Space News and Discussions

[weatheriscool]

Webb and Hubble telescopes affirm the universe's expansion rate, but the puzzle persists
https://phys.org/news/2024-03-webb-hubb ... verse.html
by Bethany Downer, Ninja Menning, European Space Agency

The rate at which the universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant, is one of the fundamental parameters for understanding the evolution and ultimate fate of the cosmos.

However, a persistent difference, called the Hubble Tension, is seen between the value of the constant measured with a wide range of independent distance indicators and its value predicted from the afterglow of the Big Bang. The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has confirmed that the Hubble Space Telescope's keen eye was right all along, erasing any lingering doubt about Hubble's measurements.

One of the scientific justifications for building the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was to use its observing power to provide an exact value for the expansion rate of the universe. Prior to Hubble's launch in 1990, observations from ground-based telescopes yielded huge uncertainties. Depending on the values deduced for the expansion rate, the universe could be anywhere between 10 and 20 billion years old.

[firestar464]

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-webb-hubb ... verse.html

Webb and Hubble telescopes affirm the universe's expansion rate, but the puzzle persists

[weatheriscool]

Hypersonic rotating detonation engine in sustained test burn
By David Szondy
March 11, 2024


https://newatlas.com/military/rotating- ... on-engine/

A revolutionary alternative to conventional rockets that uses controlled explosions has completed its first long-duration engine test as part of Venus Aerospace's partnership with DARPA to develop a Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine (RDRE).

The big player in the aerospace field since the 1940s has been the chemical rocket engine. These powerhouses are currently the only way to get beyond the Earth's atmosphere and it's a job they do very well, indeed. Liquid-fueled rockets, sometimes aided by their solid counterparts, put the first satellites into orbit and the first astronauts on the Moon. They sent robotic probes to each of the planets with a few moons, asteroids, and comets thrown in for good measure.

[weatheriscool]

SpaceX poised for third launch test of Starship megarocket
https://phys.org/news/2024-03-spacex-po ... ocket.html
by Chandan KHANNA

People gather as SpaceX Starship spacecraft prototype is transported from the launch site ahead of the SpaceX Starship third flight test from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.

SpaceX plans on Thursday to attempt another launch of Starship, the world's most powerful rocket that is vital to NASA's plans for landing astronauts on the moon later this decade—and Elon Musk's hopes of eventually colonizing Mars.

Two previous attempts have ended in spectacular explosions, though that's not necessarily a bad thing: the company has adopted a rapid trial-and-error approach in order to accelerate development, and the strategy has brought success in the past.

Blastoff from the company's launch site in southeast Texas can occur beginning at 7:00 am local time (1200 GMT), after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave its go-ahead on Wednesday.

SpaceX will run a webcast on its website starting thirty minutes earlier.

When the two stages of Starship are combined, the rocket stands 397 feet (121 meters) tall—beating the Statue of Liberty by a comfortable 90 feet.

[weatheriscool]

SpaceX Starship launches successfully, notches new milestones on way around Earth

Source: CNBC

Published Thu, Mar 14 2024 8:45 AM EDT Updated 3 Min Ago

SpaceX launched the third test flight of its Starship rocket on Thursday and reached space, as the company looks to push development of the mammoth vehicle past new milestones.

Elon Musk’s company launched Starship at about 9:25 a.m. ET from its Starbase facility near Boca Chica, Texas.

The rocket has now flown further than previous tests, with the flight expected to take an hour before it ends in an attempted splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX has flown the full Starship rocket system on two tests in the past year, with launches in April and November. Both previous launches had progressive but explosive results: While each of the rockets flew for a few minutes, with the most recent reaching space, both vehicles were ultimately destroyed due to problems.

Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/14/spacex- ... aunch.html

[caltrek]

Explosion Cuts Short Planned Commercial Satellite Launch
by Tetsuya Ishikura
March 13, 2024

Introduction:

(Asahi Shimbun) A massive explosion only seconds after liftoff at 11:01 a.m. on March 13 marked the spectacular failure of the first satellite launch by a private company.

Tokyo-based Space One Co. had planned to place a satellite in orbit with the launch from Space Port Kii in Kushimoto, Wakayama Prefecture, of its first Kairos rocket.

Space One officials held a news conference later that day and explained the explosion was intentionally triggered by a computer that detected problems with the rocket.

However, they added that further analysis of the data would be needed to determine exactly what those problems were.

The liftoff was rescheduled after one set for March 9 had to be postponed because boats had entered waters that had been designated off-limits for the launch.

Read more here: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15197016

[weatheriscool]

China Developing Giant Magnetic Launcher for Hypersonic Space Planes
March 17, 2024 by Brian Wang

China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation’s (CASIC) plans to build a giant magnetic launcher to propel airplanes up to speeds where they can start hypersonic scramjet engines.

