TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Oct 9, 2023
A Distorted Sunrise Eclipse
Yes, but have you ever seen a sunrise like this? Here, after initial cloudiness, the Sun appeared to rise in two pieces and during a partial eclipse in 2019, causing the photographer to describe it as the most stunning sunrise of his life. The dark circle near the top of the atmospherically-reddened Sun is the Moon but so is the dark peak just below it. This is because along the way, the Earth's atmosphere had a layer of unusually warm air over the sea which acted like a gigantic lens and created a second image. For a normal sunrise or sunset, this rare phenomenon of atmospheric optics is known as the Etruscan vase effect. The featured picture was captured in December 2019 from Al Wakrah, Qatar. Some observers in a narrow band of Earth to the east were able to see a full annular solar eclipse where the Moon appears completely surrounded by the background Sun in a ring of fire. The next solar eclipse, also an annular eclipse for well-placed observers, will occur this coming Saturday.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
Full record in case anybody wants more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmheOZtLn3U
SpaceX Starlink Mission
On Monday, October 9 at 12:23 a.m. PT, Falcon 9 launched 21 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California
This was the 14th flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, DART, Transporter-7, Iridium OneWeb, SDA-0B, and nine Starlink missions.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=sl-7-4
What cosmic object 'Arrokoth' can tell us about our solar system's formation
Oct 9, 2023
A new study from researchers at the Southwest Research Institute has unearthed a fascinating discovery about Arrokoth, a trans-Neptunian object made famous by the New Horizons probe on New Year’s Day in 2020.
It would appear that the two lobes of Arrokoth are dotted with mounds, each about five kilometers (3.1 miles) across. Those mounds, which give the lobes a slightly raspberry-like appearance, share roughly the same shape, size, color and albedo (how reflective the material is). Such similarity strongly indicates the mounds are disparate objects of a common origin that clumped together at some point to form large parts of the two lobes of the entire 18-kilometer wide (11.2 miles) body of Arrokoth.
"It's amazing to see this object so well preserved that its shape directly reveals these details of its assembly from a set of building blocks all very similar to one another," Dr. Will Grundy, a co-investigator of the New Horizons mission from the Lowell Observatory, said in a statement.
Arrokoth is a planetesimal in the Kuiper Belt, a vast stretch of space beyond Neptune that holds remnant building blocks of the solar system leftover from our cosmic neighborhood's formation. Because such planetesimals are believed to have slowly come together and eventually form the planets we see today, scientists are quite interested in studying these objects' characteristics.
The two lobes of Arrokoth, the team realized, are strongly suggestive of a "streaming instability model" of formation, where very gentle collisions, occuring at essentially walking speed, allow smaller objects to accumulate into larger ones. The new research opens up new questions though, primarily around the nearly uniform "building blocks" that make up the individual lobes.
"Similarities including in sizes and other properties of Arrokoth’s mound structures suggest new insights into its formation," said Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission and lead researcher on a new study about the discovery, said in the statement. "If the mounds are indeed representative of the building blocks of ancient planetesimals like Arrokoth, then planetesimal formation models will need to explain the preferred size for these building blocks."
Stern recently presented the paper at the 55th Annual Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in San Antonio.
These findings actually bolster the streaming instability model in the first place, suggesting that objects gently accumulated to form Arrokoth at minimal collision speeds in a specific region of the solar nebula undergoing gravitational collapse. "The mounds' uniform sizes and attributes could redefine the very understanding of Arrokoth's formation," Stern said. He emphasized that if these mounds indeed mirror the building blocks of ancient planetesimals like Arrokoth, scientists might need to rethink theories about planetesimal formation in general.
With missions like NASA’s Lucy targeting Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids and ESA’s comet interceptor on the horizon, there is bound to be a lot more interest in how these objects are composed. Like Arrokoth, the subjects of those endeavors are planetesimals left over from the earliest days of the solar system.
"It will be important to search for mound-like structures on the planetesimals these missions observe to see how common this phenomenon is, as a further guide to planetesimal formation theories,” Stern said.
https://www.space.com/arrokoth-kuiper-belt-planetesimal-formation-new-horizons
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/acf317
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Azerbaijan signs up to China’s international moon base project
October 8, 2023
Azerbaijan signed up to China’s International Lunar Research Station project Tuesday, on the sidelines of a major international space conference.
