Daily Archives: June 22, 2022

On June 8th, NASA revealed that its new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, is now sporting a small dimple in one of its primary mirrors after getting pelted by a larger-than-expected micrometeoroid out in deep space. The news came as a bit of a shock since the impact happened just five months into the telescopes space tenure but such strikes are simply an inevitable aspect of space travel, and more thwacks are certainly on their way.

Despite what its name implies, space isnt exactly empty. Within our Solar System, tiny bits of space dust are zooming through the regions between our planets at whopping speeds that can reach up to tens of thousands of miles per hour. These micrometeoroids, no larger than a grain of sand, are often little pieces of asteroids or comets that have broken away and are now orbiting around the Sun. And theyre everywhere. A rough estimate of small meteoroids in the inner Solar System puts their combined total mass at about 55 trillion tons (if they were all combined into one rock, itd be about the size of a small island).

That means that if you send a spacecraft into deep space, your hardware is certain to get hit by one of these little bits of space rock at some point. Knowing this, spacecraft engineers will construct their vehicles with certain protections to shield against micrometeoroid strikes. Theyll often incorporate something called Whipple shielding, a special multi-layer barrier. If the shield is hit by a micrometeoroid, the particle will pass through the first layer and fragment even further, so the second layer is hit by even smaller particles. Such shielding is usually used around sensitive components of spacecraft for extra protection.

But with NASAs James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, its trickier. The telescopes gold-coated mirrors must be exposed to the space environment in order to properly gather light from the distant Universe. And while these mirrors were built to withstand some impacts, they are more or less sitting ducks for larger micrometeoroid strikes, like the one that hit JWST in May. Though the micrometeoroid was still smaller than a grain of sand, it was larger than what NASA anticipated enough to cause damage to one of the mirrors.

Spacecraft operators model the micrometeoroid population out in space to get a better understanding of how often a spacecraft might get hit in any given part of the Solar System and what size particles might be thwacking their hardware. But even then, its not a foolproof system. Its all probability, David Malaspina, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado focusing on cosmic dust impacts on spacecraft, tells The Verge. You can only say, I have this chance of getting hit by this sized particle. But whether or not you ever do, thats up to chance.

Micrometeoroids have a wide range of origin stories. They can be the leftover products of high-speed collisions in space, which pulverize space rocks into minuscule pieces. Asteroids and comets also get bombarded over time by space particles and photons from the Sun, causing tiny pieces to break off. An asteroid can also get too close to a large planet like Jupiter, where the strong gravitational pull wrenches off pieces of the rock. Or an object can get too close to the Sun and get too hot, causing the rock to expand and break apart into pieces. There are even interstellar micrometeoroids that are just passing through our Solar System from more distant cosmic neighborhoods.

How fast these particles move depends on what region of space theyre in and the path they take around our star, averaging about 45,000 miles per hour, or 20 kilometers a second. Whether or not theyll run into your spacecraft also depends on where your vehicle lives in space and how fast its moving. For instance, NASAs Parker Solar Probe is the closest human-made object to the Sun at the moment, moving at a top speed of more than 400,000 miles per hour. It gets down to the 4-yard line, compared to Earth being all the way at one end zone, says Malaspina, who has focused on studying micrometeoroid impacts on Parker Solar Probe. Its also moving through the densest part of a region called the zodiacal cloud, a thick disk of space particles that permeates our Solar System. So the Parker Solar Probe is getting sandblasted more frequently than JWST and its hitting these particles at incredibly high speeds than the telescope would get hit.

The Parker Solar Probe is giving us a better understanding of micrometeoroids around the Sun, but we have a pretty good understanding of the population around Earth, too. Whenever a micrometeoroid hits the upper atmosphere around our planet, it burns up and creates meteoric smoke fine smoke particles that can be measured. The amount of this smoke can tell us how much dust is hitting Earth over time. Additionally, there have been experiments on the International Space Station, where materials have been mounted on the outside of the orbiting lab to see how often theyre bombarded.

