An “incident” with the James Webb Space Telescope has occurred

NASA is leading an anomaly review board to investigate and conduct additional testing.

ERIC BERGER - 11/22/2021, 3:09 PM

Enlarge / Technician standing near some of the segments of the James Webb Space Telescope primary mirror.

A short update on the projected launch date of the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope came out of NASA on Monday, and it wasn't exactly a heart-warming missive.

The large, space-based telescope's "no earlier than" launch date will slip from December 18 to at least December 22 after an "incident" occurred during processing operations at the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana. That is where the telescope will launch on an Ariane 5 rocket provided by the European Space Agency.

FURTHER READING Meet the largest science project in US government history—the James Webb Telescope

"Technicians were preparing to attach Webb to the launch vehicle adapter, which is used to integrate the observatory with the upper stage of the Ariane 5 rocket," NASA said in a blog post. "A sudden, unplanned release of a clamp band—which secures Webb to the launch vehicle adapter—caused a vibration throughout the observatory."

Let's be honest, words like "incident," "sudden," and "vibration" are not the kinds of expressions one wants to hear about the handling of a delicate and virtually irreplaceable instrument like the Webb telescope. However, NASA, the European Space Agency, and the rocket's operator, Arianespace, have a plan for moving forward.Advertisement

NASA is leading an anomaly review board to investigate and conduct additional testing to determine with certainty that the incident did not damage any part of the telescope. NASA said it will provide an update when the testing is completed at the end of this week. A senior source at the space agency said this testing is currently running ahead of schedule and that, provided some serious issue is not identified, the December 22 launch date should stick.

Any setbacks now in Webb's progress toward launch feel especially painful because reaching this point has been such a long, long road. NASA's follow-on instrument to the wildly successful Hubble Space Telescope was originally due to launch about a decade ago, with a development cost of $1 billion. Since then, technical problems and delays have bedeviled the complex telescope.

Building Webb has been difficult because its 6.5-meter mirror needs to unfurl itself once it reaches an orbit about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. This is an exceedingly complex process, and there are more than 300 single points of failure aboard the observatory. NASA has had a difficult time testing them all on Earth in conditions that mimic the temperatures, pressure, and microgravity of deep space.

NASA's science chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, said Monday it was important for NASA to ensure the telescope was healthy before its launch. "I am confident the team will do everything they can to prepare Webb to explore our cosmic past," he wrote on Twitter. "Certainly, this step is worth the wait.

Beautiful time-lapse video of the longest partial lunar eclipse in 600 years

 

  

cosmic_background

Verified

An evening in the shadows.

How gorgeous is our planet, that even our SHADOW is so stunning. This image was created using 7 of my favorite HDR images from yesterday’s eclipse. By combining shots taken from two different telescopes, I was able to create a hyper-detailed portrait of each stage, which means this image ended up being over 350 megapixels.

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who supported me by buying my last limited release of the partial eclipse. It sold out much faster than expected. I decided to make this one available in a few more sizes/styles, (but still limited quantities) so be sure to check out my shop if you’re interested.

The full size of this is available to patrons, you can find that linked in my highlights.

‘Moon has ample oxygen to sustain 8 billion people for 100k yrs, but not in gaseous form’: Report

The Conversation report, published on November 10, said there is plenty of oxygen on the Moon, which is the Earth’s only natural satellite, but it is not in gaseous form.

In October this year, the Australian Space Agency signed a deal with NASA to send a rover to the Moon to collect lunar rocks that could provide breathable oxygen.(Reuters file photo)
Published on Nov 22, 2021 01:34 PM IST

Written by Harshit Sabarwal | Edited by Sohini Goswami, New Delhi

A study has claimed that the Moon’s top layer alone has enough oxygen to sustain as many as eight billion people for 100,000 years. According to a report by the Australian website The Conversation, the top layer of rocks on the Moon, called regolith, is made up of approximately 45 per cent oxygen.

The report, published on November 10, said there is plenty of oxygen on the Moon, which is the Earth’s only natural satellite, but it is not in gaseous form.

“Although the Moon does have an atmosphere, it’s very thin and composed mostly of hydrogen, neon and argon. It’s not the sort of gaseous mixture that could sustain oxygen-dependent mammals such as humans,” it added.

In October this year, the Australian Space Agency signed a deal with NASA to send a rover to the Moon to collect lunar rocks that could provide breathable oxygen.

The Conversation report on November 10 further said that oxygen can be found in many minerals in the ground ‘around us’, adding the Moon is majorly made up of the same rocks found on planet Earth.

“Minerals such as silica, aluminium, and iron and magnesium oxides dominate the Moon’s landscape. All of these minerals contain oxygen, but not in a form our lungs can access,” it added.

