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NASA’s Hubble Restarts Science in New Pointing Mode
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NASA’s Hubble Restarts Science in New Pointing Mode This image of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was taken on May 19, 2009 after deployment during Servicing Mission 4. NASA
NASA successfully transitioned operations for the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope to an alternate operating mode that uses one gyro, returning the spacecraft to daily science operations Friday. The telescope and its instruments are stable and functioning normally.
Hubble went into safe mode May 24 due to an ongoing issue with one of its gyroscopes (gyros), which measure the telescope’s slew rates and are part of the system that determines and controls the direction the telescope is pointed. The gyro had been increasingly returning faulty readings over the past six months, suspending science operations multiple times. This led the Hubble team to transition from a three-gyro operating mode to observing with only one gyro, enabling more consistent science observations and keeping another operational gyro available for future use. The agency discussed this transition in detail during a media teleconference June 4.
The team will continue monitoring the problematic gyro to see if it stabilizes and can be used again in the future. Although there are some minor limitations to observing in one-gyro mode, Hubble can continue doing most of its science observations. Further refinements to optimize operations are anticipated as the team gains more experience with the one-gyro mode.
Launched in 1990, Hubble has more than doubled its expected design lifetime, and has been observing the universe for more than three decades, recently celebrating its 34th anniversary. Read more about some of Hubble’s greatest scientific discoveries.
NASA’s Hubble Temporarily Pauses ScienceOriginally Published May 31, 2024
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope entered safe mode May 24 due to an ongoing gyroscope (gyro) issue, suspending science operations. Hubble’s instruments are stable, and the telescope is in good health.
The telescope automatically entered safe mode when one of its three gyroscopes gave faulty telemetry readings. Hubble’s gyros measure the telescope’s slew rates and are part of the system that determines and controls precisely the direction the telescope is pointed. NASA will provide more information early the first week of June.
NASA anticipates Hubble will continue making discoveries throughout this decade and possibly into the next, working with other observatories, such as the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope for the benefit of humanity.
Launched in 1990, Hubble has been observing the universe for more than three decades and recently celebrated its 34th anniversary. Read more about some of Hubble’s greatest scientific discoveries.
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NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.
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NASA’s LRO Spots China’s Chang’e 6 Spacecraft on Lunar Far Side
NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) imaged China’s Chang’e 6 sample return spacecraft on the far side of the Moon on June 7. Chang’e 6 landed on June 1, and when LRO passed over the landing site almost a week later, it acquired an image showing the lander on the rim of an eroded, 55-yard-diameter (about 50 meters) crater.
The LRO Camera team computed the landing site coordinates as about 42 degrees south latitude, 206 degrees east longitude, at an elevation of about minus 3.27 miles (minus 5,256 meters).
This before and after animation of LRO images shows the appearance of the Chang’e 6 lander. The increased brightness of the terrain surrounding the lander is due to disturbance from the lander’s engines and is similar to the blast zone seen around other lunar landers. The before image is from March 3, 2022, and the after image is from June 7, 2024.Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University
The Chang’e 6 landing site is situated toward the southern edge of the Apollo basin (about 306 miles or 492 km in diameter, centered at 36.1 degrees south latitude, 208.3 degrees east longitude). Basaltic lava erupted south of Chaffee S crater about 3.1 billion years ago and flowed downhill to the west until it encountered a local topographic high, likely related to a fault. Several wrinkle ridges in this region have deformed and raised the mare surface. The landing site sits about halfway between two of these prominent ridges. This basaltic flow also overlaps a slightly older flow (about 3.3 billion years old), visible further west, but the younger flow is distinct because it has higher iron oxide and titanium dioxide abundances.
A regional context map of the Chang’e 6 landing site. Color differences have been enhanced for clarity. The dark area is a basaltic mare deposit; bluer areas of the mare are higher-titanium flows. Contour lines marking 100-meter (about 328 feet) elevation intervals are overlaid to provide a sense of the topography. Image is about 118 miles (190 km) across. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University
LRO is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. Launched on June 18, 2009, LRO has collected a treasure trove of data with its seven powerful instruments, making an invaluable contribution to our knowledge about the Moon. NASA is returning to the Moon with commercial and international partners to expand human presence in space and bring back new knowledge and opportunities.
