Astronews Recent Space Discoveries (Encounter With Venus,Lakes On Mars,
Water On The Moon, Europa Clipper & More)
Welcome to the fourteenth review of "Space and Astronomy" news,
selected for you by Insane Curiosity Channel. The news, which will be weekly,
will try to provide a quick overview of everything interesting that has happened in recent days in
the field of astronomical research and space exploration. Keep following us!
New Russian Module knocks International Space Station out of position!
Do you remember the story of the Russian module Nauka, exhumed after years of neglect
and launched towards the Space Station on July 21 last? Well, after a few mishaps he
finally made it to his destination, but at the time of docking, he made a big trouble.
Following its launch, it reportedly encountered some propulsion problems that Russian controllers
were able to resolve ahead of its planned docking with ISS. Then came a successful docking, and all
seemed well, until the unexpected thruster firing. The thrust was not of great magnitude but lasted
for almost an hour and caused a loss of attitude of the Space Station,
which rotated 454° (practically a turn and a half on itself) before control was regained.
The first to notice the problem were the ISS' gyroscopes, which maintain
attitude during normal operations and which were activated trying to maintain orientation. Then the
thrusters of the Zvezda module were automatically activated to try to maintain the attitude.
In response to the sudden and unforeseen rotation, the orientation of the solar panels and radiators
was also changed to prevent them from losing too much effectiveness as a result of the different
orientation. In addition, the solar panels in the vicinity of the module have been moved
to avoid them being hit by thruster jets. In the press conference held the next day,
NASA stated that the attitude of the Station was lost for a total of 47 minutes.
Throughout the operation, there were several issues to deal with.
First, the difficulties in communicating with the Nauka module, compounded by the fact that during
the emergency the ISS was in the part of the orbit not guarded by Russian control centers. Moreover,
it has been confirmed that at least two times contact with the crew has been lost.
Despite this, NASA has been very clear in saying that the situation
was never really dangerous for the astronauts on board, although as a precaution has been given
instruction to the Dragon Endeavour capsule to prepare for a possible safety separation.
What is still unclear is if the problem of the Nauka thrusters activation
has been solved by stopping them, or if they have stopped automatically. In fact, it has been
confirmed that the propellant had been completely consumed. The origin of the problem seems to
have been found, and it resides in a problem with the Nauka software. The module, in fact,
seems that "was still convinced" to be in docking mode and then in the approach phase to the ISS.
Both the cosmonauts and the astronauts on board were immediately instructed to
visually check for any structural damage to the Station. For now, they have been found.
Preparing for a double close encounter with Venus
Heavy traffic is expected from the parts of Venus in the coming hours: the probes
BepiColombo and Solar Orbiter will fly over the planet at a very short distance from each other.
The probes Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo are going to fly over Venus only 33 hours apart.
These are two maneuvers planned in the missions of the two spacecraft that take advantage of the
planet's gravity to be helped to reach their destinations (the Sun, for the Solar Orbiter,
and Mercury, for BepiColombo). The double close pass, which in
technical terms is called a "flyby" or "gravitational assist", also offers an
unprecedented opportunity to simultaneously study the environment of Venus from different points.
Solar Orbiter, a probe born from the collaboration between ESA and NASA, will pass in the vicinity of
Venus at 04:42 UT on August 9, with a maximum approach at 7,995 kilometers from the surface.
During its mission, Solar Orbiter has scheduled repeated overflights of Venus,
which will serve on the one hand to make it get closer and closer to the Sun and on the
other hand to change the orbital tilt and push it out of the plane of the ecliptic (ie outside
the plane in which the planets rotate) and get the best - and first - view of the poles of the Sun.
BepiColombo, a joint mission between ESA and JAXA (Japanese Space Agency),
is actually composed of two probes (the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury
Magnetospheric Orbiter) traveling onboard the same platform during the transfer trip).
It will pass close to Venus at 13:48 UT on August 10, at an altitude of only 550 kilometers.
BepiColombo is on its way to the solar system's innermost planet, Mercury. It too will need to
return to "skim" Earth and Venus several times to oppose the Sun's giant gravitational pull,
which would prevent it from entering orbit around Mercury, which is its destination.
