Space news topic and space related news

Started by Tsanten Eywa 'eveng, September 23, 2011, 03:31:21 PM

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NASA Readies James Webb Space Telescope for December Launch
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-readies-james-webb-space-telescope-for-december-launch

NASA plans to launch the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit Dec. 18, 2021, to serve as the premier deep space observatory for the next decade.

The agency set the new target launch date in coordination with Arianespace after Webb recently and successfully completed its rigorous testing regimen – a major turning point for the mission. The new date also follows Arianespace successfully launching an Ariane 5 rocket in late July and scheduling a launch that will precede Webb. The July launch was the first for an Ariane 5 since August 2020.

Webb, an international program led by NASA with its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency, will launch on an Ariane 5 from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana on the northeastern coast of South America. ESA is providing the Ariane 5.

The highly complex space telescope is currently resting in its final stow configuration at Northrop Grumman's facilities in Redondo Beach, California.

"Webb is an exemplary mission that signifies the epitome of perseverance," said Gregory L. Robinson, Webb's program director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "I am inspired by our dedicated team and our global partnerships that have made this incredible endeavor possible. Together, we've overcome technical obstacles along the way as well as challenges during the coronavirus pandemic. I also am grateful for the steadfast support of Congress. Now that we have an observatory and a rocket ready for launch, I am looking forward to the big day and the amazing science to come."

The Webb team is preparing for shipment operations, during which the observatory will undergo final closeout procedures and packing for its journey to the launch site. The major elements of the Ariane 5 rocket that will carry Webb into space have safely arrived in Kourou, French Guiana, from Europe.

The Webb telescope's revolutionary technology will explore every phase of cosmic history – from within our solar system to the most distant observable galaxies in the early universe, and everything in between. Webb will reveal new and unexpected discoveries, and help humankind understand the origins of the universe and our place in it.

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Hubble Shows Winds in Jupiter's Great Red Spot Are Speeding Up
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/hubble-shows-winds-in-jupiters-great-red-spot-are-speeding-up

Like the speed of an advancing race car driver, the winds in the outermost "lane" of Jupiter's Great Red Spot are accelerating – a discovery only made possible by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which has monitored the planet for more than a decade.

Researchers analyzing Hubble's regular "storm reports" found that the average wind speed just within the boundaries of the storm, known as a high-speed ring, has increased by up to 8 percent from 2009 to 2020. In contrast, the winds near the red spot's innermost region are moving significantly more slowly, like someone cruising lazily on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

The massive storm's crimson-colored clouds spin counterclockwise at speeds that exceed 400 miles per hour – and the vortex is bigger than Earth itself. The red spot is legendary in part because humans have observed it for more than 150 years.

"When I initially saw the results, I asked 'Does this make sense?' No one has ever seen this before," said Michael Wong of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the analysis. "But this is something only Hubble can do. Hubble's longevity and ongoing observations make this revelation possible."

We use Earth-orbiting satellites and airplanes to track major storms on Earth closely in real time. "Since we don't have a storm chaser plane at Jupiter, we can't continuously measure the winds on site," explained Amy Simon of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who contributed to the research. "Hubble is the only telescope that has the kind of temporal coverage and spatial resolution that can capture Jupiter's winds in this detail."

The change in wind speeds they have measured with Hubble amount to less than 1.6 miles per hour per Earth year. "We're talking about such a small change that if you didn't have eleven years of Hubble data, we wouldn't know it happened," said Simon. "With Hubble we have the precision we need to spot a trend." Hubble's ongoing monitoring allows researchers to revisit and analyze its data very precisely as they keep adding to it. The smallest features Hubble can reveal in the storm are a mere 105 miles across, about twice the length of the state of Rhode Island.

"We find that the average wind speed in the Great Red Spot has been slightly increasing over the past decade," Wong added. "We have one example where our analysis of the two-dimensional wind map found abrupt changes in 2017 when there was a major convective storm nearby."

