Space Stuff

New Horizons snaps finish buffering: Ultima Thule actually two dust bunnies that got snuggly 4.5 billion years ago
We were wrong about the chicken drumstick, OK?
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Robert said:
Chinese rover pootles about... on the far side of the friggin' MOON

Keep rollin', rollin', rollin'
China continued stoking the fires of space fanbois desperate for an Apollo-style space race as its rover trundled off the Chang'e 4 lander and on to the far side of the Moon.

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Yutu 2 sets off (credit: China National Space Administration)

Chang'e 4 landed on 3 January following a sequence of mostly successful missions since 2007's Chang'e 1 lunar orbiter. It is also the second in the Chang'e series to land on the surface.
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Now I want to see India do it.
 
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Not so sure about this one. I've seen Species.
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Killer superbugs in space... are something astronauts on orbiting science lab don't have to worry about right now
Don't miss ISS's Star Spores: Return of the Fungi
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Space isn’t, for now, turning bacteria on the International Space Station into nasty superbugs hellbent on infecting astronauts, according to a study published on Tuesday.

“There has been a lot of speculation about radiation, microgravity and the lack of ventilation and how that might affect living organisms, including bacteria,” said Erica Hartmann, lead author of a paper on the subject, published in the journal mSystems, and an assistant professor at Northwestern University in the US.

“These are stressful, harsh conditions. Does the environment select for superbugs because they have an advantage? The answer appears to be ‘no’.”
 
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Stainless-steel starship?
"Starship will look like liquid silver."
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The Starship test vehicle, currently under assembly, will look similar to this illustration when finished.

Eleven months ago—just after SpaceX astonished the world by launching and landing its titanic Falcon Heavy rocket while beaming back images of a red Tesla leaving Earth orbit—company founder Elon Musk had already begun to look beyond the moment.

The Falcon Heavy was a big, capable rocket. But it wasn't large enough to fulfill his aspirations of reaching Mars. Neither did the company have a spacecraft capable of landing there. "They really need to be way bigger than that," Musk said of the Falcon Heavy rocket at the time. Moreover, he noted that the launch in early February 2018 had confirmed the company's ability to model rocket launches on computers. "It gives me a lot of faith for our next architecture. It gives me confidence that BFR is really quite workable."

In this case, BFR stood for Big Falcon Rocket. This vehicle has since been renamed "Super Heavy," and it will launch the spacecraft SpaceX is building to land on Mars, take off from Mars, and land back on Earth. The rocket is certainly titanic in size, but the spacecraft it will carry—since branded Starship—is the greater innovation. No nation or company has ever built a single vehicle capable of flying dozens of people into space (especially deep space), landing on distant worlds, and then flying back to Earth.

Since 2016, Musk has shared several different versions of the Starship in presentations. However, we are now starting to see test hardware. During the last two months, observers near the company's site in southern Texas have been taking photos of a silvery test-version of Starship that the company will use for a series of take-off and landing tests this spring. And Musk has been sharing some of these photos (and a lot of details about them) on Twitter.

-EDIT-
Here's a pic of the assembled test hopper:
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Hubble loses best camera but discovers brightest ever quasar
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The Hubble space telescope is operating without its best camera after a hardware problem forced it to shut down.

Nasa said the camera stopped working on Tuesday but three other science instruments were still operating and able to continue celestial observations.

The news came as it emerged that Hubble has discovered the brightest quasar ever seen in the early universe, with the brightness of about 600 trillion suns.
The newly discovered quasar, catalogued as J043947.08+163415.7, is so old that the light from it started its journey when the universe was only about a billion years old. There are hopes it could provide an insight into the birth of galaxies.
 
adz said:
Fingers crossed they can fix it.
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Indeed.
To be fair, they seem pretty confident:
This is the first time the camera has acted up like this, said Cheryl Gundy, a spokeswoman with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which handles science operations for the telescope.

“Nasa is trying to pull together the team to try to diagnose the issue,” Gundy said.

“We would like to have Hubble back up and working as quickly as possible, and Nasa is making that happen,” even with the partial government shutdown, she said.
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Chang'e-4: China Moon probes take snaps of each other
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An image of the rover taken with the lander's terrain camera (TCAM)

A Chinese rover and lander have taken images of each other on the Moon's surface.

The Chinese space agency says the spacecraft are in good working order after touching down on the lunar far side on 3 January.
Also released are new panoramic images of the landing site, along with video of the vehicles touching down.
The rover and lander are carrying instruments to analyse the unexplored region's geology.
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A picture of the lander taken by the rover's panoramic camera (PCAM)

The rover has just awoken from a period on "standby".