While JWST lives roughly 1 million miles from Earth, thats still relatively close by. Scientists also have an idea of whats out there based on other missions sent to a similar orbit as JWST. And most of the stuff that hits the telescope isnt that big of a deal. Spacecraft get hit by little ones all the time, Malaspina says. By little, I mean fractions of a micron much, much, much smaller than a human hair. And for the most part, spacecraft dont even notice those. In fact, JWST was already hit by small micrometeoroids four times before getting hit by the larger micrometeoroid in May.

NASA did model the micrometeoroid environment before JWST launched, but in light of the recent impact, the agency has convened a new team to refine their models and better predict what might happen to the telescope after future impacts. Current micrometeoroid modeling will try to predict things like how debris spreads through an orbit if an asteroid or comet breaks apart. That kind of debris is more dynamic, Malaspina says, making it harder to predict.

At the end of the day, though, prediction will simply give you more knowledge about when a spacecraft might get hit by a large speck of dust. One-off impacts like this are simply inevitable. JWST will continue to get blasted over time, but it was an eventuality that NASA was always prepared for. You just have to live with the probability that you will be hit eventually by some sized dust particle, and you just do the best you can with the engineering, says Malaspina.

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Why getting hit by space dust is an unavoidable aspect of space travel - The Verge

This article was originally published atThe Conversation. (opens in new tab)The publication contributed the article to Space.com'sExpert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Sam Baron (opens in new tab), Associate professor, Australian Catholic University

At the beginning of the new Disney Pixar film, "Lightyear," Buzz Lightyear gets stranded on a dangerous faraway planet with his commanding officer and crew.

Their only hope of getting off the planet is to test a special fuel. To do that, Buzz has to fly into space and repeatedly try to jump to hyper-speed. But each attempt he makes comes with a terrible cost.

Every time Buzz takes off for a four-minute test flight into space, he lands back on the planet to find many years have passed. The people Buzz cares most about fall in love, have kids and even grandkids. Time becomes his biggest enemy.

What's going on? Is this just science fiction, or could what happened to Buzz actually happen?

Related: NASA channeled its inner Buzz Lightyear with this wild Z-1 spacesuit concept

Buzz is experiencing a real phenomenon known as time dilation. Time dilation is a prediction of one of the most famous scientific theories ever developed: Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

Prior to relativity, the best theory of motion we had was Isaac Newton's mechanics.

Newton's theory was incredibly powerful, providing stunning predictions of the motion of the planets in our solar system.

In Newton's theory, time is like a single giant clock that ticks away the seconds in the same way for everyone. No matter where you are in the universe, the master clock will display the same time.

Read more:Curious Kids: is time travel possible for humans? (opens in new tab)

Einstein's theory of relativity shattered the master clock into many clocks one for each person and object in motion. In Einstein's picture of the universe, everyone carries their own clock with them.

One consequence of this is there is no guarantee the clocks will tick at the same rate. In fact, many clocks will tick at different rates.

Even worse, the faster you travel relative to someone else, the slower your clock will tick compared to theirs.

This means if you travel very fast in a spaceship as Buzz does a few minutes might pass for you, but years might pass for someone on the planet you left behind.

In a sense, time dilation can be thought of as a kind of time travel. It provides a way to jump into someone else's future.

This is what Buzz does: he jumps into the future of his friends left on the planet below.

Unfortunately, there is no way to use time dilation to travel backwards in time, into the past (as one important character talks about later in the film).

It's also not possible to use time dilation to travel into your own future.

That means there's no known way for you to travel into the future and meet your older self, simply by going really fast.

Time dilation might seem like science fiction, but in fact it is a measurable phenomenon. Indeed, scientists have conducted a number of experiments to confirm that clocks tick at different rates, depending on how they are moving.

For example, astronauts on theInternational Space Stationare traveling atvery high speedscompared with their friends and family on Earth. (You can watch the space station pass overhead if you knowwhen to look up.)

This means those astronauts are aging at aslightly slower rate. Indeed, US astronaut Buzz Aldrin, from whom Buzz in Lightyear gets his name, would have experienced a tiny bit of time dilation during his trip to the moon in the 1960s.

Dont worry, though, the astronauts on the International Space Stationwont feel or notice (opens in new tab)any time dilation. It's nothing like the extreme time jumps seen in Lightyear.

