Space Stuff

Internally, NASA believes Boeing ahead of SpaceX in commercial crew
Both of the companies are well behind schedule, forcing the agency to scramble.
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An artist's view of the Starliner spacecraft en route to the International Space Station.

One of the biggest rivalries in the modern aerospace industry is between Boeing and SpaceX. Despite their radically different cultures, the aerospace giant and the smaller upstart compete for many different kinds of contracts, and perhaps nowhere has the competition been more keen than for NASA funds.

In 2014, both Boeing and SpaceX received multibillion awards (Boeing asked for, and got, 50 percent more funding for the same task) to finalize development of spacecraft to carry astronauts to the International Space Station as part of the commercial crew program. Since then, both companies have been locked in a race to the launchpad, not just to free NASA from its reliance on Russia to reach space but also for the considerable esteem that will accompany becoming the first private company in the world to fly humans into orbit.

A narrow margin
Although both Boeing and SpaceX have established various launch dates—first in 2017, and now slipped to 2018 and 2019—NASA hasn't publicly tipped its hand on which company is actually ahead in the race. Now, however, a new report from the US Government Accountability Office has provided a window into NASA's internal thinking on commercial crew launch dates.

The data is several months old, coming from an April 2018 analysis. But it's insightful all the same. The report shows when NASA believes Boeing and SpaceX will each have completed a single non-crewed test flight, a test flight with crew, and then undergo a certification process to become ready for operational flights. This is known as the "certification milestone."

FURTHER READING
SpaceX and Boeing spacecraft may not become operational until 2020
Based on NASA's "schedule risk analysis" from April, the agency estimates that Boeing will reach this milestone sometime between May 1, 2019, and August 30, 2020. For SpaceX, the estimated range is August 1, 2019, and November 30, 2020. The analysis' average certification date was December, 2019, for Boeing and January, 2020, for SpaceX.
 
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First Confirmed Image of Newborn Planet

Our understanding of planet formation is often shrouded in theoretical models. But now, scientists have directly observed a new planet in the gaseous disk around a young star about 370 light-years from Earth.
 
By Jove! Astroboffins spot 12 new spanking moons around Jupiter
Now it has 79 satellites, and one is a tiny 'oddball'
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Jupiter already had the most moons in the Solar System, but now scientists have discovered twelve new ones bringing the total up to 79.

They were first spotted last year by a team of astronomers originally on the hunt for the elusive Planet Nine, a hypothetical body speculated to exist beyond Neptune. Unfortunately, they couldn’t find the hypothesized planet using the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American in Chile, but they did manage to unearth a treasure trove of new satellites around our largest planet.

“Jupiter just happened to be in the sky near the search fields where we were looking for extremely distant Solar System objects, so we were serendipitously able to look for new moons around Jupiter while at the same time looking for planets at the fringes of our Solar System,” said Scott Sheppard, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science, a private, nonprofit organisation based in Washington, D.C.

The twelve moons have been broadly clustered into three groups. Nine of them have retrograde orbits, going in the opposite direction to Jupiter’s spin. Two of them go round in a prograde motion, in the same direction to Jupiter’s spin. And one of them has a very strange trip around the planet, leading it to be dubbed an “oddball”.
 
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Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
Researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on Mars. What they believe to be a lake sits beneath the Red Planet's south polar ice cap, and is about 20km across. Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day.

Lake beds like those explored by Nasa's Curiosity rover show water was present on the surface of Mars in the past.
However, the planet's climate has since cooled due to its thin atmosphere, leaving most of its water locked up in ice.
The discovery was made using Marsis, a radar instrument on board the Mars Express orbiter.
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The proposed lake sits beneath ice near the south pole of Mars

"It's probably not a very large lake," says Prof Roberto Orosei from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, who led the study.
Marsis wasn't able to determine how deep the layer of water might be, but the research team estimate that it is a minimum of one metre.
"This really qualifies this as a body of water. A lake, not some kind of meltwater filling some space between rock and ice, as happens in certain glaciers on Earth," Prof Orosei added.
 
Earth's satellite may have been habitable billions of years ago
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The Moon may not have been as desolate as it is today – and could have supported life on its surface after its formation some four billion years ago.

This revelation comes just days after the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin setting foot on the Moon, a first for humankind, on July 20, 1969.

A paper published in Astrobiology on Monday described two periods in the history of Earth's natural satellite, during which the conditions may have been ripe for life to develop. The first window of opportunity was shortly after it was forged from a gigantic impact between Theia, an early planet, and Earth 4.5 billion years ago, and the second window was around 3.5 billion years ago.

