General Astronomy 🔭 (genastronomy.blogspot.com): 12/16/22

Friday, December 16, 2022

🚀 December 16, 2022: Splashdown! Artemis I is Over, Fusion Ignition Achieved, Best Landing Sites on Mars, And More...

We Have Ignition! Fusion Breakthrough Raises Hopes — and Questions

Researchers at the National Ignition Facility have made a historic breakthrough, releasing more energy in a fusion experiment than was pumped in. They fired 192 high-powered lasers at a tiny capsule that contained a mix of deuterium and tritium, using 2.05 megajoules of energy. They extracted 3.15 megajoules of neutron-producing fusion energy, a gain of 1.5. This is a tremendous accomplishment, demonstrating that the technique works, but we're still a long way to commercial fusion plants.

Read the full story by Alan Boyle

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Should You Get a Degree, Straight Line Space Travel, Astronomy in 100 Years | Q&A 203

How far away do constellations start to change? What if The Big Bang was more energetic? Is a university degree worth it? Why don't we travel through the solar system in straight lines? All this and more in this week's Q&A with Fraser Cain.

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Orion Splashes Down in the Pacific Ocean, Completing the Artemis I Mission

Splashdown! On December 11th, 2022, after almost 26 days in space, NASA's Orion capsule landed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja, California. It had completed a multi-million-kilometer journey flying past the Moon and testing the techniques and technologies that would eventually carry humans to the Moon and back. The entire mission had almost no problems, but its payload of Cubesats wasn't so lucky - half had already failed. With Artemis I over, NASA is preparing for Artemis II, which is expected to fly in 2024.

Read the full story by Matt Williams

Asteroids Didn't Create the Moon's Largest Craters. Left-Over Planetesimals Did

The surface of the Moon is covered in craters large and small - astronomers have found over 9,000. The most significant impacts are known as "basins," and astronomers now believe that planetesimals, leftover from the formation of the Solar System, caused these vast regions. There are about 50 of these larger impact basins on the Moon, the largest of which could hold the state of Texas. These objects would have been dozens or even hundreds of kilometers across.

Read the full story by Evan Gough

The Voids Closest to Us May Not be Entirely Empty

Galaxy clusters clump together through mutual gravity, with vast voids opening up between them as the Universe expands. We can't see many galaxies in these voids, and astronomers assumed they'd also be free of dark matter. But that might not be true. Researchers simulated the seven nearest voids to the Milky Way and found that they weren't always free of dark matter. Many don't even have densities below the Universe's average density.

Read the full story by Paul M. Sutter

Accident on the ISS // JWST Deep Field // Space Habitat Goes BANG!

Splashdown! Artemis I has returned home. Webb has made its first Deep Field survey. Listen to the sound of a dust devil on Mars, and a Space journalist is going to the Moon.

Sierra Space Inflated a Habitat to Destruction, Testing its Limits Before Going to Orbit

Pop goes the space habitat. Engineers at Sierra Space pushed their new LIFE habitat to destruction in a recent Ultimate Burst Pressure (UBP). They filled the inflatable habitat with gaseous nitrogen to test its materials' strength. NASA required them to reach 182.4 PSI, but they made it past that milestone, eventually reaching 204 PSI when the module blew apart. Their next step will be to test a full-scale model in 2023 and then fly a working module to space a few years later.

Read the full story by Nancy Atkinson

Birds use Dynamic Soaring to Pick Up Velocity. We Could Use a Similar Trick to Go Interstellar

Birds are the masters of flight and have evolved various tricks to go faster when they need to by exploiting different wind speeds. A team of engineers has proposed taking this idea to space, using different speeds from the solar wind to help a spacecraft go faster. Instead of a traditional solar sail or laser sail, the engineers suggest using an electric sail that interacts with the charged particles in the solar wind, exploiting different regions of the heliosphere. It's theoretically possible to reach 6,000 km/s or 2% of the speed of light.