More on this story from Arizona State University's LRO Camera websiteMedia Contact:
Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Astronauts could mix moon dust with old satellites to make fuel
Echoes of Flares from the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole
The supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy is a quiet monster. However, Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A* for short) is not totally dormant. Occasionally it gobbles down a blob of molecular gas or even a star and then suffers a bit of indigestion. That emits x-ray flares to surrounding space.
Sgr A* is the closest supermassive black hole to Earth, at a distance of 26,000 light-years. Studying the nearby environment is tough due to the black hole’s intense gravitational pull. It distorts the view of nearby objects, making them difficult to observe. However, there are ways to do it by looking at the effect of its flares on nearby molecular clouds. Astronomers recently found the centuries-old echoes of previously unknown flares that occurred long before there were telescopes to observe them. Those echoes indicate that Sgr A* eats fairly often.
Two researchers from Michigan State University—Grace Sanger-Johnson and Jack Uteg—studied the flares and their light-echoes in detail. What they found shows activity at Sgr A* in the very distant past when Sgr A* ingested material. X-ray emissions from that activity traveled for hundreds of years from Sgr A* to bounce off of and brighten a nearby molecular cloud. That created a light echo that traveled another roughly 26,000 years before reaching Earth. So, when Uteg and Sanger studied these flares and light echoes, they were literally looking into the past.
Astronomers do know about outbursts from Sgr A* from other observations. Here’s a view from NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The combination of IXPE and Chandra data helped researchers determine that the X-ray light identified in the molecular clouds originated from Sagittarius A* during an outburst approximately 200 years ago. Credits: IXPE: NASA/MSFC/F. Marin et al; Chandra: NASA/CXC/SAO; Image Processing: L.Frattare, J.Major & K.Arcand Searching for Sgr A* X-ray Flares with NuSTARSanger-Johnson analyzed ten years’ worth of data looking for X-ray flares generated by Sgr A*’s eating habits. During the search, she found evidence for nine more such outbursts.
The flares are typically quite dramatic. Because they’re so bright, they provide astronomers a chance to study the immediate environment around the black hole. The data Sanger-Johnson studied came from the NuSTAR mission. It zeroes in on high-energy X-ray and gamma-ray emissions. These typically come from active regions in the hearts of galaxies, supernova explosions, and other active events.
The data Sanger-Johnson collected and analyzed is now a database of flares from Sgr A. “We hope that by building up this bank of data on Sgr A flares, we and other astronomers can analyze the properties of these X-ray flares and infer the physical conditions inside the extreme environment of the supermassive black hole,” Sanger-Johnson said.
Tracking the Echoes of FlaresWhile Sanger-Johnson was working with the NuSTAR data, undergraduate researcher Jack Uteg studied the activity around the black hole. He analyzed 20 years of data about a giant molecular cloud called “the Bridge”. The data came from observations made by NuSTAR and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton observatory. The Bridge lies close to Sgr A* and normally wouldn’t give off its own light.
So, astronomers took notice when it brightened up in X-rays, according to Uteg, who is constructing a timeline of Sgr A‘s past outbursts. “The brightness we see is most likely the delayed reflection of past X-ray outbursts from Sgr A,” he said. “We first observed an increase in luminosity around 2008. Then, for the next 12 years, X-ray signals from the Bridge continued to increase until it hit peak brightness in 2020.”
Uteg’s work helped astronomers determine that Sgr A* was about five orders of magnitude brighter in X-rays than it is now. That brightening indicates our central supermassive black hole had probably cannibalized a nearby gas cloud. And, the brightness revealed other properties, according to Uteg. “One of the main reasons we care about this cloud getting brighter is that it lets us constrain how bright the Sgr A* outburst was in the past,” he said.
What Those Light-echoes from Sgr A* RevealThanks to Sanger-Brown and Uteg’s work, astronomers have another way around the difficulties of observing around black holes. “Both flares and fireworks light up the darkness and help us observe things we wouldn’t normally be able to,” she said. “That’s why astronomers need to know when and where these flares occur, so they can study the black hole’s environment using that light.”
