Astronews: recent space news/discoveries 3
Welcome to the third 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
happened in recent days in the field of astronomical research and space exploration.
Keep following us!
1 Are you ready for the flight of Ingenuity?
At the end of March, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory hosted a press conference where it detailed
the plans for the drone that hitched a ride to Mars attached to the underside of the Perseverance
rover.
The scientists and engineers behind the drone announced that they've now picked a site for
what is expected to be the first powered flight on another planet.
With the site settled, they're now targeting April 8 for the flight, which will be the
first in a monthlong series of test flights to validate the technology.
Ingenuity looks familiar to anyone who's seen any of the profusion of small consumer drones
that have developed over the last decade or so.
But, It's the first aircraft designed for powered flight on another planet, and that
makes for some substantial differences with Earth-bound drones.
For starters, the hardware is much bigger than it might seem from the photos, as each
of its two counter-rotating blades is 1.2 meters long.
The test flights required two distinct areas, both of which needed to be flat.
The inner part, called “the airfield”, had to have very little material that could
interfere with landings.
That needed to be surrounded by a larger area, called the flight zone, that had to have enough
material in it that the drone's onboard image-processing system could track individual features in
order to assist with navigation.
The search for an appropriate area started within a few hours of Perseverance's landing.
That's because knowing where Perseverance was helped, the rover team search satellite
imagery of the surrounding area.
Once the rover was operational, it provided higher-resolution imagery of potential sites.
In the end, things couldn't be much more convenient, as the rover landed on what will be the edge
of the flight zone, which extends north from the landing site.
But that doesn't mean the procedure from here on out is simple.
The rover will need a few days to drive to the airfield within that area, and deploying
Ingenuity itself will take a few more days.
At present, the drone is tucked against the underside of the rover, and images have confirmed
that the debris shield that protected it during landing has dropped off.
Once on site, Ingenuity will have to be rotated 90 degrees and have its legs deploy before
it can be deposited on the Martian surface; each step in that process will be monitored
for success before moving on to the next.
Assuming the drone ends up upright on the surface, the next key step will be getting
the rover out of there quickly, as Ingenuity only has enough battery capacity to power
a heating element overnight.
Charging from its solar panel will be essential.
Perseverance will retreat to a location a distance from (and a few meters above) the
airfield in order to monitor the test flights.
While Perseverance clears out, the drone will start a weeklong commissioning project, where
its onboard hardware and sensors will be checked out.
Assuming all of that checks out, there's good reason to think that we'll manage to get the
craft up into the thin Martian atmosphere.
After all, a mock-up has flown in a chamber that's able to match Martian conditions here
on Earth.
The first flight will involve a takeoff, a climb to three meters, a brief hover, and
then a landing.
Each ensuing flight will be progressively more aggressive, but there's a limit to how
far aggression can go when the onboard batteries limit flight time to about 90 seconds.
All told, five flights are planned, with a maximum altitude in the area of five meters.
The drone will have a relatively low-bandwidth connection back to the rover, so we probably
shouldn't expect video from every single flight.
But a key aspect of the flight will be figuring out how well the system can navigate using
optical data and whether it would be capable of scouting routes for the rover.
So we can definitely expect a fair number of pictures from these efforts.
If everything goes well with depositing Ingenuity and its systems check out, the earliest we
could see a flight is in two weeks, on April 8.
A month has been set aside for five flights, with extensive checkouts of the system between
each.
During this time, however, Perseverance won't be able to move on to its main science mission.
2 Good thing...the rocket that will take NASA
back to the Moon, works!
It has been a long, difficult, and expensive road for NASA and its Space Launch System
rocket.
But on March, 17, the space agency got to taste some success with what appeared to be
a nominal ground test-firing of the vehicle's core stage.
With brilliant spring sunshine blazing overhead, the four space shuttle main engines that power
the rocket roared to life on a test stand in Mississippi.
Then they burned for 499.6 seconds, exhausting the vehicle's supply of liquid oxygen.
You will all remember that the first test, carried out in January, was stopped after
just 67 seconds of ignition due to an abrupt increase in pressure.
After the test completed, engineers in the control room began clapping and cheering.
Although days of data review lie ahead, that the vehicle made it through a complete eight-minute
test without stopping and in apparent good condition represents a huge win for NASA,
the Space Launch System program, and the core-stage primary contractor, Boeing.
Now, NASA will spend some time to assess the vehicle's performance during the test and
its overall health.
If everything looks good, the core stage could ship by barge to Kennedy Space Center in April,
where it will be integrated with its large side-mounted boosters as well as the Orion
spacecraft.
In the coming weeks, NASA is also expected to set a target launch
date for this Artemis 1 mission to fly an uncrewed Orion around the Moon and back.
Theoretically, this could occur in 2021, but a much more likely date is the first quarter
of 2022.
As always, it is difficult to design, build, test, and fly rockets, especially large ones
like the Space Launch System.
And although the design of this vehicle was foisted upon NASA by the US Senate in 2010,
and the agency has spent more than $20 billion to reach this point, completing such a dynamic
test after a decade of work is nonetheless a big achievement.
3 It’s incredible!
It collided with Jupiter in 1994, but “Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9” still apparently has things
to teach us about the Solar System's largest planet.
A new analysis of the traces of the comet's impact – still zooming around Jupiter's
atmosphere – has yielded the first direct measurement of the gas giant's powerful stratospheric
winds, in the cloudless middle layer of the atmosphere.
There, narrow bands of wind known as jets – like Earth's jet streams – blow at up
to 400 meters per second at high latitudes.
That's around 1,440 kilometers per hour – vastly outstripping the top wind speeds of around
620 km/h seen in the Great Red Spot cyclonal storm.