Using Electrolysis to extract oxygen from minerals

The report has suggested that Electrolysis technique can be used to extract oxygen from silica, aluminium, iron and other minerals found on the Moon.

“In this case, the oxygen is produced as a byproduct. On the Moon, the oxygen would be the main product and the aluminium (or other metal) extracted would be a potentially useful byproduct,” it said.

However, for the procedure to be sustainable, it has to be supported by solar energy on any other sources of energy on the Moon. “Extracting oxygen from regolith would also require substantial industrial equipment.”

Earlier this year, a start-up from Belgium said that it was making three experimental reactors to improve the process of making oxygen through electrolysis. The Space Applications Services is planning to send such reactors to the Moon by 2025, the report said.

 

Astrophysicists Reveal Largest-Ever Suite of Universe Simulations – How Gravity Shaped the Distribution of Dark Matter

Harvard-Smithsonian Center For Astrophysics

By HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS NOVEMBER 22, 2021

To understand how the universe formed, astronomers have created AbacusSummit, more than 160 simulations of how gravity may have shaped the distribution of dark matter.

Collectively clocking in at nearly 60 trillion particles, a newly released set of cosmological simulations is by far the biggest ever produced.

The simulation suite, dubbed AbacusSummit, will be instrumental for extracting secrets of the universe from upcoming surveys of the cosmos, its creators predict. They present AbacusSummit in several recently published papers in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

AbacusSummit is the product of researchers at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) in New York City and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Made up of more than 160 simulations, it models how particles in the universe move about due to their gravitational attraction. Such models, known as N-body simulations, capture the behavior of the dark matter, a mysterious and invisible force that makes up 27 percent of the universe and interacts only via gravity.

The AbacusSummit suite comprises hundreds of simulations of how gravity shaped the distribution of dark matter throughout the universe. Here, a snapshot of one of the simulations is shown at a zoom scale of 1.2 billion light-years across. The simulation replicates the large-scale structures of our universe, such as the cosmic web and colossal clusters of galaxies. Credit: The AbacusSummit Team; layout and design by Lucy Reading-Ikkanda

“This suite is so big that it probably has more particles than all the other N-body simulations that have ever been run combined — though that’s a hard statement to be certain of,” says Lehman Garrison, lead author of one of the new papers and a CCA research fellow.

Garrison led the development of the AbacusSummit simulations along with graduate student Nina Maksimova and professor of astronomy Daniel Eisenstein, both of the Center for Astrophysics. The simulations ran on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee.

Several space surveys will produce maps of the cosmos with unprecedented detail in the coming years. These include the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Euclid spacecraft. One of the goals of these big-budget missions is to improve estimations of the cosmic and astrophysical parameters that determine how the universe behaves and how it looks.

Scientists will make those improved estimations by comparing the new observations to computer simulations of the universe with different values for the various parameters — such as the nature of the dark energy pulling the universe apart.

Abacus leverages parallel computer processing to drastically speed up its calculations of how particles move about due to their gravitational attraction. A sequential processing approach (top) computes the gravitational tug between each pair of particles one by one. Parallel processing (bottom) instead divides the work across multiple computing cores, enabling the calculation of multiple particle interactions simultaneously. Credit: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Simons Foundation

“The coming generation of cosmological surveys will map the universe in great detail and explore a wide range of cosmological questions,” says Eisenstein, a co-author on the new MNRAS papers. “But leveraging this opportunity requires a new generation of ambitious numerical simulations. We believe that AbacusSummit will be a bold step for the synergy between computation and experiment.”

The decade-long project was daunting. N-body calculations — which attempt to compute the movements of objects, like planets, interacting gravitationally — have been a foremost challenge in the field of physics since the days of Isaac Newton. The trickiness comes from each object interacting with every other object, no matter how far away. That means that as you add more things, the number of interactions rapidly increases.

There is no general solution to the N-body problem for three or more massive bodies. The calculations available are simply approximations. A common approach is to freeze time, calculate the total force acting on each object, then nudge each one based on the net force it experiences. Time is then moved forward slightly, and the process repeats.

Using that approach, AbacusSummit handled colossal numbers of particles thanks to clever code, a new numerical method and lots of computing power. The Summit supercomputer was the world’s fastest at the time the team ran the calculations; it is still the fastest computer in the U.S.

The team designed the codebase for AbacusSummit — called Abacus — to take full advantage of Summit’s parallel processing power, whereby multiple calculations can run simultaneously. In particular, Summit boasts lots of graphical processing units, or GPUs, that excel at parallel processing.