Astronomers know that the black hole does gobble up nearby material on a variable basis, but these findings help them constrain how often it happens and how the resulting flares affect the nearby neighborhood. Many questions remain about how often these flares occur and have happened in the past, according to MSU assistant professor Shuo Zhang, who acted as team lead for these two studies.
“This is the first time that we have constructed a 24-year-long variability for a molecular cloud surrounding our supermassive black hole that has reached its peak X-ray luminosity,” Zhang said. “It allows us to tell the past activity of Sgr A* from about 200 years ago. Our research team at MSU will continue this ‘astroarchaeology game’ to further unravel the mysteries of the Milky Way’s center.”
These results of the MSU team’s work were presented at the summer 2024 meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
For More Information‘Flares’ and ‘Echoes’ from the Milky Way’s Monster Black Hole
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Johnson Celebrates LGBTQI+ Pride Month: Meet Michael Chandler
Michael Chandler has provided configuration and data management support at Houston’s Johnson Space Center for the last 13 years. After roughly seven years supporting the Exploration Systems Development Division, Chandler transitioned to the Moon to Mars Program Office in 2019. He and his team work to ensure that the baseline for Moon to Mars products, like agreements and documents, is appropriately controlled and that configuration and data management processes are integrated across the office’s six programs – Orion, Gateway, EHP, Space Launch System, Human Landing system, and Exploration Ground Systems.
“The most rewarding part of my job is not only the magnitude of what I have the privilege of working on every day, returning humans to the surface of the Moon, but also the experience I get in working with such a diverse group of members of the aerospace community,” said Chandler, a contractor with The Aerospace Corporation. “It’s also so rewarding to work as a team on a common goal and to look forward to the work I do every day!”
Portrait of Michael Chandler onsite at Johnson Space Center. NASA/Noah Moran
Chandler has been an active member of the Out & Allied Employee Resource Group (OAERG) since 2018 and says his involvement with the group led to some groundbreaking life events. “I was very shy and reticent about revealing who I was until I got involved with Out & Allied,” he said. “I now believe that being ‘out’ is a way to support and encourage others to be themselves.”
Chandler learned about OAERG while attending a training about how to be an ally for the LGBTQ+ community. In his first year with the group, he helped organize a panel discussion on allyship and creating safe workplaces. He then became co-chair of OAERG’s Pride Committee, working with ERG colleagues and others to plan the group’s LGBTQ+ Pride Month events and participation in Houston’s annual Pride Parade. “I had a wonderful experience managing events and bringing everyone together for Pride,” he said – efforts that earned him a Trailblazer Award.
Chandler said he has grown personally and professionally through his involvement with OAERG. “I was very shy and kind of uptight at the first meeting that I went to, but everyone was so kind and accepting, and I slowly started taking on responsibilities and planning events,” he said. “These activities helped me grow as a communicator and a leader in my regular work and personal life.”
Michael Chandler (left) stands with fellow Out & Allied Employee Resource Group members, waiting for the Houston Pride Parade to begin. Image courtesy of Michael Chandler
Chandler belongs to other employee resource groups (ERGs) at Johnson to support different communities and find opportunities to collaboratively promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the center, and he encourages others to do the same. “Even if you only participate when you have time, it can lead to knowledge and ways to support other communities that have the same challenges in this world,” he said.
Chandler has been impressed with agency and center leadership’s involvement in DEI efforts and support for ERGs to date. He suggested that increased communication around DEI initiatives may help to quell anxieties about the political landscape and developments outside of NASA by reassuring team members that their employer supports them for who they are. He believes that every person at Johnson can help create an inclusive environment by being respectful, listening with an open heart, and joining the fight to ensure that everyone can be themselves.
“The most important thing is that everyone needs to be their true self,” he said. “It’s so rewarding and makes life so much more fun!”