The death of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (do any of you remember?) was one of the most spectacular
events we've ever seen in the Solar System.
First, as the icy rock veered close to Jupiter, it was torn apart by the immense gravitational
pull of the planet.
The fragments spent two Earth years in closer and closer orbit, until finally, in July 1994,
they collided with Jupiter's atmosphere in a riveting display of fireworks.
For scientists, it was an incredible gift.
The impact churned up Jupiter's atmosphere, revealing new molecules and scarring Jupiter's
surface for months.
This allowed measurements of wind speed and new studies of the atmospheric composition
of Jupiter, as well as its magnetic field.
The comet impact also added new molecules that weren't already present on Jupiter.
These included ammonia – which disappeared within a few months – and hydrogen cyanide,
which can still be detected in the Jovian stratosphere to this day.
It was this hydrogen cyanide that a team of scientists tracked using 42 of the 66 antennas
of the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array in Chile.
Using this powerful instrument, astronomers observed the Doppler shift of the hydrogen
cyanide – the way the wavelength of the molecule's electromagnetic emission lengthens
or shortens depending on whether it's moving away from or towards the observer.
Analyzing the length of these shifts allows scientists to calculate the speed at which
the hydrogen cyanide is moving.
Around the equator of the planet, strong stratospheric wind jets blow at average speeds of around
600 kilometers per hour.
All the time.
Here on Earth, the maximum wind speed ever recorded was 407 km/h, and that was during
a wild tropical cyclone.
One of the most intriguing jets, though, was found directly below Jupiter's permanent auroral
oval, several hundreds of kilometers below the auroral winds.
It was clockwise in the north and anti-clockwise in the south, at speeds of up to 300 to 400
meters per second.
The team thinks that this jet is the lower tail of the auroral wind.
Previous studies had predicted that the auroral winds would decrease in strength as altitude
decreased, dissipating before reaching the stratosphere, so this was a surprise – a
beautiful demonstration of the unseen atmospheric complexity in a planet we already knew was
insanely atmospherically complex.
4 Curiosity to the rescue!
Let's face it: with the launch of Perseverance on Mars, the activities of its predecessor
Curiosity have gone a bit quiet.
It is less talked about everywhere, in short.
But not everywhere.
On Apod (Astronomy Picture of the Day), the Nasa website every day publishes a spectacular
image of our universe, on March 25, 2021, was published a panoramic photo of Mars in
our opinion even better than that produced by Perseverance after landing.
The photo was called "Curiosity: Sol 3048", and is a mosaic of 146 individual images taken
by Curiosity on March 4, during its 3048th day of mission.
In the foreground (look at it at maximum magnification!)
You can see a part of the rover, and then at his feet, a region literally paved with
large stones.
Further on you can see the beautiful landscape inside the large crater Gale.
Near center is Mont Mercou.
This towering outcrop provides a great look at layered sedimentary rock structures.
On Earth, it’s common to find layered rock like the ones within this cliff face, especially
where there were once lakes.
The pancake-like layers of sediment are compressed and cemented to form a rock record of the
planet’s history.
The peak of central Mount Sharp, rising over 5 kilometers above the floor of Gale Crater,
is in the distant background on the left.
To frame it all, the icy and thin clouds that adorn the pinkish sky of the planet, formations
similar to our cirrus.
The news is also in the fact that the mosaic was not composed by professionals, but by
two Italian amateur astronomers!
In fact, and we want to remember it, anyone can access the NASA archive of raw images
produced by the various missions!
Try to take advantage of it!
5 More good news for those who believe in the
need to diversify space exploration initiatives: Russia and China will build a lunar station
together!
Almost sixty years after the first human flight in history, Russia and China announce to have
signed a collaboration agreement to build a scientific research station on the lunar
surface, probably assisted by an orbital station.
The project, specify the two superpowers, is open to the collaboration of other countries,
under the principle of a peaceful exploration of space.
Although many details are missing, the project seems to follow that of the Lunar Gateway,
the plan of Nasa (United States), Esa (Europe), Csa (Canada) and Jaxa (Japan) to build a space
station orbiting around the Moon, from which to start missions to the lunar soil and prepare
for future human missions to Mars.
We'll see...
6 From our home exploration, we now move into
the realm of galactic distances.
Remember the historic first image of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, located
55 million light years from Earth?
OK.
A new, detailed shot of the black hole reveals spiraling lines of mysterious magnetic forces
that give astronomers an unprecedented look at how these cosmic monsters behave.
Black holes are scattered across the universe and exist in almost every galaxy, but their
behavior remains one of the most intriguing mysteries in astronomy.
The image helps depict how the black hole violently swallows matter and shoots energetic
jets back out from its core.
Those jets can extend thousands of lightyears into space.
Today’s photo is from the same international team of radio astronomers who shot the first
photo of a black hole, ever, in 2019.
In the two years since then, more than 300 scientists have been scrutinizing data from
that image as part of a global project called The Event Horizon Telescope.
They found that a large portion of the dark-orange light surrounding the black hole’s mouth
is filtered through a soup of magnetic energy that can be mapped and measured in unprecedented
detail.
So, putting on a pair of the radio-astronomy equivalent of polarized sunglasses, astronomers
sharpened their focus on the cosmic body to reveal distinct lines of magnetic energy flowing
inward.
The result is really a major milestone...
The new image, in fact, hints at the role magnetic turbulence plays in a black hole’s
ability to gobble up cosmic material and shoot matter out into the universe.
Astronomers are still trying to understand what steers this chaos.
OK guys, we’re done for the week too.
What do you think?
What news struck you the most?