Read the full story by Matt Williams

Watch a NASA Supercut of the Entire Artemis I Mission, From Launch to Landing

Too busy to watch every single second of the Artemis I mission? No problem; NASA just released a supercut of all the significant events from the launch, flight, and landing of SLS and Orion. The full video is about 25 minutes long, so about 1 minute's footage for each day of the mission. You can see the launch of SLS from many angles, the flight of Orion past the Moon and then its return trajectory, and finally, the landing and recovery of the capsule on Earth. Artemis II isn't scheduled to fly until 2024, so this will have to keep us entertained until then.

Read the full story by Nancy Atkinson

NASA Artemis I Mission Explained

It's been 50 years since humans set foot on the Moon. Entire generations were born after this historic accomplishment. But humanity has kept its eyes on the sky and vowed to return. This week marks the end of the beginning of that journey, the completion of Artemis I, sending a human-rated capsule around the Moon and back again. With Orion safely back on Earth, let's look at this fantastic accomplishment and ponder what comes next.

We Could Simulate Living in Lunar Lava Tubes in Caves on Earth

The Moon is a hostile environment for anyone living on the surface. But caverns and ancient lava tubes could protect explorers from the harsh lunar environment, providing reasonable temperatures and blocking radiation. A new paper suggests that a simulated lunar base could be built on Earth inside Karst caves. These caves are found worldwide and could house a small human outpost. Many of the same challenges for living on the Moon would happen in these caves, too, like access to power, supplies, and construction. And we could learn more about caves at the same time.

Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick

Iconic Earthrise By Artemis 1, Rule-Breaking GRB, SpaceX Launches Starshield

In case you missed it, here's a roundup of the space news we reported last week. Construction begins on the Square Kilometer Array, the Iconic Earthrise image from Artemis 1; SpaceX launches its new Starshield service, a gamma-ray burst that breaks all the rules; evidence of a tsunami on Mars, and more.

Read the full story by Anton Pozdnyakov

A New Way to Produce Primordial Black Holes in the Early Universe

One exotic explanation for dark matter is primordial black holes. These could be black holes of various masses, produced at the very beginning of the Universe in overdense regions. Previous theories about primordial black holes rely on violent, rapid transitions through phases of matter. But a new paper has reexamined the Standard Model of particle physics and suggests that there could be a way that smooth transitions from one state to another could lead to the formation of black holes.

Read the full story by Paul M. Sutter

Perseverance's Latest Sample is Just Crumbled Regolith. When Scientists get Their Hands on it, we'll Learn so Much About how to Live on Mars

NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover is toiling away on the Red Planet, gathering samples scientists will analyze on Earth in the next decade. All of the collected samples have been rock cores, but recently, a sample made of crumbled regolith was gathered. This sample will be critical because it will hold a record of the evolution of Mars's climate. We know that the regolith contains toxic perchlorates, which could be dangerous if it gets into astronauts' lungs. Hopefully, we'll learn how to mitigate the risks before astronauts make the long voyage to Mars.

Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick

To Fight Climate Change, We Could Block the Sun. A Lightweight Solar Sail Could Make it Feasible

As the world struggles to get its carbon emissions under control, governments will soon consider geoengineering solutions to address climate change. One idea is to put a solar sail at the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point. This would partly shade the Earth, reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface and giving nations more time to get their emissions under control. The weight of a sail like this has always been a big challenge, but a new paper suggests an innovative way to make a more lightweight sail. But there's no way to reduce the unintended consequences.

Read the full story by Scott Alan Johnston

Will This be the Iconic Picture From Artemis I?

The Apollo missions gave us some iconic images, from the Blue Earth image of the entire planet to the Earthrise image. What will be the iconic image for the Artemis I mission? Let me nominate this one: a spectacular view of a crescent Earth rising above the lunar surface with the Orion capsule in the foreground. Orion took this image right after it completed its final burn past the Moon on December 5th, the 20th day of its mission. During this burn, it came within 130 km of the lunar surface.

Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick

This Interactive Tool Lets you Simulate Asteroid Impacts Anywhere on Earth

We often talk about how devastating asteroid impacts can be and why they're an existential threat to humanity. How bad are they? Well, find out for yourself with this new interactive asteroid impact simulator. This lets you smash a 1-mile asteroid into your home city and see the damage. How big of an area was vaporized or lit on fire? How far away does the shockwave flatten trees and buildings? It's fascinating and terrifying. Give it a try yourself!

Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick

A Supercomputer Climate Model is so Accurate it Predicted the Weather Patterns Seen in the Famous 1972 "Blue Marble" Image of Earth

You must be familiar with this iconic picture of Earth taken by the astronauts of Apollo 17 as they were returning home from the Moon in 1972: the "Blue Marble." Climate scientists accurately recreated the weather patterns seen in this image purely with a supercomputer simulation. Their simulation ran on the Levante supercomputer at the German Climate Computing Center and was so robust that it could draw up details about Earth to a resolution of 1 km. It's incredible to compare the two images.

Read the full story by Andy Tomaswick

Life on Proxima b Is Not Having a Good Time

Astronomers know of an exoplanet in the habitable zone of nearby Proxima Centauri. We don't know if there's life on the planet, but it's having a miserable time if it is inhabited. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf star with only a fraction of the mass of the Sun, so planets have to be close to being habitable. Unfortunately, red dwarf stars are much more chaotic than stars like the Sun, blasting out enormous flares and coronal mass ejections. And since the planet is close to the star, it takes about 1000 times more solar wind radiation than Earth.

Read the full story by Paul M. Sutter

A Black Hole has Been Burping for 100 Million Years

It's believed that there are supermassive black holes in the hearts of almost every galaxy in the Universe. When these black holes are actively feeding, material piles up in a vast accretion disk, and powerful jets form. These jets can flare up when the black hole gorges on new material. A recent study describes the behavior of a black hole that released one of the brightest bursts of radiation ever seen. As the black hole feeds, it hurls out hot plasma into its environment, creating vast radio bubbles surrounding its galaxy.

Read the full story by Evan Gough

Perhaps a Supervoid Doesn't Explain the Mysterious CMB Cold Spot

One exciting feature in the Cosmic Microwave Background is the mysterious "cold spot." It's one place in the CMB where temperatures are slightly colder than you would expect from the standard model of cosmology. The accepted explanation is that it's a region where radiation from the CMB has traveled from an enormous void, which is less dense than the rest of the Universe. A new study suggests that a cosmic supervoid wouldn't explain the cold spot, as that radiation would have passed through the area before the Universe had expanded significantly.

Read the full story by Paul M. Sutter

Black Holes Shouldn't be Able to Merge, but Dozens of Mergers Have Been Detected. How Do They Do It?

Astronomers have detected dozens of mergers between black holes thanks to LIGO and other gravitational wave observatories. We know this is happening. But according to current theories, black holes shouldn't be able to merge easily; instead, they should settle into relatively stable orbits around one another. Researchers believe that the black holes need to be in a busy environment, like inside a globular star cluster, for there to be enough interactions to push black holes together into a collision.

Read the full story by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Webb Completes its First "Deep Field" With Nine Days of Observing Time. What did it Find?

The Hubble Deep Field is one of the most famous results from the long-lived space telescope, peering more deeply into the Universe than had ever been done before. Once James Webb launched, we wondered when we'd get a JWST version of the Deep Field using its vastly more sensitive instruments. A first survey has been completed, using 9 hours of Webb observing time to stare at a single region of space. As you can imagine, the survey turned up some interesting results.

Read the full story by Evan Gough

How Growing Giant Planets Fight for Food

Newly forming stars surround themselves with accretion disks of gas and dust. Inside these disks, planets form, gathering material until the star ignites and blasts away the remaining material with its stellar winds. To form giant planets like Jupiter, which is three times more massive than Saturn, the supply of raw material needs to be shut off relatively early in a star system's formation. This stops the other planets from growing as large before the stellar winds clear out the system.

