SPACE/COSMOS
Japanese startup attempts Moon landing
By AFP
June 5, 2025
Private companies are vying to offer cheaper and more frequent space exploration opportunities than governments - Copyright AFP KARIM JAAFAR
A Japanese startup will attempt a tricky lunar touchdown on Friday with an unmanned lander named Resilience, two years after its first try which crashed onto the Moon’s surface.
If successful, it will be only the third private mission to the Earth’s rocky natural satellite ever completed, and the first by a company based outside the United States.
The startup, ispace, says touchdown is expected at 4:17 am Japan time on Friday (1917 GMT Thursday) with the potentially nail-biting attempt streamed on its website.
Resilience is “ready to attempt a historic landing on the Moon” and “we are confident in our preparations for success”, ispace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said last week.
“We have leveraged the operational experience gained in Mission 1 and during this current voyage to the Moon,” he said in a statement.
Only five nations have soft-landed spacecraft on the Moon — the Soviet Union, the United States, China, India and Japan.
And now companies are vying to offer cheaper and more frequent space exploration opportunities than governments.
Last year, the Houston-based Intuitive Machines became the first private enterprise to touch down on the Moon.
Although its uncrewed craft landed at the wrong angle, it was still able to complete tests and send photos.
Then in March this year, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost — launched on the same SpaceX rocket as ispace’s Resilience — aced its lunar landing attempt.
Despite their rocket ride-share, Resilience took longer to reach the Moon than Blue Ghost, and ispace is now hoping for its own moment of glory, after its first mission resulted in an unsalvageable “hard landing” in 2023.
Landing on the Moon is highly challenging as spacecraft must rely on precisely controlled thruster burning to slow their descent.
Intuitive Machines’ second attempt at a Moon landing ended in disappointment in late March.
Its spacecraft Athena, designed to touch down on a spot called the Mons Mouton plateau — closer to the lunar south pole than any previous mission — tipped over and was unable to recharge its solar-powered batteries.
Meanwhile another Japanese startup, Space One, has been trying to become the country’s first private firm to put a satellite into orbit.
Its latest rocket launch attempt in December blasted off but was later seen spiralling downwards in the distance as the company said the launch had to be terminated.
Fighter pilot takes next giant step for India’s space plans
By AFP
June 5, 2025
Astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla blasts off into space next week as the first Indian to join the International Space Station - Copyright AXIOM SPACE/AFP/File -
Abhaya SRIVASTAVA
Astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla blasts off into space next week as the first Indian to join the International Space Station (ISS), bearing with him New Delhi’s dreams of its own manned space flight.
An airforce fighter pilot, 39-year-old Shukla is joining a four-crew mission launching from the United States with private company Axiom Space, aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
He will become the first Indian to join the ISS, and only the second ever in orbit — an achievement that the world’s most populous nation hopes will be a stepping stone for its own human flight.
“I truly believe that even though, as an individual, I am travelling to space, this is the journey of 1.4 billion people,” Shukla was quoted as saying by The Hindu newspaper this year.
Shukla said he hopes to “ignite the curiosity of an entire generation in my country”, and “drive the innovation that will make many such projects possible for us in the future”.
The airforce group captain — equivalent to an army colonel or navy captain — will pilot the commercial mission slated to launch June 10 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a joint team between NASA and ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organisation.
– ‘New era’ –
India’s Department of Space calls it a “defining chapter” in its ambitions, naming Shukla as “among the top contenders” for its maiden human spaceflight mission, Gaganyaan, “sky craft” in Hindi, scheduled for launch in 2027.
“His journey is more than just a flight — it’s a signal that India is stepping boldly into a new era of space exploration,” the Department of Space said ahead of the launch.
New Delhi has paid more than $60 million for the mission, according to Indian media reports.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced plans to send a man to the Moon by 2040.
India’s ISRO said in May that it planned to launch an uncrewed orbital mission later this year, before its first human spaceflight in early 2027.
Shukla’s voyage comes four decades after Indian astronaut Rakesh Sharma joined a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 1984.
“What sets Shukla’s mission apart is its strategic importance,” the department added.
