Patricia Wallace

25/09/2023

The US space agency Nasa has named the four astronauts who will take humanity back to the Moon, after a 50-year gap.

Christina Koch will become the first woman astronaut ever assigned to a lunar mission, while Victor Glover will be the first black astronaut on one.

They will join Reid Wiseman and Jeremy Hansen to fly a capsule around the Moon late next year or early in 2025.

The astronauts won't land on the Moon, but their mission will pave the way for a touchdown by a subsequent crew.

The cat is out of the bag

08/09/2023

Now, the newly named astronauts will climb into Orion for Artemis-2 and a journey to and from the Moon that's likely to take about 10 days.

The last human spaceflight mission to the Moon was Apollo 17 in December 1972. The first landing was Apollo 11 in 1969.

Artemis-3, the first landing of the new era, is not expected to occur until at least 12 months after Artemis-2.

Nasa doesn't yet have a system capable of taking astronauts down to the lunar surface. This is being developed by entrepreneur Elon Musk's SpaceX company.

It will be a variant of his Starship vehicle, which is due to start flight testing in the next few weeks.

01/09/2023

Scientists have observed the early universe running "five times slower" for the first time.

Researchers observed data from quasars - objects powered by "supermassive" black holes at the centre of early galaxies - using them to measure time near the beginning of the universe.

Quasars are among the brightest and most distant known celestial objects.

Prof Geraint Lewis, from University of Sydney, told the BBC it confirms again we live in an expanding universe.

Prof Lewis, lead author of the study published in Nature Astronomy, said: "Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower [soon after the Big Bang].

"If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second - but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag."

Quasars are bright objects powered by "supermassive" black holes blasting out energy as they engorge themselves on gas, dust, and other matter within their gravitational grasp, according to Nasa.

Astrophysicist Prof Lewis and astrostatistician Brendan Brewer, from the University of Auckland, looked at the colours of nearly 200 quasars over 20 years. They were then able to standardise the "ticking" of each quasar.

Explaining what it all means, the researchers said it confirms the expectation of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which means we should observe the distant universe running much slower than the present day.

He said: "Thanks to Einstein, we know that time and space are intertwined and, since the dawn of time in the singularity of the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding.

"This expansion of space means that our observations of the early universe should appear to be much slower than time flows today.

"In this paper, we have established that back to about a billion years after the Big Bang."

29/08/2023

Anglesey, north Wales, has some of the darkest skies in Europe.

Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island), off the Llŷn Peninsula, has become the first site in Europe to be awarded International Dark Sky Sanctuary certification.

Speaking from Anglesey, Dani Robertson, the dark skies officer for North Wales, said the evening had been a visual treat despite a light cloudy haze.

"I'm in my back garden and I can see a very nice little crescent Moon, to the top left and just above it I can see Mars, which has a lovely red glow, and a bit lower towards the horizon there's a really bright light and that's Venus," she said.

"If it were clearer, I could see all of it, the only one you wouldn't be able to see is Uranus, you'd need a telescope."

In Hexham, near the border with Scotland, Dan Pye from the Kielder Observatory said seeing the planets in alignment offered perspective about our place in the solar system.

He said: "Over the course of the night the distance between these objects shifts as the moon goes around us, we move a little further around the sun, and the planets continue their journeys around the sun.

"I think witnessing this, helps you realise that connection we have to the cosmic ballet we have with other objects in just our very local space theatre."

Ms Robertson, an amateur astronomer, said that 98% of people in the UK lived under polluted skies.

"It's a shame because that's our home galaxy, another part of being human that is being denied to lots of people," she said.

"When we look at the night sky, things like Ta**us, the Pleiades, the Moon, they've been the same for the whole of human existence."

But she said that unlike other types of pollution, this one was relatively easy to fix permanently.

18/08/2023

Telescopes have previously detected silicates in so-called brown dwarfs. These are essentially star-like objects that have failed to ignite properly. But this is a first for a planet-sized object.

To make the detection, Webb used its Mid-Infrared Instrument (Miri), part-built in the UK, and its Near-Infrared Spectrometer (NirSpec).

They didn't take pretty pictures of the planet, at least not in this instance. What they did was tease apart the light coming from VHS 1256b into its component colours as a way to discern the composition of the atmosphere.