Aldrin was able to return safely to his family, and the astronauts up in space now will too.

Clearly, time dilation could have a serious cost. But it's not all bad news. Time dilation could one day help us travel to the stars.

The universe is a massive place. The nearest star is40,208,000,000,000 km away (opens in new tab). Getting there is like traveling around the world one billion times. Traveling at an ordinary speed, no one would ever survive long enough to make the trip.

Time dilation, however, is also accompanied by another phenomenon: length contraction. When one travels very fast toward an object, the distance between your spaceship and that object will appear to be contracted.

Very roughly, at high speeds, everything is closer together. This means that for someone traveling at a high speed, they could make it to the nearest star in a matter of days.

But time dilation would still be in effect. Your clock would slow relative to the clock of someone on Earth. So, you could make a round trip to the nearest star in a few days, but by the time you arrived home, everyone you know would be gone.

That is both the promise, and the tragedy, of interstellar travel.

This article is republished fromThe Conversation (opens in new tab)under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article (opens in new tab).

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates and become part of the discussion on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

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In the new Disney Pixar movie Lightyear, time gets bendy. Is time travel real, or just science fiction? - Space.com

Katrin Fidencio, San Diego, USA

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The historic deeds of Jessica Meir:

NASA astronaut and marine biologist Jessica Meir went down in history when she was the first Swedish woman to be sent on a mission into space on September 25, 2019.

There she spent 205 days and complete

d 3,280 revolutions around the earth, which corresponds to a journey of about 139,851,994 kilometers. She conducted important research during space travel, including how heart tissue behaves in microgravity compared to on Earth. Jessica Meir also became historic when she and her colleague Christina Koch carried out the first space walk in history where only women participated, in space and in the control room on the ground.

The Swedish-American astronaut Jessica Meir, whose mother comes from Vsters, has both American and Swedish citizenship. She grew up with Swedish traditions, everything from Lucia celebrations to saffron buns, and dancing around a midsummer pole with a folk costume, for example, was a must while growing up. Already at the age of five, she began to dream of becoming an astronaut. When she was given first grade as a school assignment to draw what she wanted to be as an adult, she made a drawing of herself as an astronaut on the surface of the moon. Maybe the dream can come true?

For now, Jessica Meir once again has the opportunity to become historic. She is one of 18 selected astronauts for the American lunar program Artemis, which launches this summer, and can thus become the first woman in the world on the moon. That Jessica Meir is one of the candidates is not surprising. She has extensive experience of staying and conducting experiments in space. She also has a solid education a doctorate in marine biology, a masters degree in space studies and a bachelors degree in biology.

Jessica Meir will travel around Sweden for five days in June to lecture and meet the general public, researchers, politicians and students. Do you live near Stockholm, Helsingborg, Vsters, Ume or Gothenburg?

Then come and listen to one of the open lectures that Jessica Meir holds. It is completely free but requires advance booking so that everyone can fit in the halls. We can promise that it will be an exciting experience where Jessica Meir talks about life and research on board the space station ISS and the dream of becoming the first woman on the moon.(Jessica Meir at the moment is in Sweden and is scheduled to make lectures at different places in her native country): Ed. Upadhyaya.

Congratulations Jessica Meir: telegraphnepal.com

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US Astronaut Jessica Meir revolves 3, 280 times around the Earth Telegraph Nepal - Telegraphnepal.com

On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride was onboard the space shuttle Challenger for the STS-7 mission, thereby becoming the first American woman to go into space. Apart from making two space flights, Ride championed the cause of science education for children. A.S.Ganesh tells you more about Ride, an inspiration and role model for generations

On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride was onboard the space shuttle Challenger for the STS-7 mission, thereby becoming the first American woman to go into space. Apart from making two space flights, Ride championed the cause of science education for children. A.S.Ganesh tells you more about Ride, an inspiration and role model for generations

The first decades of space exploration was largely dominated by two countries the U.S. and the Soviet Union. This period is even referred to as the Space Race as the two Cold War adversaries pitted themselves against each other to achieve superior spaceflight capabilities.

While the two countries were neck and neck in most aspects, the Soviets sent a woman to space much before the U.S. Even though Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space in June 1963, it was another 20 years before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.

