shesol on the earliest and arguably darkest days of the Cold War and how they were inexorably intertwined with America’s space race with the former Soviet Union. The cast of characters includes Eisenhower, JFK, Khrushchev, and John Glenn. Please have a listen.

Historian and former Clinton presidential speechwriter Jeff Shesol chats about his new book, “Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy and the New Battleground of the Cold War” just out from W.W. Norton. Shesol makes the case that the Cold War and the Space Race were inextricably intertwined in ways that are rarely appreciated in most conventional histories of the subjects. Shesol gives us a great inside look into this mostly-forgotten early era.

NASA is going back to Venus after 30 years for an apocalyptic reason

Two missions will study the hellish planet to piece together its climate past, look for volcanoes, and see if it was ever habitable.

NASA Administrator and former astronaut Senator Bill Nelson announced today that the agency would be sending two missions to Venus. The two missions, called DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, will respectively study the planet’s atmosphere and geological history.

“These two sister missions both aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world capable of melting lead at the surface,” Nelson said during his State of NASA address. “They will offer the entire science community the chance to investigate a planet we haven’t been to in more than 30 years.”

These two new projects have been awarded $500 million in funding each, and are expected to launch between 2028 and 2030. They were selected from a batch of four possible missions selected by NASA’s Discovery Program in 2020.

Stunning New Image of the Center of Our Galaxy Hints at Previously Unknown Interstellar Energy Source

New image made using NASA ’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory hints at previously unknown interstellar energy source at the Milky Way center.

New research by University of Massachusetts Amherst astronomer Daniel Wang reveals, with unprecedented clarity, details of violent phenomena in the center of our galaxy. The images, published recently in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, document an X-ray thread, G0.17–0.41, which hints at a previously unknown interstellar mechanism that may govern the energy flow and potentially the evolution of the Milky Way.

“The galaxy is like an ecosystem,” says Wang, a professor in UMass Amherst’s astronomy department, whose findings are a result of more than two decades of research. “We know the centers of galaxies are where the action is and play an enormous role in their evolution.” And yet, whatever has happened in the center of our own galaxy is hard to study, despite its relative proximity to Earth, because, as Wang explains, it is obscured by a dense fog of gas and dust. Researchers simply can’t see the center, even with an instrument as powerful as the famous Hubble Space Telescope. Wang, however, has used a different telescope, NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which “sees” X-rays, rather than the rays of visible light that we perceive with our own eyes. These X-rays are capable of penetrating the obscuring fog — and the results are stunning.

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