CASIC has built a 2000 meter long low-vacuum track high-speed maglev test facility in the industrial heartland of Datong, Shanxi province. This is able to accelerate heavy object to speeds approaching 1,000km/h (620mph)– close to the speed of sound. China wants to launch a hypersonic space plane weighing 50 tonnes and measuring longer than a Boeing 737. It is part of the Tengyun project unveiled in 2016.

In the coming years, the length of the test line will be extended to achieve a maximum operating speed of 5,000km/h (3100 mph).

If the US magnetic launcher uses 121 megajoules to accelerate to a plane to 150 mph then the current CASIC system would need about 2000 megajoules to get a full sized plane to 620 mph. I would expect they are accelerating one ton or less and using about 100 megajoules or less.

Accelerating to five times the speed (3100 mph) would need 25 times more power for the same sized object. This would mean around 50,000 megajoules.

A regular gigawatt reactor would be making a gigajoule each second. However, the power could be stored in massive capacitors or batteries. A nuclear reactor could charge up massive amounts of capacitors for 50 seconds which would then be discharged for the launch.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/03/c ... lanes.html

[firestar464]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... r-BB1iCTcK

NASA's New Horizons Discovered a Large Surprise in The Kuiper Belt

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolo ... r-BB1k4sL1

also:

Physicist Claims Universe Has No Dark Matter And Is 27 Billion Years Old

(Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't JWST or something detect dark matter or something?)

[weatheriscool]

China is building a railgun that can hurl crewed spacecraft into orbit
By David Szondy
March 20, 2024

https://newatlas.com/space/china-railgu ... aft-orbit/
Rockets being passé, China is working on using an electromagnetic railgun to launch crewed spacecraft the size of a Boeing 737, weighing 50 tonnes, into orbit. This remarkably ambitious project is even more ambitious than it seems at first glance.

Call it a railgun, a catapult, or a mass driver, the idea of replacing rockets with an electromagnetic accelerator is a very attractive option. Instead of lifting off on chemical rockets that have to carry fuel and fuel to lift the fuel and fuel to lift the fuel and the additional fuel, it makes more sense to keep as much of the launching system on the ground while leaving the vehicle as light as possible.

The principle behind such a space railgun is simple, but the details are surprisingly complex and the numbers involved very quickly become daunting. If China can carry off using such a system to launch a spaceplane as part of its Tengyun project that began in 2016, it would be one of history's major engineering achievements.

According to the Chinese official media, the plan is to build an electromagnetic launch track that would be able to accelerate a spaceplane to a speed of Mach 1.6 or even as high as Mach 5. Once airborne, the vehicle would then fire its onboard rocket engines and continue to accelerate to orbital velocity.

[Time_Traveller]

Solar eclipse 2024: Millions in North America will view what promises to be a blockbuster

6 hours ago

How lucky can the residents of Carbondale, Illinois, be?

Celestial mechanics says any one spot on the Earth's surface should experience a total solar eclipse only once every 375 years, on average.

The 30,000 residents of the Midwestern city will probably chuckle at that statistic because they are about to witness the Moon block out the Sun's disc for the second time in just seven years.

And what's more, the upcoming 8 April eclipse will be even better than the one they got to see in 2017. The sky will go pitch black for 4 minutes and 9 seconds, nearly double what happened last time.

As many as 200,000 people are expected to flood prime viewing locations in southern Illinois for The Great American Eclipse, Part II. But this will be true, also, all along the eclipse path, from Mexico's Pacific coast to Canada's Atlantic seaboard. The upcoming event is set to be a blockbuster.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68597945

[weatheriscool]

Rocketstar Aneutronic Fusion-enhanced Electric Pulsed Plasma Propulsion Will Be Tested in Orbit
March 23, 2024 by Brian Wang

RocketStar, a US based startup, has successfully demonstrated an electric propulsion unit for spacecraft that uses nuclear fusion-enhanced pulsed plasma. During ground tests the process did create ionizing radiation and improved the base propulsion unit’s thrust by 50%. FireStar Drive markedly
improves performance, utilizing high-speed protons from ionized water vapor. When protons interact with boron nuclei, it\ triggers fusion, producing high-energy carbon that decays into alpha particles, thereby boosting thrust.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/03/r ... orbit.html

[Time_Traveller]

Flight attendant becomes 1st Belarusian woman in space on ISS-bound Soyuz launch

published 2 days ago

Marina Vasilevskaya, who also served as a flight instructor for Belavia Airlines in her home country of Belarus, traded her attendant uniform for a Russian Sokol pressure suit to become the first Belarusian woman to fly into space. On Saturday (March 23), she launched on Russia's Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft with cosmonaut Oleg Novitsky of Roscosmos and NASA astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson on a mission to the International Space Station.

"It's a big honor for me and a big responsibility to be in this unbelievable mission," said Vasilevskaya before heading to the launch pad. "This is our national project. It's such a big honor. I'm so proud to represent our republic."

The three crewmates left Pad 31/6 at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan at 8:36 a.m. EDT (1236 GMT or 4:36 p.m. local time) riding atop a Soyuz-2.1a rocket. It was their second try at launching to space after a low voltage warning from a piece of ground support equipment halted the countdown on Thursday.