Ride was the older of two daughters born to Carol Joyce Ride and Dale Ride. Even though her mother was a counsellor and her father a professor of political science, Ride credits them for fostering her interest in science by enabling her to explore from a very young age.

An athletic teenager, Ride loved sports such as tennis, running, volleyball, and softball. In fact, she attended Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles on a partial tennis scholarship. She even tried her luck in professional tennis, before returning to California to attend Stanford University.

By 1973, Ride not only had a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics, but had also obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. She got her Master of Science degree in 1975 and obtained her Ph.D. in Physics by 1978.

Having restricted astronaut qualification to men for decades, NASA expanded astronaut selection with the advent of the space shuttle from only pilots to engineers and scientists, opening the doorway for women finally. Having seen an ad in a newspaper inviting women to apply for the astronaut programme, Ride decided to give it a shot.

Out of more than 8,000 applications, Ride became one of six women who were chosen as an astronaut candidate in January 1978. Spaceflight training began soon after and it included parachute jumping, water survival, weightlessness, radio communications, and navigation, among others. She was also involved in developing the robot arm used to deploy and retrieve satellites.

Ride served as part of the ground-support crew for STS-2 and STS-3 missions in November 1981 and March 1982. In April 1982, NASA announced that Ride would be part of the STS-7 crew, serving as a mission specialist in a five-member crew.

On June 18, 1983, Ride became the first American woman in space. By the time the STS-7 mission was completed and the space shuttle Challenger returned to Earth on June 24, they had launched communications satellites for Canada and Indonesia. As an expert in the use of the shuttles robotic arm, Ride also helped deploy and retrieve a satellite in space using the robot arm.

Ride monitoring control panels from the pilots chair on a space shuttle flight deck in June 1983.| Photo Credit: Uncredited

Ride created history once again when she became the first American woman to travel to space a second time as part of the STS-41G in October 1984. During this nine-day mission, Ride employed the shuttles robotic arm to remove ice from the shuttles exterior and to also readjust a radar antenna. There could have even been a third, as she was supposed to join STS-61M, but that mission was cancelled following the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Even after her days of space travel were over, Ride was actively involved in influencing the space programme. When accident investigation boards were set up in response to two shuttle tragedies Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 Ride was a part of them both.

Having returned to academia, Ride believed that it was important to encourage students, especially girls, to pursue a career in science. With this objective, she co-founded a non-profit organisation called Sally Ride Science to inspire young women. She even wrote a number of science-related books for children, including To Space and Back and Exploring our Solar System.

Following a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer, Ride died in 2012. In her life of 61 years, Ride not only rode to space, but also blazed a trail for women and men to follow.

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Ride rides into the space - The Hindu

By Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer

For more than six decades, a small group of scientists has been trying to pick up radio transmissions from other planetary systems, motivated by the fact that doing so would demonstrate that someone intelligent is out there. This effort, known as SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence), is straightforward and technically fairly straightforward, as it doesnt require interstellar travel for either the aliens or the Earthlings. Its a strictly passive endeavor using big antennas feeding highly sensitive receivers that can sniff out signals over a broad range of the radio dial.

But some researchers believe we should be taking a more active role in probing nearby space. They argue we should prod the aliens with signals of our own, inviting them to respond; an exercise known as active SETI. Rather than hope that the extraterrestrials have launched signals our way, we could knock on their door and get their attention.

In practice this amounts to sequentially aiming a powerful radio transmitter at one star system after another while transmitting a friendly message that, one hopes, will trigger a similarly friendly response.

This sounds straightforward, but there are some decisions to be made. To begin with, how do we encode the message in a way that space aliens, whose English abilities are surely sub-par, will understand. In addition, what information should we transmit? Shakespeares collected works? The Harvard five-foot shelf?

Recently, a new addition to the art of cosmic composition has appeared. Its the work of a global team of researchers led by Jonathan Jiang of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Like many of its predecessors, the new communication scheme makes a call back to the short pictogram transmitted from the Arecibo, Puerto Rico radio telescope in 1974. Mathematics, physics, astronomy, and biology are the touchstones for these pictograms all subjects that are presumed to be required coursework for extraterrestrials. We wont share a common language with the aliens, but we can certainly presume a shared familiarity with science and math.

