NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

Feb 19, 2024

Looking Sideways from the Parker Solar Probe

What's happening near the Sun? To help find out, NASA launched the robotic Parker Solar Probe (PSP) to investigate regions closer to the Sun than ever before. The PSP's looping orbit brings it nearer to the Sun each time around every few months. The featured time-lapse video shows the view looking sideways from behind PSP's Sun shield during its 16th approach to the Sun last year from well within the orbit of Mercury. The PSP's Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) cameras took the images over eleven days, but they are digitally compressed here into about one minute video. The waving of the solar corona is visible, as is a coronal mass ejection, with stars, planets, and even the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy streaming by in the background as the PSP orbits the Sun. PSP has found the solar neighborhood to be surprisingly complex and to include switchbacks – times when the Sun's magnetic field briefly reverses itself.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?

Varda's 1st in-space manufacturing capsule to land in Utah this week

Feb 19, 2024

A private company's first in-space manufacturing project is about to come back to Earth.

Last week, California-based Varda Space Industries got permission from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to land the capsule from its W-1 mission in northern Utah.

If all goes according to plan, W-1's 3-foot-wide (0.9 meters) conical capsule will re-enter Earth's atmosphere on Wednesday (Feb. 21), Varda announced on Feb. 15. The craft will land under parachutes at one of two U.S. military sites west of Salt Lake City — the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) or the neighboring Dugway Proving Ground.

Varda offers customers the chance to manufacture products such as pharmaceuticals in space, a unique environment with considerable advantages, according to the company.

"These benefits primarily stem from the lack of convection and sedimentation forces, as well as the ability to form more perfect structures due to the absence of gravitational stresses," Varda's website states. "These effects are 'locked' into the material, typically through material crystallization, before being brought back to Earth."

These in-orbit reactions occur aboard the company's W-series capsules, which are designed to survive the fiery trip through Earth's atmosphere at mission's end.

Varda's first capsule launched in June 2023, as one of the many payloads on SpaceX's Transporter-8 rideshare mission. While in orbit, the W-1 capsule has been growing crystals of Ritonavir, an antiviral drug used to treat HIV and hepatitis C.

Varda originally planned to bring the capsule and its precious cargo home after a month or two but had difficulty securing reentry approval from the FAA and the U.S. military. That permission finally came last week.

The Varda capsule is integrated into a Rocket Lab Photon satellite, which provides power, propulsion, navigation, communications and other vital services. The Photon will hit Earth's atmosphere on Feb. 21 as well, but most of it will burn up on the way down.

The W-1 landing will mark the second time in less than five months that a spacecraft has touched down in northern Utah. On Sept. 23, 2023, the return capsule of NASA's asteroid-sampling OSIRIS-REx mission landed at the UTTR.

But the area won't host all Varda touchdowns, if all goes according to plan; last fall, the company inked a deal to bring some capsules down in South Australia.

https://www.space.com/varda-first-in-space-manufacturing-capsule-landing-preview

Electron launches Astroscale inspection satellite

February 18, 2024

A Rocket Lab Electron launched an Astroscale spacecraft that will rendezvous with and inspect a spent upper stage in low Earth orbit as a precursor to removing it.

The Electron lifted off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand at 9:52 a.m. Eastern Feb. 18. The launch was the second this year for the company after the Jan. 31 launch of four satellites for space situational awareness company NorthStar Earth and Space.

The sole payload for this launch was the Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan (ADRAS-J) spacecraft. The 150-kilogram satellite was released into an orbit of about 600 kilometers 64 minutes after liftoff.

Astroscale said in a statement that it made contact with ADRAS-J after deployment. “This milestone signals the start of our mission, and we are excited to survey and characterize a real piece of debris through our innovative rendezvous and proximity operations capabilities,” said Eijiro Atarashi, project manager for ADRAS-J at Astroscale.

ADRAS-J was developed by Astroscale as the first phase of the Japanese space Agency JAXA’s Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration, or CRD2, program. The goal of ADRAS-J is to approach the upper stage of an H-2A rocket, 11 meters long and 4 meters in diameter, that launched the GOSAT Earth observation satellite in 2009 and inspect it. A future second phase of the CRD2 program will send a spacecraft to the upper stage to attempt to deorbit it.