To better analyze Hubble's bounty of data, Wong took a new approach to his data analysis. He used software to track tens to hundreds of thousands of wind vectors (directions and speeds) each time Jupiter was observed by Hubble. "It gave me a much more consistent set of velocity measurements," Wong explained. "I also ran a battery of statistical tests to confirm if it was justified to call this an increase in wind speed. It is."

What does the increase in speed mean? "That's hard to diagnose, since Hubble can't see the bottom of the storm very well. Anything below the cloud tops is invisible in the data," explained Wong. "But it's an interesting piece of data that can help us understand what's fueling the Great Red Spot and how it's maintaining energy." There's still a lot of work to do to fully understand it.

Astronomers have pursued ongoing studies of the "king" of solar system storms since the 1870s. The Great Red Spot is an upwelling of material from Jupiter's interior. If seen from the side, the storm would have a tiered wedding cake structure with high clouds at the center cascading down to its outer layers. Astronomers have noted that it is shrinking in size and becoming more circular than oval in observations spanning more than a century. The current diameter is 10,000 miles across, meaning that Earth could still fit inside it.

In addition to observing this legendary, long-lived storm, researchers have observed storms on other planets, including Neptune, where they tend to travel across the planet's surface and disappear over only a few years. Research like this helps scientists not only learn about the individual planets, but also draw conclusions about the underlying physics that drive and maintain planets' storms.

The majority of the data to support this research came from Hubble's Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy program, which provides annual Hubble global views of the outer planets that allow astronomers to look for changes in the planets' storms, winds, and clouds.



By analyzing images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope from 2009 to 2020, researchers found that the average wind speed just within the boundaries of the Great Red Spot, set off by the outer green circle, have increased by up to 8 percent from 2009 to 2020 and exceed 400 miles per hour. In contrast, the winds near the storm's innermost region, set off by a smaller green ring, are moving significantly more slowly. Both move counterclockwise.

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NASA, ULA Launch Lucy Mission to 'Fossils' of Planet Formation
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-ula-launch-lucy-mission-to-fossils-of-planet-formation

NASA's Lucy mission, the agency's first to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids, launched at 5:34 a.m. EDT Saturday on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Over the next 12 years, Lucy will fly by one main-belt asteroid and seven Trojan asteroids, making it the agency's first single spacecraft mission in history to explore so many different asteroids. Lucy will investigate these "fossils" of planetary formation up close during its journey.

"Lucy embodies NASA's enduring quest to push out into the cosmos for the sake of exploration and science, to better understand the universe and our place within it," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "I can't wait to see what mysteries the mission uncovers!"

About an hour after launch, Lucy separated from the second stage of the ULA Atlas V 401 rocket. Its two massive solar arrays, each nearly 24 feet (7.3 meters) wide, successfully unfurled about 30 minutes later and began charging the spacecraft's batteries to power its subsystems.

"Today's launch marks a genuine full-circle moment for me as Lucy was the first mission I approved in 2017, just a few months after joining NASA," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "A true mission of discovery, Lucy is rich with opportunity to learn more about these mysterious Trojan asteroids and better understand the formation and evolution of the early solar system."

Lucy sent its first signal to Earth from its own antenna to NASA's Deep Space Network at 6:40 a.m. The spacecraft is now traveling at roughly 67,000 mph (108,000 kph) on a trajectory that will orbit the Sun and bring it back toward Earth in October 2022 for a gravity assist.

Named for the fossilized skeleton of one of our earliest known hominin ancestors, the Lucy mission will allow scientists to explore two swarms of Trojan asteroids that share an orbit around the Sun with Jupiter. Scientific evidence indicates that Trojan asteroids are remnants of the material that formed giant planets. Studying them can reveal previously unknown information about their formation and our solar system's evolution in the same way the fossilized skeleton of Lucy revolutionized our understanding of human evolution.