"JWST is the only telescope that can measure all these molecular and dust features together," said Miri co-principal investigator Prof Gillian Wright, who directs the STFC UK Astronomy Technology Centre, also in Edinburgh.

"The dynamic picture of the atmosphere of VHS 1256b provided by this study is a prime example of the discoveries enabled by using the advanced capabilities of Miri and NirSpec together."

JWST's primary mission is to observe the pioneer stars and galaxies that first shone just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. But a key objective is to investigate exoplanets. In Miri and NirSpec it has the tools to study their atmospheres in unprecedented detail.

Scientists hope they might even be able to tell whether some exoplanets have conditions suitable to host life.

11/08/2023

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.

07/08/2023

Astroscale is a Japanese company with a major division based at the Harwell science and space campus.

This British team has released details of its so-called Cosmic mission, which is its entry to the government contest.

Cosmic stands for Cleaning Outer Space Mission through Innovative Capture.

It would see a 600-700kg spacecraft launch to orbit to chase down and grab hold of a long obsolete satellite that is now wandering through space uncommanded.

27/07/2023

Scientists have revealed how Nasa satellites detected the brightest gamma ray explosion in space.

The gamma-ray burst (GRB) occurred two billion light-years from Earth and illuminated much of the galaxy.

Images of the rare and powerful cosmic phenomenon show a halo and "bullseye" like shapes.

Experts, including academics from the University of Leicester, say the GRB was 10 times brighter than any other previously detected.

They have released detailed analysis of the powerful explosion that was spotted on 9 October, 2022.

The blast was officially named GRB 221009A but has been nicknamed the BOAT - Brightest Of All Time - by those working on a mission Nasa calls Swift.

22/07/2023

Researchers observed data from quasars - objects powered by "supermassive" black holes at the centre of early galaxies - using them to measure time near the beginning of the universe.

Quasars are among the brightest and most distant known celestial objects.

Prof Geraint Lewis, from University of Sydney, told the BBC it confirms again we live in an expanding universe.

Prof Lewis, lead author of the study published in Nature Astronomy, said: "Looking back to a time when the universe was just over a billion years old, we see time appearing to flow five times slower [soon after the Big Bang].

"If you were there, in this infant universe, one second would seem like one second - but from our position, more than 12 billion years into the future, that early time appears to drag."

Quasars are bright objects powered by "supermassive" black holes blasting out energy as they engorge themselves on gas, dust, and other matter within their gravitational grasp, according to Nasa.

Astrophysicist Prof Lewis and astrostatistician Brendan Brewer, from the University of Auckland, looked at the colours of nearly 200 quasars over 20 years. They were then able to standardise the "ticking" of each quasar.

Explaining what it all means, the researchers said it confirms the expectation of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which means we should observe the distant universe running much slower than the present day.

14/07/2023

Nasa and the European Space Agency are working up a plan to retrieve the rock cache. It's an audacious plan that will involve another landing system, some helicopters, a Martian rocket and an interplanetary freighter.

The goal is to have the samples back on Earth in 2033.

The delivery will include some examples of igneous, or volcanic, rocks that Perseverance drilled out on the crater floor. These will tell the story, mostly, of Jezero before it was filled with lake water.

Critically, the samples are of a rock type that can be definitively dated. At present, ages on Mars can only be inferred indirectly.

The other part of the cache will include sedimentary type rocks that Perseverance has been collecting in recent months from the delta deposits in the western sector of the 45km-wide crater.

A delta is a structure built up from the silt and sand dumped by a river as it slows on entry into a wider body of water.

It's the kind of geological feature that might just have trapped traces of past microbial life.

03/07/2023

The US space agency's Perseverance rover is close to completing its first set of objectives on Mars.

The Nasa robot has collected a diverse set of rock samples that it will soon deposit on the surface, awaiting carriage to Earth by later missions.

It's 17 months since the vehicle arrived in an area called Jezero Crater, slung below a rocket crane.

Everything "Percy" has seen since confirms to scientists the rover is in the perfect place to hunt for life.

It's not looking for any organisms that are alive today; the harsh environment on Mars makes their presence highly improbable. Rather, the robot is searching for the traces of a biology that could have existed billions of years ago when Jezero was filled with a lake.

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.

UK Mars rover will have to aim for the Moon
Nasa rover begins key drive to find life on Mars
Perseverance Mars rover finds its 'baseline' rocks