Thursday, September 07, 2023

SPACE RACE 2.0

Japan joins Moon race with successful rocket launch

Derek Cai - BBC News, Singapore
Thu, September 7, 2023

Japan on Thursday successfully launched a rocket with a lunar lander at its fourth try this year, after previous attempts were foiled by bad weather.

The lander, dubbed the "moon sniper", is expected to attempt a Moon landing in February if all goes well.

Japan has twice failed to reach the lunar surface in the past year, amid setbacks for its space programme.

It is bidding to become only the fifth country to land on the Moon, after the US, Russia, China and India.

Two weeks ago, India made history when it successfully landed a spacecraft near the south pole of the Moon.

The Japanese spacecraft is projected to land within 100m (328ft) of a location near the Shioli crater, on the near side of the Moon.

It is expected to enter the Moon's orbit within four months. It will then spend a month circling the Moon before attempting a landing in February.

The $100m (£59m) mission is meant to demonstrate Tokyo's ability to land a lightweight, low-cost spacecraft on the Moon.

The rocket was also carrying the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite, a joint project between the Japanese, American and European space agencies.

The satellite, containing a telescope the size of a bus, has parted ways with the lunar lander to orbit around the Earth. It will now begin studying space phenomena such as black holes.

The successful launch follows a series of failures over the past year.

Last November, JAXA lost contact with its OMOTENASHI spacecraft and aborted the Moon landing mission.

More recently in April, a private Japanese start-up, iSpace, failed to land its Hakuto-R lander after it too lost contact with the spacecraft.

Two test rocket launches have also failed this year, the latest in July when engine failure caused an explosion.

Japan launches 'moon sniper' lunar lander SLIM into space

Kantaro Komiya
Updated Thu, September 7, 2023

Japan launches 'moon sniper' lunar lander SLIM into spaceH-IIA rocket carrying the national space agency's moon lander is launched at Tanegashima Space Center on the southwestern island of Tanegashima

By Kantaro Komiya

TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan launched a lunar exploration spacecraft on Thursday aboard a homegrown H-IIA rocket, hoping to become the world's fifth country to land on the moon early next year.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said the rocket took off from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan as planned and successfully released the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM). Unfavourable weather led to three postponements in a week last month.

Dubbed the "moon sniper", Japan aims to land SLIM within 100 metres of its target site on the lunar surface. The $100-million mission is expected to start the landing by February after a long, fuel-efficient approach trajectory.

"The big objective of SLIM is to prove the high-accuracy landing ... to achieve 'landing where we want' on the lunar surface, rather than 'landing where we can'," JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa told a news conference.

Hours after launch on Thursday, JAXA said it picked up signals from SLIM showing it was operating normally.

The launch comes two weeks after India became the fourth nation to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission to the unexplored lunar south pole. Around the same time, Russia's Luna-25 lander crashed while approaching the moon.

Two earlier lunar landing attempts by Japan failed in the last year. JAXA lost contact with the OMOTENASHI lander and scrubbed an attempted landing in November. The Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander, made by Japanese startup ispace, crashed in April as it attempted to descend to the lunar surface.

SLIM is set to touch down on the near side of the moon close to Mare Nectaris, a lunar sea that, viewed from Earth, appears as a dark spot. Its primary goal is to test advanced optical and image processing technology.

After landing, the craft aims to analyse the composition of olivine rocks near the sites in search of clues about the origin of the moon. No lunar rover is loaded on SLIM.

Thursday's H-IIA rocket also carried the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) satellite, a joint project of JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency. The satellite aims to observe plasma winds flowing through the universe that scientists see as key to helping understand the evolution of stars and galaxies.

Ground stations in Hawaii and Japan received signals from XRISM soon after the launch confirming that the satellite's solar panels successfully deployed, JAXA said.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries manufactured the H-IIA rocket and operated the launch, which marked the 47th H-IIA Japan has launched since 2001, bringing the vehicle's success rate close to 98%.

JAXA had suspended the launch of H-IIA carrying SLIM for several months while it investigated the failure of its new medium-lift H3 rocket during its debut in March. Japan plans to retire the H-IIA after its 50th launch in 2024.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said in a social media post after the launch on Thursday that developing flagship rockets is essential to Japan's independent space activities.

"We'll build up the momentum toward the successful re-launch of the H3 rocket," Kishida posted on the social media X, previously known as Twitter.

Japan's space missions have faced other recent setbacks, with the launch failure of an Epsilon small rocket in October 2022, followed by an engine explosion during a test in July.

JAXA plans a joint Lunar Polar Exploration Mission (LUPEX) with the Indian Space Research Organisation beyond 2025, in which Japan's H3 rocket will carry India's next lunar lander into space.

The country also aims to send an astronaut to the moon's surface in the latter half of the 2020s as part of NASA's Artemis programme.

