Category: Space

William Shatner, in his new book, writing about his trip with Blue Origin:

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna … things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

When the space shuttle program wrapped up 11 years ago, one of the many things that was lost was the ability to service the Hubble Space Telescope, which needed quite a bit of service back in the shuttle days.

For years, it has been understood that if anything major failed on Hubble after the last shuttle touched down, it could spell the end of the space telescope. Beyond hardware failures, the telescope’s decaying orbit also poses a long-term danger.

…but all that could be changing. Seth Kurkowski has details:

NASA and SpaceX signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement to produce a study on the capability of using Dragon to dock with Hubble and boost it into its original 372-mile orbit around Earth. This isn’t an announcement that SpaceX will do so, or a promise that NASA will sign off on the mission, but it is one step closer to having it become a possibility. According to both NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zubuchen and Hubble’s project manager Patrick Crouse, the space observatory is in good condition and is expected to last well through this decade and beyond.

If this Hubble mission is deemed possible, the mission would launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 with a Crew Dragon.

This flight would probably be a part of The Polaris Program, which is run run by Jared Issacman, who flew to space on Inspiration 4 while raising money for St. Jude.

Eric Berger has an article up about what caused NASA’s SLS rocket launch to be scrubbed last week, and why the problems surrounding liquid hydrogen are so hard to solve:

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it is also the lightest. It takes 600 sextillion hydrogen atoms to reach the mass of a single gram. Because it is so tiny, hydrogen can squeeze through the smallest of gaps. This is not so great a problem at ambient temperatures and pressures, but at super-chilled temperatures and high pressures, hydrogen easily oozes out of any available opening.

To keep a rocket’s fuel tanks topped off, propellant lines leading from ground-based systems must remain attached to the booster until the very moment of launch. In the final second, the “quick-disconnects” at the end of these lines break away from the rocket. The difficulty is that, in order to be fail-safes in disconnecting from the rocket, this equipment cannot be bolted together tightly enough to entirely preclude the passage of hydrogen atoms—it is extremely difficult to seal these connections under high pressure, and low temperatures.

NASA, therefore, has a tolerance for a small amount of hydrogen leakage. Anything above a 4 percent concentration of hydrogen in the purge area near the quick disconnect, however, is considered a flammability hazard.

If you’ve wondered why some of us have such complex feelings about NASA’s new rocket, Eric Berger has a great article on the very subject.

Tiffany Fairley at NASA:

The Flight Readiness Review for NASA’s Artemis I mission has concluded, and teams are proceeding toward a two-hour launch window that opens at 8:33 a.m. EDT Monday, August 29, from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39B in Florida.

When the giant SLS rocket gets off the ground, it’ll be a huge win for the agency, which has been developing it for over a decade. I can’t wait to see it clear the tower.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten years since Curiosity landed on Mars. I remember watching the news come in, sitting on the edge of my seat. In the decade since, the rover has done some amazing work.

The number is a record for any launch vehicle over the course of a year.

The new James Webb Space Telescope is officially in action, and is already beaming back some amazing imagery.

Over at Ars Technica, Eric Berger has an article outlining the space agency’s internal plans for future moon missions:

The Artemis I mission should launch later this year, testing NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and boosting the Orion spacecraft into lunar orbit. The second mission, Artemis II, will more or less be a repeat, only with four humans on board Orion. Then comes the big test, Artemis III, which will send two humans to the Moon and back during the middle of this decade.

Beyond these missions, however, NASA has been vague about the timing of future Artemis missions to the Moon, even as some members of Congress have pressed for more details. Now, we may know why. Ars Technica has obtained internal planning documents from the space agency showing an Artemis mission schedule and manifest for now through fiscal year 2034.

If you have followed along for a while now, the theme of delays and cost overruns won’t be new, but seeing this schedule certainly highlights some of the issues with this program.

JPL:

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has captured dramatic footage of Phobos, Mars’ potato-shaped moon, crossing the face of the Sun. These observations can help scientists better understand the moon’s orbit and how its gravity pulls on the Martian surface, ultimately shaping the Red Planet’s crust and mantle.

Captured with Perseverance’s next-generation Mastcam-Z camera on April 2, the 397th Martian day, or sol, of the mission, the eclipse lasted a little over 40 seconds – much shorter than a typical solar eclipse involving Earth’s Moon. (Phobos is about 157 times smaller than Earth’s Moon. Mars’ other moon, Deimos, is even smaller.)

The imagery is amazing:

Jason Kottke summed it up nicely:

Just a hunk of space rock passing in front of a massive burning ball of gas recorded by a robot from the surface of an extraterrestrial planet, no big deal.

Alise Fisher, writing on the JWST blog:

The James Webb Space Telescope is nearing completion of the first phase of the months-long process of aligning the observatory’s primary mirror using the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument.

The team’s challenge was twofold: confirm that NIRCam was ready to collect light from celestial objects, and then identify starlight from the same star in each of the 18 primary mirror segments. The result is an image mosaic of 18 randomly organized dots of starlight, the product of Webb’s unaligned mirror segments all reflecting light from the same star back at Webb’s secondary mirror and into NIRCam’s detectors.

What looks like a simple image of blurry starlight now becomes the foundation to align and focus the telescope in order for Webb to deliver unprecedented views of the universe this summer. Over the next month or so, the team will gradually adjust the mirror segments until the 18 images become a single star.

It doesn’t look like much, but this is the first step in what should be an amazing set of discoveries:

Robert Pearlman:

Artifacts that were recovered from the fallen space shuttle Challenger and prepared for presentation to the President of the United States have been recovered again, 36 years later, after they surfaced at auction among the collection of a NASA liaison to the White House.

Little is known about how or why the late James Foster Fanseen, who died in 2000, had come into possession of the small American flag and crew patch that were mounted to a plaque and inscribed to “Ronald Reagan, President of the United States.” Once recognized for what they were, though, the artifacts were restored to the proper hands, now at the Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California, collectSPACE has learned.