Saturday, January 11, 2025

 SPACE/COSMOS

Blue Origin set for first launch of giant New Glenn rocket


By AFP
January 11, 2025


This handout photo courtesy of Blue Origin shows the New Glenn rocket on the launch pad at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida - Copyright YONHAP/AFP -



Gregg Newtown with Issam Ahmed in Washington

A quarter of a century after its founding, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is finally ready for its maiden orbital voyage on Sunday with a brand new rocket the company hopes will shake up the commercial space race.

Named New Glenn after a legendary astronaut, it stands 320 feet (98 meters) tall, roughly equivalent to a 32-story building — and is set to blast off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in a launch window that opens at 1:00 am (0600 GMT).

“Pointy end up!” the company’s CEO, Dave Limp posted on X alongside photos of the gleaming white behemoth.

With the mission, dubbed NG-1, Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, is taking direct aim at the world’s wealthiest: Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX dominates the orbital launch market through its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

These serve the commercial sector, the Pentagon, and NASA — including, crucially, ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

“SpaceX has for the past several years been pretty much the only game in town, and so having a competitor.. this is great,” G. Scott Hubbard, a retired senior NASA official, told AFP.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is planning the next orbital test of Starship — its gargantuan new-generation rocket — the very next day, upping the sense of high-stakes rivalry.

– Landing attempt –

If all goes to plan, shortly after launch, Blue Origin will attempt to land the first-stage booster on a drone ship named Jacklyn, in honor of Bezos’s mother, stationed about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.

Though SpaceX has long made such landings a near-routine spectacle, this will be Blue Origin’s first shot at a touchdown on the high seas.

Meanwhile, the rocket’s upper stage will fire its engines toward Earth orbit, carrying a Defense Department-funded prototype spaceship called Blue Ring, which will remain aboard for the roughly six-hour test flight.

Limp emphasized that simply reaching orbit is the prime goal, while successfully recovering the booster would be a welcome “bonus.”

Blue Origin does have experience landing its New Shepard rockets — used for suborbital tourism — but they are much smaller and land on terra firma rather than a ship at sea.

Physically, New Glenn dwarfs the 230-foot Falcon 9 and is designed for heavier payloads.

It slots between Falcon 9 and its big sibling, Falcon Heavy, in terms of mass capacity but holds an edge with its wider payload fairing, ideal for transporting more voluminous cargo.

– Slow v fast development –

Blue Origin has already secured a NASA contract to launch two Mars probes aboard New Glenn. The rocket will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to compete with Starlink.

For now, however, SpaceX maintains a commanding lead, while other rivals — United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Rocket Lab — trail far behind.

Like Musk, Bezos has a lifelong passion for space. But whereas Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions shifting heavy industry off-planet onto floating space platforms in order to preserve Earth, “humanity’s blue origin.”

He founded Blue Origin in 2000 — two years before Musk created SpaceX — but has adopted a more cautious pace, in contrast to his rival’s “fail fast, learn fast” philosophy.

“There’s been impatience within the space community over Blue Origin’s very deliberate approach,” Scott Pace, a space policy analyst at George Washington University and former member of the National Space Council, told AFP.

If New Glenn succeeds, Pace added, it will give the US government “dissimilar redundancy” — valuable backup if one system fails.

Musk’s closeness to President-elect Donald Trump has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest, especially with private astronaut Jared Isaacman — a business associate of Musk — slated to become the next NASA chief.

Bezos, however, has been making his own overtures, paying his respects to his former foe during a visit to the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago residence, while Amazon has said it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee.


‘What is that?’ UCalgary scientists explain white patch that appears near northern lights



Improved camera technology helps capture true colour images of the night sky




University of Calgary

Image of the aurora borealis with the structured continuum emission 

image: 

Images of the aurora borealis showing the structured continuum emission

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Credit: Courtesy Faculty of Science research team




A whitish, grey patch that sometimes appears in the night sky alongside the northern lights has been explained for the first time by researchers at the University of Calgary.

The article, which was published on Dec. 30 in the journal Nature Communications, explores a “structured continuum emission” that’s associated with aurora borealis.

“You’d see this dynamic green aurora, you’d see some of the red aurora in the background and, all of a sudden, you’d see this structured – almost like a patch – grey-toned or white toned-emission connected to the aurora,” says Dr. Emma Spanswick, PhD, lead author on the paper and an associate professor with the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Faculty of Science. 

“So, the first response of any scientist is, ‘Well, what is that?’”

Spanswick says the white patch has been referenced in scientific papers before, but it has never been explained.

Her team’s paper concludes it’s “most certainly a heat source” and says it suggests that the aurora borealis are more complex than previously thought.

Spanswick says the discovery was made possible because an advancement in camera technology allows both amateur photographers and scientists to see true colour images of the night sky.

“Everyone has noticed the advancement in digital photography. Your cellphone can now take pictures of the aurora,” she says. “That has flowed to the commercial sensor market now. 

“Those types of sensors can now be found in more commercial, more robust sensors that we would use in science.”

The team’s research came after there was a renewed interest in continuum emission with the discovery and observations of the long, glowing ribbon of purple light known as STEVE – or Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.

“There are similarities between what we’re seeing now and STEVE,” explains Spanswick. “STEVE manifests itself as this mauve or grey-toned structure.

“To be honest, the elevation of the spectrum between the two is very similar but this, because of its association with dynamic aurora, it’s almost embedded in the aurora. It’s harder to pick out if you were to look at it, whereas STEVE is separate from the aurora – a big band crossing the sky.”

The latest research is also significant because it includes three UCalgary students, including undergraduate Josh Houghton who was initially hired as an intern on the project.

“I was still learning things at the time,” he says. “I had just started my internship, and I very quickly got involved. It’s just very, very cool.”

Spanswick says Houghton did a lot of the analysis on the research, which led to his participation in the Nature paper as an undergraduate student.

“He’s had one heck of an internship experience,” she says.

Houghton will continue the research as part of his undergrad honours thesis, before taking on his master’s degree at UCalgary next year.

The research was made possible by the Transition Region Explorer (TREx), which is a UCalgary project jointly funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Government of Alberta and the Canadian Space Agency.

The TREx RGB and Spectograph instruments are operated and maintained by Space Environment Canada with the support of the Canadian Space Agency through its Geospace Observatory (GO) Canada initiative.

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