Running N-body calculations using parallel processing requires careful algorithm design because an entire simulation requires a substantial amount of memory to store. That means Abacus can’t just make copies of the simulation for different nodes of the supercomputer to work on. The code instead divides each simulation into a grid. An initial calculation provides a fair approximation of the effects of distant particles at any given point in the simulation (which play a much smaller role than nearby particles). Abacus then groups nearby cells and splits them off so that the computer can work on each group independently, combining the approximation of distant particles with precise calculations of nearby particles.

“The Abacus algorithm is well matched to the capabilities of modern supercomputers, as it provides a very regular pattern of computation for the massive parallelism of GPU co-processors,” Maksimova says.

Thanks to its design, Abacus achieved very high speeds, updating 70 million particles per second per node of the Summit supercomputer, while also performing analysis of the simulations as they ran. Each particle represents a clump of dark matter with 3 billion times the mass of the sun.

“Our vision was to create this code to deliver the simulations that are needed for this particular new brand of galaxy survey,” says Garrison. “We wrote the code to do the simulations much faster and much more accurate than ever before.”

Eisenstein, who is a member of the DESI collaboration — which recently began its survey to map an unprecedented fraction of the universe — says he is eager to use Abacus in the future.

“Cosmology is leaping forward because of the multidisciplinary fusion of spectacular observations and state-of-the-art computing,” he says. “The coming decade promises to be a marvelous age in our study of the historical sweep of the universe.”

Reference: “AbacusSummit: a massive set of high-accuracy, high-resolution N-body simulations” by Nina A Maksimova, Lehman H Garrison, Daniel J Eisenstein, Boryana Hadzhiyska, Sownak Bose and Thomas P Satterthwaite, 7 September 2021, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab2484

Additional co-creators of Abacus and AbacusSummit include Sihan Yuan of Stanford University, Philip Pinto of the University of Arizona, Sownak Bose of Durham University in England and Center for Astrophysics researchers Boryana Hadzhiyska, Thomas Satterthwaite and Douglas Ferrer. The simulations ran on the Summit supercomputer under an Advanced Scientific Computing Research Leadership Computing Challenge allocation.

Purdue professor, her team identify aspects of space junk
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Lafayette Journal & Courier



WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Associate professor at Purdue, Carolin Frueh and her team are investigating the causes of spacecrafts to turn into "space junk." Their findings reveal preventative measures of spacecrafts breaking into thousands of dangerous pieces.

According to Purdue's release, there have been more than 570 incidents of spacecraft fragmenting in Earth's orbit due to explosion, detonation or collision. While technology is in its beginning phases of testing what may help clean up the debris, it is still not clear how spacecrafts fragment to begin with.

This is one of Frueh's team's main points of focus.

“I like harsh, challenging problems that don’t have obvious solutions,” Frueh said in the release. "Because space objects are too far away to easily do experiments on or with them, we just observe these objects with a telescope. But even then, we don’t have much data on the objects, as they are not always visible or they’re too small to detect. The question is, ‘What can I still find out about this object with the little data that I can collect?’”

More: Purdue's 'Cradle of Astronauts': Now 26 Boilermakers who have traveled into space

Essentially putting together the most difficult puzzle out-of-this world, spacecrafts can shatter into hundreds or thousands of pieces, many of which are the size of a quarter inch or smaller and tend to travel faster than a bullet out of a gun at over 15,000 miles per hour.

In a collaboration with the University of Bern in Switzerland, Frueh and her teams discovered that even identical "upper stages" of spacecraft fragment for different reasons. Their study found these reasonings.

“It’s interesting that there wasn’t just one cause that had determined the fate of all three upper stages,” Frueh said in a statement to Purdue. “These objects normally just look like white dots, similar to stars against a night sky. It can be hard to tell which ones are objects that you have already identified."

More:From Purdue to the moon (and back): Memories of Neil Armstrong

Frueh, according to Purdue, is one of only a handful of researchers using a technique called "light curves" to identify the breakdown of spacecraft components from from thousands of miles away based on how a spacecraft or its components reflect sunlight.

“It is like driving a car, where you can’t get out of the car to check if something has fallen off or gotten damaged. But you know that there might be a problem,” Frueh said. “An operator might notice that a satellite appears unstable or not charging properly. An outside perspective can tell if it’s because something broke off, or if a panel or antenna is not properly oriented, for example.”

Information learned by Frueh and her team via light curves can change and improve how satellites are designed in the future.

“There’s starting to be a lot more traffic in the cislunar space. We want to avoid some of the haphazard approaches we’ve done around Earth that clogs up everything,” Frueh said. “In a region where the dynamics are very different, what does that mean for space debris? Where are spacecraft going after a mission ends? How do we establish observations from that space to track objects? The goal is sustainable use of space.”

