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Category: space – Page 652

The secrets of the solar system can drive economic return for all.

The launch of NASA’s fifth Mars rover marks a new milestone in the era of space exploration. It puts focus on the need for greater collaboration, equity and inclusion among international partners to ensure the sustainable, peaceful and fair use of resources. Guidelines for interacting and norms of behaviour are as essential to ensure success in space as on Earth.

The Artemis Accords: a framework for cooperation

The Artemis Accords, recently announced by NASA, is a framework to encourage international cooperation and ensure a safe, prosperous and sustainable future for all humankind in space. The Accords are bi-lateral agreements between the United States and other nations who wish to collaborate with NASA on the Artemis program, and they build on existing agreements with countries already involved in NASA-led programs such as the International Space Station.

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It seems Starlink will give other service providers a run for their money. 🙂

Managing Expectations

SpaceX made its expectations clear from the beginning: The space company called the public test a “Better Than Nothing Beta” and suggested users might see speeds of 50 to 150 Mbps.

“Starlink will forever change the game,” one user from rural Montana said on Reddit as they shared their 174 Mbps download speeds. Another beta tester boasted of their results in Seattle, which were slightly lower but still better than 95 percent of the U.S.

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An international team of planetary scientists led by astronomers at AOP have found an asteroid trailing behind Mars with a composition very similar to the moon’s. The asteroid could be an ancient piece of debris, dating back to the gigantic impacts that formed the moon and the other rocky planets in our solar system like Mars and the Earth. The research, which was published in the journal Icarus, also has implications for finding such primordial objects associated with our own planet.

Trojans are a class of asteroid that follows the in their orbits as a flock of sheep might follow a shepherd, trapped within gravitational “safe havens” 60 degrees in front of, and behind, the planet (Figure 1). They are of great interest to scientists as they represent leftover material from the formation and early evolution of the solar system. Several thousands of those Trojans exist along the orbit of the giant planet Jupiter. Closer to the Sun, astronomers have so far discovered only a handful of Trojans of Mars, the planet next door to Earth.

A team including scientists from Italy, Bulgaria and the US and led by the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium (AOP) in Northern Ireland has been studying the Trojans of Mars to understand what they tell us about the early history of the inner worlds of our solar system—the so-called terrestrial planets—but also to inform searches for Trojans of the Earth. Ironically, it is much easier to find Trojans of Mars than for our own planet because these Earth Trojans, if they exist, sit always close to the Sun in the sky where it is difficult to point a telescope. An Earth Trojan, named 2010 TK7, was found a decade ago by NASA’s WISE space telescope, but computer modeling showed it is a temporary visitor from the belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter rather than a relic planetesimal from the Earth’s formation.

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After years of detective work, scientists working on the European Space Agency (ESA) Rosetta mission have now been able to locate where the Philae lander made its second and penultimate contact with the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 12 November 2014, before finally coming to a halt 30 metres away. This landing was monitored from the German Aerospace Center Philae Control Center. Philae left traces behind; the lander pressed its top side and the housing of its sample drill into an icy crevice in a black rocky area covered with carbonaceous dust. As a result, Philae scratched open the surface, exposing ice from when the comet was formed that had been protected from the Sun’s radiation ever since. The bare, bright icy surface, the outline of which is somewhat reminiscent of a skull, has now revealed the contact point, researchers write in the scientific publication Nature.

All that was known previously was the location of the first contact, that there had been another impact following the rebound, and the location of the final landing site where Philae came to rest after two hours and where it was found towards the end of the Rosetta mission in 2016. “Now we finally know the exact place where Philae touched down on the comet for the second time. This will allow us to fully reconstruct the lander’s trajectory and derive important scientific results from the telemetry data as well as measurements from some of the instruments operating during the landing process,” explains Jean-Baptiste Vincent from the DLR Institute of Planetary Research, who was involved in the research published today. “Philae had left us with one final mystery waiting to be solved,” says ESA’s Laurence O’Rourke, the lead author of the study.

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Space — The final frontier, and for Soviet cosmonaut, Sergei Krikalev, it nearly was his final frontier! Check out today’s new video where a soviet astronaut was on a space mission, meanwhile the USSR crumbled,… More making him the last citizen of the Soviet Union. How did Sergei finally get home, and what home would he be coming back to? Check out this epic new space story to find out!

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