Innehållsförteckning för No. 132 från All About Space

ISSUE 1 32 This August, all being well, Artemis I will be launching for the Moon. The spacecraft is the first in a series that will eventually enable humankind to further explore our natural satellite and Mars on foot. Not only that, but the NASA program aims to be the first to land a woman and a person of colour on another world – atruly astonishing feat that will change the face of manned space exploration. You can keep up to date with the latest news, including the actual launch, by following our social channels and on our sister site space.com. We’ll be following the action every step of the way. While we wait for Artemis I to leave the launchpad at Kennedy Space Center aboard the Space Launch System,…

The largest near-infrared image of galaxies ever taken by Hubble has provided a playground for astronomers seeking out potential targets for the James Webb Space Telescope. The image spans 1.35 square degrees of the sky – equivalent to about six full Moons – and contains thousands of galaxies. The aim is to identify galaxies worthy of further study by Webb and other telescopes in the future. “I am curious about giant galaxies, which are the most massive ones in the universe formed by the mergers of other galaxies,” said Lamiya Mowla, an astronomer at the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto and leader of the new research. “How did their structures grow, and what drove the changes in their form? It was difficult to study…

1 Launch day Scheduled to launch in 2025, the third Artemis mission and second with crew on board launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. All the action will be watched and monitored by the nearby Launch Control Center. 2 Entering orbit Once the rocket has completed its task of taking Orion into orbit, its engines shut down and it will separate from the capsule. These rocket components then fall towards the Pacific Ocean. Left to fend for itself, Orion will deploy its solar arrays. 3 Trans-lunar injection Having successfully made it into Earth orbit, the Orion vehicle is ready to cross over to the Moon. During a 20-minute burn, the engines fire to increase the speed of travel, displacing the spacecraft from its low-Earth orbit. 4 To deep…

Byany standard, Project Icarus is a very ambitious attempt at assessing the requirements for an unmanned interstellar probe using current and developing technology. In the process of producing technical reports on the physics, functionality, engineering and performance requirements of the spacecraft needed for different types of mission profiles, it’s hoped to provide inspiration for a new generation of scientists and boost the possibility of bringing such a scheme into reality. The project is an update of the British Interplanetary Society’s Project Daedalus, which ran from 1973 to 1978. Daedalus envisaged a huge two-stage, 54-million-kilogram nuclearfusion-powered spacecraft fuelled by deuterium and helium-3. The intentions of Project Icarus are to design a similar unmanned fusion-powered space probe that can be targeted at a variety of nearby star systems and can reach and…

Mercury is the smallest of all the planets in the Solar System and the closest planet to the Sun, but there’s so much more to it. Mercury is so tiny compared to the other planets that you can actually fit around 23,500 Mercurys into Jupiter, though it’s roughly 1,400 kilometres (870 miles) larger in diameter than the Moon. The small planet orbits the Sun with less than half the distance between the Sun and Earth, resulting in it being ‘tidally locked’. Tidal locking occurs when an object is so close to its host that the gravity is overwhelmingly powerful; because of this influence, instead of continuously spinning on its axis like Earth does, the object has one side facing towards its host object at all times. In this case Mercury…

Every 133 years, Comet Swift-Tuttle makes its return to the inner Solar System. It last made an appearance in 1992. Each time it nears the Sun, this speeding ball of ice, rock and dust grows a tail that deposits a glittering trail in its wake. Every year our planet moves through this, causing the dust particles left behind to come crashing through the atmosphere. Most of them are tiny, but as they burn up 100 kilometres (60 miles) above our heads they leave a bright streak of light. We call this a meteor, or ‘shooting star’. The space between the planets and around Earth’s orbit is full of dust, so every night there will be one or two random meteors. When Earth travels through the cloudy trail of dust left…

Fresh off its fifth flight of the biggest plane ever built, Stratolaunch is readying to test a hypersonic vehicle that will launch from the huge Roc carrier aircraft. The Mojave-based company has said that it has structurally completed the Talon-A test vehicle, known as TA-0. A future flight will release TA-0, which is unpowered, to assess Roc’s systems. “After completing TA-0 separation testing, the company will transition to flying its first hypersonic test vehicle, TA-1,” Stratolaunch stated. “The team has also started fabrication of a third vehicle, TA-2, the first fully reusable hypersonic test vehicle.” Stratolaunch was going to do the first drop tests with Roc and Talon-A in early 2022, but will likely achieve full operational capability by mid-to-late 2023. TA-0 should do a captive carry flight later this…

PLANET OF THE MONTH This will be a good month for you if you enjoy seeing the Red Planet. It will be found in the rather star-starved constellation of Aries, rising around four hours before the Sun. At that time Mars will be shining with a magnitude of +0.4, making it quite striking to the naked eye, especially with its distinctive orange hue. As the days pass Mars will increase in brightness, making it appear even more obvious. Look out for a waning crescent Moon shining to the planet’s lower right on the morning of 21 July, and to its lower left the following morning. Mars’ rise in brightness will continue relentlessly during the month. By 1 August Mars will have reached magnitude +0.2, and by the end of our…