Space Is Becoming Both a Battlefield and a Garbage Dump

BY SETH STEVENSON

NOV 22, 20214:27 PM

Imagine this in orbit around the Earth. Evan Demicoli/Unsplash

Last week, the International Space Station had a “conjunction event,” meaning it was in danger of getting hit by space debris. As it turns out, that debris was traceable to the breakup of an old Russian satellite, which Russia had destroyed on purpose in a test of a destructive weapon. In the 2013 film Gravity, nearly the exact same event occurs, leading to the destruction of George Clooney and Sandra Bullock’s spaceship. While the real-world ISS astronauts are currently safe, the recent space drama has illuminated how lacking current space policy is and what a (literal) mess space is becoming.

On Friday’s episode of What Next: TBD, I spoke with Laura Grego, a former astrophysicist who’s now a fellow at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, about how space is simultaneously becoming a battlefield and a garbage landfill, and what kinds of policies might be able to preserve space as a safe place for all earthlings. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Seth Stevenson: When Russia destroys this satellite, is it a warning to the United States or other countries that if we want to, we could knock your satellites out of this sky and shut down your communications?

Laura Grego: Yeah. Space is important to militaries, and especially to the United States military, which sends soldiers and equipment and things all over the world and needs to be able to communicate with them. That provides the backbone for U.S. military functioning. When you’re thinking about space weapons and anti-satellite weapons, it’s almost always targeting the kinds of satellites which support war making on the ground. Navigation, communications, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance.

Russia is certainly capable of this technologically, but demonstrating it is different. They’re saying, “We can target your satellites. They don’t have safe harbor.”

How do you shoot down a satellite? Is it hard to do?

It’s pretty challenging. It takes a lot of technical finesse, which is maybe one of the other motivations for demonstrating this because it shows you’ve mastered a challenging technology. What you do is you launch a kill vehicle, a little weapon, on a missile from the ground. It sends it straight up towards where you think the satellite is going to be. And it releases a little something that can maneuver itself in a high-speed collision with that satellite. And those satellites are going really fast, 7 kilometers a second, 30 times a speed of a jet. It takes a lot of technical know-how to be able to maneuver in a high-speed collision like that. It’s been described as hitting a bullet with a bullet.

Is shooting down satellites something that happens a lot?

Shooting down satellites is not something that happens a lot. There has been a lot of restraint for all of our time in space and all of the difficult relationships of the cold war and the new competitions that are happening. In fact, for decades, there was almost a taboo, it was like, “We’re not doing this.” So in terms of big satellite destructions, there’s only been a handful in the last 15 years.

I think China did it, India did it and the U.S. has done it. Right?

Yep, and now Russia. When China tested this in 2007, there was a lot of public outcry, and China never did the same thing again. When India and the United States tested their systems, they were at low enough altitudes above the Earth’s surface that the debris produced fell out relatively quickly.

Is there any reason Russia is doing this now?

I have no particular insight into Russian thinking. But of course we’re in the middle of an arms race and maybe it’s a slow walk or an amble, or maybe it’s speeding up to a jog. But between the United States and Russia and China, all three countries are modernizing their nuclear arsenals to the tune of billions of dollars. And we’re not talking to each other the way that we used to. Arms control treaties are being left by the wayside.

This is, I think, a symptom of a larger dynamic of trying to win technologically against the other countries and engaging in all sorts of techniques to not only show you have great offensive weapons, but that you can target another country’s defenses.

We have arms control treaties here on Earth, but they don’t seem to be slowing down the arms race that much. As for up in space, there’s been a United Nation’s Outer Space Treaty since 1967. Among other things, it asserts that space belongs to all of humanity, and it prohibits stationing nuclear weapons in orbit or on the moon.

I used to be guilty of repeating things like “it’s the Wild West out in space” and that there’s “no laws,” and that’s not true. There is law. Thankfully, we haven’t had to apply it, we haven’t had a space war yet. But I think any big hostilities you’re going to see between the major countries will involve something happening in space.

These conflicts over what the rules of engagement should be in space have been brewing for a long time. I’m thinking of the Strategic Defense Initiative where Ronald Reagan was pushing the idea of space based defensive weapons that could stop a nuclear first strike, right?

Yeah. The SDI or Star Wars Initiative time in Reagan’s tenure was really a crescendo point in this conversation. The vision was that the U.S. would put missile defense interceptors or missile defense systems in space, which could stop any Soviet missile attack with nuclear weapons. And it would make nuclear weapons obsolete.

When you say “missile defense could make nuclear weapons obsolete,” I’m all for it. Human beings cannot co-exist with nuclear weapons indefinitely. But the problem with building defenses and not having an agreement about it or not thinking it through, is that what it generally does is it inspires or incentivizes your adversary to just build more offensive missiles. You build a little defense, they build more offense, then I build more defense, they build more offense and look, we’re in an arms race.