Hybrid design could make nuclear fusion reactors more efficient
Hybrid design could make nuclear fusion reactors more efficient
Human Factors Researcher Garrett Sadler
“I graduated in 2008, so that job market was not super great, and I ended up with this very unusual job working for this guy who thought that he had some new theory of physics that he wanted to work on. And so I was responsible for creating little computer simulations, trying to resemble some version of his ideas. His whole thing was like a quasi-spiritual tool, looking toward science as a rationalization of different spiritual beliefs that he had about a collective consciousness and the interconnectedness of things.
“As I worked for him longer and met a bunch of other people who were trying to put various spiritual beliefs on scientific footing, I got interested [and thought] maybe this could be studied as a cultural thing. What’s going on here with the desire to scientifically explain spiritual beliefs that they have? What’s the dynamic going on there? That’s what led me into eventually going to grad school for anthropology. I studied the way that science gets conceptualized and interpreted to rationalize spiritual and religious beliefs.
“I had this sort of unconventional trajectory [to NASA]. I didn’t really set a target on something to pursue it. The other thing that might be surprising is that I’ve been insecure about it at every single stage. You know, there’s the whole impostor syndrome thing, and I didn’t feel like I was qualified to be here because I didn’t have some sort of traditional path or because my educational background looks different than that of most of my colleagues. But I’m now at a place where I’ve come to understand that’s true for everyone.”
– Garrett Sadler, Human Factors Researcher, NASA’s Ames Research Center
Image Credit: NASA/Bradon Torres
Interviewer: NASA/Tahira Allen
Hubble Captures a Cosmic Fossil
Hubble Captures a Cosmic Fossil
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the globular cluster NGC 2005. It’s not an unusual globular cluster in and of itself, but it is a peculiarity when compared to its surroundings. NGC 2005 is located about 750 light-years from the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which is the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxy some 162,000 light-years from Earth. Globular clusters are densely-packed groups of stars that can hold tens of thousands or millions of stars. Their density means they are tightly bound by gravity and therefore very stable. This stability contributes to their longevity: globular clusters can be billions of years old, and are often comprised of very old stars. Studying globular clusters in space can be a little like studying fossils on Earth: where fossils give insights into the characteristics of ancient plants and animals, globular clusters illuminate the characteristics of ancient stars.
Current theories of galaxy evolution predict that galaxies merge with one another. Astronomers think the relatively large galaxies we observe in the modern universe formed when smaller galaxies merged. If this is correct, then we would expect to see evidence that the most ancient stars in nearby galaxies originated in different galactic environments. Because globular clusters hold ancient stars, and because of their stability, they are an excellent laboratory to test this hypothesis.
NGC 2005 is such a globular cluster, and its very existence provides evidence that supports the theory of galaxy evolution via mergers. Indeed, what makes NGC 2005 a bit peculiar from its surroundings, is the fact that its stars have a chemical composition that is distinct from the stars around it in the LMC. This suggests that the LMC underwent a merger with another galaxy somewhere in its history. That other galaxy has long-since merged and otherwise dispersed, but NGC 2005 remains behind as an ancient witness to the long-past merger.
Text Credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
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Warp Drives Could Generate Gravitational Waves
Will future humans use warp drives to explore the cosmos? We’re in no position to eliminate the possibility. But if our distant descendants ever do, it won’t involve dilithium crystals, and Scottish accents will have evaporated into history by then.
Warp drives have their roots in one of the most popular science fiction franchises ever, but they do have a scientific basis. A new paper examines the science behind them and asks if a warp drive containment failure would emit detectable gravitational waves.
The paper is titled “What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse.” The authors are Katy Clough, Tim Dietrich, and Sebastian Khan, physicists from institutions in the UK and Germany.
There’s room for warp drives in General Relativity, and Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre described how they could theoretically work in 1994. He’s well-known in space and physics circles for his Alcubierre Drive.
Everyone knows that no object can travel faster than the speed of light. But warp drives may offer a workaround. By warping spacetime itself, a spacecraft with a warp drive wouldn’t be breaking the faster-than-light (FTL) rule.
“Despite originating in science fiction, warp drives have a concrete description in general relativity, with Alcubierre first proposing a spacetime metric that supported faster-than-light travel,” the authors write.