However, the idea of trying to initiate contact is not looked upon kindly by some people in the research community, who see the possibility of a calamitous outcome to betraying our existence to unknown beings. Its been likened to shouting in a dark forest. The potential consequences could be dire, so we mustnt take chances. We should keep our heads down.

Thats a popular point of view, one that was even endorsed by Stephen Hawking. But I dont agree. Laying low might seem like cheap insurance against catastrophe, but thats not the way I see it.

I believe that the costs of laying low would be substantial. After all, Homo sapiens might be around for a long time, and insisting that we never, ever point a powerful radio transmitter skyward could prove to be a weighty albatross burdening our descendants.

But remember that we can only be threatened by species that have the means to either come here or send their weaponry our way. Either option demands a degree of technical sophistication thats far beyond our own. But if theyre that advanced, then they can be presumed to have large antennas and sensitive radio receiving equipment, and to have had such technologies for a while. That means that irrespective of their personal natures, they can detect the transmissions weve already sent into space: The television, radio, and radar signals weve been lofting skyward since World War II.

In other words, its entirely too late to worry about giving away our position. Thats been done. Additionally, if we were to accede to the alarmist position that strong transmissions to the sky should somehow be forbidden, what happens when we establish colonies or waystations elsewhere in our solar system? Do we set limits on any transmissions to these outposts because of the inevitable spill radiation that would continue into deep space? And what about the use of radar for establishing the orbits of long-period comets as a matter of defense against the type of deadly impact that doomed the dinosaurs? Do we give that up too?

The paper from Jiang et al. suggests yet another scheme for sending an informative postcard to other Milky Way inhabitants. The public reaction to this work has been modest, even if some of the graphics which portrayed nude humans were not. Some people seem to think that the real issue with active SETI is the impropriety of sending images of unclothed human bodies into space. These guardians of terrestrial decorum seem less concerned with whether doing so might be a suicidal move for life on Earth than with keeping aliens from seeing what we look like underneath our clothes. From my point of view, both worries are wacky.

Originally appeared at

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/chinas-possible-alien-satellite-signal-highlights-extraterrestrial-com-rcna33602

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Earth Calling the Cosmos - SETI Institute

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) Inspiration4 Commander and Shift4 Founder and CEO Jared Isaacman announced a $10 million donation to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center to build a new Space Camp facility.

The multimillion-dollar gift will help build a 40,000-square foot, hanger-style building.

Space Camp may be located in Huntsville, Alabama, but its an asset for the entire nation, Isaacman said. There are things here you will not find at school, you will not find at your local museum, your computer, your iPad, or your virtual reality headset will never be able to provide.

The building is planned to bring several of Space Camp and Aviation Challenges immersive activities under one roof. The plans include space and aviation simulators, an indoor pool, a netted drone space, classrooms and a challenge course for future trainees.

The announcement was made on Space Camps current mission training floor during their 40th-anniversary celebration. While the U.S. Space and Rocket Center opened its doors in 1970, Space Camp was founded in 1982.

The Rocket Center is in the final stages of selecting a site for the new building and an architectural firm for the design. There was no set timetable for the construction process in the announcement.

Isaacman will also be donating an L-39 Black Diamond plane to be displayed at the new facility when it is finished.

The Inspiration4 mission was the first all-civilian crew to go to space. They raised almost $250 million for St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital during a fundraiser before their flight on September 15, 2021, aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule. The four-person crew made a visit to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center before their flight to meet with campers and talk about their mission.

Isaacman said the Inspiration4 mission was a big step forward for space travel, and he encourages others to support the future of U.S. space exploration.

We always said if we got this right, it would open the door for so many exciting missions to follow, and thats exactly whats going to happen, Isaacman said. What youre seeing at Space Camp is a lot of young minds that will some day go on those missions.

Isaacman went to Aviation Challenge when he was 12 years old and his fellow crewman Chris Sembroski previously worked as a Space Camp counselor.

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Space Camp receives $10M donation for new Inspiration4 Training Center - WHNT News 19