Astronomy

Video: 00:02:35

Europe’s next rocket, Ariane 6, passed all its qualification tests in preparation for its first flight, and the full-scale test model has been removed from the launch pad to make way for the real rocket that will ascend to space.

The test model at Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, stood 62 m high. It is exactly the same as the ‘production model’ Ariane 6 rockets that will soon be launched, except that its boosters do not need to be tested as part of the complete rocket, so the boosters are not fuelled.

Teams preparing Ariane 6 for its inaugural flight successfully completed for the first time a launcher preparation and countdown sequence, on 18 July. Representatives of ESA, Ariane 6 prime contractor ArianeGroup and launch base prime contractor and test conductor CNES completed important objectives for system qualification and performed a series of actions fully representative of a launch chronology.

The launch simulation included the removal of the mobile gantry, the chill-down of ground and launcher fluidic systems, the filling of the upper and core stage tanks with liquid hydrogen (–253°C) and liquid oxygen (–183°C), and at the end of the test, the successful completion of a launch chronology up to the ignition of the Vulcain 2.1 engine thrust chamber by the ground system.

On 5 September 2023 the Vulcain 2.1 engine was ignited, fired for four seconds as planned and switched off before its liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen fuels were drained to their separate underground tanks. The exercise showed again that the system can be kept safe in the event of a launch abort, as already demonstrated during the 18 July test.

A nighttime full-scale wet rehearsal for Ariane 6 was completed on 24 October 2023, the rocket was fuelled and then drained of its fuel. The test lasted over 30 hours with three teams working in shifts of 10 hours each.

A major full-scale rehearsal was conducted on 23 November 2023 in preparation for its first flight, when teams on the ground went through a complete launch countdown followed by a seven-minute full firing of the core stage’s engine, as it would fire on a launch into space.

A third combined test loading occurred on 15 December 2024 that included a launch countdown to qualify the launch system in degraded conditions and ensure its robustness in preparation for operations. This test sequence included qualification tests of several launch system functions in case of aborted launch and included one ignition of the Vulcain 2.1 engine thrust chamber. It was the fifth countdown run to include loading Ariane 6 with cryo-propellants since July.

On 30 January 2024, the cryogenic connection system passed a last system test of the liftoff disconnection operations lines – the yellow arms supporting the fuel lines to the upper stage to power the Vinci orbital engine. Simultaneously at the bottom of the central core the connection system for the main stage also disconnected.

On 5 February, it was the turn of the electrical umbilical lines to be disconnected. These lines supply the launcher and the satellites inside Ariane 6 with electrical power but also host the digital signals for communications with the informatics system as well as carrying sensor information to ensure the flight system is in good shape for liftoff.

The largest components for the first flight model of Europe’s new rocket Ariane 6 arrived at the port of Pariacabo in Kourou, French Guiana on 21 February 2024 via the novel ship, Canopée (canopy in French). The Ariane 6 stages and components are all manufactured across Europe.

The two central stages for Ariane 6’s first flight were then assembled in the launcher assembly building (BAL) at Europe’s Spaceport. The core stage and the upper stage for Europe’s new rocket Ariane 6 are set to fly in the Summer of 2024. Once assembled, the stages will be transferred to the launch pad.

Watch the total solar eclipse — alongside interviews with scientists and astronauts — with these livestreams.

The post Where to Watch the Total Solar Eclipse Online appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

An Alabama court ruling that human embryos outside the uterus should be regarded as children has raised concerns among doctors and scientists about the future of the fertility treatment in vitro fertilization

Predicting what the sun will look like during a total solar eclipse is a helpful exercise for scientists in the long quest to understand how our star works

From the time I learned to read, I have experienced a form of mental closed-captioning called ticker-tape synesthesia

Hot on the heels of its predecessor, the DJI Mini 4 Pro emerges as the best sub-250g drone money can buy.

Protected zones are meant to let adult fish populations recover from overfishing, but an analysis of 111 sites in the Caribbean finds that this is not happening in most cases

Protected zones are meant to let adult fish populations recover from overfishing, but an analysis of 111 sites in the Caribbean finds that this is not happening in most cases

A bunch of breweries in the path of totality for the April 8 total solar eclipse have created special beers for the surreal event.