(Reporting by Kantaro Komiya; Editing by Tom Hogue and Gerry Doyle)
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Japan launches SLIM moon lander, XRISM X-ray telescope on space doubleheader

Mike Wall

SPACE.COM
Wed, September 6, 2023

a white rocket launches into a blue sky.

Japan sent two ambitious missions soaring into the heavens today (Sept. 6) — a pioneering lunar lander and a powerful X-ray space telescope.

A Japanese H-2A rocket carrying the SLIM moon lander and the XRISM space telescope lifted off from Tanegashima Space Center today (Sept. 6) at 7:42 p.m. EDT (2342 GMT; 8:42 a.m. Japan time on Sept. 7). That was about 10 days later than originally planned, thanks to weather delays.

Both spacecraft were deployed on schedule, sequentially less than an hour after liftoff. If all goes according to plan, a few months from now, SLIM ("Smart Lander for Investigating Moon") will attempt to pull off Japan's first-ever soft lunar landing — a pinpoint touchdown that will pave the way for even more ambitious feats down the road.

SLIM "aims to achieve a lightweight probe system on a small scale and use the pinpoint landing technology necessary for future lunar probes," officials with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) wrote in a mission description.

"The project will aim to cut weight for higher-function observational equipment and to land on resource-scarce planets, with an eye towards future solar system research probes," they added.

Related: Missions to the moon: Past, present and future

Shooting for the moon

SLIM is a small spacecraft, measuring just 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) high, 8.8 feet (2.7 m) long and 5.6 feet (1.7 m) wide. At liftoff, it tipped the scales at about 1,540 pounds (700 kilograms), but roughly 70% of that weight was propellant.

SLIM will take a long, looping and fuel-efficient route to the moon, finally reaching lunar orbit three to four months from now. It will then eye the lunar surface for another month or so before attempting a touchdown inside Shioli Crater, a 1,000-foot-wide (300 m) impact feature that lies at 13 degrees south latitude, on the moon's near side.

The probe aims to land within 330 feet (100 m) of a target point within Shioli Crater — a more precise touchdown than previous lunar landers have attempted. The goal is to demonstrate pinpoint-landing tech that could open the moon, and other celestial bodies, to more extensive exploration.

"By creating the SLIM lander, humans will make a qualitative shift towards being able to land where we want and not just where it is easy to land, as had been the case before," JAXA officials wrote in the mission description. "By achieving this, it will become possible to land on planets even more resource-scarce than the moon."

SLIM also carries two miniprobes, which will be ejected onto the lunar surface following touchdown. Those two little craft will help the mission team monitor the status of the larger lander, take photos of the landing site and provide an "Independent communication system for direct communication with Earth," according to JAXA's mission press kit.

SLIM isn't the first lunar lander that JAXA has built. The agency's tiny OMOTENASHI craft was one of 10 cubesats that launched with NASA's Artemis 1 moon mission in November 2022. While Artemis 1 succeeded, OMOTENASHI did not; its handlers could not establish communications with the little probe in time for its planned touchdown try. (Several of the other Artemis 1 cubesats failed in their missions as well.)

And a Japanese lander has tried its hand at a lunar touchdown before. The Tokyo-based company ispace's Hakuto-R lander reached lunar orbit — a huge accomplishment for a private spacecraft — but crashed during its touchdown attempt this past April.

Success by SLIM would therefore be historic. Just four nations have soft-landed a probe on the moon to date — the Soviet Union, the United States, China and India. India put its name on this exclusive list just last month, when its Chandrayaan-3 mission touched down near the lunar south pole.

A short golden lunar lander with the grey of the lunar surface behind.

RELATED STORIES:

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An X-ray space telescope, too

As exciting as SLIM is, it's merely the secondary payload on Sunday's launch. The main spacecraft is XRISM, which is headed for a perch in low Earth orbit.

XRISM (short for "X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission") is a collaboration involving JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). As its full name suggests, the telescope will study the universe in high-energy X-ray light.

"X-ray astronomy enables us to study the most energetic phenomena in the universe," Matteo Guainazzi, ESA project scientist for XRISM, said in a statement.

"It holds the key to answering important questions in modern astrophysics: how the largest structures in the universe evolve, how the matter we are ultimately composed of was distributed through the cosmos, and how galaxies are shaped by massive black holes at their centers," he added.

The observatory will focus particularly on the super-hot gas surrounding galaxy clusters.

"JAXA has designed XRISM to detect X-ray light from this gas to help astronomers measure the total mass of these systems," ESA officials wrote in the same statement. "This will reveal information about the formation and evolution of the universe."

XRISM won't be the only X-ray telescope studying the heavens from Earth orbit. Also up there right now, for example, are NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton, both of which launched in 1999, as well as NASA's NuSTAR, which lifted off in 2012.