Unfortunately, the scientific cameras on board of both missions will not be able to acquire
high-resolution images of Venus: Solar Orbiter, in fact, must always remain facing the Sun,
while the main camera onboard BepiColombo is shielded by the transfer module. However,
two of the three monitoring cameras (i.e. control cameras) of BepiColombo will take
pictures during the approach and in the following days, when the planet will disappear from view.
It will take many months to collect the flyby measurements,
coordinate them and analyze them in a meaningful way, but they will be critical to future NASA
and ESA missions to Venus that will depart for the planet in the next decade. Then,
on the night between October 1 and 2, BepiColombo will see its destination for the first time,
performing the first of six flyovers of Mercury, just 200 kilometers away from the surface.
On November 27, however, Solar Orbiter will make a final overflight of the Earth at a distance
of 460 km, but will continue to perform regular overflights of Venus to gradually increase
the inclination of its orbit and better observe the still little known polar regions of our Sun.
Bad News. Those underground lakes on Mars are probably just frozen clay
Ok, if you were planning an ice-fishing trip to the Martian south pole and its
sub-surface lakes, please, just be patient for a moment.
In a research published earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters,
it seems that the Martian lakes may be nothing more than smectite, that is, a kind of clay.
Should the findings of the paper, titled "A Solid Interpretation of Bright Radar Reflectors
Under the Mars South Polar Ice", turn out to be correct, it would be a significant setback for
those hoping to find life on the red planet. So why were these supposed lakes so critical
for the search for life on Mars? How were they discovered in the first place?
Why have our dreams of Martian ice-fishing turned to dust (or, more correctly, clay)?
In short, that’s the story. In 2018, the European Space Agency announced that Mars Express orbiter
had discovered evidence of liquid water lakes below the surface of the Martian south pole.
Understandably, the discovery bolstered hopes for finding extremophile organisms surviving in
the icy water similar to bacteria surviving under 4 kilometers of ice in Antarctica’s Lake Vostok.
Like Mars, also Antarctica had a warm and wet past. As geological and tectonic processes
migrated the great continent to the south pole, it underwent extreme glaciation. Microbes adapted to
the radical climate change and eventually gave rise to the ecosystem that thrives there today.
With a really important difference... While the glaciation of Antarctica was driven by
the tectonic action of continental drift, the climate change on Mars was global and
likely due to the loss of the atmosphere from erosion by the solar wind. So, it is not
unreasonable to imagine microbes adapting to this extreme climate change and clinging stubbornly to
life in subsurface lakes at the Martian poles. European probe utilized Mars Advanced Radar
instrument which revealing reflectivity data for the surface and below to a
depth of 1.5 kilometers. An exceptionally bright area, roughly 20 kilometers wide,
was consistent with what would be expected if a large body of liquid were present.
The authors of the paper disputing the validity of the claims of Martian lakes
raise some questions that cannot be answered by radar reflectivity alone.
They claim that the required amounts of salt and heat needed to sustain the supposed lake
are not plausible. Mars is too cold, and while there is salt present on the planet,
there is no known mechanism that would concentrate it to the salinity levels necessary for liquid
water to persist. They also estimate that the local geothermal flux (would Mars-thermal flux
be a more appropriate term?) is one-sixth that is required to maintain liquid as well.
In science, especially when the stakes are as high as identifying possible biomes for
extraterrestrial life, it is crucial to seek out the simplest explanation for an observation. The
authors posit that rather than a portion of the south pole exhibiting highly anomalous salinity
and heating levels, a particularly reflective clay called smectite that is abundant on Mars
is the more likely culprit for the radar results seen by Mars Express.
Rest assured... All these are hypotheses that only the human presence on the red planet,
within the next decade, will confirm or deny. You have to wait.
