This week, sky watchers will be treated to the last full moon of the year. The Wolf Moon will become officially full late Tuesday night, but will continue to look like a full moon through Thursday.
This is actually the 13th full moon of the year. Wait, what? Twelve months and 13 full moons - that’s so 2020. October’s lunar cycle pushed us toward this, with two full moons that month, one rising on Oct. 1 and the other on Halloween.
“By season, as the first full Moon of winter, the Algonquin tribes of what is now the northern and eastern United States named this the Wolf Moon, from the packs of wolves that howled hungrily outside the villages amid the cold and deep snows of winter,” he said.
Other names for it include the Ice Moon, the Old Moon or, seasonally, the Moon After Yule.
“Europeans called this the Moon after Yule, a three-day winter solstice festival in pre-Christian Europe. In the 10th century, King Haakon I associated Yule with Christmas as part of the Christianization of Norway, and this association has spread throughout the countries that follow European traditions.”
Because it’s the full moon closest to our recent Winter Solstice on Dec. 21, this week’s moon is also known as the Long Night Moon, marking the time of year when we have our shortest days and our longest and darkest nights.
“The moon will be in the sky for a total of 15 hours 27 minutes, with 14 hours 31 minutes of this when the sun is down, making Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning, Dec. 29 to 30, 2020, the longest full Moon night of the year,” he said.
In his blog, Johnston does his calculations from NASA’s Washington D.C. office, but it’s roughly the same for Michigan.
This week’s full moon is also the last full moon of the decade. Think we closed out the decade in 2019? Calendar purists say no, that this New Year’s Eve is the final party for the decade and Jan. 1, 2021, marks the beginning of the next decade, according to EarthSky.
“Although it’s somewhat arbitrary, most people regarded the full moon of Dec. 12, 2019, as the last full moon of the decade (2010 to 2019). Purists insist, however, that the full moon of Dec. 30, 2020, counts as the last full moon of the decade, and that 2020 - not 2019 - ends the second decade of the 21st century (2001 to 2100).”
WASHINGTON — The White House released a national strategy for planetary protection Dec. 30, outlining new assessments to prevent terrestrial contamination of other worlds and vice versa.
The National Strategy for Planetary Protection, developed by an interagency working group led by the National Space Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), outlines work to be done over the next year to update planetary protection policies, considering both scientific advances as well as growing private capabilities in space exploration.
The strategy is designed to implement a portion of the updated National Space Policy, released Dec. 9, that calls on OSTP, in cooperation with NASA and other agencies, to develop new planetary protection guidelines “working with scientific, commercial, and international partners, for the appropriate protection of planetary bodies and Earth from harmful biological contamination.”
“Current and future missions to Mars and other destinations necessitate a strategy to support a safe, sustainable, and predictable Earth and space environment,” Scott Pace, executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in a statement. “By establishing objectives for the implementation of the 2020 National Space Policy’s direction on planetary protection, this strategy continues American leadership in scientific discovery, human exploration, and private sector space activities.”
The planetary protection strategy has three broad objectives. One is to create a “risk assessment and science-based guidelines” for mitigating what’s known as “forward contamination,” or contamination of other worlds by terrestrial life. It also directs an assessment of the role of planetary protection in the government’s payload review process for private missions.
A second objective seeks to avoid “backward contamination,” or potential contamination of the Earth by any extraterrestrial life. The strategy directs agencies to develop various frameworks for assessing risks of sample return missions and other sources of backward contamination, as well as an approval framework for such missions and procedures for safely handling materials returned from beyond Earth.
A third objective seeks to incorporate private sector views on planetary protection issues given the growing capabilities of, and interest by, companies in flying missions to other worlds, in particular Mars. That objective includes work by the government to develop guidelines for authorization and continuing supervision of private sector missions to destinations with planetary protection implications.
The strategy does not set any new policy, but instead outlines work on various issues to be done over the next year. “Really it’s a work plan,” said an administration official, speaking on background. “It’s a strategy laying out work that’s going to be done over the next nine months to a year.”
Planetary protection has traditionally been an issue primarily for NASA. The agency has been working to update its own planetary protection policies, based on recommendations made by an independent review board last year. In July, NASA announced it was issuing new interim directives to both reclassify most of the moon into a lower category that has no planetary protection requirements, as well as to study how to make planetary protection guidelines compatible with future human missions to Mars.
“We’re very fine with what NASA has done, but the problem is that the NASA rules and interim directives don’t really apply to the private sector,” said the administration official. The strategy follows what the official described as a “light touch” approach for any planetary protection regulations for private missions. “We’re trying to find ways so that people can go forward, but to do so safely.”
The strategy also seeks to leverage the expertise of other agencies. The interagency working group included several Cabinet-level departments, from Agriculture and Health and Human Services to Commerce and State. It also included the Centers for Disease Control, Environmental Protection Agency and the Federal Aviation Administration, among others.
Many of them were brought in to support work on backward contamination. “It’s a great opportunity to bring in departments and agencies who may not have worked together on this issue historically,” said an administration official, “but are very excited to be doing so now.”
“There’s really no reason for the space guys to reinvent the wheel. There’s tons of great expertise out there,” an official added.
The planetary protection strategy is part of a surge of space policy activity by the White House in the final weeks of the Trump administration. In addition to the updated National Space Policy, the White House released a space nuclear strategy Dec. 16, outlining priorities for development of nuclear power and propulsion capabilities and related policy issues.