ESA’s new Arctic Weather Satellite has taken centre stage at OHB’s facilities in Stockholm, Sweden, before the spacecraft is packed up and shipped to California, US, for a launch currently scheduled for June.

Embracing the New Space approach to demonstrate new concepts in a cost-effective and timely manner, the Arctic Weather Satellite has been designed to show how it can improve weather forecasts in the Arctic.

Video: 00:03:01

Watch the first episode of the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin rover mission – Europe’s ambitious exploration journey to search for past and present signs of life on Mars.

This episode starts after a successful descent and landing on the Red Planet in 2030.

Rovers on Mars have previously been caught in loose soils, and turning the wheels dug them deeper, just like a car stuck in sand. To avoid this, Rosalind Franklin has a unique wheel-walking locomotion mode to to overcome difficult terrains, as well as autonomous navigation software.

A major goal of the mission is to understand the geological context and identify minerals formed in the presence of water that could be good targets for drilling into and collecting samples for analysis.

The scientific eyes of the rover are set atop the mast on the Panoramic Camera suite, known as PanCam. From its vantage point about two metres above the ground, PanCam cameras come into play to get a whole picture of the site with high resolution imaging.

Enfys, meaning rainbow in Welsh, is an infrared spectrometer to study mineral composition. Enfys and PanCam work in synergy. PanCam is used to obtain colour, visual information of what lies around the rover. Enfys’ job is to inform scientists what the minerals are.

Rosalind Franklin will be the first rover to reach a depth of up to two metres deep below the surface, acquiring samples that have been protected from surface radiation and extreme temperatures.

The mission will serve to demonstrate key technologies that Europe needs to master for future planetary exploration missions.

This episode shows the spacecraft, the rover and martian landscapes are as true to reality as possible for a simulation.

Check ESA’s ExoMars website and our frequently asked questions for the latest updates.

Credits:

Production: Mlabspace for ESA

3D animation: ESA/Mlabspace

Video footage: ESA/NASA, Shutterstock

Music composed by Valentin Joudrier

On 8 April 2024, a great swath of the United States and Mexico will experience a total solar eclipse, with viewers getting the rare chance to see the Sun’s stunning outer atmosphere.

Some of the biggest names in aerospace — and the automotive industry — will play roles in putting NASA astronauts in the driver’s seat for roving around on the moon.

The space agency today selected three teams to develop the capabilities for a lunar terrain vehicle, or LTV, which astronauts could use during Artemis missions to the moon starting with Artemis 5. That mission is currently scheduled for 2029, three years after the projected date for Artemis’ first crewed lunar landing.

The teams’ leading companies may not yet be household names outside the space community: Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab. But each of those ventures has more established companies as their teammates.

Over the next 15 years, the three teams will be eligible to work on task orders amounting to a potential total value of $4.6 billion — with the aim of providing mobility technology for crewed and uncrewed moon rovers. The marquee vehicle would be a rover capable of carrying Artemis astronauts on journeys of exploration around the lunar surface, as well as taking robotic trips on its own.

“We look forward to the development of the Artemis generation lunar exploration vehicle to help us advance what we learn at the moon,” Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said today in a news release. “This vehicle will greatly increase our astronauts’ ability to explore and conduct science on the lunar surface while also serving as a science platform between crewed missions.”

In a posting to X / Twitter, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the LTV rover is “essential to the success of Artemis.”

After the teams conduct year-long feasibility studies, NASA plans to select one of the teams to go ahead with construction and testing of its LTV, leading up to a lunar demonstration mission in advance of Artemis 5. NASA could give the teams additional task orders to fill its needs for unpressurized rover capabilities on the moon through 2039.

Texas-based Intuitive Machines is best-known for putting a robotic lander on the lunar surface in February. A couple of its teammates — Boeing and Northrop Grumman — have moon-mission experience that goes back to the Apollo era. Michelin (the tire company) and AVL (which provides vehicle testing and simulation services) round out the Moon RACER team.