“Unlike the symbolic undertones of India’s first human spaceflight, this time the focus is on operational readiness and global integration.”
Shukla also trained in Russia, in 2020 along with three other astronaut hopefuls, at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center — before further training at ISRO’s centre in the southern city of Bengaluru.
He has said the journey aboard the Axiom Mission 4 — and then the expected 14 days on the ISS — will provide “invaluable” lessons to bring back home.
– Space yoga –
Shukla will be led by mission commander Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut, and joined by European Space Agency project astronaut Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski of Poland, and Tibor Kapu of Hungary.
The son of a government ministry official, from Lucknow in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Shukla is a veteran fighter pilot experienced in flying Russian Sukhoi and MiG jets.
He has promised to perform yoga poses in the ISS.
If he is unable to fly on Tuesday, fellow airforce pilot Group Captain Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair, 48, is expected to take his place.
India has flexed its ambitions in the last decade with its space programme growing considerably in size and momentum, matching the achievements of established powers at a much cheaper price tag.
In August 2023, it became just the fourth nation to land an unmanned craft on the Moon after Russia, the United States and China.
Waiting at home will be Shukla’s family, including his wife and son.
“I’ve been having goosebumps by just thinking that soon my brother will be in space,” his older sister Suchi, a school teacher, told the Times of India newspaper.
New measure of the universe’s expansion suggests resolution of a conflict
Team led by UChicago scientist Wendy Freedman using James Webb Space Telescope finds no evidence of tension in Hubble Constant
University of Chicago
image:
Scientists have made a new calculation of the speed at which the universe is expanding, using the data taken by the powerful new James Webb Space Telescope on multiple galaxies. Above, Webb’s image of one such galaxy, known as NGC 1365.
view moreCredit: Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, Janice Lee (NOIRLab), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
For the past decade, scientists have been trying to get to the bottom of what seemed like a major inconsistency in the universe.
The universe expands over time, but how fast it’s expanding seemed to differ depending on whether you looked early in the universe’s history or the present day. If true, this would have presented a major problem to the gold-standard model that represents our best understanding of the universe.
But thanks to the new James Webb Space Telescope, scientists from the University of Chicago have been able to take new and better data—suggesting there may be no conflict after all.
“This new evidence is suggesting that our Standard Model of the universe is holding up,” said UChicago Prof. Wendy Freedman, a leading figure in the debate over this rate of expansion, known as the Hubble Constant.
“It doesn’t mean we won’t find things in the future that are inconsistent with the model, but at the moment the Hubble Constant doesn’t seem to be it,” she said.
The new results are published in the May 27th issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
Space, stars and supernovae
There are currently two major approaches to calculating how fast our universe is expanding.
The first approach is to measure the remnant light left over from the Big Bang, which is still traveling across the universe. This radiation, known as the cosmic microwave background, informs astronomers about what the conditions were like at early times in the universe.
Freedman, the John and Marion Sullivan University Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics, specializes in a second approach, which is to measure how fast the universe is expanding right now, in our local astronomical neighborhood. Paradoxically, this is much trickier than seeing back in time, because accurately measuring distances is very challenging.
Over the last half century or so, scientists have come up with a number of ways to measure relatively nearby distances. One relies on catching the light of a particular class of star at its peak brightness, when it explodes as a supernova, at the end of its life. If we know the maximum brightness of these supernovae, measuring their apparent luminosities allows us to calculate its distance. Additional observations tell us how fast the galaxy in which that supernova occurred is moving away from us. Freedman has also pioneered two other methods that use what we know about two other types of stars: red giant stars and carbon stars.
However, there are many corrections that must be applied to these measurements before a final distance can be declared. Scientists must first account for cosmic dust that dims the light between us and these distant stars in their host galaxies. They must also check and correct for luminosity differences that may arise over cosmic time. And finally subtle measurement uncertainties in the instrumentation used to make the measurements must be identified and corrected for.
But with technological advances such as the launch of the much more powerful James Webb Space Telescope in 2021, scientists have been able to increasingly refine these measurements.