There are ongoing talks in the U.N. about creating some new space rules. Spacefaring countries like China and Russia are in favor of a new space treaty that would further limit space-based weaponry, but they seem to be at odds with the United States over the scope of new regulations.

From all the conversations I’ve had, Russia and China still are very, very concerned about the U.S. thinking about pursuing space-based missile defenses. It still animates a lot of their anxieties, their concerns. It certainly is something that’s central to the treaty that they’ve advanced, which would outlaw space-based missile defense interceptors.

You could see from our adversaries’ perspective why they’d be worried if we had some system that could shoot down all their nuclear missiles, well, we could launch a first strike with complete impunity. We would have no concern about retribution.

That is the concern. If you have an impenetrable defense, then you are not vulnerable to retaliation. If Russia or China believed that the United States believed it could conduct a first strike without risking retaliation, it’s intolerable. To have one party in this mutual assured destruction—

No longer of assured of being destroyed.

Right. So what does that say? What might they do if they didn’t feel vulnerable to retaliation? A lot of this is thinking of ways to convince a perhaps unconvinced United States that it truly is still vulnerable.

Amid all this military posturing, where countries are blowing up their satellites to show that they can, it seems like there’s a negative externality, which is all the debris that gets created. How big a problem is all that space debris?

Space debris is a huge problem. The destruction of one large satellite could essentially double the amount of debris in space. And if you do it in certain types of orbits, it could stay in space for decades—essentially forever. Keeping space working well and predictably requires everybody rowing in the same direction and not making big mistakes or doing tests like this, which might prove a political point, but which endanger everybody else’s use of space.

What’s interesting is this is happening at the same time as a big expansion of commercial space activity, the launch of these Starlink satellites and other initiatives to build space-based internet services, which would help rural users and remote users have access to the internet. But you can’t do that, you can’t invest all this money and you can’t imagine that a constellation of tens of thousands of satellites can remain working well in an environment where you’re also blowing up satellites.

Even if these things are well intended, if the satellites are going to have good uses, just the fact putting more things up there means there’s more potential for collisions. There was once an accidental collision between two satellites that created a lot of space junk, right?

Right. We have had a pretty relatively slow-growing amount of satellites over the past decades. But this is completely different. Hundreds are being put up every year, and we’re imagining thousands in there. That’s a lot of things to keep track of. We don’t have experience with that. We don’t have the infrastructure to do what people call “space traffic management,” which is knowing where everything is, where it’s going to be, what it might hit.

I read about something called Kessler syndrome, where you have this chain reaction of debris causing more debris causing more debris until space is completely impassible, no spaceship could go through space. Is that something we should be worried about?

Kessler syndrome is very real. It’s a cascade effect, but one that could actually be pretty slow. Without being really deliberate about it, I don’t think you’re going to make space absolutely impassable. What you’re going to do is make space much more hazardous and more expensive. Someplace where you might put satellites, but perhaps you wouldn’t put human beings.

If we think about spaces as a big ocean, and we’re starting to pollute our own shores, are we at the early stages of another big human-caused problem like plastic in the ocean or like climate change where we’re creating this huge future problem and we’re just watching it happen?

That’s part of the dynamic. It’s not exactly any one person’s responsibility, it’s a shared resource. And we have this enormous burst of activity that we’re unprepared to regulate and monitor, which we think might be beneficial, but we don’t have all of the tools to make sure it’s done safely. We need to catch up with technology. We don’t have all of the laws and strategies and approaches to work on the military parts of space. We also don’t have all the regulations to work on the environmental aspects, what people call space sustainability, how do you create space that you can use for generations ahead? How do we make sure that we don’t pollute it? We have a lot of work to do.

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Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

Blown-up satellite pieces circling Earth shown in scientist's unsettling simulation
"It wasn't a good outcome. It was never going to be a good outcome."

By Mark Kaufman on November 20, 2021

A simulation of space debris from the blown-up Russian satellite Cosmos 1408.

 Credit: Screenshot: YouTube / Hugh Lewis

Russia blew up a big, derelict satellite in an objectively terrible area of space.

The space community is heated, disappointed, and frustrated by the Nov. 15 missile test that transpired some 300 miles above Earth. The explosion of the around 4,850-pound satellite created a cloud of fragments that triggered an emergency response on the relatively nearby International Space Station: Astronauts awoke and hastily prepared to evacuate the threatened space outpost.

A simulation of the orbital debris, created by Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Southampton who researches space debris, shows the ring of problematic junk orbiting Earth.

"We're going to see consequences from this particular event for the next few decades," Lewis told Mashable. "It wasn't a good outcome. It was never going to be a good outcome."

"There wasn't a worse target to aim for with respect for human spaceflight," Lewis added. "It wasn't a good outcome. It was never going to be a good outcome."

