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22/09/2023

Nasa's Artemis spacecraft has arrived at the Moon.

The Orion capsule swept 130km (80 miles) above the lunar surface, and it will now begin to enter a larger orbit.

The vehicle was out of contact for 34 minutes during this manoeuvre, which began at 12:44 GMT, as it took place on the far side of the Moon.

As the signal returned, the spacecraft sent back an image of the Earth. Nasa says so far the mission has "exceeded expectations" since last week's launch.

Media caption,
WATCH: Can you see Snoopy moving around inside the Orion capsule?

Nasa flight director Zebulon Scoville said: "This is one of those days that you've been thinking about and dreaming about for a long, long time.

"This morning, we just saw the Earth set behind the Moon as we take the next human-rated vehicle around the Moon, preparing to bring humans back there within a few years. This is a game-changer."

Artemis mission: How humans are returning to the Moon
Nasa's Artemis Moon rocket lifts off Earth
Nasa's Orion spacecraft: A guide
A photographic mission to show us the Moon
Media caption,
WATCH AGAIN: Nasa's Artemis I rocket blasts off

The spacecraft zoomed over the landing sites of Apollo 11, 12 and 14 as it made the close approach.

The Artemis mission began on Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with the launch of the most powerful rocket Nasa has ever built.

It placed Orion on a path towards the Moon. The capsule has already sent back several selfies during its journey.

IMAGE SOURCE,NASA
Image caption,
As the spacecraft emerged from the far side of the Moon it snapped an image of the "pale blue dot"
Because this is a test flight, no astronauts are on board this time - instead three manikins, covered in thousands of sensors, are making the journey.

"Those sensors are getting an idea of whether the environment is going to be OK for people," explained Nasa astronaut Zena Cardman.

"So there are things like radiation sensors, motion sensors, accelerometers - things that we as human payloads are going to care a lot about."

And this is important because if this flight goes well astronauts will join the next ride, first of all going into orbit around the Moon, before a third Artemis mission then takes the first woman and first person of colour down to the lunar surface.

Media caption,
A VR guide to the Artemis mission

The European Space Agency is also carefully monitoring the spacecraft. It's built Orion's service module, which provides the power and propulsion for the voyage.

Esa also has a passenger on board: Shaun the Sheep, the British stop-motion animated character. Shaun is strapped in for the journey. Nasa's mascot is Snoopy, who is floating free in the cockpit of the crew capsule.

IMAGE SOURCE,NASA
Image caption,
The spacecraft will be passing over the landing sites of several of the Apollo missions
After this close flyby, Orion will now swing much further out as it begins to loop around the Moon.

On 26 November, it is set to break Apollo 13's distance record when it reaches 400,171km (248,655 miles) from Earth.

Two days later, it will have travelled more than 430,000km (270,000 miles) from our planet - the furthest a spacecraft built for humans has ever flown.

After this, the capsule will begin its journey home, back towards the Moon and then on to Earth with a scheduled splash down in the Pacific Ocean on 11 December.

13/09/2023

The extent of Arctic sea-ice cover has been in decline for the entire period that satellites have been monitoring it, which is more than 40 years - a reduction running at an average rate of 13% per decade.

But it's only really since 2011 that spacecraft have been able to consistently measure its thickness - and thickness (or more properly, volume) is the true measure of the floes' health.

That's because the extent of sea-ice cover is heavily dependent on whether the winds have spread out the floes or pushed them together.

To measure thickness, scientists use satellite altimeters.

The European Space Agency's (Esa) pioneering Cryosat-2 mission carries a radar to measure the difference in height between the top of the marine ice and the top of the water in the cracks, or leads, that separate the floes.

From this difference, scientists can then, with a relatively simple calculation, work out the thickness of the ice.

The approach works well in winter months, but in summer, when the snows on top of the ice, and the ice itself, start to melt, pooling water effectively dazzles the radar. Scientists can't be sure if the echo signal that returns to Cryosat is coming from the open ocean or from the surface of a meltpond sitting on the ice.

May through to September - the key melt season - has been a blind period for the spacecraft.

To solve the problem, researchers used an artificial intelligence (AI) technique in which an algorithm was able to learn and identify reliable observations from a vast library of synthetic radar signals.
Prof Julienne Stroeve, from University College London (UCL), explained: "We simulated what would be the echo shapes that we would get for different ice surface types - whether they had meltponds; whether it was flooded ice; or ice of different roughnesses; or simply leads. We created this huge database of physically based estimates of what the radar return should look like, and then we matched those to the individual radar pulses from the instrument to find echoes that matched the best."

Esa has kept in its data archives all the Cryosat May-to-September measurements, even though for the past decade they've been of next to no use. But now, thanks to this new approach, Dr Landy's team has been able to go back through the records to recover full-year ice thickness measurements for the entire time the satellite has been operational.

Dr Rachel Tilling worked extensively with Cryosat data before transferring her studies to the US space agency's recently launched Icesat-2 laser altimeter mission.

She applauded the innovation.

"Summer is when sea-ice extent in the Arctic is seeing its most rapid decline, and having this extra dimension will help us understand more about how the ice pack is changing," the Nasa scientist told BBC News.