The US space agency (Nasa) has released an animation showing how its one-tonne Perseverance rover will land on Mars on 18 February.
The robot is being sent to a crater called Jezero where it will search for evidence of past life. But to undertake this science, it must first touch down softly.
The sequence of manoeuvres needed to land on Mars is often referred to as the "seven minutes of terror" - and with good reason.
So much has to go right in a frighteningly short space of time or the arriving mission will dig a very big and very expensive new hole in the Red Planet.
What's more, it's all autonomous.
With a distance on the day of 209 million km (130 million miles) between Earth and Mars, every moment and every movement you see in the animation has to be commanded by onboard computers.
It starts more than 100km above Mars where the Perseverance rover will encounter the first wisps of atmosphere.
Artwork: The "skycrane" lowers the rovers on a series of nylon cords
At this point, the vehicle, in its protective capsule, is travelling at 20,000km/h (12,000mph).
In little more than 400 seconds, the descent system has to reduce this velocity to less than 1m/s at the surface.
Most of the work is done by a heat shield.
As the capsule plunges deeper into the Martian air, it gets super-hot at more than 1,000C - but at the same time, the drag slows the fall dramatically.
By the time the supersonic parachute deploys from the backshell of the capsule, the velocity has already been reduced to 1,200km/h.
Perseverance will ride the 21.5m-wide parachute for just over a minute, further scrubbing that entry speed.
The most complex phases are still to come, however.
One tonne of high technology: Seven instruments, 23 cameras, two microphones and a drill
At an altitude of 2km, and while moving at 100m/s - the Perseverance rover and its "Skycrane" separate from the backshell and fall away.
Eight rockets then ignite on the cradle to bring the rover into a hovering position just above the surface. Nylon cords are used to lower the multi-billion-dollar wheeled vehicle to the ground.
But that's still not quite it.
When Perseverance senses contact, it must immediately sever the cables or it will be dragged behind the crane as the cradle flies away to dispose of itself at a safe distance.
The sequence looks much the same as was used to put Nasa's last rover, Curiosity, on the surface of Mars eight years ago. However, the navigation tools have been improved to put Perseverance down in an even more precisely defined landing zone.
Touchdown is expected in the late afternoon, local time, on Mars - just before 21:00 GMT on Earth.
It's worth remembering that on the day of landing, the time it takes for a radio signal to reach Earth from Mars will be roughly 700 seconds.
This means that when Nasa receives the message from Perseverance that it has engaged the top of the atmosphere, the mission will already have been dead or alive on the planet's surface for several minutes.
The robot will be recording its descent on camera and with microphones. The media files will be sent back to Earth after landing - assuming Perseverance survives.
Rover diagram
Read our guides to Perseverance (also known as the Mars 2020 mission) - where it's going and what it will be doing.
Perseverance will target a crater that once held a lake
Most of us will remember 2020 primarily as the year of the great pandemic, but let's not forget how space exploration and astronomy had good years considering the circumstances. NASA astronauts blasted into space in May as part of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule. New research revealed there might be more water on the moon than previously believed. Scientists debated whether or not Venus is harboring life in its clouds after discovering phosphine. Betelgeuse continued to dim, raising suspicions that it might soon go nova. Researchers noticed an excitingly odd series of radio signals.
While 2021 won't magically reset our reality, there is a lot to look forward to next year, especially in the realm of space news. Even if you aren't a space enthusiast, it's amazing what experiencing a little wonder and awe can do for your mindset. It helps put into perspective our place in the world and reminds us that we are part of something bigger; learning about our universe is a great way to tap into that. If you're feeling like there's nothing to look forward to next year, consider adding one of these missions to your list.
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NASA to launch Q-PACE
Originally planned to be launched earlier this month, the CubeSat Particle Aggregation and Collision Experiment (Q-PACE) is now scheduled to take off from the Mojave Air and Space Port on January 15, 2021. Q-PACE is a 3U CubeSat, a type of small, modular spacecraft, designed for studying the collision and aggregation of small particles in a chamber as part of a three-year microgravity experiment. The objective of the mission is to develop a database of small-particle interactions in microgravity at low velocity. This information will help researchers better understand the process of early coagulation which led to planet formations.
"The Q-PACE mission will last up to three years, providing the opportunity to study adhesion and fragmentation events that happen only rarely, such as near-simultaneous collision of three or more particles," NASA explains about the mission. "The mission will proceed over several phases with the introduction of different types of particles into the ETC, beginning with large solid spherical particles, and finishing with aggregates of micron-sized dust and chondrules."
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Mars2020 will finally get to work
2021 will be the beginning of a new chapter in the field of Martian discoveries. Over the summer, the mission Mars2020 launched into space. But come February 18, 2021, the Perseverance rover will finally land on Mars' Jezero Crater. Its mission is expected to last 687 Earth days, or one Earth year.
According to NASA, the primary science objectives of Mars 2020 are "to identify past environments capable of supporting microbial life, seeking signs of possible past microbial life, collecting core rock and regolith samples and caching them on the surface for future missions, and testing oxygen production from the martian atmosphere."
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One of the most exciting parts of the mission is that the collected samples will be returned to Earth. Sample return missions are extremely uncommon due to their expense; notably, there has never been a sample return mission from another planet.
"Returning samples of Mars to Earth has been a goal of planetary scientists since the early days of the space age, and the successful completion of this MSR [Mars Sample Return] key decision point is an important next step in transforming this goal into reality," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters. "MSR is a complex campaign, and it encapsulates the very essence of pioneering space exploration – pushing the boundaries of what's capable and, in so doing, furthering our understanding of our place in the universe."