The debris disk from which the Moon formed would have retained some water and a small concentration of volatiles. After the accretion process, where the disk grows in mass, the Moon is expected to have been molten with flowing oceans of magma.

These oceans would have spewed out large volumes of hot gassy volatiles, including water vapour. Liquid pools of water and atmospheres could have formed during these fertile periods.

'Transiently habitable'
"If liquid water and a significant atmosphere were present on the early Moon for long periods of time, we think the lunar surface would have been at least transiently habitable," said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, coauthor of the paper and a professor at Washington State University in the US.
 
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All that dust on Mars is coming from one weird giant alien structure
Impress pals at the pub by telling them about the creepy-sounding Medusae Fossae
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Have you ever wondered where Mars got all that striking iron-rich rust-colored dust from?

Weirdly enough, it appears it is mostly drawn from a formation on its surface called the Medusae Fossae, a single geological object that is slowly crumbling and scattering debris all over the Red Planet.

The formation stretches for about a thousand kilometres across the equator. A group of scientists analyzed data collected from NASA's Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and found that the structure is abundant with sulfur and chlorine, and its material is the best chemical match for the dust on the Martian surface.

The results of this study were published in Nature Communications on Tuesday.
 
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Four huge rockets are due to debut in 2020—will any make it?
Ariane 6, Space Launch System, New Glenn, and Vulcan all have 2020 launch dates.
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The Falcon Heavy is just the beginning of big rocket debuts ...
Rocket enthusiasts are lucky to see the debut of a handful of large, powerful rockets per decade. For example, during the last 10 years, just three rockets with a capacity of 25 tons or more to low-Earth orbit have made their debuts: the Russian Angara A5 flew in 2014, the Chinese Long March 5 in 2016, and the SpaceX Falcon Heavy earlier this year.

However, there is now a chance that up to four large and powerful rockets will make their debuts during a single year, as four boosters have maiden launches scheduled for 2020. Of course, there is also a chance that none of them will fly. Delays seem inevitable in the launch industry, especially with such large and in some ways unprecedented boosters. But given the uncertainty and the unprecedented potential, we thought it might be fun to assess whether any or all of them might make it.
 
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Robert said:
Liquid water 'lake' revealed on Mars
Researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on Mars. What they believe to be a lake sits beneath the Red Planet's south polar ice cap, and is about 20km across. Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day.

Lake beds like those explored by Nasa's Curiosity rover show water was present on the surface of Mars in the past.
However, the planet's climate has since cooled due to its thin atmosphere, leaving most of its water locked up in ice.
The discovery was made using Marsis, a radar instrument on board the Mars Express orbiter.
_102684264_moc2_msss_sp_cap_50.jpg

The proposed lake sits beneath ice near the south pole of Mars

"It's probably not a very large lake," says Prof Roberto Orosei from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, who led the study.
Marsis wasn't able to determine how deep the layer of water might be, but the research team estimate that it is a minimum of one metre.
"This really qualifies this as a body of water. A lake, not some kind of meltwater filling some space between rock and ice, as happens in certain glaciers on Earth," Prof Orosei added.
Click to expand...
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I still think calling this a spaceship is a stretch but nonetheless, I hope it eventually qualifies:
Virgin’s Unity spaceship sets a new altitude record of 52 kilometers
"The views of Earth from the black sky were magnificent.”

Virgin Galactic has been saying for some time that it will reach outer space this year, and on Thursday it came the closest it has ever gotten. During the third powered flight of the VSS Unityvehicle, the spacecraft reached an altitude of 52km (32.3 miles), just over halfway toward the Kármán line, which generally is regarded as the beginning of space. This is the first time that Virgin Galactic has flown into the mesosphere.

The company also released a few other details about the flight, noting that the spacecraft was released from its carrier aircraft at 14.2km, that its engine burned for 42 seconds, and that the vehicle reached a maximum speed of Mach 2.7. Pilots Dave Mackay and Mike “Sooch” Masucci flew the Unity vehicle on Wednesday morning from the Mojave Air & Space Port.

“It was a thrill from start to finish," Mackay said after the flight in a company news release. "Unity’s rocket motor performed magnificently again, and Sooch pulled off a smooth landing. This was a new altitude record for both of us in the cockpit, not to mention our mannequin in the back, and the views of Earth from the black sky were magnificent.”
 
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