Controllers placed it in this mode shortly after the touchdown as a precaution against high temperatures, as the Sun rose to its highest point over the landing site.

Those temperatures were expected to reach around 200C. But the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (CLEP) said that as of the morning of 11 January, the Yutu 2 rover, its lander and the relay satellite were all in a "stable condition".

The Chang'e-4 mission was the first such attempt to touch down on the side of the Moon that we don't see.
 
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China's Moon mission sees first seeds sprout
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Cotton sprouts, seen to the left, on board the Moon lander

Seeds taken up to the Moon by China's Chang'e-4 mission have sprouted, says China National Space Administration.

It marks the first time any biological matter has grown on the Moon, and is being seen as a significant step towards long-term space exploration.
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Some have raised the question of whether the experiment risks "contaminating" the Moon, but scientists generally think this is of little concern. And it's worth reiterating that there are already nearly 100 bags of human waste on the Moon left behind by the Apollo astronauts.
 
System has four stars and a planet-forming disk oriented vertically
Orbital mechanics sometimes produces unusual results.
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Artist's conception of the B binary in the quad-star system HD 98000.

Models and observations indicate that both stars and planets form as a cloud of material collapses into a disk. If the process proceeds in an orderly manner, then the planets will all form from the same disk and thus orbit in the same plane. And—because material from the same disk will fall into the star, bringing its momentum with it—the star will rotate with its equator along the same plane. That should lead to a tidy system with the equator of the star lined up with the plane of any planets orbiting it.

Except when it doesn't. Anything that upsets the even inflow of material—from clumping in disk to a passing star—can upset this process. We've seen the results: planet-forming disks and planetary orbits that don't line up with a star's equator.

Now, researchers are reporting a complex, four-star system where a planet-forming disk is lined up perpendicular to the stars so that it orbits over their poles.
 
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Friday fun fact: If Stegosauruses had space telescopes, they wouldn't have seen any rings around Saturn
Bet you were expecting a rude ring pun here? Well, not today
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Beautiful ... An artist's impression of Saturn (Not drawn by dinosaur. They didn't have telescopes)

Saturn’s characteristic rings may only be as old as 100 million years, and thus formed during a time when dinosaurs still roamed on Earth.

Although NASA’s historic Cassini mission to Saturn is over, astrophysicists are still discovering new facts about the gas giant from the amassed data, including the history of the planet's rings. A paper published in Science this week reveals that Saturn’s rings could be as young as 10 million years old and are disappearing relatively quickly.

As the Cassini spacecraft dipped in between Saturn and its rings, its movements were influenced by the planet’s gravity. The resulting motion of the probe suggested Saturn’s gravitational field was much higher than expected, and this field is affected by how fast its internal matter spins, so there was some process on the planet that the scientists failed to account for. And it turned out to be pretty impressive winds.

“We constructed models of the gravitational fields, and none of those models matched the data. Now, we know it’s from the winds that are 9,000 kilometers deep,” Burkhard Militzer, co-author of the paper and an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told The Register.

Crucially, these gravity measurements also helped them calculate the total mass of Saturn’s rings. At about 1.54 x 1019 kilograms, they’re less than 20,000 times the mass of Mercury, the smallest planet in the Solar System. The mass of the rings also helped the researchers to estimate their age
 
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Relativity Space to launch from historic Florida site
A company that aspires to 3D print almost the entirety of its rockets has reached an agreement with the US Air Force to launch from historic facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Relativity Space said Thursday it has a multiyear contract to build and operate its own rocket launch facilities at Launch Complex 16.

Under terms of the competitively awarded agreement, the site will officially be a “multiuser” facility for five years. However, if Relativity meets certain milestones and begins regularly launching rockets, it will be able to convert the agreement into a 20-year exclusive right to use the launch site.
 
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I'd love to know the cost, but I have a feeling it won't be within my means...
 
NASA's Opportunity rover celebrates 15 years on Mars – by staying as dead as a doornail
Still, not bad for hardware that was supposed to last 90 days
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Opportunity rocks ... NASA's Mars rover in happier times

NASA scientists this week celebrated the fact their robot buddy Opportunity has spent the past fifteen years on Mars.

The six-wheeled bot was booted into space on July 7, 2003, and reached its final destination in less than a year, on January 24, 2004. A day later, it beamed its first signal back to Earth.

Designed to operate for 90 Martian days, and cover just over 1,000 metres on Mars, Opportunity has exceeded expectations, trundling at least 45 kilometres (28 miles) for more than a decade.
 
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