Space news topic and space related news

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ESA awards contract to Thales Alenia Space to restart ExoMars
https://spacenews.com/esa-awards-contract-to-thales-alenia-space-to-restart-exomars/

The European Space Agency awarded a contract to a consortium of companies to resume work on a Mars rover mission that was derailed two years ago by geopolitics.

ESA announced April 9 it awarded a contract worth 522 million euros ($567 million) to a team led by Thales Alenia Space to restart work on the ExoMars Rosalind Franklin mission. That mission will deliver to the surface of Mars the Rosalind Franklin rover, equipped with a drill that will go up to two meters into the surface, collecting material to analyze for evidence of past or present life.

ExoMars was scheduled to launch in September 2022 on a Russian Proton rocket, part of a partnership between ESA and Roscosmos that also included Russian development of a landing platform for the rover. However, ESA suspended cooperation on the mission weeks after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and put the completed rover in storage.

The new contract covers work to replace some of the contributions Russia provided. Thales Alenia Space, the prime contractor, will lead the design of a new landing platform to replace the Russian design, and will handle assembly, integration and testing work. Airbus Defence and Space, which built the rover, will provide mechanical, thermal and propulsion systems for the landing platform. ArianeGroup will be responsible for the landing module's heat shield and OHB a carrier module.

"There is a complementary difference in technologies and experience that each of the major players in the consortium have," said Massimo Comparini, deputy chief executive and senior vice president for observation, exploration and navigation at Thales Alenia Space, said in a briefing about the new contract at the 39th Space Symposium.

Besides getting ExoMars back on track, the contract will help Europe develop key technologies in entry, descent and landing, or EDL. "The key aspect is that we develop new capabilities in Europe, industrial capabilities," said Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA director of human and robotic exploration, at the briefing. "EDL is a key topic."

The new lander will not require any major modifications to the rover itself, he said. Thales Alenia Space noted in a statement that its work on the contract will include a "full audit and tests" of the rover and other mission hardware, as well as the installation of a new infrared spectrometer instrument on the rover.

ExoMars will also incorporate contributions from NASA under a partnership between NASA and ESA announced after Russia was removed from the mission. NASA will provide aerobraking engines and radioisotope heating units (RHUs), small devices that use the heat produced by the decay of plutonium to keep the spacecraft warm.

NASA will also provide a launch of the mission, currently scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2028. Neuenschwander said NASA is currently procuring a launch vehicle for ExoMars but has not selected one yet. "There are natural candidates that you can imagine that are currently operational launchers currently going from U.S. soil" that could be used for ExoMars, he said.

Comparini said there was no one specific factor on the critical path to that late 2028 launch date. "It's more the complexity of what must be refurbished and adapted for the mission," he said.

"We are now facing the classical challenges we have in these types of missions," Neuenschwander added, calling the new contract a "major stabilization" of the program. "Now, a lot of work remains to be done, but we are back on track in a nominal, typical space program."

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NASA, Japan Advance Space Cooperation, Sign Agreement for Lunar Rover
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-japan-advance-space-cooperation-sign-agreement-for-lunar-rover/

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Astronomers find a tiny star system with a tantalizing story to tell
https://news.yale.edu/2024/04/05/astronomers-find-tiny-star-system-tantalizing-story-tell

If confirmed as a galaxy, the system would be the faintest galaxy ever discovered — and may suggest that many others remain to be discovered.

Yale astronomers have helped identify a tiny star system orbiting the Milky Way which they say hints at the existence of a new class of faint, satellite star systems that orbit around large galaxies.

An international team led by researchers at Yale and the University of Victoria in Canada recently announced the discovery of Ursa Major III/UNIONS 1 (UMa3/U1), the faintest and lowest-mass star system ever found.

The newly discovered system is only 20 light years across (more than 58.7 trillion miles) and contains only about 60 "mature" stars — mature in this case meaning more than 10 billion years old. Its mass is 15 times less than the mass of the dimmest dwarf galaxy.

The researchers discovered UMa3/U1 and studied it in detail using the W.M Keck Observatory's Deep Imaging Multi-Object Spectrograph (DEIMOS) in Hawai'i, the Ultraviolet Near Infrared Optical Northern Survey (UNIONS) at the Canada-France-Hawai'i Telescope, and Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) at the University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy.

"There are so few stars in Uma3/U1 that one might reasonably question whether it's just a chance grouping of similar stars," said Marla Geha, a professor of astronomy and physics in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and co-author of a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

"Keck was critical in showing this is not the case," Geha said. "Our DEIMOS measurements clearly show all the stars are moving through space at very similar velocities and appear to share similar chemistries."

For now, the new star system has two names, due to the fact that astronomers can't yet confirm whether it is a dwarf galaxy (named for its constellation, Ursa Major) or a star cluster (named after the survey in which it was discovered, UNIONS).

At the heart of this question is the possible involvement of dark matter — unseen matter that is thought to be the invisible "scaffolding" of the universe.

"Excitingly, a tentative spread in velocities among the stars in the system may support the conclusion that UMa3/U1 is a dark matter dominated galaxy, a tantalizing possibility we hope to scrutinize with more Keck observations," said William Cerny, a Yale graduate student in Geha's research group and second author of the new study.