"Icesat-2 has its own unique difficulties in summer but we're lucky that its photon-counting technology means we can still measure the height of sea-ice, water and melt ponds year-round.

"Having said that, Cryosat-2 will always be my first love so I'm really excited to see it being used in this novel way."A chief beneficiary of the new thickness measurements would be Inuit populations in the Arctic, said Dr Michel Tsamados, also from UCL.

"[They] have identified sea-ice roughness and slush (melted snow and ice) as a key impediment for safe travel on the ice with the changing climate already negatively affecting these characteristics and causing increased travel accidents and search-and-rescues," he explained.

"Both are related to the thickness of the ice. Therefore, measuring throughout the full year the sea-ice thickness from space from Cryosat-2 but also Icesat-2 and other satellite sensors will eventually help provide better maps to the Inuit populations for safe travel over this rapidly changing terrain."

Dr Landy and colleague have published their new Cryosat approach in the journal Nature.

05/09/2023

This ancient history, scientists hope, is now recorded in the "amazing" rock samples that will be laid down in "a depot" in the next couple of months.

"If [Jezero's ancient] conditions existed pretty much anywhere on Earth at any point in time over the last 3.5 billion years, I think it's safe to say, or at least assume, that biology would have done its thing and left its mark in these rocks for us to observe," said David Shuster, a Perseverance mission scientist from the University of California, Berkeley.

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24/08/2023

A raging dust storm has been observed on a planet outside our Solar System for the first time.

It was detected on the exoplanet known as VHS 1256b, which is about 40 light-years from Earth.

It took the remarkable capabilities of the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to make the discovery.

The dust particles are silicates - small grains comprising silicon and oxygen, which form the basis of most rocky minerals.

But the storm detected by Webb isn't quite the same phenomenon you would get in an arid, desert region on our planet. It's more of a rocky mist.

"It's kind of like if you took sand grains, but much finer. We're talking silicate grains the size of smoke particles," explained Prof Beth Biller from the University of Edinburgh and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, UK.

"That's what the clouds on VHS 1256b would be like, but a lot hotter. This planet is a hot, young object. The cloud-top temperature is maybe similar to the temperature of a candle flame," she told BBC News.

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VHS 1256b was first identified by the UK-developed Vista telescope in Chile in 2015.

It's what's termed a "super Jupiter" - a planet similar to the gas giant in our own Solar System, but a lot bigger, perhaps 12 to 18 times the mass.

It circles a couple of stars at great distance - about four times the distance that Pluto is from our Sun.

Earlier observations of VHS 1256b showed it to be red-looking, hinting that it might have dust in its atmosphere. The Webb study confirms it.

"It's fascinating because it illustrates how different clouds on another planet can be from the water vapour clouds we are familiar with on the Earth," said Prof Biller.

"We see carbon monoxide (CO) and methane in the atmosphere, which is indicative of it being hot and turbulent, with material being drawn up from deep.

"There are probably multiple layers of silicate grains. The ones that we're seeing are some of the very, very fine grains that are higher up in the atmosphere, but there may be bigger grains deeper down in the atmosphere."

17/08/2023

Nasa is expecting hundreds of thousands of spectators to line the beaches along the space coast.

This will be the most powerful rocket ever to pull away from Kennedy, producing 39.1 meganewtons (8.8 million pounds) of thrust off the pad. That's close to 15% more than from Apollo's Saturn V rockets and over 20% more than from the old space shuttle system.

Put another way, the SLS's engines could power the equivalent of almost 60 Concorde supersonic jets on take-off.

"I can tell you there's an energy and there's an excitement around the Kennedy Space Center; I would say across the agency and all around the Space Coast as we get closer and closer to this launch," commented Janet Petro, the director at KSC.

07/08/2023

A motor pushed the capsule clear, enabling it to make a soft return to the ground with the aid of parachutes.

New Shepard regularly carries people, but on this occasion the only payload was a batch of zero-G experiments.

The incident occurred at an altitude of just over 28,000ft (8.5km) while the vehicles were moving upwards at 700mph (1,120km/h).

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02/08/2023

Much of the bright red emission comes from jets of shocked molecular gas flowing at high speed from an invisible protostar, VLA1623, a star so young that many Stone Age cave paintings pre-date it.

"JWST is not only going to revolutionise our view of how galaxies were born in the early universe, but also how stars and planets are being made today, much closer to home in our own Milky Way," the astronomer told BBC News.

To underline just what a marvel Webb is, the below image of the Rho Ophiuchi complex was acquired by Nasa's now retired Spitzer space telescope. Spitzer, like Webb, was sensitive to infrared light. It was a very capable facility, but with a primary mirror just 85cm in diameter, it could never have achieved the kind of detail we now see with Webb's 6.5m primary mirror.

31/07/2023

"JWST is not only going to revolutionise our view of how galaxies were born in the early universe, but also how stars and planets are being made today, much closer to home in our own Milky Way," the astronomer told BBC News.

To underline just what a marvel Webb is, the below image of the Rho Ophiuchi complex was acquired by Nasa's now retired Spitzer space telescope. Spitzer, like Webb, was sensitive to infrared light. It was a very capable facility, but with a primary mirror just 85cm in diameter, it could never have achieved the kind of detail we now see with Webb's 6.5m primary mirror.

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