Read the full story by Paul M. Sutter

Astronomers Spot Three Interacting Systems With Twin Discs

Stars and their planets form out of vast clouds of gas and dust. The material is pulled inward by gravity, and the newly-forming system spins faster and faster, flattening out into a protoplanetary disk. That's the theory, anyway, but astronomers have discovered that star-forming regions can spin out multiple systems rather than just one. These solar siblings can interact with each other as the star and planets are still forming with unpredictable results.

Read the full story by Matt Williams

ESA's Upcoming Mission Will Tell us if Venus is Still Volcanically Active

There are spacecraft at the Moon and Mars imaging their surfaces with incredible detail, down to resolutions of dozens of centimeters. But Venus is covered in thick clouds that obscure its surface. The highest-resolution images we've ever gotten of Venus come from NASA's Magellan spacecraft, which used radar to scan the surface to a resolution of dozens of meters. ESA's upcoming EnVision mission will be flying to Venus in the 2030s and will be equipped with a subsurface radar sounder that will scan at much higher resolution. It would tell us if there has been recent volcanic activity at Venus.

Read the full story by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Hubble Sees a Glittering Jewel in the Small Magellanic Cloud. But the Jewel is Disappearing

A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a glittering open star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud called NGC 376. Open clusters like this remain after a vast star-forming nebula has lost all its excess gas and dust, revealing the stars to the Universe. But NGC 376 is being dismantled by the gravitational forces in the Small Magellanic Cloud, and astronomers estimate that it might have already lost 90% of its mass.

Read the full story by Evan Gough

The Formation of the Southern Ring Nebula was Messier Than the Death of a Single Star

When the first science images from JWST were unveiled in July, we saw a new view of the Southern Ring Nebula. Now the science is out, and we've learned how this beautiful planetary nebula formed. There's a white dwarf star at the center, but it's not alone. There's a low-mass companion object orbiting at about the distance of Pluto. With further study, astronomers now suspect that four stars are interacting in the region, whipping up the gas and dust forming the strange structure of the nebula.

Read the full story by Brian Koberlein

The Oort Cloud Could Have More Rock Than Previously Believed

The Oort Cloud is a vast expanse of primordial ice and rock that stretches almost halfway to the nearest star system. We only know it's there because of the occasional long-period comets that drop into the inner Solar System. Astronomers assumed this region mainly was water ice, but new evidence suggests that the Oort Cloud contains more rock than previously believed. Astronomers found a meteorite that hit the atmosphere over Alberta in 2021 and traced its trajectory to the Oort Cloud. It penetrated more deeply into the atmosphere than a purely icy object should have, which means it was rocky.

Read the full story by Evan Gough

Perseverance Heard a Dust Devil on Mars, and Now You Can Too

We've seen images of dust devils on Mars, both from the surface and from space, but we've never heard them before. Until now. NASA's Perseverance Rover is equipped with a microphone and has already listened to the wind blowing, the sand shifting, and its own mechanical noises on Mars. And now the rover has captured a whirling dust devil that passed directly over its location. Check out the article, and you can hear it for yourself.

Read the full story by Nancy Atkinson

Could Life Survive on Frigid Exo-Earths? Maybe Under Ice Sheets

The traditional "habitable zone" is a region where liquid water can exist on the surface of a terrestrial exoplanet. But what about worlds that are just outside their star's habitable zone? Could they still have life? A new study suggests that planets covered by ice sheets could still generate enough heat to create a persistent layer of liquid water under the ice or trapped between layers of ice. Life could survive (but probably not thrive) in those regions under the ice, waiting for the star to heat up enough to melt the ice and turn the planet green.

Read the full story by Evan Gough

Rubble Pile Asteroids Might be the Best Places to Build Space Habitats

Space habitats are a fixture in science fiction, with humans living and working far away from Planet Earth. But space is a harsh environment, and humans are fragile compared to robots, needing artificial gravity, protection from radiation, and resources like air and water. What's a realistic way to build a space colony? According to a new study, rubble pile asteroids like Ryugu or Bennu might hold the key. A strong, lightweight mesh could enclose an asteroid and then be spun up, with the debris forming a habitable ring in space.