This sky full of stars from the Hubble Space Telescope is a heavenly view. It’s a galactic image from the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys, focusing on NGC 3631. The spiral arms of the ‘Grand Design Spiral’, as this object is nicknamed, are absolutely brimming with starbirth. The blue colouring in the image represents visible wavelengths and orange is showcasing infrared or heat-rich areas that are otherwise difficult to see due to dust in the way. “Star formation in spirals is similar to a traffic jam,” NASA said about the new image. “Like cars on the highway, slower moving matter in the spiral’s disc creates a bottleneck, concentrating star-forming gas and dust along the inner part of their spiral arms. This traffic jam of matter…

Ryugu contains some of the most primitive material ever studied on Earth, dating back to just 5 million years after the formation of the Solar System according to analyses of samples retrieved by Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission. Because it’s so old, it’s made of the same material that formed the planets. “Ryugu is one of the building blocks of Earth,” Hisayoshi Yurimoto, a professor at Hokkaido University in Japan, said. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 launched in 2014 and arrived at Ryugu in 2019. It retrieved two small samples of regolith from the asteroid. These samples then landed on Earth in a capsule equipped with a parachute in December 2020. Upon their return, the samples were distributed among scientific groups, including one team led by Tetsuya Yokoyama, a professor at…

Launch The launch rocket is responsible for the all-important task of firing the capsule and crew into space. The Space Launch System (SLS) is NASA’s new rocket designed for human space travel beyond Earth orbit. Having to travel almost 1,000 times farther than those headed for the ISS, it’s designed to reach speeds of 40,000 kilometres (25,000 miles) per hour. Approximately eight minutes after launch, the core stage falls away and the astronauts continue with their journey to the Moon. TRAVEL TECHNOLOGY The Orion spacecraft that will deliver astronauts to the Moon is designed to have the lowest mass possible while still being strong enough to withstand the conditions of space. This will enable the capsule to carry the astronauts and their equipment using minimal fuel. 1 Launch vehicle stage…

Because Earth is the only planet known to host life as we know it, researchers have usually focused on planetary systems similar to our own when searching for extraterrestrial life. But new research suggests that planetary systems form differently around binary stars than they do around lone stars like the Sun, and those differences could affect the potential for a binary star system to support life. Nearly 50 per cent of all Sun-size stars are binary stars, so if the new theory is confirmed, it could double the number of systems that researchers might want to probe. “The result is exciting since the search for extraterrestrial life will be equipped with several new, extremely powerful instruments within the coming years,” lead scientist Jes Kristian Jørgensen, a professor of astrophysics and…

The Milky Way is home to millions of potentially habitable planets – and approximately four of them may harbour evil alien civilisations that would invade Earth if they could. A new paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, poses a peculiar question: what are the odds that humans could one day contact a hostile alien civilisation that’s capable of invading our planet? To answer this, lead scientist Alberto Caballero, a doctoral student in conflict resolution at the University of Vigo in Spain, began by looking back at human history before looking out to the stars. “This paper attempts to provide an estimation of the prevalence of hostile extraterrestrial civilisations through an extrapolation of the probability that we, as the human civilisation, would attack or invade an inhabited exoplanet,” Caballero wrote…

There’s something special about Ceres, the small but significant world located in the asteroid T belt between Mars and Jupiter. Quite aside from it potentially having a water-vapour plume and subsurface water, it’s also a round object in an area otherwise filled with misshapen space rocks. It’s much larger than any of its neighbours, and there’s a slim chance it could harbour life. Ceres has also suffered an identity crisis. Originally deemed a planet after being discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801, it was later classified as an asteroid – the first to spotted. Since 2006 it’s considered to be a dwarf planet, putting it on the same pedestal as Pluto. Yet just because it’s special doesn’t necessarily mean it belongs. In fact, some scientists think it’s an intruder. There’s…

One of the Moon’s most sublime and recognisable craters, Posidonius can be viewed to good advantage as it’s illuminated by a local evening Sun on the morning of 4 August, when the Moon is situated above the southeastern horizon. Two weeks later, the Moon lies low above the western horizon as the dusk skies are darkening, but vigilant telescopic observers may still be able to make out Posidonius near the lunar terminator despite the Moon’s low twilight altitude. Measuring 95 kilometres (59 miles) across, Posidonius is a prominent crater that lies at the northeastern border of the large nearcircular Mare Serenitatis (Sea of Serenity) and at the entrance to Lacus Somniorum (Lake of Dreams), an irregular lava-filled plain that forms a short arc parallel to the northeastern shoreline of Mare…

Scientists are tracing the movement of dust over Martian aeons using a highdefinition camera from orbit. A Twitter account for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Experiment, at work at Mars since 2006, recently posted a picture of barchan dunes formed by the Red Planet’s winds pushing continuously in a single direction. “Who doesn’t like an image of dunes in 3D,” a tweet said along with the picture. “Pay attention to the sand ‘thread’ on the right side of the image. Interesting how that might have formed.” While mission experts provided few details with the image, scientists have been probing the Nili Patera region for many years now in an attempt to figure out how the dunes evolve over time. A 2012 study showed remarkably swift movements across 105…