India's Moon Lander Just Took Off Again and Landed in a Different Place

Victor Tangermann
Wed, September 6, 2023

Second Landing

After safely landing on the lunar surface last month, India's Vikram Moon lander just pulled off its next daring stunt.

The lander fired up its engines, causing it to float 15 inches above the lunar surface, then moved laterally. Moments later it landed again, roughly 11 to 15 inches away from where it was sitting previously.

A clip shared by the Indian Space Research Organization shows the view from the lander as the cratered lunar surface goes up in a cloud of dust. Seconds later, the lander's view clears up again, showing a slightly altered landing spot.

"Vikram soft-landed on the Moon again!" the ISRO's update reads.

It's an impressive feat that again demonstrates India's growing off-world prowess.

"All systems performed nominally and are healthy," the ISRO wrote.

https://twitter.com/isro/status/1698570774385205621

Goodnight Moon

Shortly after landing on the lunar surface two weeks ago, Vikram released a smaller, six-wheeled rover dubbed Pragyaan, which has been exploring the surrounding area for signs of water ice since.

Vikram's successful flight was performed shortly before it and its rover cousin were scheduled to take a prolonged nap. Early Monday morning, the lander entered sleep mode.

"Vikram will fall asleep next to Pragyan once the solar power is depleted and the battery is drained," the ISRO tweeted on Monday. "Hoping for their awakening, around September 22, 2023."

The stakes are pretty high. If Vikram fails to get up from its slumber, it could be game over for the mission.

"Hoping for a successful awakening for another set of assignments!" the ISRO tweeted over the weekend. "Else, it will forever stay there as India's lunar ambassador."

Australian moon rover to hitch a ride on NASA’s giant moon rocket

Andrew Wulfeck
Wed, September 6, 2023

Australia is aiming to become one of only a handful of countries to operate a rover on the Moon and said it could reach the lunar surface by 2026.

The Australian Space Agency is working with NASA to design and launch the rover that will depend on an Artemis launch to make it to the Moon.

The agency said the first attempt could occur as soon as 2026, when NASA is expected to launch the Artemis III crew to the Moon’s surface.

"Drawing on Australia’s world-leading remote operations expertise, the rover will collect lunar soil, known as regolith. NASA will attempt to extract oxygen from the sample. This is a key step towards a sustainable human presence on the Moon," the ASA said in a statement.

SEE THE OBJECT HUMANS LEFT BEHIND ON THE MOON

Australian Space Agency moon rover

Russia recently attempted to put a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon, but the mission is believed to have ended in spectacular fashion, with a massive crater now seen from satellites near the expected landing site.

If Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, had been successful with the Luna-25 mission, it would have been the first time since the 1970s that the country had successfully landed a spacecraft on the lunar body.

India, the Soviet Union, China and the United States are the only countries to have successfully operated a spacecraft on the Moon, with several other countries eyeing to achieve the historic feat.

SPACECRAFT CAPTURES PHOTOS OF NEW CRATER ON MOON LIKELY CREATED BY FAILED MISSION

Australia has yet to determine a name for the rover but said it is turning to its citizens for help.

The space agency has opened a website for Australians to submit potential names that will one day come to a public vote.

The winner is expected to be announced in December, and the name will be placed on the robot for the universe to see.

Original article source: Australian moon rover to hitch a ride on NASA’s giant moon rocket

SPACE

Hubble Space Telescope sees lonely galaxy looming in isolation (photo)

Samantha Mathewson
Wed, September 6, 2023

a spiral galaxy

A distant galaxy looms in lonely isolation in a new photo from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The galaxy, called IC 1776, lies over 150 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces. Hubble, a joint mission led by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), snapped this new view of the galaxy, capturing its irregularly-shaped structure and indistinct spiral arms.

"The edges are faint and the core has a pale yellow glow. It is dotted with small, wispy, blue regions where stars are forming," ESA officials said in a statement. "A few stars and small galaxies in warm colors are visible around it."

Observations of IC 1776 suggest the galaxy recently hosted a violent star explosion, also known as a supernova. Data from the Lick Observatory Supernova Search — a robotic telescope that scours the night sky in search of transient phenomena such as supernovas — revealed remnants of the stellar explosion, named SN 2015ap, with observations collected in 2015.

— Hubble telescope sees an angry star and an evaporating planet

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Hubble then followed up with observations of the supernova’s aftermath as part of two different projects, both of which were designed to investigate the debris left behind by such stellar explosions. The ESA shared Hubble’s latest view of IC 1776, in which the supernova SN 2015ap occurred, on Sept. 4.

"A variety of telescopes automatically follow up the detection of supernovae to obtain early measurements of these events’ brightnesses and spectra," ESA officials said in the statement. "Complementing these measurements with later observations which reveal the lingering energy of supernovae can shed light on the systems which gave rise to these cosmic cataclysms in the first place."