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Shadows on the Moon could be hiding water, even in the daytime
"If water were available on the Moon in the form of frost in sunlit regions, future explorers
could use it as a resource for fuel and drinking water. But first, we need to understand how the
exosphere and the lunar surface interact." This was stated by Björn Davidsson and Sona Hosseini,
scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a new study published in the British journal
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. As it is known, the presence of water on the Moon
has been found already in 1994 thanks to the U.S. space probe Clementine and detections
with ultraviolet and infrared radiation. That the lunar surface could have zones that
keep water in a solid-state during the lunar night was therefore now established and reasonable. But
when in 2018 the presence of ice was also proven on the sun-beaten surface, the question became
enigmatic. How can water, resist in areas where the temperature reaches even 120 degrees Celsius?
Considering that the inclination of the lunar axis, although minimal,
produces shadows even when the sun is at its zenith, recent studies on lunar temperature
have suggested that the shadows produced by rocks and craters scattered on the surface
of our satellite, could create the right environment for the maintenance of ice.
Davidsson and Hosseini, in this new study, explain how the exosphere of the Moon
(formed by a series of gases that act as a thin atmosphere) may have a relevant role:
during the lunar day, the sun evaporates the water molecules collected in rocks, bringing
them in the exosphere; these then refreeze and reaccumulate in the form of frost in the shadows.
To test this theory, Hosseini is leading a research team to develop an ultra-miniature sensor
that measures the faint signals of water ice. This study may later be tested to
understand the presence of water and gas molecules on Mars and Saturn's rings as well.
According to the scientist, the research also requires a race against time.
"The current lunar exploration carried out also by private companies,
will lead to significantly alter the lunar surface. If this trend continues,
we will lose the opportunity to understand the Moon's natural environment, particularly the water
flowing through the pristine exosphere. Advanced development of ultra-compact,
high-sensitivity instruments, therefore, is of critical importance and urgency."
NASA Chooses Falcon Heavy Over SLS to Launch Europa Clipper, Saving About $2 Billion
The bureaucracy of government control is slowly fading away in space exploration,
at least in the US. A series of delays, cost overruns, and imposed requirements have finally
started taking its toll on the Space Launch System (SLS), the next generation NASA rocket system.
Now, the space agency has finally conceded a point to the commercial launch industry. It has elected
to use Space X’s Falcon Heavy to launch one of its upcoming flagship missions – Europa Clipper.
That decision was made despite a massive push from SLS contractors
to try to keep the mission on board. In fact,
Congress originally had not allowed NASA to open Europa Clipper’s contract up to other bidders.
Pressure came from the constituents of the variety of Congressional districts that the
SLS is built in. But the downsides of using the oft-delayed system became too big to ignore.
One downside was the cost – and not only of the rocket itself. Overall the Falcon Heavy,
which is reusable, unlike the SLS, is expected to save $2 billion when it launches the Clipper on
its path to Jupiter. About half of that savings will come from avoiding a costly redesign.
That redesign had to do with the vibrational load of the SLS system on launch.
Known in the jargon as “torsional load”, the current iteration of the Clipper
could not withstand those forces, according to a NASA inquest. To redesign the whole Clipper
to make it compatible with the SLS’s launch forces would have cost around $1 billion alone.
Adding a single-use, expensive rocket to the mix adds another $1 billion to the launch costs.
Another nail in the coffin was timeline – the SLS has been repeatedly delayed and is now more than
two years behind schedule, though it still hasn’t completed its first launch yet, which is expected
in November. Falcon Heavy, on the other hand, started development after the SLS and has already
proved flight worthy, having three successful flights to date and a number of ongoing launch
contracts. SLS is primarily designed to support Artemis, NASA’s effort to return to the moon. It
was unclear, given the commitment the SLS program had made to Artemis and its repeated delays,
whether or not the system would even be ready to support the Clipper’s Launch in 2024,
and its usefulness for other science missions has been called into question as well.
Even with $2 billion in savings on the table, as well as the risk of missing the entire original
launch window, Congress still stuck by SLS. Until earlier this year at least, when it passed a
budget amendment that would allow NASA to pursue other contractors for the launch of the mission.
When the agency announced that SpaceX had landed the new contract,
it didn’t surprise veteran launch watchers. But it did add another feather in the cap of
the commercial launch industry – and saved the American taxpayer almost $2 billion.
OK guys, we’re done for the week too. What do you think? What news struck you the most?