Remember the Soyuz rocket that failed a couple of weeks ago, forcing the astronauts to make a quick return back to Earth? Russia's Roscosmos has released the launch video showing the entire journey from blast-off to the moment the event happened.
For the first minute or so, it's a beautiful launch to watch, seeing the ground get farther and farther away. Seeing the sky turn from blue to black as the rocket rises above the atmosphere. And then at the 1:25 mark or so, when the boosters separate, it all goes wrong. And spinny.
Once again, it's a stark reminder of how dangerous spaceflight still is. Astronauts are crazy brave to get into those things and fly to space.
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today
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This week's guest on the Weekly Space Hangout was me. Well, me and Dave Dickinson, the author of our new book: "The Universe Today Ultimate Guide to Viewing the Cosmos". Dave talked about what it was like to write the book, and highlighted a lot of the content you'll find in it. We also shared some of our ideas for what we might do next.
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Good news everyone! Hubble Space Telescope is back in business. We all held our collective breaths a few weeks ago when one of Hubble's gyros failed, putting it into safe mode. And then on Oct. 26th, NASA announced that they were able to get a backup gyro online and working within the parameters they needed. Phew.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe crossed a significant milestone this week, becoming the closest object humanity has ever thrown at the Sun - the previous record was 42 million km, held by the German-American Helios 2. Not only that, but it also became the fastest object ever launched into space, reaching a speed of 245,000 km/h. The mission is just beginning. There are many more records about to be broken.
Have you heard about China's plans to build an artificial moon in orbit that'll brighten the nighttime sky? The reality is that orbital mechanics will make this impossible to pull off. If it's in low orbit, it'll only be over a city for a few minutes each orbit. If it's at geostationary orbit, it'll have to be HUGE. Not impossible, but as Scott Manley points out, really really difficult to do.
It's been about a year since the interstellar asteroid/comet Oumuamua passed quickly through the Solar System from interstellar space. Astronomers are still trying to puzzle out its bizarre trajectory, and one idea is that a solar sail buffeted by the Sun's winds could explain its path. Of course, it's not aliens. It's never aliens...
Construction is going well for all the next generation ground observatories. But one of the big ones, the Thirty Meter Telescope, has had multi-year legal battle to get built on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. Native Hawaiians blocked the construction, not wanting to add another huge observatory on the sacred mountain, but this week Hawaii's supreme court ruled in favor of the $1.4 billion telescope.
Actually, that's not exactly right. It's a simulation of what the Milky Way would look like bouncing off the Moon in radio waves. It was created by astronomers to actually study an early time in the Universe called the "Dark Ages". They see how the Moon blocks a view to the background radiation of the cosmos, and needed to show how the reflection of the Milky Way would interact with that. Very cool.
Curiosity's sister rover, the Mars 2020 rover is getting ready for its trip to Mars. But where should it go? That's the question that planetary scientists were trying to answer at a recent meeting in Los Angeles. They're down to four landing sites that have the best potential for finding evidence of past life on Mars.
Astronomers have a couple of ways of calculating the expansion rate of the Universe, and it turns out, the best two methods disagree. So, astronomers are looking for new ways, and one idea might be to use the gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars for another measurement. We just need more collisions to be observed.
Planetary scientists have been watching this strange cloud high up in the atmosphere of Mars. The strange part is that it's hovering right at the huge Arsia Mons Volcano. It looks like the volcano is erupting, but actually, it's a cloud of water ice known as an orographic or lee cloud. We get them on Earth, and they've been seen on Mars too.
NASA's hardworking Kepler Space Telescope has found over 2,600 extrasolar planets, more than any other survey or mission to date (with thousands more planetary candidates in the works). And now, after 9 years of observations, including a loss of reaction wheels that almost ended the mission, the telescope is out of fuel and time to be retired... forever.
The commercial rocket game is expanding, and Virgin Orbit is getting into the business with its "Launcher One"; a rocket that'll be carried underneath a Boeing 747 aircraft. This week the company showed off the rocket and carrier plane, getting closer to its first flight sometime next year.
Other Interesting Space Stuff
This is a photograph of the Milky Way seen from the bottom of Upper Antelope Canyon in Arizona, USA. It was taken by @photography_by_ko, who explains just how difficult it was to be able to even take this shot.
We have featured nearly 1,000 astrophotographers on our Instagram page, which has more than 139,000 followers. Want to do a takeover? Use the hashtag #universetoday and I'll check out your photos.
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