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As part of the Mars2020 mission, NASA will also deploy the Ingenuity helicopter from the rover to study the Martian atmosphere. This will help NASA study how to produce oxygen from Mars' carbon dioxide atmosphere, an important step for the future of human exploration on Mars.
The Parker Solar Probe will make two more Venus flybys
The car-size probe, which launched in 2018, is scheduled to make its fourth and fifth Venus flybys, in February and October, respectively, in 2021. The two flybys are part of a longer journey to arrive at its closest proximity to the sun in 2025.
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As Salon previously explained, these flybys are unique as they are leveraging the gravity of Venus to slow the probe down for its arrival in a close orbit around the sun. The probe will do seven flybys over seven years.
"Though it sounds bizarre, the laws of physics allow for any two objects with mass to exchange their momentum in a manner that speeds one up while slowing the other down," Salon's Keith Spencer explained previously. "This method that is frequently used to send spacecraft to distant reaches of the solar system without using as much fuel to speed up as they would have otherwise."
James Webb Space Telescope launch
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On October 31, 2021, the nearly $9 billion James Webb Space Telescope — the successor to the Hubble Telescope — will launch from a port near Kourou, French Guiana. Its mission is to observe the first galaxies that formed in the early universe, in addition to see stars forming planetary systems. According to NASA, it will be the leading observatory of the 2020s and help thousands of astronomers worldwide.
"[James Webb] will study how the first stars were very different from the stars around us today, because there were no metals that make up the stars of today," said Massimo Stiavelli, Mission Head, Space Telescope Science Institute, in an interview with NasaSpaceflight.com. "Stars had to make those. [James Webb] is the only telescope designed to study those early epochs."
The Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper will map water on the moon
Scientists previously suspected that water existed in the shadowy, cold parts of the moon — such as its poles, where it would stay frozen — but a pair of studies published in 2020 confirmed that there is a large amount of water on its sunlit regions, too. The Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper (LunaH-Map) will further our knowledge of water on the moon by orbiting the moon with the objective of determining the amount of water ice exists in the permanently shadowed lunar polar craters. It will do this by using a miniaturized neutron spectrometer to count epithermal neutrons. The shoebox-sized spacecraft will launch no later than November 2021.
The way things behave in microgravity may seem obvious to us now, after humans have been venturing into space for over 50 years.
But we haven't always been certain how space might affect certain things. Like fire. Or planarian worms. Or even plants. It's only by conducting experiments that we can learn the answers to these burning questions.
That has led to some pretty fascinating, sometimes upsetting, and sometimes downright wacky experiments conducted in space.
A spacesuit gets shoved out an airlock
The video above plays out like something out of a nightmare. A spacesuit floats, untethered, away from the International Space Station ISS), the vast black void of space yawning before it.
You may be relieved to learn that no humans were harmed in the making of this experiment - there's no one in the Russian Orlan spacesuit, nicknamed Ivan Ivanovitch or Mr Smith - it's stuffed with a bunch of old clothes and a radio transmitter.
The idea was that old spacesuits could be used as satellites. SuitSat-1 - officially designated AMSAT-OSCAR 54 - was deployed on 3 February 2006, but the experiment was only partially successful; reports vary, with NASA claiming the transmitter had died shortly after release and Russia reporting a final transmission a whole fortnight later. The last confirmed signal was received on 18 February.
SuitSat-1 went on to spend several months in silent orbit, before entering Earth's atmosphere and burning up on 7 September 2006.
The hammer and the feather
In the late 16th century, Galileo Galilei dropped two spheres of unequal mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. When both arrived on the ground at the same time, he'd countered classically established views, by showing mass had no bearing on gravitational acceleration. All objects, no matter the mass, should fall at the same rate - even if it's a feather and a hammer.
On Earth, this is tricky to demonstrate due to air resistance. But nearly 400 years later, a human standing on the Moon repeated the experiment.
On 2 August 1971, Commander David Scott of Apollo 15 took a geological hammer in one hand, and a falcon feather in the other. He raised them to a height of about 1.6 metres off the ground, and dropped them. Because the astronaut was essentially in a vacuum, without air resistance the two objects fell in sync.
"Within the accuracy of the simultaneous release, the objects were observed to undergo the same acceleration and strike the lunar surface simultaneously," wrote NASA astronaut Joe Allen, "which was a result predicted by well-established theory, but a result nonetheless reassuring considering both the number of viewers that witnessed the experiment and the fact that the homeward journey was based critically on the validity of the particular theory being tested."
In 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly coloured a water blob with food colouring, then inserted effervescent tablets, watching them dissolve and release gases into the water. It was filmed using the space station's new 4K camera, so you can view the whole alien-algae-spawning... thing in gloriously crisp resolution.
Just as water behaves differently in microgravity, so too does fire. The Mir space station fire of 1997 has thankfully been a one-off event so far, but working out how fire behaves in microgravity can help plan for fire safety for future long-term missions such as the crewed mission to Mars, and the permanent Moon base. It can help to inform fire safety protocols down here on Earth, too.
To that end, a number of ongoing research projects have studied what happens to flames in space. The Burning and Suppression of Solids experiments aboard the ISS have investigated the burning and extinction characteristics of a broad range of fuel types in microgravity. Data from these experiments can be used to build more complex models to understand the finer details of combustion in Earth gravity.