Nine minutes into the flight, a small figurine of "Sharik," the black and white puppy from the Soviet-era cartoon "A Kitten Named Woof," began to float while attached to a tether.

The toy, or "zero-g indicator," signaled that Novitsky, Dyson and Vasilevskaya had entered Earth orbit. The Soyuz was now on a trajectory to autonomously dock with the station after circling the planet 34 times. The two spacecraft are scheduled to link together using Russia's Prichal node at 11:09 a.m. EDT (1509 GMT) Monday.

https://www.space.com/soyuz-ms-25-launc ... ce-station

[weatheriscool]

Boeing Is Preparing for the Starliner's First Crewed Spaceflight
Perhaps the $116 billion aerospace giant is hoping this will fix its botched reputation.
By Adrianna Nine March 27, 2024

https://www.extremetech.com/aerospace/b ... paceflight
Amid questions about the safety of its airplanes, Boeing is preparing to launch its first crewed Starliner flight this spring. The capsule is expected to bring veteran astronauts Commander Barry Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams to the International Space Station "no later than May 1." The trip will be the first of six crew rotation missions to the ISS.

Starliner—formally known as the Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100—has traveled a long, bumpy road to get here. In December 2019 following years of development and assembly, Starliner was meant to make its maiden voyage to the ISS in an uncrewed show of safety and stability. But shortly after Lockheed Martin's Atlas V rocket deposited Starliner in Earth's upper atmosphere, the computer on Boeing's capsule made a crucial miscalculation and missed its chance to put Starliner in the space station's orbit.

[Time_Traveller]

NASA prepares to power-down Voyager spacecraft after more than 44 years

Friday 17 June 2022

After more than 44 years of travelling farther from Earth than any man-made objects have before, the Voyager spacecraft are entering their very final phase.

Both of the Voyagers were launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977 - with Voyager 2 actually the first to take off - taking advantage of a rare alignment (once every 176 years) of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to shoot into interstellar space.

They were designed to last five years and study Jupiter and Saturn but remarkably both spacecraft are still functioning despite escaping beyond the hot plasma bubble known as the heliopause that defines the beginning of the edge of our solar system.

It is certain that at some point the plutonium powering the spacecraft will decay beyond what is capable of keeping the probes functional. Some estimate that could be as soon as 2025, while others hope it may be later.

https://news.sky.com/story/nasa-prepare ... s-12635485

More news on this: -

NASA optimistic about resolving Voyager 1 computer problem

March 27, 2024



WASHINGTON — A NASA official says he is optimistic that a problem with the Voyager 1 spacecraft that has kept it from transmitting intelligible data for months can be resolved.

Speaking at a March 20 meeting of the National Academies’ Committee on Solar and Space Physics, Joseph Westlake, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, said it appeared possible to fix the computer problem on the nearly 50-year-old spacecraft that has disrupted operations since last November.

“I feel like we’re on a path now to resolution,” he said. “They’re on the right path and I think we’re going to get to a point where Voyager 1 is going to continue, alive and kicking in space.”

Spacecraft controllers first noticed a problem with the spacecraft in November, when the data transmitted by the spacecraft was unusable. Engineers concluded that the problem was with an onboard computer called the flight data system (FDS), which collects data from the spacecraft’s instruments and other spacecraft telemetry.

Several factors have hampered efforts to correct the problem. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, which means it takes 22.5 hours for signals to travel between Earth and the spacecraft. None of the people who developed the FDS in the early to mid 1970s are available to assist now, so the project has had to turn to documentation to help identify the problem.

https://spacenews.com/nasa-optimistic-a ... r-problem/

[weatheriscool]

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[wjfox]

[weatheriscool]

Engineers Complete the Largest Astronomical Camera Ever Constructed
The 3,200-megapixel camera was built for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

It has taken nearly 20 years, but the massive digital camera for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has been completed. Engineers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have put the finishing touches on the 3,200-megapixel camera. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera will sit at the heart of the telescope and open a new window to the heavens.

https://www.extremetech.com/science/eng ... onstructed

[Time_Traveller]

World first UK prototype could pave the way for constant energy all the time - from space

Friday 5 April 2024 10:00, UK

A company hoping to launch the first solar farm into space has passed a critical milestone with a prototype on Earth.

Oxfordshire-based Space Solar plans to power more than a million homes by the 2030s with mile-wide complex of mirrors and solar panels orbiting 22,000 miles above the planet.

But its super-efficient design for harvesting constant sunlight - called CASSIOPeiA - requires the system to rotate towards the sun, whatever its position, while still sending power to a fixed receiver on the ground.



That's now been shown to work for the first time at Queen's University Belfast, with a wireless beam successfully "steered" across a lab to turn on a light.

Martin Soltau, the company's founder, told Sky News in an exclusive interview: "This is a world first. You can get constant energy all the time.

https://news.sky.com/story/quest-to-pow ... e-13107285