“This will be, to my knowledge, the first mission that will approach and rendezvous with an actual piece of space debris,” said Mike Lindsay, chief technology officer of Astroscale, during a panel discussion at the Space Debris Conference organized by the Saudi Space Agency Feb. 12. “What we’re going to do is assess the state of this space debris, see how it’s moving, how it’s tumbling, what is its condition, really trying to determine if it’s safe to approach with a follow-on mission.”

Astroscale officials said in a September briefing that the mission had several milestones to demonstrate rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO), including the ability to safely approach and operate around the upper stage while collecting information about it to aid a future mission to grapple and deorbit it.

“The key to the mission is demonstrating the most challenging aspects of RPO technologies,” Gene Fujii, chief engineer of Astroscale, said at that briefing. He said Astroscale expected the ADRAS-J mission to last three to six months.

ADRAS-J was completed last fall and planned to launch in November, but was delayed by a September Electron launch failure. Astroscale said at the time it did not plan to switch launch providers because of the delay, and Rocket Lab argued that the mission was only possible through a dedicated launch like Electron that placed the spacecraft into a specific orbit close to the H-2A upper stage.

“Our next mission is an orbital rendezvous mission,” said Sandy Tirtey, director of global commercial launch services at Rocket Lab, during a panel at the SmallSat Symposium Feb. 7, referring to the upcoming ADRAS-J launch. “There is no way you could do this on a rideshare.”

ADRAS-J is Astroscale’s second mission, after the End-of-Life Services by Astroscale demonstration (ELSA-d) mission launched in 2021. ELSA-d demonstrated rendezvous and capture technologies using a servicer and client spacecraft, although those tests were complicated by the failure of four of eight thrusters on the servicer spacecraft.

“We definitely learned a lot from ELSA-d,” Fujii said at the September briefing. That included not just hardware design and software development but also operations, which featured a mix of autonomous operations and those handed by ground controllers. “To figure how to balance between autonomy and ground interactions for safety was a really tricky thing to put together.”

Astroscale announced Jan. 24 that it had completed mission operations for the ELSA-d servicer and client spacecraft after performing maneuvers by the servicer to lower its orbit. The servicer spacecraft will reenter in about three and a half years, the company said, while the client spacecraft, which lacks propulsion, is expected to deorbit within five years.

https://spacenews.com/electron-launches-astroscale-inspection-satellite/

Leonardo kicks off Space Cloud project for Italy's armed forces

19 Feb 2024 06:15PM

Italy's state-owned Leonardo said on Monday that the Ministry of Defence had asked it to study the development of its military space cloud architecture project, the first in Europe.

The project, dubbed MILSCA, will provide Italy's government and armed forces with a system of high-performing computing, cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) and storage capacity directly in space, the statement said.

During the two-year study, Leonardo will cooperate with Telespazio and Thales Alenia Space, two joint ventures between the Italian defence and aerospace group and France's Thales.

It falls in line with Leonardo's main goals for the years ahead to focus on the space industry - key for defence and security in the future - and setting up interconnected, multi-domained digitalised platforms, aimed at supporting its traditional products.

MILSCA will guarantee users access to strategic data such as communications, earth observation, and navigation data, anywhere and at any time.

It can grant higher speed and flexibility in the processing and sharing of information, with 100 Terabytes of data storage on Earth and in space aboard each satellite and a processing power of over 250 TFLOPS, or 250 thousand billion operations per second.

In the first phase of the study the architecture will be defined, while in the second phase a digital twin will be developed.

"In a multi-domain scenario, management, security, and rapid exchange of an ever-increasing amount of data, much of which is tactical, become strategic elements for the country's defense. We will be the first in Europe to develop a Space Cloud project…," Leonardo's Chief Innovation Officer Simone Ungaro said in a statement.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/business/leonardo-kicks-space-cloud-project-italys-armed-forces-4133941

EXCLUSIVE What REALLY happened during Roswell crash? America's most famous UFO case is thrust back into the spotlight again by former NASA scientists who say new Pentagon report is 'bogus'

UPDATED: 09:58 EST, 17 February 2024

One of America's most famous UFO cases — if not, the most famous — has been thrust back into the spotlight, decades after the Air Force claimed to have solved it.