During his career at NASA, Swanson logged over 195 days in space, undertaking five spacewalks. His three missions to the ISS include two Space Shuttle flights (STS-117 and STS-119) and one Soyuz flight (TMA-12M). How does NASA select astronauts? Nobody knows for sure. Really it’s up to the chief of the astronaut office to make that selection, and sometimes others depending on how high profile the mission is. But it’s partly just where you are in the queue, because we come in as a group together. The people who came in the group before will fly before you do. I didn’t think about an astronaut career until I was about 25. It took 12 years from that point to become one, and I ended up working 11 of those years…

NASA is hailing the Perseverance rover’s improved ability to pick its own targets as a way of speeding up science on Mars. Without explicit direction from Earth, the Perseverance rover zapped two rock targets with its SuperCam instrument on Sol 442 (18 May 2022) to learn more about their elemental compositions, mission scientists said in an update on 31 May. “Normally when the rover team picks the targets, observations aren’t made until the following day,” Roger Wiens, principal investigator of SuperCam and a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said. “If Perseverance picks its own targets, it can shoot them right after a drive. Having the SuperCam results right away can alert the team to unusual compositions in time to make decisions about further analyses before the rover moves…

BEPICOLOMBO’S SEVEN-YEAR JOURNEY TO MERCURY • Date: 20 October 2018 Activity: Launch from Earth. • Date: 10 April 2020 Activity: Earth flyby. • Date: 15 October 2020 Activity: First Venus flyby. • Date: 10 August 2021 Activity: Second Venus flyby. • Date: 1 October 2021 Activity: First Mercury flyby. • Date: 9 January 2025 Activity: Sixth and final Mercury flyby. • Date: 5 December 2025 Activity: Orbital insertion around Mercury. NASA’s MESSENGER mission stayed in orbit around Mercury from March 2011 to April 2015 before crashing into the surface of the planet On Mercury’s nightside at the right time of year, there’s a faint orange glow from the sodium scattered by sunlight 59 One day on…

Galaxies are tremendous clusters of billions to trillions of stars, and are where the majority of G stars reside. If you’re fortunate enough to have a dark night sky, you will be able to see a section of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, as a ribbon of stars stretching across the sky. The Milky Way is estimated to be roughly 100,000 light years across, containing some 100 billion stars, and is probably a barred spiral rather than the classic swirl we think of as a galaxy. Our nearest galactic companion, the Andromeda Galaxy, is even bigger, containing up to a trillion stars, but how do these massive structures come to form? There are two major shapes that a galaxy can form. Elliptical galaxies are fuzzy clouds of stars, whereas…

Our universe is growing. Ever since the Big Bang, every point in the fabric of space has been expanding in all directions. This O expansion is carrying almost all galaxies away from us. The biggest surprise came in 1998 with the discovery that not only is the universe expanding, but that expansion is accelerating. Nobody knows why, but scientists have come up with a term for the mysterious force driving the acceleration: dark energy. According to data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Planck spacecraft, dark energy constitutes over two-thirds of all the mass and energy in the universe, or 68.3 per cent. The remainder is 26.8 per cent dark matter and just 4.9 per cent normal matter, which makes up the stars, galaxies and planets. Scientists are perplexed as…

Researchers have discovered a new particle that’s a magnetic relative of the Higgs boson. R Whereas the discovery of the Higgs boson required the tremendous power of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this particle, dubbed the axial Higgs boson, was found using an experiment that would fit on a small kitchen countertop. As well as being a first in its own right, this magnetic cousin of the Higgs boson – the particle responsible for granting other particles their mass – could be a candidate for dark matter, which accounts for 85 per cent of the total mass of the universe but only reveals itself through gravity. “When my student showed me the data I thought she must be wrong,” Kenneth Burch, a professor of physics at Boston College and lead…

In this issue... 78 What’s in the sky? As we pass into August, prepare for longer in the dark 80 Planetarium Where you can find the planets this month and the phases of the Moon 82 Month’s planets Mars is excellent viewing this month, while the majority of the outer planets take the morning watch 84 Moon tour This impact makes for prime viewing this month 85 Naked eye and binocular targets See a cloud of stars and shells of gas produced by faraway dying suns 86 Deep sky challenge The summer skies are full of deep-sky objects to point your telescope at 88 The Northern Hemisphere The summer skies are alive with star clusters and a smattering of galaxies 90 Your astrophotos The best of our readers’ astrophotography images…

1 Messier 39 Messier 39 is a large open star cluster. It’s seven light years across and 824 light years from Earth. It contains around 30 stars. At magnitude +5.5, it’s visible to the naked eye as a Moon-sized faint smudge in a dark sky. Binoculars will show its triangular shape. 2 The Ring Nebula (Messier 57) The Ring Nebula is so faint at magnitude +8.8 that you will need binoculars to see it. Even then it will just look like a tiny out-of-focus star. It is actually a shell of glowing gases puffed out by a dying star over 2,000 light years away. 3 Cygnus X Down the right side of the Northern Cross, which forms part of the constellation of Cygnus, you will see a long, fuzzy area.…