"The object is so puny that its long-term survival is very surprising," Cerny added. "One might have expected the harsh tidal forces from the Milky Way's disk to have ripped the system apart by now, leaving no observable remnant. The fact that the system appears intact leads to two equally interesting possibilities. Either UMa3/U1 is a tiny galaxy stabilized by large amounts of dark matter, or it's a star cluster we've observed at a very special time before its imminent demise."

The answer may have ramifications well beyond the star system's eventual name.

The standard cosmological model of the universe, known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model, predicts that when galaxies such as the Milky Way formed, they exerted enough gravitational pull to attract hundreds of small satellite star systems down to very small masses, which continue to orbit the larger galaxies.

If UMa3/U1 is a galaxy, its existence implies that many such faint satellite galaxies remain to be discovered.

"Whether future observations confirm or reject that this system contains a large amount of dark matter, we're very excited by the possibility that this object could be the tip of the iceberg — that it could be the first example of a new class of extremely faint stellar systems that have eluded detection until now," Cerny said.

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China's Queqiao-2 relay satellite ready to support lunar far side sample mission
https://spacenews.com/chinas-queqiao-2-relay-satellite-ready-to-support-lunar-far-side-sample-mission/

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Chemical reactions can scramble quantum information as well as black holes
https://news.rice.edu/news/2024/chemical-reactions-can-scramble-quantum-information-well-black-holes

If you were to throw a message in a bottle into a black hole, all of the information in it, down to the quantum level, would become completely scrambled. Because in black holes this scrambling happens as quickly and thoroughly as quantum mechanics allows, they are generally considered nature's ultimate information scramblers.

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Teaching doglike robots to walk on the moon's dusty, icy surface
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/teaching-doglike-robots-walk-moons-dusty-icy-surface

Researchers from Penn are part of a NASA-funded multidisciplinary collaborative effort that's teaching robots to navigate the extraterrestrial craters, like the moon and Mars.

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Unusually Lightweight Black Hole Candidate Spotted by LIGO
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/unusually-lightweight-black-hole-candidate-spotted-by-ligo

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DESI first-year data delivers unprecedented measurements of expanding universe
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/what-is-dark-energy-desi-expanding-universe-600592/

Dark energy survey looks 11 billion years into the past, reveals most detailed view ever of expanding universe
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/what-is-dark-energy-desi-expanding-universe-600592/

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Physicists solve puzzle about ancient galaxy found by Webb telescope
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2024/04/12/physicists-solve-puzzle-about-ancient-galaxy-found-webb-telescope

UC Riverside study offers an explanation for dark matter distribution in a massive quiescent galaxy

Last September, the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, discovered JWST-ER1g, a massive ancient galaxy that formed when the universe was just a quarter of its current age. Surprisingly, an Einstein ring is associated with this galaxy. That's because JWST-ER1g acts as a lens and bends light from a distant source, which then appears as a ring — a phenomenon called strong gravitational lensing, predicted in Einstein's theory of general relativity.

The total mass enclosed within the Einstein radius — the radius of the Einstein ring — has two components: stellar and dark matter components.

"If we subtract the stellar mass from the total mass, we get the dark matter mass within the Einstein radius," said Hai-Bo Yu, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, whose team has published new work about JWST-ER1g in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "But the value for the dark matter mass seems higher than expected. This is puzzling. In our paper, we offer an explanation."

A dark matter halo is the halo of invisible matter that permeates and surrounds a galaxy like JWST-ER1g. Although dark matter has never been detected in laboratories, physicists are confident dark matter, which makes up 85% of the universe's matter, exists.

"When ordinary matter — pristine gas and stars — collapses and condenses into the dark matter halo of JWST-ER1g, it may be compressing the halo, leading to a high density," said Demao Kong, a second-year graduate student at UCR, who led the analysis. "Our numerical studies show that this mechanism can explain the high dark matter density of JWST-ER1g — more dark matter mass in the same volume, resulting in higher density."

According to Daneng Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at UCR and co-author on the paper, JWST-ER1g, formed 3.4 billion years after the Big Bang, provides "a great chance to learn about dark matter."

"This strong lensing object is unique because it has a perfect Einstein ring, from which we can obtain valuable information about the total mass within the Einstein radius, a critical step for testing dark matter properties," he said.

Launched on Christmas Day in 2021, NASA's JWST is an orbiting infrared observatory. Also called Webb, it is designed to answer questions about the universe. It is the largest, most complex, and powerful space telescope ever built.

"JWST provides an unprecedented opportunity for us to observe ancient galaxies formed when the universe was young," Yu said. "We expect to see more surprises from JWST and learn more about dark matter soon." 

The study was supported by the John Templeton Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The title of the open access research paper is "Cold Dark Matter and Self-interacting Dark Matter Interpretations of the Strong Gravitational Lensing Object JWST-ER1."

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NASA to look for new options to carry out Mars Sample Return program
https://spacenews.com/nasa-to-look-for-new-options-to-carry-out-mars-sample-return-program/

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NASA document outlines selection of lunar rover companies
https://spacenews.com/nasa-document-outlines-selection-of-lunar-rover-companies/

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Mysterious object in the gap
https://www.mpg.de/21778967/0404-grav-mysterious-object-in-the-gap-152520-x?c=2249