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

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Brightest gamma-ray burst of all time came from the collapse of a massive star
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/04/brightest-gamma-ray-burst-of-all-time-came-from-the-collapse-of-a-massive-star/

James Webb Space Telescope observations show no sign of heavy elements

In October 2022, an international team of researchers, including Northwestern University astrophysicists, observed the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded, GRB 221009A.

Now, a Northwestern-led team has confirmed that the phenomenon responsible for the historic burst — dubbed the B.O.A.T. ("brightest of all time") — is the collapse and subsequent explosion of a massive star. The team discovered the explosion, or supernova, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

While this discovery solves one mystery, another mystery deepens.

The researchers speculated that evidence of heavy elements, such as platinum and gold, might reside within the newly uncovered supernova. The extensive search, however, did not find the signature that accompanies such elements. The origin of heavy elements in the universe continues to remain as one of astronomy's biggest open questions.

The research was published today (April 12) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

"When we confirmed that the GRB was generated by the collapse of a massive star, that gave us the opportunity to test a hypothesis for how some of the heaviest elements in the universe are formed," said Northwestern's Peter Blanchard, who led the study. "We did not see signatures of these heavy elements, suggesting that extremely energetic GRBs like the B.O.A.T. do not produce these elements. That doesn't mean that all GRBs do not produce them, but it's a key piece of information as we continue to understand where these heavy elements come from. Future observations with JWST will determine if the B.O.A.T.'s 'normal' cousins produce these elements."

Blanchard is a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), where he studies superluminous supernovae and GRBs. The study includes co-authors from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian; University of Utah; Penn State; University of California, Berkeley; Radbound University in the Netherlands; Space Telescope Science Institute; University of Arizona/Steward Observatory; University of California, Santa Barbara; Columbia University; Flatiron Institute; University of Greifswald and the University of Guelph.

"This event is particularly exciting because some had hypothesized that a luminous gamma-ray burst like the B.O.A.T. could make a lot of heavy elements like gold and platinum," said second author Ashley Villar of Harvard University and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "If they were correct, the B.O.A.T. should have been a goldmine. It is really striking that we didn't see any evidence for these heavy elements."

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Beautiful nebula, violent history: clash of stars solves stellar mystery
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2407/

When astronomers looked at a stellar pair at the heart of a stunning cloud of gas and dust, they were in for a surprise. Star pairs are typically very similar, like twins, but in HD 148937, one star appears younger and, unlike the other, is magnetic. New data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggest there were originally three stars in the system, until two of them clashed and merged. This violent event created the surrounding cloud and forever altered the system's fate.

"When doing background reading, I was struck by how special this system seemed," says Abigail Frost, an astronomer at ESO in Chile and lead author of the study published today in Science. The system, HD 148937, is located about 3800 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the Norma constellation. It is made up of two stars much more massive than the Sun and surrounded by a beautiful nebula, a cloud of gas and dust. "A nebula surrounding two massive stars is a rarity, and it really made us feel like something cool had to have happened in this system. When looking at the data, the coolness only increased."

"After a detailed analysis, we could determine that the more massive star appears much younger than its companion, which doesn't make any sense since they should have formed at the same time!" Frost says. The age difference — one star appears to be at least 1.5 million years younger than the other — suggests something must have rejuvenated the more massive star.

Another piece of the puzzle is the nebula surrounding the stars, known as NGC 6164/6165. It is 7500 years old, hundreds of times younger than both stars. The nebula also shows very high amounts of nitrogen, carbon and oxygen. This is surprising as these elements are normally expected deep inside a star, not outside; it is as if some violent event had set them free.

To unravel the mystery, the team assembled nine years' worth of data from the PIONIER and GRAVITY instruments, both on ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), located in Chile's Atacama Desert. They also used archival data from the FEROS instrument at ESO's La Silla Observatory.

"We think this system had at least three stars originally; two of them had to be close together at one point in the orbit whilst another star was much more distant," explains Hugues Sana, a professor at KU Leuven in Belgium and the principal investigator of the observations. "The two inner stars merged in a violent manner, creating a magnetic star and throwing out some material, which created the nebula. The more distant star formed a new orbit with the newly merged, now-magnetic star, creating the binary we see today at the centre of the nebula."

"The merger scenario was already in my head back in 2017 when I studied nebula observations obtained with the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope," adds co-author Laurent Mahy, currently a senior researcher at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. "Finding an age discrepancy between the stars suggests that this scenario is the most plausible one and it was only possible to show it with the new ESO data."

