Doomed US lunar lander’s space odyssey continues…for now


AFP
January 13, 2024


Though Astrobotic, the company that built the Peregrine robot, has said a controlled touchdown on the Moon is no longer possible -- it hasn't ruled out a so-called "hard landing" or crash, a prospect that has space watchers gripped. - Copyright Astrobotic/AFP/File -

Issam AHMED

Is it the little spaceship that could?

A private US lunar lander that’s been hemorrhaging fuel since an onboard explosion at the start of its journey is somehow still chugging along, snapping selfies and running science instruments as it continues its journey through space.

Though Astrobotic, the company that built the Peregrine robot, has said a controlled touchdown on the Moon is no longer possible, it hasn’t ruled out a so-called “hard landing” or crash — a prospect that has space watchers gripped.

“Peregrine has now been operating in space for more than 4 days,” Astrobotic said in its latest update posted on X on Friday, adding it remained “stable and operational.”

The rate of fuel loss has steadily diminished as the pressure inside its tank drops, meaning the company has been able to extend the spacecraft’s life far longer than it initially thought possible.

Meanwhile, the US, German and Mexican space agencies have been able to power on the scientific instruments they wanted to run on the Moon.

“Measurements and operations of the NASA-provided science instruments on board will provide valuable experience, technical knowledge, and scientific data to future CLPS lunar deliveries,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration for NASA.

Commercial Lunar Payload Services is the experimental NASA program under which the space agency paid Astrobotic more than $100 million to ship its hardware of Peregrine, as part of a strategy to seed a commercial lunar economy and reduce its own overheads.

Astrobotic is the third private entity to have failed in a soft landing, following an Israeli nonprofit and a Japanese company.

– ‘Shots on goal’ –

Though it hasn’t worked out this time, NASA officials have made clear their strategy of “more shots on goal” means more chances to score, and the next attempt, by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, launches in February.

Astrobotic itself will get another chance in November with its Griffin lander transporting NASA’s VIPER rover to the lunar south pole.

For now, the Pittsburgh-based company is staying tight-lipped on Peregrine’s intended destination, leaving enthusiasts to make their own calculations.

Amateur astronomer Tony Dunn used publicly available data provided by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to plot out the spaceship’s current course, posting a graphic on social media platform X showing it would collide with the Moon on January 23.

But “it’s really anybody’s guess as to what is actually going to happen because of the leaking fuel,” which could easily push it off course, he told AFP.

Or, Astrobotic could intentionally point Peregrine another way, such as flying by the Moon and shooting for interplanetary space.

While a hard lunar landing might satisfy some of Astrobotic’s clients, such as those flying human ashes and DNA to the Moon, it could anger others like the Navajo Nation, which had called that cargo a “desecration” of the celestial body.

“I think it would be a shame if they completed their failed mission by littering the surface of the Moon with debris,” Justin Walsh, a professor of art history, archaeology, and space studies at USC told AFP, adding that humanity had left some 180 tons of material on the surface since the first Soviet impactor crashed in 1959.


Op-Ed: Giant cosmic Big Ring is corkscrewing — What makes it do that?


ByPaul Wallis
January 12, 2024

In this screen grab of a White House broadcast the first infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is seen during a briefing with US President Joe Biden and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officials in the South Court Auditorium at the White House in Washington, DC, on July 11, 2022.The JWST is the most powerful telescope launched into space and it reached its final orbit around the sun, approximately 930,000 miles from Earths orbit, in January, 2022. The technological improvements of the JWST and distance from the sun will allow scientists to see much deeper into our universe with greater detail. — © AFP/NASA

The James Webb Telescope is rewriting the history of the universe, and upending a lot of core theories. It’s also throwing a few space-time curve balls, and the Big Ring of galaxies is one of them.

This gigantic ring is 1.2 billion light-years across. If the artistic impression images are anything to go by, it really is a circular shape in two dimensions. Nobody thought that was possible.

There’s a profound but understandable lack of information regarding the specific galaxies in the Big Ring. How old is the Big Ring? What are the ages and relationships with each other? Have they been gathered together over time or are they acting in relation to a local gravity situation? Are they ordered into a ring by some unknown gravitational phenomenon?

This vast ring of galaxies isn’t a sort of decorative place mat, either. It’s active. It’s actually corkscrewing. “Corkscrew” means a more or less symmetrical consistent directional screwing motion. That’s where classic physics gets a word in edgewise.

According to all known laws of physics, there needs to be a driving source of energy for the Big Ring to be able to corkscrew. Now it gets even more opaque in terms of physics beyond the Newtonian level.

Another more or less accurate word for this type of corkscrew motion is vortex. Vortices exist in micro and macro environments. A black hole is a vortex. So is the water going down your kitchen sink. Earth’s orbit around the sun looks like a corkscrew in real-time, too.

OK, that still leaves us with the question of what is driving the Big Ring corkscrew? Gravitational forces created by itself? It requires a lot of mass and gravity to move such a vast structure.

There’s another galactic megastructure in the vicinity of the Big Ring called the Great Arc. What created the arc shape, of all possible configurations? These are both huge local events, even in context with the trillions of galaxies in the known universe.

Is there a superstructure creating the Big Ring and causing it to corkscrew? This can’t be a rhetorical question. Any physical action has a cause.

The problem with terminology in cosmology is usually scale. There are supermassive things, megastructures, and just maybe scales nobody’s seen before. The driver of the corkscrew may be something so big nobody’s even thought of it before.

Symmetry doesn’t “just happen”, even in basic physics. The consistent morphologies of the Big Ring and the Great Arc are interesting. The curves give unique pictures of “curved space”.

Nothing else seems to have curves like that or in that form. Well, at least not yet. They’re not ball shapes, condensed by a local center of gravity. They don’t even have similar curves in relation to each other.

This is where visualization needs some space, excuse the pun. It would require colossal mass to create a ring of orbiting galaxies. So, what exactly are they orbiting, if those are orbits?

Is the Great Arc the remains of a former Big Ring? Maybe the Great Arc is a released former Big Ring, dissipating. Is something blowing smoke rings with galaxies? Are these phenomena some sort of distant cousins of a Fermi Bubble, extrusions from a bigger structure?

One way or another, cosmology isn’t in Kansas anymore. This type of cosmic tornado obviously needs a bit of Yellow Brick logic. Probably one brick at a time.

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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.