Aboard the Cygnus cargo spacecraft, scientists investigated how flames behave under different spacecraft conditions in the Saffire experiments. And NASA's Flame Design investigation - part of the Advanced Combustion via Microgravity Experiments - is exploring the production and control of soot.
All of which is very useful and interesting, sure. But it's also insanely beautiful, and we bet there are some astronauts having an absolute blast playing with fire in space.
Space spiders
In 2011, scientists set about answering the burning question: Can spiders adapt to space travel? They sent two golden silk orb-weaver spiders (Trichonephila clavipes), Esmeralda and Gladys, for a 45-day sojourn aboard the ISS.
They were kept in a nice habitat (can you imagine spiders loose on a space station), with light conditions to simulate a night-day cycle, temperature and humidity control, and a healthy diet of juicy fruit flies.
Both spiders adapted beautifully, continuing to spin their webs and hunt their food. Orb weavers eat their webs at the end of each day to regain protein, and spin them again in the morning; this, too, the spiders continued to do right on schedule, which was interesting, since different orb weaver species on the ISS just spun their webs at any old time of day.
But not everything was totally normal. In microgravity, the spiders spun their webs differently - flatter and rounder, compared to the more three-dimensional, asymmetrical structures the orb-weavers spin on Earth.
The two spiders returned to Earth at the end of their stay in space. Esmeralda perished on the return journey, having lived a normal spider lifespan. Gladys returned home hale, but turned out to be a boy. He was renamed Gladstone.
Tortoises go round the Moon
Back in the 1960s, before humans had been to the Moon, it wasn't clear exactly how - if at all - getting up close and personal with the Moon would affect us physically. So, in 1968, the Soviet space program sent two Russian tortoises (Agrionemys horsfieldii) up for a trip round Earth's companion.
Actually, it wasn't just tortoises. Included in the flight were wine flies, mealworms, seeds, plants, algae and bacteria. There was also a dummy fitted with radiation sensors, since none of the living organisms aboard were remotely analogous to humans. Tortoises, according to a 1969 report, seem to have been chosen because they're relatively easy to strap down.
The two unnamed reptilian cosmonauts were placed onboard the Zond-5 spacecraft on 2 September 1968, at which point they were no longer fed. They were launched into space on 15 September 1968, returning back to Earth (in the Indian ocean) on 21 September. They finally returned to Moscow on 7 October.
Their journey included seven days of spaceflight, several days in tropical climates (including bobbing about in the ocean while they waited for retrieval) and transportation back to Russia. Ultimately, they spent 39 days without food. It would try anyone.
Control tortoises that remained on Earth were also deprived of food for the same time period. A comparison of the two sets of tortoises revealed that any changes in the space-faring reptiles were mostly the result of starvation, with a small contribution from spaceflight-related atrophy.
We'd like to say that no one ever sent tortoises to space again, but sadly, two more tortoise missions took place. Zond 7 in 1969 carried tortoises. In 1975, the Soyuz 20 spacecraft ferried a tortoise around for 90 days. And two tortoises flew on the Salyut-5 space station in 1976.
Moon Trees
Just as we once didn't know how space would affect animals, so too were we unaware of its effects on plants. So when the Apollo 14 mission launched on 31 January 1971, its cargo contained something we might now consider a bit peculiar: roughly 500 seeds.
Scientists from the US Forest Service wanted to know if tree seeds that had flown in microgravity and been subjected to space radiation would sprout, grow and look the same as seeds that had never left Earth.
The seeds were then planted and tended, and most of them survived to grow into saplings, alongside controls that had never left Earth. Unsurprisingly to us now, there was no discernible difference between the two.
By 1975, the Moon Trees, as they had come to be known, were large enough to be transplanted, and they were shipped all over America. According to this NASA website, less than 100 Moon Trees can be accounted for today, and of those, only 57 were living when the page was put together.
That means there could potentially be hundreds of Moon Trees hiding across the US, a lost relic of a time when our curiosity sent tiny seeds whizzing around space. And we think that's beautiful.
You’d never know it by looking at the dragonflylike adult antlion, but its wingless larvae—fingernail-size eating machines with huge, poison-filled jaws—build deadly sand traps to capture tiny insects, including ants. Now, scientists know precisely how they do it: As the hapless prey falls into its pit, an antlion at the bottom uses its head to fling a blizzard of sand grains up the funnel-shaped slope, creating a minilandslide that pulls the unfortunate insect to its doom. The pits, scientists say, are feats of engineering—and physics.
To figure out how the larvae create such effective pitfalls, German scientists used high-speed videography to watch lab-reared antlions ensnare ants and small crickets in small, sand-filled terrariums (see video, above). The researchers then dug their own artificial sand traps and saw that the prey was able to escape out of the pit when a larva wasn’t inside flinging up sand.
Comparing decades-old biological observations with engineering models, the researchers found that by hurling sand grains, the antlions constantly maintain the pit’s “angle of repose”—the steepest possible angle before the sandy slope starts to slide. The sand storms not only discombobulate prey, but they also maintain the geometry of the sand traps and ensure the antlions don’t get buried themselves, the team reports in a preprint on bioRxiv.
The new study reveals antlion larvae must constantly maintain their traps to keep them in working order—and to catch enough prey to last the 1 to 3 years before they transform into graceful, less deadly adults.
C.V. Vishveshwara in 2007 in Oak Park, Illinois. Namitha Vishveshwara
Namitha Vishveshwara
For a scientist, few things are sweeter than data from an experiment that confirms a theoretical prediction.