"We started working on the Lucy mission concept early in 2014, so this launch has been long in the making," said Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator, based out of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), which is headquartered in San Antonio. "It will still be several years before we get to the first Trojan asteroid, but these objects are worth the wait and all the effort because of their immense scientific value. They are like diamonds in the sky."

Lucy's Trojan destinations are trapped near Jupiter's Lagrange points – gravitationally stable locations in space associated with a planet's orbit where smaller masses can be trapped. One swarm of Trojans is ahead of the gas giant planet, and another is behind it. The asteroids in Jupiter's Trojan swarms are as far away from Jupiter as they are from the Sun.

The spacecraft's first Earth gravity assist in 2022 will accelerate and direct Lucy's trajectory beyond the orbit of Mars. The spacecraft will then swing back toward Earth for another gravity assist in 2024, which will propel Lucy toward the Donaldjohanson asteroid – located within the solar system's main asteroid belt – in 2025.

Lucy will then journey toward its first Trojan asteroid encounter in the swarm ahead of Jupiter for a 2027 arrival. After completing its first four targeted flybys, the spacecraft will travel back to Earth for a third gravity boost in 2031, which will catapult it to the trailing swarm of Trojans for a 2033 encounter.

"Today we celebrate this incredible milestone and look forward to the new discoveries that Lucy will uncover," said Donya Douglas-Bradshaw, Lucy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

NASA Goddard provides overall mission management, systems engineering, plus safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Lucy is the 13th mission in NASA's Discovery Program. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the agency.

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Astronomers make most distant detection yet of fluorine in star-forming galaxy
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2115/

A new discovery is shedding light on how fluorine — an element found in our bones and teeth as fluoride — is forged in the Universe. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, a team of astronomers have detected this element in a galaxy that is so far away its light has taken over 12 billion years to reach us. This is the first time fluorine has been spotted in such a distant star-forming galaxy.

"We all know about fluorine because the toothpaste we use every day contains it in the form of fluoride," says Maximilien Franco from the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, who led the new study, published today in Nature Astronomy. Like most elements around us, fluorine is created inside stars but, until now, we did not know exactly how this element was produced. "We did not even know which type of stars produced the majority of fluorine in the Universe!"

Franco and his collaborators spotted fluorine (in the form of hydrogen fluoride) in the large clouds of gas of the distant galaxy NGP–190387, which we see as it was when the Universe was only 1.4 billion years old, about 10% of its current age. Since stars expel the elements they form in their cores as they reach the end of their lives, this detection implies that the stars that created fluorine must have lived and died quickly.

The team believes that Wolf–Rayet stars, very massive stars that live only a few million years, a blink of the eye in the Universe's history, are the most likely production sites of fluorine. They are needed to explain the amounts of hydrogen fluoride the team spotted, they say. Wolf–Rayet stars had been suggested as possible sources of cosmic fluorine before, but astronomers did not know until now how important they were in producing this element in the early Universe.

"We have shown that Wolf–Rayet stars, which are among the most massive stars known and can explode violently as they reach the end of their lives, help us, in a way, to maintain good dental health!" jokes Franco.

Besides these stars, other scenarios for how fluorine is produced and expelled have been put forward in the past. An example includes pulsations of giant, evolved stars with masses up to few times that of our Sun, called asymptotic giant branch stars. But the team believes these scenarios, some of which take billions of years to occur, might not fully explain the amount of fluorine in NGP–190387.

"For this galaxy, it took just tens or hundreds of millions of years to have fluorine levels comparable to those found in stars in the Milky Way, which is 13.5 billion years old. This was a totally unexpected result," says Chiaki Kobayashi, a professor at the University of Hertfordshire. "Our measurement adds a completely new constraint on the origin of fluorine, which has been studied for two decades."

The discovery in NGP–190387 marks one of the first detections of fluorine beyond the Milky Way and its neighbouring galaxies. Astronomers have previously spotted this element in distant quasars, bright objects powered by supermassive black holes at the centre of some galaxies. But never before had this element been observed in a star-forming galaxy so early in the history of the Universe.