NASA has awarded Intuitive Machines $30 million as a prime contractor to complete a Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract. The company’s global Moon RACER team will be tasked with creating a feasibility roadmap to develop and deploy a Lunar Terrain Vehicle on the Moon using… pic.twitter.com/GaVh3cvrG5

— Intuitive Machines (@Int_Machines) April 3, 2024

Colorado-based Lunar Outpost has already booked three rover missions for delivery to the moon by SpaceX and Intuitive Machines. Its teammates on the Lunar Dawn project include Lockheed Martin, General Motors, Goodyear Tire & Rubber and MDA Space (known for building the robotic arms on NASA’s space shuttles and the International Space Station).

Buckle up, Earthlings!@NASA has selected the Lunar Dawn team to develop a next-generation lunar terrain vehicle for its LTV contract as part of the @NASAArtemis program. pic.twitter.com/blxXrYL0F8

— Lockheed Martin Space (@LMSpace) April 3, 2024

California-based Astrolab made a separate deal last year with SpaceX to have its FLEX rover delivered to the moon aboard a Starship lander for a commercial mission that’s set for as soon as 2026. Astrolab’s teammates on the FLEX LTV project include Axiom Space (which is making spacesuits for Artemis moon missions) and Odyssey Space Research.

NASA has awarded Astrolab and its partners a contract worth up to $1.9 billion to advance the development of the Lunar Terrain Vehicle which will help Artemis astronauts explore more of the Moon’s surface.

Read the full announcement: https://t.co/h9Cwopy5Z5 pic.twitter.com/FJJtq0oiH9

— Astrolab (@Astrolab_Space) April 3, 2024

NASA said the LTV would support the Artemis program’s crewed missions to the moon’s south polar region, plus remote-controlled exploration activities as needed between those missions. “Outside those times, the provider will have the ability to use their LTV for commercial lunar surface activities unrelated to NASA missions,” the space agency said.

With regard to the financial arrangements, NASA said only that the Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract had a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion for all task-order awards. But a couple of the teams provided additional details. Intuitive Machines said it was awarded $30 million as a prime contractor to complete the initial feasibility study for Moon RACER. And Astrolab said its LTV contract could be worth up to $1.9 billion, depending on NASA’s needs.

The post Start Your Engines: NASA Picks 3 Teams to Work on Lunar Terrain Vehicle appeared first on Universe Today.

Trees use circadian genes to time photosynthesis and reproduction – but as temperatures rise, the clocks may not work as well

From cloud coverage to clear skies, here’s up-to-date weather conditions expected along the path of April 8’s total solar eclipse

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the Milky Way’s most massive satellite galaxy. Because it’s so easily observed, astronomers have studied it intently. They’re interested in how star formation in the LMC might have been different than in the Milky Way.

A team of researchers zeroed in on the LMC’s most metal-deficient stars to find out how different.

The LMC is about 163,000 light-years away and about 32,000 light-years across. Even though it’s that large, it’s still only 1/100th the mass of the Milky Way. It was probably a dwarf spiral galaxy before gravitational interactions with the Milky Way and the Small Magellanic Cloud warped its shape. Scientists predict it’ll probably merge with the Milky Way in about 2.4 billion years.

The LMC wasn’t always this close to the Milky Way. It formed elsewhere in the Universe, out of a different reservoir of gas than the Milky Way. The LMC’s stars preserve the environmental conditions they formed in.

The first stars to form in the Universe were the most metal-poor stars. When they formed, only hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang were available. These stars are called Population 3 stars, and they’re largely hypothetical. They were massive and many of them exploded as supernovae. These stars forged the heavier elements, called metals in astronomy, and then spread them out into space to be taken up by the next stars to form. That process continued generation by generation.

Population III stars were the Universe’s first stars. They were extremely massive, luminous stars, and many exploded as supernovae. Image Credit: DALL-E

Nobody’s ever found a Population 3 star because even if they’re more than hypothetical, they’d all be long gone by now. But in new research, scientists examined 10 of the LMC’s most metal-poor stars. They found one Population 2 star that is so metal-poor it’s similar to Population 3 stars.

The research is titled “Enrichment by extragalactic first stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud.” It’s published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The lead author is Anirudh Chiti from the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, both at the University of Chicago.