Frequently, however, scientists don't live long enough to savor that reward. Take Albert Einstein's prediction about gravitational waves. Einstein postulated their existence in 1916, but they weren't detected until a hundred years later, long after the great physicist had died.
C.V. Vishveshwara was one of the lucky ones. He got to enjoy what Einstein had missed, and the detection of gravitational waves verified a theoretical prediction that Vishveshwara himself had made nearly half a century earlier.
In 1970, Vishveshwara, known to his friends as Vishu, was a physics graduate student at the University of Maryland.
His thesis adviser had given him a problem to solve: Figure out what would happen if two black holes collided.
"Study the whole process, computing all the characteristics of the emitted gravitational wave" is how he described the assignment in a memoir. Vishu's daughter Smitha Vishveshwara, herself a physicist, says her father realized the problem was too complex to solve in one go.
"What he did was to break it up into parts," she says.
As he worked on the parts, Vishu had what turned out to be a fundamental insight. He found that black holes had a kind of structure. If you were able to bang on a black hole, it would vibrate, much like a bell does when you hit it with a mallet. He wrote a paper about his insight, and it was published in Nature.
"This is the very first time that we realized that black holes could be dynamical objects that could vibrate or ring like a bell," says Kip Thorne. Thorne was a young theoretical physicist on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology when Vishu made his discovery.
Thorne says the paper was one of those aha moments. Vishu had found a characteristic of black holes that others had missed up to that point.
"It became obvious after we saw Vishu's simulations," says Thorne.
At the time, there was no way to prove Vishu correct. You can't bang on a black hole with a mallet to see what will happen. But Thorne and others realized that if a gravitational wave happened to bang into a black hole, a wave would be emitted from the black hole that would vibrate like the sound of a bell.
Thorne ultimately embarked on a quest to build a device that could confirm Vishu's prediction and prove Einstein's prediction about the existence of gravitational waves correct.
That instrument was LIGO, an enormous detector that physicists hoped would be sensitive enough to measure the tiny perturbations of matter that would occur when a gravitational wave passed by. In 2016, LIGO did just that, a stunning feat that won Thorne and two colleagues the Nobel Prize in physics just one year later.
The first gravitational wave that LIGO recorded came from the collision of two black holes. And sure enough, when they looked carefully at the wave they recorded, they saw the signature of that ringing bell, what Vishu had predicted nearly 50 years earlier.
Vishu did live to see it happen. The LIGO discovery made him a celebrity in his native India, and just this month he was honored by the Indian Association for General Relativity and Gravitation. The International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, based in India, also runs a lecture series in his name.
In the days after the gravitational wave detection was announced, he was swamped with requests to speak about his work.
In one talk, Vishu's delight at the LIGO discovery, and his dry wit, are evident.
"There's a story of a physicist: He had a nightmare that he was giving a talk and woke up and found that he was," he said. The audience chucked appreciatively.
Arianespace launched a new reconnaissance satellite for the French military into orbit Tuesday (Dec. 29), marking the European launch provider's final mission of 2020.
A Russian-built Soyuz rocket launched the satellite, called Optical Space Component 2 (or Composante Spatiale Optique 2, CSO-2, in French) from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana in South America. Liftoff occurred at 11:42 a.m. EST (1642 GMT) after a one-day delay due to bad weather.
CSO-2 is a next-generation Earth imaging satellite designed to help replace France's aging Helios 1 and 2 systems.
A Soyuz rocket carrying the French military spy satellite CSO-2 launches from the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana on Dec. 29, 2020 in the final Arianespace flight of 2020.(Image credit: Arianespace)
"CSO-2 is the second in a constellation of three identical military observation satellites that will operate in different polar orbits to accomplish two missions: reconnaissance for CSO-1 and CSO-3, and identification for CSO-2, which will be joining CSO-1 launched in December 2018," officials with the French space agency CNES, which is overseeing the mission, said in a statement.
Built by Airbus, the 7,852-lb. (3,562 kilograms) CSO-2 will orbit the Earth at a distance of about 300 miles (480 kilometers), lower than its predecessor CSO-1, which had a 500-mile (800 km) orbit. The satellite was successfully deployed about an hour after liftoff.
An artist's illustration of the French military reconnaissance satellite CSO-2 in orbit.(Image credit: French Ministry of Defense)
"It will acquire very-high-resolution day/night, clear-weather imagery in the visible and infrared in a range of viewing modes to serve a broad spectrum of operational requirements," CNES officials wrote in the statement.
According to Spaceflight Now, the CSO satellites are expected to have a resolution of about 14 inches (35 centimeters) from that 500-mile orbit. CSO-2 is designed to last at least 10 years in orbit, CNES officials have said.
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The French government is reportedly spending $1.5 billion on the new CSO surveillance satellite program, a cost that includes the satellites and ground-based systems, Spaceflight Now reported.
The successful launch of CSO-2 marked the 10th mission of 2020 by Arianespace and its fifth Soyuz flight this year. But even as the company winds down for the year, it has a series of Ariane 5, Vega and Soyuz flights for 2021, including the much-anticipated launch of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope on Oct. 31.
"2021 is set to be intense for Arianespace," Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël said after launch. "So, 2021 is set to be a very busy indeed and that is why, here, we'll take a bit of a rest now at this end of the year."
Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
In a demonstration of high-fidelity quantum teleportation at the Fermilab Quantum Network, fiber-optic cables connect off-the-shelf devices (shown above), as well as state-of-the-art R&D devices. Credit: Fermilab
A viable quantum internet—a network in which information stored in qubits is shared over long distances through entanglement—would transform the fields of data storage, precision sensing and computing, ushering in a new era of communication.
This month, scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory—a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory affiliated with the University of Chicago—along with partners at five institutions took a significant step in the direction of realizing a quantum internet.
In a paper published in PRX Quantum, the team presents for the first time a demonstration of a sustained, long-distance teleportation of qubits made of photons (particles of light) with fidelity greater than 90%.
The qubits were teleported over a fiber-optic network 27 miles (44 kilometers) long using state-of-the-art single-photon detectors, as well as off-the-shelf equipment.
"We're thrilled by these results," said Fermilab scientist Panagiotis Spentzouris, head of the Fermilab quantum science program and one of the paper's co-authors. "This is a key achievement on the way to building a technology that will redefine how we conduct global communication."
The achievement comes just a few months after the U.S. Department of Energy unveiled its blueprint for a national quantum internet at a press conference at the University of Chicago.
Linking particles
Quantum teleportation is a "disembodied" transfer of quantum states from one location to another. The quantum teleportation of a qubit is achieved using quantum entanglement, in which two or more particles are inextricably linked to each other. If an entangled pair of particles is shared between two separate locations, no matter the distance between them, the encoded information is teleported.
The joint team—researchers at Fermilab, AT&T, Caltech, Harvard University, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and University of Calgary—successfully teleported qubits on two systems: the Caltech Quantum Network and the Fermilab Quantum Network. The systems were designed, built, commissioned and deployed by Caltech's public-private research program on Intelligent Quantum Networks and Technologies, or IN-Q-NET.
"We are very proud to have achieved this milestone on sustainable, high-performing and scalable quantum teleportation systems," said Maria Spiropulu, the Shang-Yi Ch'en professor of physics at Caltech and director of the IN-Q-NET research program. "The results will be further improved with system upgrades we are expecting to complete by the second quarter of 2021."
Both the Caltech and Fermilab networks, which feature near-autonomous data processing, are compatible both with existing telecommunication infrastructure and with emerging quantum processing and storage devices. Researchers are using them to improve the fidelity and rate of entanglement distribution, with an emphasis on complex quantum communication protocols and fundamental science.
"With this demonstration we're beginning to lay the foundation for the construction of a Chicago-area metropolitan quantum network," Spentzouris said.
The Chicagoland network, called the Illinois Express Quantum Network, is being designed by Fermilab in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory, Caltech, Northwestern University and industry partners.
"The feat is a testament to success of collaboration across disciplines and institutions, which drives so much of what we accomplish in science," said Fermilab Deputy Director of Research Joe Lykken. "I commend the IN-Q-NET team and our partners in academia and industry on this first-of-its-kind achievement in quantum teleportation.
Citation: Researchers achieve sustained, high-fidelity quantum teleportation (2020, December 29) retrieved 29 December 2020 from https://ift.tt/34SDYHY
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There are two kinds of nuclear power — fission and fusion. Fission is the one we are most familiar with. It involves splitting atoms — isotopes of uranium being the most common — in a process that releases large amounts of heat. That heat is then used to turn water into steam which is then used to drive fairly conventional turbines to generate electricity.
The Commonwealth Fusion Systems tokamak. Credit: CFS
Fusion is the obverse of fission. Instead of splitting atoms, it forces them together under under extreme heat and pressure. In theory, the result is more heat than is needed to keep the process going and that excess heat can be used to turn water into steam which is then used to drive fairly conventional turbines to generate electricity.
Lots of people think humanity will find a way to “science our way out” of the global heating conundrum, even though lots of other people have been busy trashing science and scientists lately, calling them charlatans, liars, and worse so often that the word science has become an epithet. “You geedunkin foofraw. You’re nothing but a low down scientist looking to steal money from hard working taxpayers to line your own pockets!” is how conservative media usually puts it.
Despite the slur on science propounded by the bloviating jacknapes surrounding the current alleged leader of the free world, a group of those self same scientists — escapees from the insane asylum on the banks of the Charles River known to the world by the code name Massachusetts Institute of Technology — say they have studied all the available literature on fusion energy and have found a way to create a fusion reactor that is compact and more or less affordable. That is, it will cost less than a fleet of aircraft carriers. Their work has been published recently in the Journal of Plasma Physics.
They have formed a company called Commonwealth Fusion Systems to build the first fusion reactor based on their new research. It will be called SPARC (who says scientists have no sense of humor?) and the company claims it will be completed and providing electricity to the grid by the end of this decade.
The thing about fusion is, the process doesn’t work until isotopes of hydrogen are heated to hundreds of millions of degrees, according to The Guardian. As you can imagine, something that hot can’t be contained in a normal vessel made of stainless steel, concrete, or even kryptonite. In fact, the only way to contain it is inside a tokamak, a device with an ultra-powerful magnetic field. That’s the part that has stymied nuclear physicists until now. The people at SPARC claim to have invented new magnet technology that will allow them to build a compact tokamak that is relatively affordable.
We are all familiar with fusion reactors, as it turns out. That bright light in the sky that we call the sun is in fact a really big fusion reactor. It has been doing its thing for billions of years and hopefully will continue to do so for a while longer, assuming humans don’t find a way to destroy it the way they have destroyed almost everything here on Earth. Fusion power is it, the Holy Grail, the sine qua non of energy. In theory, it is capable of producing emissions- free electricity forever, at least to the limited extent homo sapiens can understand that term.