The Roswell incident of 1947 captured imaginations worldwide when the US Army Air Force issued a press release stating that it had recovered debris from a 'flying disc.'

But less than 24 hours later, military officials reversed course, announcing that the debris had only come from a crashed weather balloon, sparking America's fascination with UFOs and allegations of a government cover-up ever since.

Last month, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the Pentagon's departing UFO chief, teased his office's own conclusion: The Air Force's 1994 report was correct. Roswell's 'flying saucer' crash had just been debris from a top secret 'Project Mogul' spy balloon.

But independent experts, including former NASA scientists, tell DailyMail.com that official documents, created by the very scientists who ran Project Mogul themselves, flatly contradict the government's theory.

Running from 1947 until early 1949, Project Mogul was an effort to track from a distance the sound waves generated by Soviet nuclear weapons tests.

But Mogul scientists struggled to develop a system of high-altitude balloons and sensors that could remain level within the right 'sound channel' about 50,000 feet above sea level, fighting often against bad weather and aviation safety issues.

In fact, one longtime NASA aerospace engineer — who conducted atmospheric balloon experiments not unlike Mogul — told DailyMail.com that the critical Mogul balloon launch in question never took place.

The engineer pointed to a June 4th, 1947 journal entry written by Project Mogul's Field Operations Director, Dr. Albert P. Crary, which states: 'No balloon flights again on account of clouds. Flew regular sonobuoy up in cluster of balloons.'

'If he was just flying a rubber balloon cluster with a sonobuoy [a thin, three-foot-long, sonar device], it would go up and come down relatively quickly and never go too far,' this NASA engineer, who wished to remain anonymous, explained to DailyMail.com.

'In my opinion, that's what Crary meant when he wrote 'no balloon flights on account of clouds.''

'He meant no balloon flights that would take the train outside of military airspace.'

Dr. Crary's journal, which is corroborated by Mogul's official progress reports, indicate that there was no high-altitude balloon flight that fits both the Air Force investigation's timeline and was also capable of traveling the roughly 87 miles north to the Roswell UFO's crash site.

Dr. David Rudiak, a team member of the University of Texas at Arlington's 'Roswell UFO incident' archival project, told DailyMail.com he agrees.

Dr. Rudiak scrutinized the Mogul balloon theory of the Roswell crash in partnership with Roswell skeptic and ex-NASA-Ames researcher Brad Sparks in the early 2000s.

Together they focused on the hypothetical flight path of the cancelled June 4th balloon flight, which had been calculated by the Air Force's star witness from Mogul.

They uncovered 'numerous, grade-school type math errors' — in one instance '100 feet / 12 minutes = 350 feet-per-minute' — which allowed the alleged Mogul flight to start and stop at just the right altitude to ride the wind toward the Roswell crash site.

Nevertheless, in an interview with CNN analyst Peter Bergen this January, Dr. Kirkpatrick announced that his Pentagon UFO office would be doubling-down on the Air Force's official Project Mogul balloon theory.

From July 2022 to the end of last year, Dr. Kirkpatrick served as the Pentagon's first-ever director of its brand new All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a congressionally mandated new group devoted to investigating military UFO cases.

'Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into Roswell,' Bergen explained on his podcast.

'Kirkpatrick and his team at AARO concluded that crashed Mogul balloons, recovery operations to retrieve downed Air Force dummies, and glimpses of the aftermath of that real plane crash,' Bergen told listeners, 'likely combined into a single narrative.'

Dr. Kirkpatrick's take is a far cry from the testimony of Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) intelligence veteran Major Jesse Marcel who came forward in the late 1970s to say that the crash debris he witnessed in 1947 was 'not anything of this earth.'

Maj. Marcel, his colleague Master Sergeant Bill Rickett who also inspected the debris field, and scores more who lived near the New Mexico base have told overlapping tales of a crashed craft, recovered 'alien' bodies and intimidation of witnesses.

cont.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13029881/roswell-crash-theories-ufo.html