It's a bad outcome because humanity is adding more space debris into increasingly crowded orbits around Earth much faster than it's removed (satellites below altitudes of some 1,200 miles above Earth gradually fall into the atmosphere and burn up, a process called atmospheric drag). Already, spacecraft today have to maneuver to avoid collisions with other debris. Earlier this November, threatening debris from a Chinese weapon test in 2007 forced NASA to move the space station. The U.S., Russia, and China have all destroyed satellites in space, resulting in clouds of space junk.

The two simulations below show the new debris cloud as it travels around Earth and spreads out. Already, there are some 1,250–2,500 pieces of known, trackable debris, and certainly thousands of tiny undetectable objects. The consequences are long-term.

"This debris field will expand in size and spread in a ring around the Earth that will likely remain on orbit to threaten other space objects for years to come," the Secure World Foundation, an organization promoting sustainable and peaceful uses of space, said in a statement. "Regardless of rationale, to deliberately create orbital debris of this magnitude is extremely irresponsible."

Russia claims its latest missile test "did not pose a threat" to the space station.

To create a realistic view of the evolving debris ring, Lewis used a computer program that modeled the breakup of the satellite, and then simulated how the fragments would move around Earth. The debris cloud spreads out, with some fragments moving to higher and lower altitudes — hence the potential danger to the space station. (Things, however, have largely returned to normal aboard humanity's oldest and largest space outpost.)



The looming problem is that space debris spawns more space debris, specifically by increasing the odds for more collisions. In 2009, for example, the defunct Russian satellite Cosmos 2251 slammed into an Iridium communication satellite, creating some 2,000 pieces of debris four inches or larger along with countless tiny fragments. In 2013, astronaut Chris Hadfield spotted a "bullet hole" in a space station solar panel — from either space junk or a small meteorite. Humanity has already put large amounts of debris into orbit around Earth, and its impacts are serious and growing. "Spent rockets, satellites, and other space trash have accumulated in orbit increasing the likelihood of collision with other debris," NASA wrote in 2016.

Over the coming three or four decades, if enough debris eventually accumulates, a runaway cascade of collisions will ensue, an extreme event dubbed the "Kessler Syndrome" by Don Kessler, a former senior scientist for orbital debris research at NASA. In 2018, Kessler expressed worry to Mashable about SpaceX's plans to launch thousands of Starlink satellites into Earth's orbit. Already, the private space company has launched over 1,800 satellites, with plans for thousands more. SpaceX has plans to deorbit failing or old satellites into Earth's atmosphere, but the sheer number of satellites still means a lot of objects zipping around the planet. Among other mega-satellite constellations, Amazon plans to launch over 3,200 satellites, too.

The latest satellite blow-up itself isn't nearly "end days" for the fleets of satellites monitoring weather, the planet, and providing crucial communications. But it shows that civilization is now in the incremental, slow-moving process of increased collisions.

"It's a very insidious type of process," explained Lewis. "What we see is not this sudden transition. We're seeing gradual change."

Gradual change, unfortunately, means a heightened risk for humans aboard the space station. One of the most serious emergencies on the station would be a "rapid depress" of air pressure, which could happen during a collision. (Fortunately, the station's modules do have some protective shields.)

SEE ALSO: How the space station flipped out of control—and why that's a big problem

There are plans and ideas to catch and remove large, defunct satellites and rocket parts — the kind of debris that might be too high to naturally fall into (and burn up in) the atmosphere — from Earth's orbit. The European Space Agency has paid a company to capture part of an old rocket with a crab-like apparatus, and researchers tested a harpoon that catches space debris. But these won't be deployed, at least in large numbers, any time soon.

To clean up Earth's space neighborhood, the best option is closely monitoring spacecraft (to maneuver and avoid collisions), ensuring old satellites are well-placed to burn up in the atmosphere, and promoting international coordination in launching sprawling satellite constellations. Satellite companies, like Iridium, SpaceX, and Amazon, certainly have a big financial incentive to avoid collisions, which would lead to more collisions and loss of expensive (and expensive to launch) inventory. "It's in the companies' own interest to operate in a clean way," noted Lewis.

But it's in no one's interest to unexpectedly blast a satellite into thousands of fragments in a region of space where people live. After the early morning missile strike, NASA had little time to react, or even try and maneuver the station. So the agency awoke the astronauts and prepared for the worst.

"That shows you how reckless the act was," said Lewis.

Video captures great white shark's gruesome attack on a seal near Cape Cod


By Mindy Weisberger about 24 hours ago

Though peak season for sharks is over, some individuals still linger near the coast.

Great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are most active in waters around the Cape Cod coast between August and October. (Image credit: Stuart Westmorland/Getty Images)

Calm waters near the Cape Cod coast recently erupted in a display of predatory violence as a great white shark tore into a seal, and an onlooker on a boat captured the attack on video.