Astronomers discover new class of cosmic explosion brighter than 100 billion suns

Brandon Specktor
Wed, September 6, 2023

Artists impression of a black hole destroying a nearby star. The researchers believe such a collision may be responsible for this new type of explosion.

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious new type of cosmic explosion that outshines nearly every supernova ever detected. Within 10 days, the peculiar blast grew brighter than 100 billion suns, then faded away to nearly nothing a few weeks later — a destructive event both briefer and more spectacular than a typical supernova.

The fast and furious event likely represents a new class of explosion never studied before, according to research published Sept. 1 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"We have named this new class of sources 'Luminous Fast Coolers' or LFCs," lead study author Matt Nicholl, an astrophysicist at Queen's University Belfast said in a statement. "The exquisite data set that we have obtained rules out this being another supernova."

Supernovas are bright explosions that occur when large stars (typically measuring at least eight times the mass of the sun) burn up their nuclear fuel, collapse in on themselves and blast their outer layers of gas into space. Every year, astronomers observe hundreds of supernovas suddenly brighten, then gradually dim. Typically, a supernova reaches peak brightness after about 20 days, shining several billion times brighter than the sun. Over the following months, the explosion slowly fades away.

But LFCs are not supernovas. For one thing, the newly discovered explosion — which astronomers detected with the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope network in Hawaii, Chile and South Africa — occurred in a galaxy full of sun-like stars that are far too small to be supernova material.

Related: A messy black hole may have just triggered the largest explosion in the universe

Image from the European Southern Observatory New Technology Telescope showing the distant red galaxy (center) where the explosion occurred. The explosion site is marked by the yellow cross.

"Our data showed that this event happened in a massive, red galaxy two billion light-years away," study co-author Shubham Srivastav, a research fellow also at Queen's University, said in the statement. "These galaxies contain billions of stars like our Sun, but they shouldn't have any stars big enough to end up as a supernova."

In addition to its unusual location, the newfound explosion also grew far brighter and faded far quicker than a typical supernova, according to the researchers. Within the next 15 days, the object had faded by two orders of magnitude, and had faded to only 1% of its peak brightness just one month after detonating.

Simply put, the explosion did not fit the profile of any known supernova. So, had anything like it ever occurred before? To find out, the researchers combed through archival telescope surveys, looking for objects with a similar brightness and lifespan. They ultimately uncovered two other objects — one from a 2009 survey, and the second from 2020 — with similar properties to the newly detected blast.

The team concluded that these blasts represent a new — and very rare — class of cosmic explosion that likely has nothing to do with dying stars. What exactly are LFCs, then? For now, the team can only speculate.

"The most plausible explanation seems to be a black hole colliding with a star," Nicholl said.

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However, even this explanation doesn't quite fit; when black holes rip material away from passing stars in gruesome interactions known as tidal disruption events, they release bright X-ray emissions — and none of the LFCs identified here showed any X-ray emissions.

It could be that scientific models of star-on-black-hole collisions need to be refined — or, astronomers just don't have enough information about LFCs to make any conclusions yet. The team will continue looking for more of these mysterious explosions in galaxies closer to Earth.

Astronomers discover the biggest shockwaves in the known universe

Scott Sutherland
Wed, September 6, 2023

Astronomers discover the biggest shockwaves in the known universe

A team of astronomers has identified immense shockwaves radiating out from a massive collision in space as the biggest in the known universe.

Hiding behind the dust and gas of our Milky Way galaxy is a pair of galaxy clusters, called CIZA J1358.9-4750, that are in the early stages of merging together.

Milky Way plus CIRA clusters - centred

A map of the galaxy clusters found by the Clusters in the Zone of Avoidance (CIZA) survey has been centred with the galactic core and matched up with a panoramic view of the Milky Way. The location of merging galaxy clusters CIZA J1358.9-4750 (CIZA 1359) is indicated by an arrow. The green arch denotes a region of the map that is best viewed from the southern hemisphere. Credits: Milky Way panorama - ESO/S. Brunier. CIZA map - D.D. Kocevski et al., 2003

CIZA 1359 is located around 1 billion light years away in what astronomers call the Zone of Avoidance — a region of space beyond our galaxy that most telescopes avoid due to the obscuring light, gas, and dust of the Milky Way.

However, x-ray telescopes can detect high-energy events even though the core of our galaxy. In fact, Japan's Suzaku x-ray astronomy satellite (deactivated since 2015) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton x-ray astronomy satellite (still operating after 23 years) have both collected observations of CIZA 1359 over the years.

By combining these observations, a team of researchers led by Kazuhiro Nakazawa and doctoral student Yuki Omiya, both from Nagoya University's Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute for the Origin of Particles and the Universe (KMI), closely examined these merging galaxy clusters.