There are clear scientific barriers to actually making a warp drive. But it’s possible to simulate how one would work and how they may be detectable via gravitational waves in the event of a failure. Warp drives distort spacetime itself, just like binary mergers of compact objects like black holes and neutron stars. It’s theoretically possible that they emit a gravitational wave signal in the same vein as mergers. “To search for such signals and to correctly identify them in the measured data, it is important to understand their phenomenology and properties,” the authors explain.
It begins with understanding how warp drives might work, and for that, we have to delve deeply into physics.
“The principle idea behind a warp drive is that instead of exceeding the speed of light directly in a local reference frame, which would violate Lorentz invariance, a “warp bubble” could traverse distances faster than the speed of light (as measured by some distant observer) by contracting spacetime in front of it and expanding spacetime behind it,” the paper states.
The first barrier is that warp drives require a Null Energy Condition (NEC). Physics states that a region of space cannot have a negative energy density. There are theoretical workarounds for that, but for now, none of them are practical.
“Other issues with the warp drive metric include the potential for closed time-like curves and, from a more practical perspective, the difficulties for those in the ship in controlling and deactivating the bubble,” the authors explain. This is because there would be no way for the crew to send signals to the front of the ship. It’s difficult for events inside the bubble to influence events outside the warp bubble, as this paper explains.
“From the perspective of simulating the warp drive dynamically, the key challenge is stability,” the authors explain. Equations show that the Alcubierre Drive can initiate a warp bubble using the Einstein Equation, but no known equations can sustain it. “There is (to our knowledge) no known equation of state that would maintain the warp drive metric in a stable configuration over time. Therefore, whilst one can require that initially, the warp bubble is constant, it will quickly evolve away from that state, and, in most cases, the warp fluid and spacetime deformations will disperse or collapse into a central point.”
Though instability is a prime obstacle to warp drives, it’s also what could make them detectable. If an Alcubierre Drive achieves a constant velocity, it’s not detectable. It generates no gravitational waves and has no ADM mass. ADM stands for Arnowitt–Deser—Misner, named for three physicists. I’ll leave it to curious readers to read more about ADM mass.
But the warp drive is only undetectable if it’s constant and stable. Once it breaks down, accelerates or decelerates, it could be detectable. In their work, the authors allow the warp drive bubble to collapse. “Physically, this could be related to a breakdown in the containment field that the post-warp civilization (presumably) uses to support the warp bubble against collapse,” they write.
In their formulations, the nature of the ship itself isn’t important. Only the warp bubble and the warp fluid inside are significant.
The researchers simulated the breakdown of the warp bubble. They found that the collapse generated gravitational waves with characteristics different from those generated by mergers. “The signal comes as a burst, initially having no gravitational wave content, followed by an oscillatory period with a characteristic frequency of order 1/[R],” they write. “Overall, the signal is very distinct from the typical compact binary coalescences observed by gravitational wave detectors and more similar to events like the collapse of an unstable neutron star or the head-on collision of two black holes.”
The authors point out that though the warp drive creates a GW signal, it’s outside the frequency range of our current ground-based detectors. “Proposals for higher frequency detectors have been made, so in the future, one may be able to put bounds on the existence of such signals,” they write.
The ship itself could also send some type of multimessenger signal, but it’s difficult to know how the ship’s matter would interact with regular matter. “Since we do not know the type of matter used to construct the warp ship, we do not know whether it would interact (apart from gravitationally) with normal matter as it propagates through the Universe,” the researchers explain.
This is a fun thought experiment. It’s possible that some type of workaround to FTL travel will exist one day in the distant future. If it does, it may be related to a better understanding of dark matter and dark energy. If any ETIs exist, they may be in a position to exploit fundamental knowledge of the Universe that we don’t yet possess.
If they’ve figured out how to construct and use a warp drive, even with all of its seeming impossibilities, their activities might create gravitational waves that our future observatories could detect, even in other galaxies. But for now, it’s all theoretical.
“We caution that the waveforms obtained are likely to be highly specific to the model employed, which has several known theoretical problems, as discussed in the Introduction,” the authors write in their conclusion. “Further work would be required to understand how generic the signatures are and properly characterize their detectability.”
Without a doubt, some curious physicists will continue to work on this.
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