The team's detection of fluorine was a chance discovery made possible thanks to the use of space and ground-based observatories. NGP–190387, originally discovered with the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory and later observed with the Chile-based ALMA, is extraordinarily bright for its distance. The ALMA data confirmed that the exceptional luminosity of NGP–190387 was partly caused by another known massive galaxy, located between NGP–190387 and the Earth, very close to the line of sight. This massive galaxy amplified the light observed by Franco and his collaborators, enabling them to spot the faint radiation emitted billions of years ago by the fluorine in NGP–190387.

Future studies of NGP–190387 with the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) — ESO's new flagship project, under construction in Chile and set to start operations later this decade — could reveal further secrets about this galaxy. "ALMA is sensitive to radiation emitted by cold interstellar gas and dust," says Chentao Yang, an ESO Fellow in Chile. "With the ELT, we will be able to observe NGP–190387 through the direct light of stars, gaining crucial information on the stellar content of this galaxy."

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ESO telescope images planet around most massive star pair to date
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2118/

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) has captured an image of a planet orbiting b Centauri, a two-star system that can be seen with the naked eye. This is the hottest and most massive planet-hosting star system found to date, and the planet was spotted orbiting it at 100 times the distance Jupiter orbits the Sun. Some astronomers believed planets could not exist around stars this massive and this hot — until now.

"Finding a planet around b Centauri was very exciting since it completely changes the picture about massive stars as planet hosts," explains Markus Janson, an astronomer at Stockholm University, Sweden and first author of the new study published online today in Nature.

Located approximately 325 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, the b Centauri two-star system (also known as HIP 71865) has at least six times the mass of the Sun, making it by far the most massive system around which a planet has been confirmed. Until now, no planets had been spotted around a star more than three times as massive as the Sun.

Most massive stars are also very hot, and this system is no exception: its main star is a so-called B-type star that is over three times as hot as the Sun. Owing to its intense temperature, it emits large amounts of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation. 

The large mass and the heat from this type of star have a strong impact on the surrounding gas, that should work against planet formation. In particular, the hotter a star is, the more high-energy radiation it produces, which causes the surrounding material to evaporate faster. "B-type stars are generally considered as quite destructive and dangerous environments, so it was believed that it should be exceedingly difficult to form large planets around them," Janson says.

But the new discovery shows planets can in fact form in such severe star systems. "The planet in b Centauri is an alien world in an environment that is completely different from what we experience here on Earth and in our Solar System," explains co-author Gayathri Viswanath, a PhD student at Stockholm University. "It's a harsh environment, dominated by extreme radiation, where everything is on a gigantic scale: the stars are bigger, the planet is bigger, the distances are bigger."

Indeed, the planet discovered, named b Centauri (AB)b or b Centauri b, is also extreme. It is 10 times as massive as Jupiter, making it one of the most massive planets ever found. Moreover, it moves around the star system in one of the widest orbits yet discovered, at a distance a staggering 100 times greater than the distance of Jupiter from the Sun. This large distance from the central pair of stars could be key to the planet's survival.

These results were made possible thanks to the sophisticated Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument (SPHERE) mounted on ESO's VLT in Chile. SPHERE has successfully imaged several planets orbiting stars other than the Sun before, including taking the first ever-image of two planets orbiting a Sun-like star.

However, SPHERE was not the first instrument to image this planet. As part of their study, the team looked into archival data on the b Centauri system and discovered that the planet had actually been imaged more than 20 years ago by the ESO 3.6-m telescope, though it was not recognised as a planet at the time.

With ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), due to start observations later this decade, and with upgrades to the VLT, astronomers may be able to unveil more about this planet's formation and features. "It will be an intriguing task to try to figure out how it might have formed, which is a mystery at the moment," concludes Janson.

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Vawmataw

Fmawn Ta 'Rrta - News IN NA'VI ONLY (Discord)
Traducteur francophone de Kelutral.org, dict-navi et Reykunyu

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