Through their research, the researchers confirmed an intensely hot region of space located between the two that is roughly 20 million degrees hotter than the cores of both clusters. This zone is the result of two immense shockwaves, measured at around 3 million light years square, that are travelling through the material of the clusters at around 1,500 kilometres per second.

20230615 ciza1359 01 en

On the left, an X-ray image of CIZA J1359 points out the locations of the two galaxy clusters and the filament structure currently joining the two as they merge. On the right, a detailed model isolates the extremely hot region between the two clusters and the shockwaves generated by the collision. Credit: Yuki Omiya, et al., 2023/KMI

"By conducting a detailed reanalysis of past data in this study, we have successfully discovered the existence of two 'newborn giant shock waves' in merging clusters," said Omiya. "These shock waves have a width and depth 30 times larger than the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy, and this is the first time they have been observed."

In a blog post discussing the research on the KMI website, the team called this "the largest energy-release event in the universe."

Since the merger of these galaxy clusters is in such an early stage, this gave the researchers a good idea of the initial shape of the pair. That made it possible to compute the kinetic energy of one of these shock waves.

Taking the size and speed of the 'northwest' shockwave (the one pushing into the galaxy cluster on the right in the above images), they estimated its kinetic energy at "one billion times the energy consumed by the sun in a year, all released within just one second."

From here, the hope is that observations from new, more advanced radio telescopes, and new x-ray observatories such as Japan's XRISM mission, will help reveal more details of CIZA 1359 and deepen the researchers' understanding of the processes involved in the merging of galaxy clusters.

(Thumbnail image courtesy Yuki Omiya, et al., 2023)

SpaceX launch of NASA's Psyche mission to bizarre metal asteroid just 1 month away

Mike Wall
Wed, September 6, 2023

A NASA probe will start winging its way toward a bizarre metal asteroid less than a month from now, if all goes according to plan.

The agency's Psyche spacecraft is scheduled to lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 5 (though the launch window extends through Oct. 25, with each day offering one opportunity).

Psyche will arrive at its namesake — a 170-mile-wide (280 kilometers) metallic object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter — in the summer of 2029, providing a feast for scientists and lots of eye candy for space fans.

"I am so looking forward to seeing those first images," Lori Glaze, director of NASA's Planetary Sciences Division, said during a news conference on Wednesday (Sept. 6). "They are going to be spectacular, when we finally get to see what this metal asteroid looks like up close."

Next month's launch will be a milestone moment for SpaceX as well: It will mark the first Falcon Heavy liftoff for NASA, as well as the rocket's first interplanetary mission. The Falcon Heavy, which is the second-most powerful rocket currently in operation (after NASA's Space Launch System), has lifted off just seven times to date, most recently on July 28.

Psyche was supposed to be aloft already. The original plan called for launch in the fall of 2022, but problems with the spacecraft's flight software led to a one-year delay.

Those kinks have all been worked out, say mission team members, who are eager for the upcoming liftoff.

"It’s getting increasingly real," Henry Stone, Psyche's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said in a statement on Wednesday. "We are counting the days. The team is more than ready to send this spacecraft off on its journey, and it's very exciting."

Liftoff will kick off a long cruise phase for Psyche, which will use highly efficient solar electric propulsion to make its way to the asteroid belt. A "gravity assist" flyby of Mars in May 2026 will boost Psyche's velocity, helping it reach its target space rock in late July 2029.

The probe will then study the asteroid up close for 26 months, circling lower and lower until it orbits a mere 40 miles (64 kilometers) above Psyche's surface. Scientists don't know what that surface looks like — they've never gotten a good look at Psyche or any other metal asteroid — but they have some intriguing ideas.

"One possibility is that the metal surface of Psyche is covered by tiny, spiky, cup-shaped micrometeorite impacts into metal, and little tiny grains of metal that flew off of them when they happened," the mission's principal investigator, Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University, said during Wednesday's press conference.

"We expect part of the surface to be metal and part of it not to be metal," she added. "What's the non-metal part? Rock? Sulfur? We don't really know. I would say that the only thing we're pretty darn confident of is that there's metal there, and the metal is going to be similar to metal meteorites."

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is shown in a clean room on June 26 at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

And Psyche has a lot of metal — so much, in fact, that it would be worth about $10 quintillion here on Earth, Elkins-Tanton calculated a few years ago. But that figure is not to be taken seriously, she stressed on Wednesday.

"We have zero technology as a species to bring Psyche back to Earth. And if we did, it would likely be a catastrophic mistake," Elkins-Tanton said.

"Let's say we were able to actually bring Psyche back. Then it would flood the metals market, and it would literally be worth nothing," she added. "So, calculating the value of it is a fun intellectual exercise with no truth to it. We are not going there to mine an asteroid."

Rather, the $1.2 billion Psyche mission will take the asteroid's measure for science's sake. It will study the space rock using three dedicated instruments — a gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer, a multispectral imager and a magnetometer. The spacecraft will also use its onboard radio telecommunications system to conduct "gravity science," learning more about Psyche's internal structure and composition.