“We’ve more than doubled our sample of galaxies used to calibrate the supernovae,” Freedman said. “The statistical improvement is significant. This considerably strengthens the result.”
Freedman’s latest calculation, which incorporates data from both the Hubble Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, finds a value of 70.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec, plus or minus 3%.
That brings her value into statistical agreement with recent measurements from the cosmic microwave background, which is 67.4, plus or minus 0.7%.
Webb has four times the resolution of the Hubble Telescope, which allows it to identify individual stars previously detected in blurry groups. It’s also about 10 times as sensitive, which provides higher precision, and the ability to find even fainter objects of interest.
“We’re really seeing how fantastic the James Webb Space Telescope is for accurately measuring distances to galaxies,” said co-author Taylor Hoyt of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. “Using its infrared detectors, we can see through dust that has historically plagued accurate measurement of distances, and we can measure with much greater accuracy the brightnesses of stars,” added co-author Barry Madore, of the Carnegie Institution for Science.
‘Extraordinarily difficult’
Freedman explained that astrophysicists have been trying to come up with a theory that would have explained different rates of expansion as the universe ages.
“There have been well over 1,000 papers trying to attack this problem, and it’s just turned out to be extraordinarily difficult to do,” she said.
Scientists are still trying to find cracks in the Standard Model that describes the universe, which could provide clues to the nature of two big outstanding mysteries—dark matter and dark energy. But the Hubble Constant increasingly seems not to be the place to look.
Freedman and her team will be using the Webb Telescope next year to get measurements in a group of galaxies called the Coma cluster, which should provide more data from a different angle, she said. “These measurements will allow us to measure the Hubble constant directly, without the additional step of needing the supernovae.”
“I am optimistic about resolving this in the next few years, as we boost the accuracy to make these measurements,” she said.
Other UChicago coauthors included In Sung Jang, Abigail Lee and Kayla Owens.
Citation: “Status Report on the Chicago-Carnegie Hubble Program (CCHP): Measurement of the Hubble Constant Using the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes.” Freedman et al, The Astrophysical Journal, May 27, 2025.
Journal
The Astrophysical Journal
Article Title
The Astrophysical Journal The American Astronomical Society logo. The Institute of Physics logo. A publishing partnership The following article is Open access Status Report on the Chicago-Carnegie Hubble Program (CCHP): Measurement of the Hubble Constant Using the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes
Millions of new solar system objects to be found and ‘filmed in technicolor’ – studies predict
A group of astronomers from across the globe, including a team from the University of Washington and led by Queen’s University Belfast, have revealed new research showing that millions of new solar system objects will be detected by a brand-new facility, which is expected to come online later this year.
The NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory is set to revolutionize our knowledge of the solar system’s “small bodies” — asteroids, comets and other minor planets.
The Rubin Observatory, under construction on the Cerro Pachón ridge in northern Chile, features the 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope with a unique three-mirror design capable of surveying the entire visible sky every few nights. At its heart is the world’s largest digital camera — the 3.2 gigapixel Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera — covering a 9.6 square-degree field of view with six filters, roughly 45 times the area of the full moon. Together, this “wide-fast-deep” system will generate 20 terabytes of data every night — creating an unprecedented time-lapse “movie” of the cosmos over the next 10 years, and an incredibly powerful dataset with which to map the solar system.
The team of astronomers, led by Queen’s University’s Meg Schwamb, created Sorcha, an innovative new open-source software used to predict what discoveries are likely to be made. Sorcha is the first end-to-end simulator that ingests Rubin’s planned observing schedule. It applies assumptions on how Rubin Observatory sees and detects astronomical sources in its images with the best model of what the solar system and its small body reservoirs look like today.
“Accurate simulation software like Sorcha is critical,” said Schwamb, a reader in the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen’s University. “It tells us what Rubin will discover and lets us know how to interpret it. Our knowledge of what objects fill Earth’s solar system is about to expand exponentially and rapidly.”
In addition to the eight major planets, the solar system is home to a vast population of small bodies that formed alongside the planets more than 4.5 billion years ago. Many of these smaller bodies remain essentially unchanged since the solar system’s birth, acting as a fossil record of its earliest days. By studying their orbits, sizes and compositions, astronomers can reconstruct how planets formed, migrated and evolved.
