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Week in images: 02-06 September 2024

Discover our week through the lens

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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)

NASA is exploring potential partnerships for alternate use cases for the On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1) flight hardware, test facilities, and experienced personnel. Through a Request for Information for OSAM-1 Partnerships released Sept. 5, 2024, NASA seeks interest from U.S. organizations that will benefit commercial, civil, and national objectives, thereby advancing domestic leadership in In-space Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (ISAM) capabilities.  

A comprehensive list of OSAM-1 resources and technologies organizations can consider using are outlined in the full Request for Information for OSAM-1 Partnerships available at www.sam.gov. Responses are due Sept. 30, 2024, by 11:59 p.m. EDT. 

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NASA's Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) can be seen with the naked eye as it orbits Earth, and can be tracked with a helpful app.

BepiColombo made a close flyby of Mercury on Sept. 4, getting just 103 miles (165 kilometers) above the planet.

Galaxies of the NGC 7771 Group are featured in

Social scientists are uncovering the intricate group dynamics of gossip

Meteorologists predicted a busy Atlantic hurricane season—and a recent lull in activity doesn’t negate that

Hubble Space Telescope

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Hubble Examines a Busy Galactic Center This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the active spiral galaxy IC 4709. ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Koss, A, Barth

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy IC 4709 located around 240 million light-years away in the southern constellation Telescopium. Hubble beautifully captures its faint halo and swirling disk filled with stars and dust bands. The compact region at its core might be the most remarkable sight. It holds an active galactic nucleus (AGN).

If IC 4709’s core just held stars, it wouldn’t be nearly as bright. Instead, it hosts a gargantuan black hole, 65 million times more massive than our Sun. A disk of gas spirals around and eventually into this black hole, crashing together and heating up as it spins. It reaches such high temperatures that it emits vast quantities of electromagnetic radiation, from infrared to visible to ultraviolet light and X-rays. A lane of dark dust, just visible at the center of the galaxy in the image above, obscures the AGN in IC 4709. The dust lane blocks any visible light emission from the nucleus itself. Hubble’s spectacular resolution, however, gives astronomers a detailed view of the interaction between the quite small AGN and its host galaxy. This is essential to understanding supermassive black holes in galaxies much more distant than IC 4709, where resolving such fine details is not possible.

This image incorporates data from two Hubble surveys of nearby AGNs originally identified by NASA’s Swift telescope. There are plans for Swift to collect new data on these galaxies. Swift houses three multiwavelength telescopes, collecting data in visible, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray light. Its X-ray component will allow SWIFT to directly see the X-rays from IC 4709’s AGN breaking through the obscuring dust. ESA’s Euclid telescope — currently surveying the dark universe in optical and infrared light — will also image IC 4709 and other local AGNs. Their data, along with Hubble’s, provides astronomers with complementary views across the electromagnetic spectrum. Such views are key to fully research and better understand black holes and their influence on their host galaxies.

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Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

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Wispy whorls on the moon’s surface are as lovely as they are strange. Scientists are starting to unravel their origins

Boeing's Starliner capsule will depart the ISS without astronauts today (Sept. 6), and you can watch the action live.

Caring for aging loved ones brings its own set of emotional and physical hurdles. Experts offer guidance on finding support.

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Rover trials in a quarry in the UK showing a four-wheeled rover, known as Codi, using its robotic arm and a powerful computer vision system to pick up sample tubes. 

The rover drives to the samples with an accuracy of 10cm, constantly mapping the terrain. Codi uses its arm and four cameras to locate the sample tube, retrieve it and safely store it on the rover – all of it without human intervention. At every stop, the rover uses stereo cameras to build up a 180-degree map of the surroundings and plan its next maneouvres. Once parked, the camera on top of the mast detects the tube and estimates its position with respect to the rover. The robotic arm initiates a complex choreography to move closer to the sample, fetch it and store it. 

The sample tubes are a replica of the hermetically sealed samples inside which NASA’s Perseverance rover is collecting precious martian soil inside. To most people on Earth, they resemble lightsabres.

The reddish terrain, although not fully representative of Mars in terms of soil composition, has plenty of slopes and rocks of different sizes, similar to what a rover might encounter on the martian surface. Quarry testing is an essential next step in the development process, providing a unique and dynamic landscape that cannot be replicated indoors. 

ESA continues to run further research using the rover to maintain and develop rover capabilities in Europe.

Read the full article: Rovers, lightsabres and a piglet.

In 2022 NASA’s DART spacecraft made history, and changed the Solar System forever, by impacting the Dimorphos asteroid and measurably shifting its orbit around the larger Didymos asteroid. In the process a plume of debris was thrown out into space.

The latest modelling, available on the preprint server arXiv and accepted for publication in the September volume of The Planetary Science Journal, shows how small meteoroids from that debris could eventually reach both Mars and Earth – potentially in an observable (although quite safe) manner.

Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2B satellite captured this image over Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on 2 September, just ahead of the Sentinel-2C launch.

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ESA’s Metal 3D Printer has produced the first metal part ever created in space. 

The technology demonstrator, built by Airbus and its partners, was launched to the International Space Station at the start of this year, where ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen installed the payload in the European Drawer Rack of ESA’s Columbus module. In August, the printer successfully printed the first 3D metal shape in space.  

This product, along with three others planned during the rest of the experiment, will return to Earth for quality analysis: two of the samples will go to ESA’s technical heart in the Netherlands (ESTEC), another will go to ESA’s astronaut training centre in Cologne (EAC) for use in the LUNA facility, and the fourth will go to the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). 