Such work will reveal a great deal about the asteroid, which scientists think may be the exposed core of a protoplanet — the raw materials from which rocky planets such as Earth and Mars are made.

"The first mission to explore an asteroid with a surface that contains substantial amounts of metal rather than rock or ice, Psyche seeks to better understand iron cores, an unexplored building block of planet formation," NASA officials wrote in a mission description.

"The mission will be the first to directly examine the interior of a previously layered planetary body, which they expect will shed additional light on how Earth and other rocky planets formed," they added.

IMAGE: THIS IMAGE SHOWS THE ORIENTATION OF THE MAGNETIC FIELD IN THE DISTANT 9IO9 GALAXY, SEEN HERE WHEN THE UNIVERSE WAS ONLY 20% OF ITS CURRENT AGE — THE FURTHEST EVER DETECTION OF A GALAXY’S MAGNETIC FIELD. THE OBSERVATIONS WERE DONE WITH THE ATACAMA LARGE MILLIMETER/SUBMILLIMETER ARRAY (ALMA), IN WHICH ESO IS A PARTNER. DUST GRAINS WITHIN 9IO9 ARE SOMEWHAT ALIGNED WITH THE GALAXY’S MAGNETIC FIELD, AND DUE TO THIS THEY EMIT POLARISED LIGHT, MEANING THAT LIGHT WAVES OSCILLATE ALONG A PREFERRED DIRECTION RATHER THAN RANDOMLY. ALMA DETECTED THIS POLARISATION SIGNAL, FROM WHICH ASTRONOMERS COULD WORK OUT THE ORIENTATION OF THE MAGNETIC FIELD, SHOWN HERE AS CURVED LINES OVERLAID ON THE ALMA IMAGE. THE POLARISED LIGHT SIGNAL EMITTED BY THE MAGNETICALLY ALIGNED DUST IN 9IO9 WAS EXTREMELY FAINT, REPRESENTING JUST ONE PERCENT OF THE TOTAL BRIGHTNESS OF THE GALAXY, SO ASTRONOMERS USED A CLEVER TRICK OF NATURE TO HELP THEM OBTAIN THIS RESULT. THE TEAM WAS HELPED BY THE FACT THAT 9IO9, ALTHOUGH VERY DISTANT FROM US, HAD BEEN MAGNIFIED VIA A PROCESS KNOWN AS GRAVITATIONAL LENSING. THIS OCCURS WHEN LIGHT FROM A DISTANT GALAXY, IN THIS CASE 9IO9, APPEARS BRIGHTER AND DISTORTED AS IT IS BENT BY THE GRAVITY OF A VERY LARGE OBJECT IN THE FOREGROUND. view more
CREDIT: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/J. GEACH ET AL.

Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have detected the magnetic field of a galaxy so far away that its light has taken more than 11 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was just 2.5 billion years old. The result provides astronomers with vital clues about how the magnetic fields of galaxies like our own Milky Way came to be.
Lots of astronomical bodies in the Universe have magnetic fields, whether it be planets, stars or galaxies. “Many people might not be aware that our entire galaxy and other galaxies are laced with magnetic fields, spanning tens of thousands of light-years,” says James Geach, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, and lead author of the study published today in Nature.
“We actually know very little about how these fields form, despite their being quite fundamental to how galaxies evolve,” adds Enrique Lopez Rodriguez, a researcher at Stanford University, USA, who also participated in the study. It is not clear how early in the lifetime of the Universe, and how quickly, magnetic fields in galaxies form because so far astronomers have only mapped magnetic fields in galaxies close to us.
Now, using ALMA, in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, Geach and his team have discovered a fully formed magnetic field in a distant galaxy, similar in structure to what is observed in nearby galaxies. The field is about 1000 times weaker than the Earth’s magnetic field, but extends over more than 16 000 light-years.
“This discovery gives us new clues as to how galactic-scale magnetic fields are formed,” explains Geach. Observing a fully developed magnetic field this early in the history of the Universe indicates that magnetic fields spanning entire galaxies can form rapidly while young galaxies are still growing.
The team believes that intense star formation in the early Universe could have played a role in accelerating the development of the fields. Moreover, these fields can in turn influence how later generations of stars will form. Co-author and ESO astronomer Rob Ivison says that the discovery opens up “a new window onto the inner workings of galaxies, because the magnetic fields are linked to the material that is forming new stars.”
To make this detection, the team searched for light emitted by dust grains in a distant galaxy, 9io9 [1]. Galaxies are packed full of dust grains and when a magnetic field is present, the grains tend to align and the light they emit becomes polarised. This means that the light waves oscillate along a preferred direction rather than randomly. When ALMA detected and mapped a polarised signal coming from 9io9, the presence of a magnetic field in a very distant galaxy was confirmed for the first time.
“No other telescope could have achieved this,” says Geach. The hope is that with this and future observations of distant magnetic fields the mystery of how these fundamental galactic features form will begin to unravel.