“This star provides a unique window into the very early element-forming process in galaxies other than our own,” said lead author Chiti. “We have built up an idea of how these stars that were chemically enriched by the first stars look like in the Milky Way, but we don’t yet know if some of these signatures are unique or if things happened similarly across other galaxies.”

The earliest Population 3 stars changed the Universe. By producing metals, they guaranteed the stars to follow had higher metallicities. But exactly what metals did they produce, and how much?

“We want to understand what the properties of those first stars were and what were the elements they produced,” said Chiti.

The difficult part is that nobody’s ever seen a Population 3 star. But by identifying an extremely metal-poor star that’s very similar to the first stars, the researchers found the next best thing. Finding nine other metal-poor stars was also helpful.

They compared the 10 LMC metal-poor stars to metal-poor stars in the Milky Way. The results show how different processes and different environments in both galaxies affected star formation and metal enrichment.

This illustration shows the Milky Way galaxy’s inner and outer halos. Old, metal-poor stars tend to inhabit the halo. (Image Credits: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild [STScI])

These metal-poor stars are difficult to find. Most of the stars in the Universe resulted from successive generations of stars; their enriched metallicity is a testament to that. Our Sun is a metal-rich Population 1 star, for example.

But these older, metal-poor Population 2 stars are out there. Since astronomers will likely never find an ancient Population 3 star, the Population 2 stars with the lowest metallicities are the next best things.

“Maybe fewer than 1 in 100,000 stars in the Milky Way is one of these second-gen stars,” Chiti said. “You really are fishing needles out of haystacks.”

But once astronomers find them, the outer layers of these rare stars hold evidence of the conditions they formed in. “In their outer layers, these stars preserve the elements near where they formed,” Chiti explained. “If you can find a very old star and get its chemical composition, you can understand what the chemical composition of the universe was like where that star formed billions of years ago.”

This figure from the study shows the ten LMC stars (blue crosses) compared to all stars within 10° of the LMC. They’re colour-coded with the Fe/H bar on the right. The Fe/H ratio shows the ratio of iron atoms to hydrogen atoms and is a common measure of overall metallicity. The scale on the left shows Calcium, Hydrogen, and Potassium abundances across the whole sky, another useful measure of metallicity. Image Credit: Chiti et al. 2024.

Finding such metal-poor stars in the LMC allowed astronomers to compare the star-forming conditions in that satellite galaxy to those in the Milky Way. The comparison can help astrophysicists understand how these star-forming conditions may have differed.

One of the 10 stars in the LMC stood out from the rest. It had markedly lower metallicity than the other nine. Called LMC 119, it’s 50 times more metal-deficient than the others. “Given its extremely low metallicity, this star exhibits the characteristics of a second-generation star that preserves the chemical imprints of a first-star supernova,” the authors write.

This figure from the research compares the atomic abundances of LM 119 to red giant stars in the Milky Way’s halo, where older, metal-poor stars are situated. As the figure shows, LMC 119 has much lower metallicity than the Milky Way’s metal-poor stars. Image Credit: Chiti et al. 2024.

One fact stood out to the researchers when they mapped LMC 119’s elements. It had much less carbon than iron when compared to Milky Way stars. In fact, the same was true of all 10 stars in the sample. This is important because the LMC wasn’t always a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. That association only goes back a couple of billion years or so. Its stars formed in a distant region of the high-redshift Universe.

“That was very intriguing, and it suggests that perhaps carbon enhancement of the earliest generation, as we see in the Milky Way, was not universal,” Chiti said. “We’ll have to do further studies, but it suggests there are differences from place to place.”

For Chiti and his colleagues, the conclusion is clear. “This, and other abundance differences, affirm that the extragalactic early LMC experienced diverging enrichment processes compared to the early Milky Way. Early element production, driven by the earliest stars, thus appears to proceed in an environment-dependent manner,” they write in their conclusion.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are visible at the lower right-hand corner of this image of the Milky Way as seen by the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. Image Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Since Chiti and his fellow researchers found one very low-metallicity star in the LMC, there are probably many more among its suspected population of 20 billion stars. Chiti is leading a program to map out more stars in the southern sky and find more of these types of stars.

“This discovery suggests there should be many of these stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud if we look closely,” he said. “It’s really exciting to be opening up stellar archeology of the Large Magellanic Cloud and to be able to map out in such detail how the first stars chemically enriched the universe in different regions.”

