TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Sep 21, 2023
Tagging Bennu
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's arm reached out and touched asteroid 101955 Bennu on October 20, 2020, after a careful approach to the small, near-Earth asteroid's boulder-strewn surface. Dubbed a Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event, the 30 centimeter wide sampling head (TAGSAM) appears to crush some of the rocks in this close-up recorded by the spacecraft's SamCam. The image was snapped just after surface contact some 321 million kilometers from planet Earth. One second later, the spacecraft fired nitrogen gas from a bottle intended to blow a substantial amount of Bennu's regolith into the sampling head, collecting the loose surface material. And now, nearly three years later, on Sunday, September 24, that sample of asteroid Bennu is scheduled to arrive on planet Earth. The sample return capsule will be dropped off by the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft as it makes a close flyby of Earth. Twenty minutes after the drop-off, the spacecraft will fire its thrusters to divert past Earth and continue on to orbit near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
Happy places
NASA's Parker Solar Probe flies through major coronal mass ejection — and survives to tell the tale
Sep 20, 2023
Coronal mass ejections (CMEs), or magnetic bursts of plasma from the sun’s corona, are fearsome indeed. They can drive high-energy space storms for millions of miles and endanger satellites, astronauts and even electronics within Earth’s atmosphere. So, engineers cheered when they learned the Parker Solar Probe drifted through a CME unscathed on September 5, 2022.
Scientists had a few science-focused reasons to celebrate: Parker’s dangerous journey offered the probe a golden opportunity to view a CME up close. And in fact, Parker’s observations helped scientists validate a two-decade-old theory.
As two scientists suggested in 2003, CMEs can push away interplanetary dust — the tiny detritus from planets, asteroids, and comets that is left to drift around the sun. Interplanetary dust is small and difficult to observe, but Parker’s Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) camera managed to pick out light reflected off the particles. The specks of such light were still very subtle, however, but scientists enhanced the signals by subtracting out the average brightness of images WISPR had taken during similar orbits.
When they did, they found the CME blew dust away along an approximately 6-million-mile-long (9.7 million kilometers) path from the sun. Guillermo Stenborg, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and lead author of the paper, compared the observed effect to a vacuum cleaner. And just like a freshly vacuumed room, the gap in interplanetary dust quickly filled in with yet more interplanetary dust.
Whether all CMEs clean up dust in this way remains an open question. Since astronomers have only ever observed the phenomenon with this one 2022 event, Stenborg and colleagues believe that only the most powerful CMEs may be responsible for such tidying up.
Fortunately, the sun is approaching solar maximum, and Parker as well as other observatories may get more opportunities to observe these fearsome CMEs.
A paper on this research was published on May 31, 2023 in The Astrophysical Journal.
https://www.space.com/parker-cme-flies-through-displaces-dust-solar-physics
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acd2cf
#015 Kari Lake | The Roseanne Barr Podcast
This week two strong and resilient women sit together in this powerful episode. Roseanne sits down with the rightful Governor of Arizona, Kari Lake! Kari is one of the most free-spoken fiercest defenders of America and the two women discuss motherhood, election fraud and how Americans can beat the globalist agenda that is killing us all.
Kari Lake:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9M6sA1AwtU