Notes

[1] 9io9 was discovered in the course of a citizen science project. The discovery was helped by viewers of the British BBC television programme Stargazing Live, when over three nights in 2014 the audience was asked to examine millions of images in the hunt for distant galaxies.

More information

This research was presented in a paper to appear in Nature.
The team is composed of J. E. Geach (Centre for Astrophysics Research, School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire, UK [Hertfordshire]), E. Lopez-Rodriguez (Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, USA), M. J. Doherty (Hertfordshire), Jianhang Chen (European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany [ESO]), R. J. Ivison (ESO), G. J. Bendo (UK ALMA Regional Centre Node, Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Manchester, UK), S. Dye (School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, UK) and K. E. K. Coppin (Hertfordshire).
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) enables scientists worldwide to discover the secrets of the Universe for the benefit of all. We design, build and operate world-class observatories on the ground — which astronomers use to tackle exciting questions and spread the fascination of astronomy — and promote international collaboration for astronomy. Established as an intergovernmental organisation in 1962, today ESO is supported by 16 Member States (Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom), along with the host state of Chile and with Australia as a Strategic Partner. ESO’s headquarters and its visitor centre and planetarium, the ESO Supernova, are located close to Munich in Germany, while the Chilean Atacama Desert, a marvellous place with unique conditions to observe the sky, hosts our telescopes. ESO operates three observing sites: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope and its Very Large Telescope Interferometer, as well as survey telescopes such as VISTA. Also at Paranal ESO will host and operate the Cherenkov Telescope Array South, the world’s largest and most sensitive gamma-ray observatory. Together with international partners, ESO operates ALMA on Chajnantor, a facility that observes the skies in the millimetre and submillimetre range. At Cerro Armazones, near Paranal, we are building “the world’s biggest eye on the sky” — ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. From our offices in Santiago, Chile we support our operations in the country and engage with Chilean partners and society.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of ESO, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded by ESO on behalf of its Member States, by NSF in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in Taiwan and by NINS in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). ALMA construction and operations are led by ESO on behalf of its Member States; by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI), on behalf of North America; and by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) on behalf of East Asia. The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.
About the University of Hertfordshire: Defined by the spirit of innovation and enterprise, the University of Hertfordshire has been an innovative, vocation-first educational force for more than 70 years. From our start as a leading educator within Britain’s aeronautical industry to our extensive offering today, we have always specialised in providing the environment and expertise needed to power every kind of potential. For our thriving community of more than 30,000 students from over 140 countries, that means high-quality teaching from experts engaged in groundbreaking research with real-world impact. Access to over 550 career-focused degree options and a chance to study at more than 170 universities worldwide, using outstanding, true to life facilities. And industry connections that offer professional networking opportunities which take talents even further. We are Herts. Herts. Beats Faster. Discover a place where ideas move at a different pace. Visit herts.ac.uk.

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NASA’s Webb wins Howard Hughes Memorial Award

Grant and Award Announcement

NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

The Aero Club of Southern California has awarded the Howard Hughes Memorial Award to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The award will be accepted at a ceremony Wednesday, Sept. 6, at the California Club in Los Angeles.

The Howard Hughes Memorial Award honors exceptional leaders who have advanced the fields of aviation or aerospace technology. Hughes’ first cousin, William R. Lummis, established the award in 1978, and the Aero Club of Southern California presents the award annually.

Accepting the award will be Mike Menzel, the NASA mission systems engineer for Webb at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“On behalf of the entire Webb team I would like to thank Aero Club for this great honor,” Menzel said. “Our team was privileged to have had the opportunity to develop and execute such an important scientific mission – one that clearly demonstrates what can be achieved when a dedicated team of international partners commits to such an endeavor. We are all excited and inspired by Webb’s first year of images and scientific data, and we look forward to many more years of future exploration and discoveries.”

The award recognizes the contributions of the team that designed, developed, and now operate Webb, including individuals from Goddard; Northrop Grumman, Redondo Beach, California; the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland; and Ball Aerospace, Boulder, Colorado. The mission was also made possible by many international contributions from partnerships with ESA (European Space Agency) and the CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

Launched in late 2021 after more than a decade of preparation, Webb successfully performed a complex series of deployments shortly after leaving Earth's orbit. About a month later, the telescope reached its working orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point, a stable orbit in space well beyond that of the Moon. Once there and fully commissioned, the 21-foot (6.5-meter) telescope began its record-breaking work. The first images were unveiled on July 12, 2022.

Webb operates at infrared frequencies. The combination of sensitive instrumentation with its massive primary mirror allows the telescope to see farther and more clearly than any previous observatory of its kind. Discoveries from existing and newly identified targets began to accumulate almost immediately.