Bob Mumgaard, CEO of “These are concrete public predictions that when we build SPARC, the machine will produce net energy and even high gain fusion from the plasma. That is a necessary condition to build a fusion power plant for which the world has been waiting decades. The combination of established plasma physics, new innovative magnets, and reduced scale opens new possibilities for commercial fusion energy in time to make a difference for climate change. This is a major milestone for the company and for the global clean tech effort as we work to get commercial fusion energy on the grid as fast as possible.”
The company says, “CFS and MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center are also now constructing the advanced magnets that will allow CFS to build significantly smaller and lower cost fusion power plants. This collaboration is on track to demonstrate a successful 20 Tesla, large-bore magnet in 2021. This magnet test, the first of its kind in the world, opens a widely identified transformational opportunity for commercial fusion energy. These magnets will then be used in SPARC, which is on track to begin construction in 2021 and demonstrate net energy gain from fusion for the first time in history by 2025. SPARC will pave the way for the first commercially viable fusion power plant called ARC.”
At a time when wind and solar power are growing by leaps and bounds, why do we need fusion power? According to Bob Mumgaard, the goal is not to use fusion to replace solar and wind, but to supplement them. “There are things that will be hard to do with only renewables, industrial scale things, like powering large cities or manufacturing,” he tells The Guardian. “This is where fusion can come in.”
Martin Greenwald, one of the senior scientists on the SPARC project, adds that a key motivation for the ambitious timeline is meeting energy requirements in a warming world. “Fusion seems like one of the possible solutions to get ourselves out of our impending climate disaster. What we’ve really done is combine an existing science with new material to open up vast new possibilities,” he says.
Of particular note is that the climate plan put forth by incoming president Joe Biden includes investments in advanced nuclear technology. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has attracted investment from a diverse group of backers, including the Breakthrough Energy Ventures, founded by Bill Gates, and Equinor, Norway’state owned energy company. In a statement to the press reported by Recharge News, it says, “Equinor is a broad energy company and we will continue to invest in promising and potentially game changing zero carbon energy technologies. We are investing in fusion and CFS because we believe in the technology and the company.”
Will fusion power save us from ourselves? Maybe. It seems far fetched but than again so did airplanes, the microwave oven, and cell phones at one time. According to legend, on New Year’s Eve, 1899, the head of the US Patent Office said to a colleague, “Everything that can be invented has now been invented.” Perhaps we would be wise to keep an open mind on this fusion energy stuff.
Steve Hanley Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his homes in Florida and Connecticut or anywhere else the Singularity may lead him. You can follow him on Twitter but not on any social media platforms run by evil overlords like Facebook.
Japanese company Sumitomo Forestry has announced a joint development project with Kyoto University to test the idea of using wood as a component in satellite construction. As part of the announcement, officials with Sumitomo Forestry told reporters that work on the project will begin with experiments designed to test different types of wood in extreme environments.
Some of the major components in most satellites include aluminum, Kevlar and aluminum alloys, which are able to withstand both temperature extremes and constant bombardment by radiation—all in a vacuum. Unfortunately, these characteristics also allow satellites to remain in orbit long after their usefulness has ended, resulting in constant additions to the space junk orbiting the planet. According to the World Economic Forum, there are currently approximately 6,000 satellites circling the Earth but only 60% of them are still in use. Some in the field have predicted that nearly 1,000 satellites will be launched into space each year over the coming decade. Considering their lifespan, this suggests there could be thousands more dead satellites orbiting the planet in the coming years. This space debris poses a significant threat to other satellites (they all travel thousands of miles per hour) and also to manned space missions. Most in the space community agree that space junk is becoming a serious problem. And there is more bad news—the aluminum used in satellites has been found to break apart when a satellite returns to Earth, creating hundreds or thousands of tiny alumina particles that wind up floating in the upper atmosphere for many years, possibly posing an environmental problem. For all these reasons, the researchers with this new project are looking to replace these materials with wood.
The major benefit of wood-based satellites is they would burn up completely when returning to Earth. But another major bonus of using wood to create the outer shell of a satellite is that electromagnetic waves would pass right through it, which means antennas could be placed inside of satellite structures, making them simpler to design and deploy. The researchers plan to look for appropriate wood candidates and then to conduct experiments to see it they could be treated to stand up to space conditions. They predict they will have a product ready for testing by 2023.
Citation: Japanese pairing looking into using wood to build satellites (2020, December 29) retrieved 29 December 2020 from https://ift.tt/3aPBCNz
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Color image of the galaxy density map at redshift of 0.36 from eROSITA's Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC). White circles mark the location of the eight galaxy clusters forming the new supercluster. Credit: Ghirardini et al., 2020.
By analyzing the data from the eROSITA Final Equatorial Depth Survey (eFEDS), an international team of astronomers has detected a new supercluster. The newly found structure consists of eight galaxy clusters. The discovery is reported in a paper published December 21 on the arXiv pre-print server.
Containing various structures with a range of masses, from massive and dense clusters of galaxies to low-density bridges, filaments and sheets of matter, superclusters are among the largest structures in the known universe. Finding and investigating superclusters in detail could be essential in order to improve our understanding of the formation and evolution of large cosmic filaments.
Now, a group of astronomers led by Vittorio Ghirardini of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, reports the discovery of a new supercluster. The structure was identified by the eFEDS survey during its Performance Verification (PV) phase.