As exploration of the Moon and Mars will increase mission duration and distance from Earth, resupplying spacecraft will be more challenging.  Additive manufacturing in space will give autonomy for the mission and its crew, providing a solution to manufacture needed parts, to repair equipment or construct dedicated tools, on demand during the mission, rather than relying on resupplies and redundancies. 

ESA’s technology demonstrator is the first to successfully print a metal component in microgravity conditions. In the past, the International Space Station has hosted plastic 3D printers.

The largest pterosaurs, ancient reptiles that were the first vertebrates to master flight, may have mostly soared while smaller ones flapped their wings, a pattern that persists in today's birds

The largest pterosaurs, ancient reptiles that were the first vertebrates to master flight, may have mostly soared while smaller ones flapped their wings, a pattern that persists in today's birds

SpaceX launched a batch of spy satellites for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office tonight (Sept. 5), the company's second orbital mission of the day.

Mars: Perseverance (Mars 2020)

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Persevering Through the Storm A region-wide seasonal dust storm obscures the Jezero Crater in this image from NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover, acquired using its Left Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover’s mast. Perseverance captured the image on Aug. 20, 2024 (Sol 1244, or Martian day 1,244 of the Mars 2020 mission) at the local mean solar time of 16:05:34. This image is part of a Mastcam-Z mosaic of the “northern fan,” a part of Jezero Crater that Perseverance never drove through, but is an area that’s thought to have been deposited in a similar way to the delta that the rover did explore. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

It is dust-storm season on Mars! Over the past couple of weeks, as we have been ascending the Jezero Crater rim, our science team has been monitoring rising amounts of dust in the atmosphere. This is expected: Dust activity is typically highest around this time of the Martian year (early Spring in the northern hemisphere). The increased dust has made our views back toward the crater hazier than usual, and provided our atmospheric scientists with a great opportunity to study the way that dust storms form, develop, and spread around the planet.

Perseverance has a suite of scientific instruments well-suited to study the Martian atmosphere. The Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) provides regular weather reports, the cadence of which has increased during the storm to maximize our science. We also routinely point our Mastcam-Z imager toward the sky to assess the optical density (“tau”) of the atmosphere.

There are not any signs that this regional dust storm will become planetwide — like the global dust storm in 2018 — but every day we are assessing new atmospheric data. Hopefully the skies will further clear up as we continue to climb in the coming weeks, because we are expecting stunning views of the crater floor and Jezero delta. This will offer the Perseverance team a unique chance to reflect on the tens of kilometers we have driven and years we have spent exploring Mars together.

Written by Henry Manelski, Ph.D. student at Purdue University

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The European Space Agency (ESA) launched its final Vega rocket this week, lofting a Sentinel-2C Earth observation satellite into orbit. This wraps up 12 years of service and 20 successful flights for the venerable Vega. The rocket launched several well-known missions, including LISA Pathfinder (2015), the Earth-observing satellites Proba-V (2013), and Aeolus (2018). ESA will now launch these types of payloads on the new Vega-C rocket, capable of launching heavier payloads at a lower price.

Vega’s final launch was on September 5, 2024 from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, and ESA said that it was fitting the rocket boosted to orbit one of the Sentinel satellites, as Vega had previously launched Sentinel-2A in 2015 and Sentinel-2B in 2017.

Vega was a smaller but powerful rocket launcher designed to loft smaller science and Earth observation satellites, specializing in launching of satellites into polar orbit. At 30 meters (98 ft) tall the rocket weighs 137 tons on the launch pad. Vega consisted of three solid-propellant powered stages with the a liquid-propellant fourth stage.  before the fourth liquid-propellant stage took over to bring satellites to their required orbit. Vega could reach space in just six minutes.

On 13 February 2012, the first Vega lifted off on its maiden flight from Europe’s South American Spaceport in French Guiana and deployed 9 science satellites. Credits: ESA – S. Corvaja

Vega’s first launch took place in February 2012, conducting a perfectly executed qualification flight to deploy 9 science cubesats into Earth orbit.

On Vega’s second flight in 2013, a secondary payload adapter called Vespa was added. This provided different options for payload ride-sharing where multiple satellites could be launched on one rocket. This flight brought three satellites to orbit — Earth observation satellites, ESA’s Proba-V, Vietnam’s VNREDSat-1A and Estonia’s first satellite, the ESTCube-1 technology demonstrator. All three were released into different orbits and the complex mission required five upper-stage boosts, with the flight lasting about twice as long as its first launch.

Countdown and launch of Vega’s final flight.

The most satellites Vega ever launched to orbit was in 2020 when a variant of Vespa was used — called the Small Spacecraft Mission Service — and brought over 50 satellites at once to orbit.

2015 was Vega’s’ busiest year, launching three ESA missions including a reentry demonstrator called IXV that prove the technology to launch a vehicle to space and return it safely to Earth. According to ESA, in less than two hours Vega accelerated IXV to speeds of 27,000 km/h (16,777 mph) at a height of 412 km (250 miles) before the reentry vehicle splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.

But now ESA is building on Vega’s heritage, and the era of Vega-C has already begun. This new rocket completed its inaugural flight in July of 2022, putting the main payload LARES-2 – a scientific mission of the Italian Space Agency ASI – into orbit as well as six research CubeSats from France, Italy and Slovenia. ESA said Vega-C will provide better performance and greater payload capability as it has two new solid propulsion stages, an uprated fourth stage, a newly designed fairing, and new ground infrastructure.

Lift-off of a Vega-C rocket, with the Lares-2 mission plus rideshares. Credit: ESA

The post The Final Vega Rocket Blasts Off appeared first on Universe Today.