The ever-growing list of Webb discoveries includes direct imaging of exoplanets and the identification of key gases in their atmospheres; tracking clouds on Saturn's moon Titan; identifying new details in a cluster of galaxies; imaging the incredibly faint rings around Uranus; capturing the galactic merger of Arp 220; discovering sand-bearing clouds on a remote exoplanet; measuring the temperature of a rocky exoplanet; and observing galaxies seen in their earliest years, when the universe was just 350 million years old – about two percent of its current age.

The Aero Club of Southern California is a 501(c)(3) charitable aviation industry non-profit led by volunteer officers and Board members. Open to everyone with an interest in aviation and aerospace, Aero Club members get insights into the future of air and space exploration and access to the legends who explored the unknown.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest, most powerful, and most complex space science telescope ever built. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency.

2 new eclipse projects receive NASA funding

Ahead of the total solar eclipse crossing North America on April 8, 2024, NASA has funded two more proposals that will use the eclipse to advance science while engaging the public

Business Announcement

NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

Baily's Beads over Madras, Oregon — IMAGE: THE BAILY'S BEADS EFFECT AS SEEN FROM MADRAS, OREGON, DURING THE AUG. 21, 2017, TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE. view more
CREDIT: CREDIT: NASA/AUBREY GEMIGNANI

Ahead of the total solar eclipse crossing North America on April 8, 2024, NASA has funded two more proposals that will use the eclipse to advance science while engaging the public. The new projects were awarded via NASA’s Heliophysics Innovation in Technology and Science (HITS) program.

“There are so many ways to participate in NASA science, especially as we enter the Heliophysics Big Year,” said NASA Heliophysics citizen science lead, Elizabeth MacDonald. “We’re so excited to watch these and our many other projects come to life.”

SunSketcher 2024: An Eclipse Movie Across America

Led by Gordon Emslie, a professor of physics and astronomy at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, SunSketcher 2024 will become NASA’s newest citizen science project. Citizen science, also known as participatory science, involves collaboration between professional scientists and members of the public who work together to conduct scientific studies.

SunSketcher 2024 will enable observers from along the eclipse’s path of totality – the region wherein the Moon completely blocks the Sun’s light during a total solar eclipse – to collaborate and create a single crowd-sourced “megamovie” of the event. Using the SunSketcher 2024 smartphone app, an upgraded version of an app originally developed for the 2017 total solar eclipse, participants will capture their views of the eclipse. The app uses the device’s GPS coordinates to determine the exact time when an eclipse phenomenon known as Baily’s Beads are visible. Baily’s Beads appear for a few moments right before and after totality, as tiny slivers of sunlight pass through the valleys on the lunar surface, giving the brief appearance of bright points, or “beads,” of sunlight. They disappear during totality, when the Moon completely blocks the solar surface, and then reappear as the Sun emerges from behind the Moon.

Using the SunSketcher 2024 app, participant observations will be combined to create a continuous one-hour movie of Baily’s Beads, recording exactly when they appear and disappear at different locations. Combined with precision maps of the lunar limb collected by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, this movie will allow the team to precisely measure the shape of the Sun – in particular, how much it deviates from a perfect sphere. This information will lead to an improved understanding of the flows in the solar interior, and is also key to testing gravitational theories.

GeoCollaborate: Sharing Eclipse Data for Broadcasters and Educators

Eclipses present a special scientific opportunity to collect a wide array of information, from direct solar measurements to the fleeting effects on Earth’s surface and atmosphere. But gathering and sharing that data is a challenge in and of itself. To address that challenge, StormCenter Communications, a company based out of Halethorpe, Maryland, and led by founder and CEO Dave Jones, has been funded to use their patented GeoCollaborate software application to widen access to eclipse science data.

GeoCollaborate was developed through NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts. The platform provides real-time data visualization, data sharing, and collaboration capabilities within a single interactive environment. For the upcoming 2024 total solar eclipse, StormCenter will use the GeoCollaborate Dashboard to share interactive visualizations, video content, and graphics with broadcast meteorologists and educators who can share it with broader audiences. By leveraging existing relationships in the broadcast community, GeoCollaborate will make it much easier for eclipse-related information to be accessed and broadcast to viewers across the nation. Social media posts and links to additional information will be presented in both English and Spanish to better engage speakers of both languages.

“These two projects join several other NASA-funded eclipse projects, and highlight how important solar eclipses are to understanding the Sun and its influence on Earth,” said program scientist and eclipse lead at NASA Headquarters, Kelly Korreck.

The same GeoCollaborate technology that supported response operations for Hurricane Idalia will be sharing Heliophysics content to broadcast meteorologists and educators in the classroom, delivering NASA data and information to help inspire the public and the next generation explorers.

CREDIT

StormCenter Communications, Inc.

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