Read the full story by Brian Koberlein

Where are the Best Places to Land Humans on Mars?

Only robots have visited Mars, but humans will eventually make the trip to the Red Planet. Where should they go? Many fascinating places have scientific value, like canyons, volcanoes, craters, and polar regions. You'll also want to ensure resources are available to build structures and gather other supplies. Researchers have evaluated potential landing sites across various criteria and have come up with their favorite locations to send humans.

Read the full story by Carolyn Collins Petersen

A Soyuz Capsule on ISS is Leaking Coolant Into Space

The Soyuz spacecraft attached to the International Space Station is leaking coolant into space. Mission controllers aren't sure how it happened, but it's possible that it was caused by a micrometeorite strike to the station. This is a big problem since the Soyuz is the only way for the three Russian cosmonauts to return to Earth. The temperature inside the Soyuz is rising, and it's unclear if it can be used safely on a return flight. Russia may need to send up a new Soyuz as quickly as possible.

Read the full story by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Here's a new Image of the Carina Nebula From Hubble

The famous Carina Nebula is one of the most photographed objects in the night sky, located about 7,500 light-years away. This enormous star-forming nebula contains many gigantic stars, some of which are 50-100 times the mass of the Sun. One of the most famous of these is Eta Carina, which is expected to be one of the next stars to detonate as supernovae in the coming years. A new photo has been released from the Hubble Space Telescope that reveals the Carina Nebula in stunning detail.

Read the full story by Nancy Atkinson

Earth's Water is 4.5 Billion Years Old

Astronomers are still trying to find where the Earth's water came from. Was it delivered by comets or asteroids, or was the water part of the accretion disk where the Earth formed billions of years ago? A new paper has tracked the age of the Earth's water, dating it to about 4.5 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Earth formed. This doesn't explain the source, but it tells us when water arrived on Earth and can help confirm future theories.

Read the full story by Evan Gough

NOAA's New Weather Satellite is Operational, and its Pictures of Earth are Gorgeous

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched its newest weather satellite, NOAA-21, on November 10, 2022. This spacecraft follows a polar orbit, orbiting the Earth 14 times daily and imaging the entire planet twice daily. In addition to providing enhanced weather monitoring, NOAA-21 takes stunning images of the world and its ever-changing weather systems. Mission controllers released this entire photo of Earth, taken over half a day, revealing many interesting features across the planet.

Read the full story by Evan Gough

Avatars Return to the Movies — and Find a Real-Life Foothold

"Avatar: The Way of the Water" opens in theatres today, 13 years since the original movie was released. In this article, Alan Boyle looks into the science of real-life avatars, allowing a human controller to remotely pilot a robot in a hostile environment. Japan's All Nippon Airways has sponsored a $10 million XPRIZE and awarded several prizes to teams in November for developing avatar technology.

Read the full story by Alan Boyle

Juno's has Been Touring Jupiter's Moons on its Extended Mission. Next Stop: Volcanic Io

NASA's Juno spacecraft has been observing Jupiter for several years, flying close to the giant planet every few months. Now that it's completed its main mission at Jupiter, it's starting to capture images and data of the Jovian moons. It's already observed Ganymede and Europa, and now it's setting its sights on the volcanic moon Io. Over the next 18 months, Juno will make nine flybys of Io, eventually coming within 1,500 kilometers of the surface.

Read the full story by Carolyn Collins Petersen

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In Case you Missed it, Here are Some Amazing Pictures of Mars Hiding Behind the Moon

Did you catch last week's occultation of Mars by the Moon? We had nothing but clouds here, but other astronomers were more fortunate. Nancy Atkinson reached out to several astronomers and pulled together an article that showcases their work. You'll want to check it out.

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Thanks!

Fraser Cain
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Universe Today

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