This scenario also explains why one of the stars in the system is magnetic and the other is not — another peculiar feature of HD 148937 spotted in the VLTI data.

At the same time, it helps solve a long-standing mystery in astronomy: how massive stars get their magnetic fields. While magnetic fields are a common feature of low-mass stars like our Sun, more massive stars cannot sustain magnetic fields in the same way. Yet some massive stars are indeed magnetic.

Astronomers had suspected for some time that massive stars could acquire magnetic fields when two stars merge. But this is the first time researchers find such direct evidence of this happening. In the case of HD 148937, the merger must have happened recently. "Magnetism in massive stars isn't expected to last very long compared to the lifetime of the star, so it seems we have observed this rare event very soon after it happened," Frost adds.

ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert, will enable researchers to work out what happened in the system in more detail, and perhaps reveal even more surprises.

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Most massive stellar black hole in our galaxy found
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2408/

Astronomers have identified the most massive stellar black hole yet discovered in the Milky Way galaxy. This black hole was spotted in data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission because it imposes an odd 'wobbling' motion on the companion star orbiting it. Data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) and other ground-based observatories were used to verify the mass of the black hole, putting it at an impressive 33 times that of the Sun.

Stellar black holes are formed from the collapse of massive stars and the ones previously identified in the Milky Way are on average about 10 times as massive as the Sun. Even the next most massive stellar black hole known in our galaxy, Cygnus X-1, only reaches 21 solar masses, making this new 33-solar-mass observation exceptional [1].

Remarkably, this black hole is also extremely close to us — at a mere 2000 light-years away in the constellation Aquila, it is the second-closest known black hole to Earth. Dubbed Gaia BH3 or BH3 for short, it was found while the team were reviewing Gaia observations in preparation for an upcoming data release. "No one was expecting to find a high-mass black hole lurking nearby, undetected so far," says Gaia collaboration member Pasquale Panuzzo, an astronomer from the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Observatoire de Paris - PSL, France. "This is the kind of discovery you make once in your research life."

To confirm their discovery, the Gaia collaboration used data from ground-based observatories, including from the Ultraviolet and Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES) instrument on ESO's VLT, located in Chile's Atacama Desert [2]. These observations revealed key properties of the companion star, which, together with Gaia data, allowed astronomers to precisely measure the mass of BH3.

Astronomers have found similarly massive black holes outside our galaxy (using a different detection method), and have theorised that they may form from the collapse of stars with very few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in their chemical composition. These so-called metal-poor stars are thought to lose less mass over their lifetimes and hence have more material left over to produce high-mass black holes after their death. But evidence directly linking metal-poor stars to high-mass black holes has been lacking until now.

Stars in pairs tend to have similar compositions, meaning that BH3's companion holds important clues about the star that collapsed to form this exceptional black hole. UVES data showed that the companion was a very metal-poor star, indicating that the star that collapsed to form BH3 was also metal-poor — just as predicted.

The research study, led by Panuzzo, is published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. "We took the exceptional step of publishing this paper based on preliminary data ahead of the forthcoming Gaia release because of the unique nature of the discovery," says co-author Elisabetta Caffau, also a Gaia collaboration member and CNRS scientist from the Observatoire de Paris - PSL. Making the data available early will let other astronomers start studying this black hole right now, without waiting for the full data release, planned for late 2025 at the earliest.

Further observations of this system could reveal more about its history and about the black hole itself. The GRAVITY instrument on ESO's VLT Interferometer, for example, could help astronomers find out whether this black hole is pulling in matter from its surroundings and better understand this exciting object.

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Nelson defends "very tough choices" in NASA's budget proposal
https://spacenews.com/nelson-defends-very-tough-choices-in-nasas-budget-proposal/

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China to leverage growing commercial space sector to launch megaconstellations
https://spacenews.com/china-to-leverage-growing-commercial-space-sector-to-launch-megaconstellations/

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How to Build a Space Station
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/how-to-build-space-station

Nanoracks has grown from facilitating science research on the International Space Station to building a commercial space station of its own. Co-founder Chris Cummins '89 explains how the firm has navigated disruption and built a collection of capabilities that opened up opportunity.

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NASA confirms Dragonfly mission despite doubled costs
https://spacenews.com/nasa-confirms-dragonfly-mission-despite-doubled-costs/