"We analyze the 140 deg2 eROSITA Final Equatorial Depth Survey (eFEDS) field, observed during the Performance Verification phase to a nominal depth of about 2.3 ks. In this field, we detect a previously unknown supercluster," the astronomers wrote in the paper.
The supercluster consists of a chain of eight galaxy clusters at a redshift of 0.36. The observations show that the northernmost clusters of this structure are going through an off-axis major merger activity. Optical and X-ray data suggest that it is a triple merging system with a double merger and a pre-merger.
The cluster designated eFEDS J093513.3+004746, residing at the northern part of the supercluster, is the most massive and luminous one of the eight. It is also one of the most massive and luminous clusters in the entire eFEDS field. Its mass was calculated to be 580 trillion solar masses.
The least massive clusters of this supercluster, eFEDS J093546.4-000115 and eFEDS J093543.9-000334, have masses of around 130 trillion solar masses. The masses of the remaining five clusters are estimated to be between 140 and 250 trillion solar masses.
Furthermore, the data revealed the existence of two radio relics in the north and southeast region of the northernmost clusters and an elongated radio halo, which also supports the ongoing merger activity scenario.
"The presence of an elongated radio halo connecting two radio relics in eFEDS J093513.3+004746 and eFEDS J093510.7+004910 indicates that the cluster is undergoing a major merger. This is supported by the galaxy density contour map that shows two peaks in the north and south regions of the cluster system," the astronomers explained.
In general, the study reports that the X-ray properties of the eight clusters forming the new supercluster are similar to those of the common eFEDS cluster population. Moreover, their morphological properties are also consistent with the sample of more than 300 clusters identified by eFEDS.
More information: Discovery of a Supercluster in the eROSITA Final Equatorial Depth Survey: X-ray Properties, Radio Halo, and Double Relics, arXiv:2012.11607 [astro-ph.CO] arxiv.org/abs/2012.11607
Citation: New supercluster discovered by astronomers (2020, December 29) retrieved 29 December 2020 from https://ift.tt/3o3ytOc
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Following the celestial event of Christmas Star or the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, skywatchers can get excited for the last celestial event of the year 2020. This will be the last full moon of the year which is also known as the Cold Moon. It will be the highest full moon in the entire Gregorian year and interestingly, the 13th and the final lunar event of 2020 will be visible on two different days. According to The Old Farmer's Almanac, the peak illumination of the full moon is supposed to take place on 7:54 pm IST on 29 December and 8:57 pm IST on 30 December. The Almanac says that people can begin to spot the December full moon just before sunset.
A full moon seen in Washington, USA. Image credit: Flickr/ Rocky Raybell
What makes Cold Moon 2020 special?
The Cold Moon will have a distinctively high trajectory across the sky. This results in the moon being visible over the horizon for a longer period of time.
It is also called the ‘Long Night Moon’ as the event occurs on one of the longest nights of the year. This is because the date is fairly near to the winter solstice. As it takes place just after Christmas, the full moon is called the ‘Moon After Yule’ in Europe as well. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, the name Cold Moon has seeped in from some traditions observed by the native Americans. The name refers to the “frigid conditions of this time of year”.
According to a report by Forbes, the timing of the Moon reaching its peak illumination is behind the globe spotting the Cold Moon on two different dates. While the Asia Pacific, Europe and Africa will have a full moon on 30 December, both South America and North America will have it a day prior, on 29 December.
After this, the full moon is going to appear to be a full-blown moon for the next three days.
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A Japanese company and Kyoto University have joined forces to develop what they hope will be the world's first satellites made out of wood by 2023.
Sumitomo Forestry said it has started research on tree growth and the use of wood materials in space.
The partnership will begin experimenting with different types of wood in extreme environments on Earth.
Space junk is becoming an increasing problem as more satellites are launched into the atmosphere.
Wooden satellites would burn up without releasing harmful substances into the atmosphere or raining debris on the ground when they plunge back to Earth.
"We are very concerned with the fact that all the satellites which re-enter the Earth's atmosphere burn and create tiny alumina particles which will float in the upper atmosphere for many years," Takao Doi, a professor at Kyoto University and Japanese astronaut, told the BBC.
"Eventually it will affect the environment of the Earth."
"The next stage will be developing the engineering model of the satellite, then we will manufacture the flight model," Professor Doi added.
As an astronaut he visited the International Space Station in March 2008.
During this mission, he became the first person to throw a boomerang in space that had been specifically designed for use in microgravity.
Sumitomo Forestry, part of the Sumitomo Group, which was founded more than 400 years ago, said it would work on developing wooden materials highly resistant to temperature changes and sunlight.
The wood it is using is an "R&D secret" a spokesman for the company told the BBC.
Space junk
Experts have warned of the increasing threat of space junk falling to Earth, as more spacecraft and satellites are launched.
Satellites are increasingly being used for communication, television, navigation and weather forecasting. Space experts and researchers have been investigating different options to remove and reduce the space junk.
There are nearly 6,000 satellites circling Earth, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). About 60% of them are defunct (space junk).
Research firm Euroconsult estimates that 990 satellites will be launched every year this decade, which means that by 2028, there could be 15,000 satellites in orbit.
Getty Images
Elon Musk's SpaceX has already launched more than 900 Starlink satellites and has plans to deploy thousands more.
Space junk travels at an incredibly fast speed of more than 22,300 mph, so can have cause considerable damage to any objects it hits.
In 2006 a tiny piece of space junk collided with the International Space Station, taking a chip out of the heavily reinforced window.
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