The post The Large Magellanic Cloud isn’t Very Metal appeared first on Universe Today.

A surge of mining in some African countries for materials used to make green energy technologies puts gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos at risk

After a few decades of simply finding exoplanets, humanity is starting to be able to do something more – peer into their atmospheres. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has already started looking at the atmospheres of some larger exoplanets around brighter stars. But in many cases, scientists are still developing models that both explain what the planet’s atmosphere is made of and match the data. A new study from researchers at UC Riverside, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, American University, and the University of Maryland looks at what one particular atmospheric process might look like on an exoplanet – volcanism.

There are a few caveats in the paper, though. First, the model itself is for an “exoEarth” – a planet equivalent to Earth circling a Sun-like star. Even JWST isn’t powerful enough to capture the data spectrographic data of an atmospheric planet of this size, no matter how close it is. So, the authors make some assumptions about the next generation of large in-space telescopes – specifically, they refer to the LUVOIR project we’ve reported on before.

Assuming the next great space telescope can collect data as planned, it is still necessary to understand the data that comes in. In particular, understanding what the dips in spectra are caused by and what, if any, specific pattern emerges that might be related to active volcanoes.

Fraser talks about JWST’s capabilities as an exoplanet hunter.

Those volcanoes would likely be spewing out sulfur dioxide and sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere of the exoEarth. To model the introduction of those materials, the authors turned to a simulation program called the Goddard Earth Observing System Chemistry Climate Model (GEOSCCM). This model allows researchers to manipulate certain aspects of the atmosphere and watch the results over long periods.

In this particular case, the researchers modeled the effect of a volcano by injecting one of several quantities of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere every three months for four years. They then observed the effects for some time after the volcano stopped “erupting” (i.e., when they stopped injecting sulfur dioxide into the model) so they could conclude the atmospheric composition of a planet in recovery from a sustained eruption.

Three main spectra lines stood out in the researcher’s analysis. All three were related to oxygen – O2 (the breathable stuff), O3 (ozone), and good old H20. Each of these three spectral signals underwent serious changes around the time of the eruptions, and then those changes were reversed once the eruptions ceased.

Fraser talks about the difficulties in directly imaging planet with Dr. Thayne Currie

One particular feature that stood out was the spectral line for ozone (O3). It continually decreased during the eruption phase, likely caused by its transformation into sulfuric acid. After the eruptions, however, the quantity of ozone in the modeled atmosphere began to creep up again, showing a similar resilience to our own ozone layer that had been impacted by the use of CFCs last century. 

With their expected results in hand, the researchers calculated how long they thought it would take a telescope like LUVOIR to observe a particular exoplanet to find these tale-tell spectral lines that would indicate whether there was active volcanism on the planet. Ozone was relatively simple, as it required only 6 hours of observation. In contrast, water vapor was trickier to quantify, as it could be as short as 9 hours or impossible altogether, depending on the variability in the signal.

Studies like this will be crucial to the success of any future large space telescope mission, and there will be plenty of things for LUVOIR, or its equivalent, to look at when (and if) it launches. Therefore, plenty of other studies detailing what features we can expect to see will be necessary in the near future. But for now, at least we’ll know what to look for if we see volcanoes on a planet just like our own.

Learn More:
Ostberg et al – The Prospect of Detecting Volcanic Signatures on an ExoEarth Using Direct Imaging
UT – A Super-Earth (and Possible Earth-Sized) Exoplanet Found in the Habitable Zone
UT – Can JWST Tell the Difference Between an Exo-Earth and an Exo-Venus?
UT – Earth is an Exoplanet to Aliens. This is What They’d See

Lead Image:
LP 791-18 d, shown here in an artist’s concept, is an Earth-size world about 90 light-years away.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith (KRBwyle)

The post Could We Directly Observe Volcanoes on an Exoplanet? appeared first on Universe Today.

Anxiety is on the rise in young people but we need to follow the science - and the causes aren't clearly linked to social media

Unlike some sponges, making a vegan version of carrot cake is easy – if you add a little science, says Karmela Padavic-Callaghan