Li Guoping, chief engineer of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and Samaddin Asadov, chairman of the Board of Azercosmos, Azerbaijan’s space agency, signed a joint statement on cooperation on the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) Oct. 3 during the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), hosted by Azerbaijan, in the capital Baku. CNSA announced the agreement Oct. 8 via a statement on its webpages.
The agreement, as with a statement released on South Africa joining the ILRS last month, does not provide specifics of the cooperation.
The statement said the agreement will see CNSA and Azercosmos carry out extensive cooperation in the demonstration, implementation, operation and application of the ILRS, as well as training and other areas.
The ILRS project aims to construct a permanent lunar base in the 2030s. The initiative is seen as a China-led, parallel project and potential competitor to the NASA-led Artemis Program.
China has now attracted around 15 signatories to its ILRS initiative, according to representatives of the Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) under the CNSA. However, a list of these partners is not yet available. The partners are known to consist of organizations and institutions as well as countries.
Russia, Venezuela and South Africa have signed up. The Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO), Swiss firm nanoSPACE AG, the Hawaii-based International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA), and the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT) have also signed joint statements. Pakistan is also thought to have signed up.
China and Russia presented a joint ILRS roadmap in 2021 in St. Petersburg. Beijing has however since apparently taken the role of lead of the project since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
China is setting up an organization, named ILRSCO, in the city of Hefei in Anhui province to coordinate the initiative. DSEL said earlier this year that China aims to complete the signing of agreements with space agencies and organizations for founding members of ILRSCO by October.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is growing the number of signatories to its Artemis Accords. Last month Germany became the 29th country to sign up to the Accords, the political underpinning of the Artemis lunar program.
The Accords have signatories from each continent. A working group from the Accords stated at IAC that it drafted ideas to boost transparency in lunar cooperation.
China is already working on a series of robotic missions to launch later this decade as precursors to the ILRS. The 2026 Chang’e-7 lunar south pole mission and 2028 Chang’e-8 in-situ resource utilization and 3D-printing technology test mission will lay the basis for the larger plan, according to CNSA. NARIT will be involved in Chang’e-7 through the Sino-Thai Sensor Package for Space Weather Global Monitoring payload.
China will next year also launch Chang’e-6, which will be a first-ever lunar far side sample return mission. Pakistan will be involved in a CubeSat to fly with the mission.
A relay satellite named Queqiao-2 will be launched ahead of that mission early in 2024. The Queqiao-2 satellite will provide communications support for the Chang’e-6, 7 and 8 missions.
Russia’s Luna 25 mission was nominally part of the ILRS. That mission launched in August this year, but crashed into the moon during an anomalous orbital maneuver.
Azercosmos was founded in 2010. It operates a pair of telecommunications satellites, while communication with its only remote sensing satellite, Azersky, launched in 2014, was lost in April this year. Chinese commercial telemetry, tracking and command firm Emposat operates two ground stations in Azerbaijan.
https://spacenews.com/azerbaijan-signs-up-to-chinas-international-moon-base-project/
New Data Reveals Which State Is The Top UFO Hotspot
October 09, 2023
Newly released data from 2023 suggests that Maryland is a the country’s biggest hotspot for UFO sightings.
Data released by the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) revealed that residents and guests of Maryland have seen almost 2,000 UFOs since the year 1946. Folks across the state have seen everything from bizarre flying oval-shaped objects, to ones that flash and change shape, and even a chevron.
California, Florida, Connecticut, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington and a handful of others all rank pretty highly in the number of reported sightings of UFOs. These states seem to be more popular than some countries for UFO sightings.
But Maryland was a surprise on the list, as many of the reported sightings came from the 1950s and 1990s but were not made public until decades later. “It’s heartening to me that so many people are coming forward now,” NUFORC director Peter Davenport told CBS News. “We are getting significantly more reports than just six months or a year ago.”
There is still no general consensus on what UFOs are, where they come from or what they’re doing here on Earth. Despite Congress pushing the Pentagon for greater disclosure on UFOs, all we’ve been fed thus far is unsubstantiated crap. At this point, the aliens will probably have to reveal themselves to us directly for most people to start believing they’re real.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/10/09/best-states-see-ufos-maryland-california-arizona-nuforc/