These objects — numbering in the tens of millions -— provide a powerful window into processes such as the delivery of water and organic material to Earth, the reshaping of planetary orbits by giant planets and the ongoing risk posed by those whose paths bring them near our planet.
In addition to Queen’s University and the UW, the international team includes researchers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
A series of papers describing the software and the predictions have been accepted for publication by the Astronomical Journal and are available now on arXiv.org.
Beyond just finding these new small bodies, Rubin Observatory will observe them multiple times using different optical filters, revealing their surface colors. Past solar system surveys typically observed with a single filter.
“With the LSST catalog of solar system objects, our work shows that it will be like going from black-and-white television to brilliant color,” said Joe Murtagh, a doctoral student at Queen’s University. “It’s very exciting – we expect that millions of new solar system objects will be detected and most of these will be picked up in the first few years of sky survey.”
The team’s simulations show that Rubin will map:
127,000 near-Earth objects — asteroids and comets whose orbits cross or approach Earth. That’s more than tripling today’s known objects, about 38,000, and detecting more than 70% of potentially hazardous bodies larger than 140 meters. This will cut the risk of undetected asteroid impact of catastrophic proportions by at least two times, making a tremendous contribution to planetary defense.
Over 5 million main-belt asteroids, up from about 1.4 million, with precise color and rotation data on roughly one in three asteroids within the survey’s first years. This will give scientists unprecedented insight into the characteristics and history of the solar system’s building blocks.
109,000 Jupiter Trojans, bodies sharing Jupiter’s orbit at stable “Lagrange” points — more than seven times the number cataloged today. These bodies represent some of the most pristine material dating all the way back to the formation of the planets.
37,000 trans-Neptunian objects, residents of the distant Kuiper Belt — nearly 10 times the current census — shedding light on Neptune’s past migration and the outer solar system’s history.
Approximately 1,500-2,000 Centaurs, bodies on short-lived giant planet-crossing orbits in the middle solar system. Most Centaurs will eventually be ejected from the solar system, but a few lucky ones will survive to become short-period comets. The LSST will provide the first detailed view of the Centaurs and the important transition stage from Centaur to comet.
Rubin Observatory’s LSST is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fill in the missing pieces of our solar system, said Mario Juric, a member of the Sorcha team and a UW professor of Astronomy. Juric also is a team lead of Rubin’s Solar System Processing Pipelines and a director of UW’s DiRAC Institute.
“Our simulations predict that Rubin will expand known small-body populations by factors of 4–9x, delivering an unprecedented trove of orbits, colors and light curves,” Juric said. “With this data, we’ll be able to update the textbooks of solar system formation and vastly improve our ability to spot — and potentially deflect — the asteroids that could threaten Earth.”
It took 225 years of astronomical observations to detect the first 1.5 million asteroids, and researchers found that Rubin will double that number in less than a year, said Jake Kurlander, a doctoral student at the UW.
“Rubin's unparalleled combination of breadth and depth make it a uniquely effective discovery machine,” Kurlander said.
Siegfried Eggl, an assistant professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign added: “Only by debiasing LSST’s complex observing pattern can we turn raw detections into a true reflection of the solar system’s history — where the planets formed, and how they migrated over billions of years. Sorcha is a game changer in that respect.”
The Sorcha code is open-source and freely available with the simulated catalogs, animationsat https://sorcha.space. By making these resources available, the Sorcha team has enabled researchers worldwide to refine their tools and be ready for the flood of LSST data that Rubin will generate, advancing the understanding of the small bodies that illuminate the solar system like never before.
Rubin Observatory is scheduled to unveil its first spectacular imagery at its “First Look” event on June 23, offering the world an early glimpse of the survey’s power. Full science operations are slated to begin later this year.
For more information, contact Juric at mjuric@uw.edu, Kurlander at jkurla@uw.edu, Schwamb at m.schwamb@qub.ac.uk, and Murtagh at jmurtagh05@qub.ac.uk.
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