Peak shark season along coastal Massachusetts is typically August through October, but great white sharks still continue to cruise — and hunt — in coastal waters well into November, as this shark demonstrated on Nov. 7 near the southern tip of Monomoy Island, a sandy stretch of land that extends for 8 miles (13 kilometers) to the southwest of Chatham, Massachusetts.

Footage of the attack was shared in a tweet on Friday (Nov. 19) by the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy (AWSC), a shark conservation nonprofit. Two video clips were captured by a boater identified as R. Nossa, and the footage duration is 32 seconds; it shows a shark's dorsal fin briefly appearing above the surface of the water, accompanied by a lot of thrashing and a spreading pool of what appears to be blood.



Because much of the attack took place at a distance and underwater, it's difficult to see exactly what's happening in the video, but AWSC representatives described the attack as "seal predation" in the tweet. The most common seals near Cape Cod are harbor seals (Phoca vitulina vitulina) and gray seals (Halichoerus grypus atlantica), which live there year-round. Great white sharks prey on both species, according to the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are one of the most widespread of living shark species. They inhabit coastal and offshore waters worldwide where sea-surface temperatures range from 45 to 81 degrees Fahrenheit (7 to 27 degrees Celsius), according to the ReefQuest Centre for Shark Research in Vancouver, Canada. The sharks are frequent visitors to the Cape Cod area, especially during the "peak season" months in the late summer and early fall, according to AWSC.

But in recent decades, conservation work protecting sharks and seals sparked population booms for predator and prey alike. This in turn has led to an uptick in shark sightings in New England waters, with some sharks venturing as close as 10 feet (3 meters) from the shore, Boston University representatives reported in September 2020.

"Seal populations are responding to conservation and showing up in areas where they used to be in the United States and Canada," Greg Skomal, a fisheries biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, said in the statement. "And the white shark population has been rebounding."

Recently, researchers found that great white sharks may attack people not because they have a taste for human flesh, but because they mistake humans for seals, Live Science previously reported. However, such attacks are rare, with just 57 cases of "unprovoked" bites — instances when a swimmer didn't interact with the shark prior to the attack — recorded worldwide in 2020, according to the Yearly Worldwide Shark Attack Summary published by the Florida Museum of Natural History's International Shark Attack File.


Of those unprovoked interactions, 10 were fatal, according to the 2020 summary.


Originally published on Live Science.

NASA’s “Eyes on the Earth” Real-Time 3D Visualization Tool Puts the World at Your Fingertips

By JET PROPULSION LABORATORY NOVEMBER 22, 2021

With NASA’s Eyes on the Earth, you can track Earth science satellites in real time as they orbit our planet and explore the trove of information they provide. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The 3D real-time visualization tool lets users track NASA satellites as well as the vital Earth science data they provide. Recent upgrades make for an even more fascinating experience.

NASA’s real-time 3D visualization tool Eyes on the Earth got a recent upgrade to include more datasets, putting the world at your fingertips. Using the tool, you can track the planet’s vital signs – everything from carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide to sea level and soil moisture levels – as well as follow the fleet of Earth satellites providing those measurements.

Eyes on the Earth offers an engaging, interactive resource to learn more about environmental phenomena and their impacts.

For instance, to see measurements of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in a particular part of the globe, navigate to the Vital Signs menu and click the carbon dioxide button. Eyes on the Earth will show a visualization of data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 (OCO-2) satellite, which measures the gas from the ground to the top of the atmosphere. (To ensure the greatest accuracy, the mission reprocesses the data in the months prior to it appearing in Eyes.) Click “animate data,” specify a date range and see how levels shift over time.

There are eight vital signs to choose from, with background information on the role each plays.

The newest version of Eyes on the Earth also provides snapshots of significant events in the natural world. For instance, you can see details about the maximum wind speeds of a tropical storm, the impacts of a northern California fire, even see the scale of a phytoplankton bloom off of New Zealand and why it matters.

The improvements also include upgrades for a more seamless user experience.

“With the latest advancements in technology, we are able to harness these innovations to combine larger amounts of data and imagery for users to visualize how our planet is constantly changing,” said Jon Nelson, group supervisor of the Visualization Technology Applications and Development at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which developed Eyes.

If you want to know more about the Aqua satellite, just click the icon that shows the spacecraft’s course around the globe. Along with background information about the mission, there’s an interactive 3D model to provide a closer look.

While you’re at it, you can check out the recently launched Landsat 9 as well as two powerful forthcoming missions: NISAR (short for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) and SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography).

The graphics are as rich as the data, making for fascinating deep dives as you learn about the science, get to know the planet better, and learn about some of the many NASA missions that track the globe’s health. And while no downloads are required, the web-based application makes a great addition to any device with a browser and an internet connection including your smartphone.

Hubble Snaps Brilliant Image of Flame Nebula
Nov 22, 2021 by Enrico de Lazaro

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shot this image of a large star-forming region known as the Flame Nebula.

This Hubble image shows the Flame Nebula. Image credit: Hubble / NASA / ESA / N. Da Rio, University of Virginia / Gladys Kober, NASA & Catholic University of America.

The Flame Nebula is an emission nebula located about 1,400 light-years away in the constellation of Orion.

Otherwise known as NGC 2024 and Sh2-277, the nebula is approximately 12 light-years wide.

It was discovered by the German-born British astronomer William Herschel on January 1, 1786.

“The Flame Nebula is a portion of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, which includes such famous nebulae as the Horsehead Nebula and the Orion Nebula,” the Hubble astronomers said.

The Flame Nebula is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex and is found near the Horsehead Nebula. Image credit: Hubble 
/ NASA / ESA / N. Da Rio, University of Virginia / ESO / DSS2 / D. De Martin / Gladys Kober, NASA & Catholic University of America.

At the center of the nebula lies a cluster of over 800 stars, the majority of which are very young stellar objects.

“The new Hubble image focuses on the dark, dusty heart of the nebula, where the star cluster resides, mostly hidden from view,” the astronomers said.

“Nearby — but not visible in this image — is the bright star Alnitak, the easternmost star in the Belt of Orion. “

“Radiation from this star ionizes hydrogen gas in the Flame Nebula,” they explained.

“As the gas begins to cool from its higher-energy state to a lower-energy state, it emits energy in the form of light, causing the visible glow behind the swirled wisps of dust.”

“Hubble measured the mass of stars in the cluster as it looked for brown dwarfs, a type of dim object that’s too hot and massive to be classified as a planet but also too small and cool to shine like a star.”

Attack of the Galactic Clones

By ESA/HUBBLE NOVEMBER 21, 2021

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, E. Wuyts

This star- and galaxy-studded image was captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), using data that were collected for scientific purposes. The object of interest was a galaxy that is visible in the bottom left corner of the image, named SGAS 0033+02. What makes this particular galaxy interesting is a little unusual — it appears not just once in this image, but three times. The thrice-visible galaxy is a little difficult to spot: it appears once as a curved arc just to the upper right of the very bright star, and twice more as small round dots above the star and to the right of the star respectively.

SGAS 0033+02’s multiple appearances in the same image are not the result of an error, but instead are due to a remarkable phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when the light from a very distant galaxy — such as SGAS 0033+02 — is curved (or ‘lensed’) by the gravity of a massive celestial object that lies in the foreground, between the distant galaxy and the Earth. SGAS 0033+02 was discovered by its namesake, the Sloan Giant Arcs Survey (SGAS), which aimed to identify highly magnified galaxies that were gravitationally lensed by foreground galaxy clusters. SGAS 0033+02 is of special interest because of its highly unusual proximity in the sky to a very bright star. The star is useful, because it can be used to calibrate and correct observations of the lensed SGAS 0033+02.

Image: Hubble catches celestial prawn drifting through the cosmic deep

by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Tan (Chalmers University of Technology); Processing; Gladys 

Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

The Prawn Nebula is a massive stellar nursery located in the constellation Scorpius, about 6,000 light years from Earth. Though the nebula stretches 250 light-years and covers a space four times the size of the full moon, it emits light primarily in wavelengths the human eye cannot detect, making it extremely faint to earthbound viewers. Hubble's gaze, however, shows a small section of the nebula here in both visible and invisible infrared light, capturing dazzling detail of the nebula's structure, including bright areas of glowing gas.

The Prawn Nebula, also known as IC 4628, is an emission nebula, which means its gas has been energized, or ionized, by the radiation of nearby stars. The radiation from these massive stars strips electrons from the nebula's hydrogen atoms. As the energized electrons revert from their higher-energy state to a lower-energy state by recombining with hydrogen nuclei, they emit energy in the form of light, causing the nebula's gas to glow. In this image, red indicates the presence of ionized iron (Fe II) emission.

This Hubble Space Telescope image was captured as part of a survey of massive- and intermediate-size "protostars," or newly forming stars. Astronomers used the infrared sensitivity of Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 to look for hydrogen ionized by ultraviolet light ionized by the protostars, jets from the stars, and other features.

The Prawn Nebula lies south of the star Antares in the constellation Scorpius, the Scorpion. Hubble's focused view captures just a small portion of the vast star-forming region. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Tan (Chalmers University of Technology), and ESO; Processing; Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Image: Hubble surveys a snowman sculpted from gas and dust

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Provided by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center