TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
June 8, 2024
Pandora's Cluster of Galaxies
This deep field mosaicked image presents a stunning view of galaxy cluster Abell 2744 recorded by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam. Also dubbed Pandora's Cluster, Abell 2744 itself appears to be a ponderous merger of three different massive galaxy clusters. It lies some 3.5 billion light-years away, toward the constellation Sculptor. Dominated by dark matter, the mega-cluster warps and distorts the fabric of spacetime, gravitationally lensing even more distant objects. Redder than the Pandora cluster galaxies many of the lensed sources are very distant galaxies in the early Universe, their lensed images stretched and distorted into arcs. Of course distinctive diffraction spikes mark foreground Milky Way stars. At the Pandora Cluster's estimated distance this cosmic box spans about 6 million light-years. But don't panic. You can explore the tantalizing region in a 2 minute video tour.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
Virgin Galactic 07 Mission
Virgin Galactic Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: SPCE) today announced the ‘Galactic 07’ flight window will open Saturday, June 8, 2024. This will be the Company’s second spaceflight this year and 12th to date.
Virgin Galactic’s spaceship will again be converted into a suborbital science lab, with VSS Unity carrying an Axiom Space affiliated researcher astronaut who will conduct multiple human-tended experiments. In addition, Purdue University and UC Berkeley will have autonomous payloads on board, supported by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program. This mission showcases Virgin Galactic’s ability to provide a flexible microgravity research platform, benefiting further space exploration initiatives as well as innovations on Earth.
“Discovery and innovation are central to our mission at Virgin Galactic. We’re excited to build on our successful record of facilitating scientific experiments in suborbital space, and we look forward to continuing to expand our role in suborbital research going forward,” said Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic. “‘Galactic 07’ will also mark and celebrate VSS Unity's final commercial flight – an exciting and historic turning point for the business as we dedicate our resources fully to the production of our next-generation Delta spaceships, on track for commercial service in 2026.”
The hybrid research and private astronaut crew of ‘Galactic 07’ will include:
Astronaut 027 – Researcher Astronaut, Axiom Space (research and astronaut to be announced in the coming weeks)
Astronaut 028 – Private Astronaut, California, USA
Astronaut 029 – Private Astronaut, New York, USA
Astronaut 030 – Private Astronaut, Italy
The Virgin Galactic crew will include:
VSS Unity Commander Nicola Pecile and pilot Jameel Janjua
VMS Eve Commander Andy Edgell and pilot C.J. Sturckow
The ‘Galactic 07’ autonomous rack-mounted research payloads will include a Purdue University experiment designed to study propellant slosh in fuel tanks of maneuvering spacecraft, as well as a UC Berkeley payload testing a new type of 3D printing. Virgin Galactic has flown payloads for NASA’s Flight Opportunities program since the Company’s first spaceflight in 2018 and was recently selected by NASA as a contracted flight provider for the next five years.
Galactic 07 will also include research and participation from Virgin Galactic partner Axiom Space.
"Axiom Space's commitment to enabling access to space and providing opportunities for scientific discovery beyond Earth aligns closely with Virgin Galactic's mission," said Tejpaul Bhatia, chief revenue officer of Axiom Space. "We are very excited about this upcoming Galactic 07 flight; stay tuned for more on our groundbreaking research and astronaut participant as we get close to June 8th."
Today’s announcement follows notification from the FAA that Virgin Galactic’s investigation into the cause of the alignment pin that detached from VMS Eve following the release of VSS Unity during the ‘Galactic 06’ mission on January 26th, 2024 is approved. The FAA has accepted Virgin Galactic's final investigation report, as well as the corrective actions that have been made to enhance the retention mechanism of the pinand the addition of a secondary retention mechanism. Stay tuned to Virgin Galactic’s social channels for further updates.
About Virgin Galactic Virgin Galactic is an aerospace and space travel company, pioneering human spaceflight for private individuals and researchers with its advanced air and space vehicles. Scale andprofitability are driven by next generation vehicles designed to be capable of bringing humans to space at an unprecedented frequency with an industry-leading cost structure.
https://www.virgingalactic.com/news/galactic-07-mission-launch-window-opens-june-8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXh_zykEc9U
NASA Ames Astrogram – May/June 2024
JUN 07, 2024
CONTENTS:
Swarming for Success: Starling Completes Primary Mission
3D-MAT – A thermal protection material for the Artemis Generation
U.S. President Joe Biden Arrives Aboard Air Force One
2023 Presidential Rank & NASA Honor Awards Ceremony Held
Ames Veterans Community Outreach Team Receives Federal Employee of the Year Award
DC-8 Flying Laboratory Makes Farewell Flight Over Ames Prior to Retirement
Hangar 3 Historical Website is Now Live!
In Memoriam … Fred Martwick, Senior Engineer at Ames, Passes Away
https://www.nasa.gov/general/nasa-ames-astrogram-may-june-2024/
‘Super’ Star Cluster Shines in New Look From NASA’s Chandra
JUN 07, 2024
Westerlund 1 is the biggest and closest “super” star cluster to Earth. New data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, in combination with other NASA telescopes, is helping astronomers delve deeper into this galactic factory where stars are vigorously being produced.
This is the first data to be publicly released from a project called the Extended Westerlund 1 and 2 Open Clusters Survey, or EWOCS, led by astronomers from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Palermo.
As part of EWOCS, Chandra observed Westerlund 1 for about 12 days in total.
Currently, only a handful of stars form in our galaxy each year, but in the past the situation was different. The Milky Way used to produce many more stars, likely hitting its peak of churning out dozens or hundreds of stars per year about 10 billion years ago and then gradually declining ever since. Astronomers think that most of this star formation took place in massive clusters of stars, known as “super star clusters,” like Westerlund 1. These are young clusters of stars that contain more than 10,000 times the mass of the Sun. Westerlund 1 is between about 3 million and 5 million years old.
This new image shows the new deep Chandra data along with previously released data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
The X-rays detected by Chandra show young stars (mostly represented as white and pink) as well as diffuse heated gas throughout the cluster (colored pink, green, and blue, in order of increasing temperatures for the gas). Many of the stars picked up by Hubble appear as yellow and blue dots.
Only a few super star clusters still exist in our galaxy, but they offer important clues about this earlier era when most of our galaxy’s stars formed.
Westerlund 1 is the biggest of these remaining super star clusters in the Milky Way and contains a mass between 50,000 and 100,000 Suns. It is also the closest super star cluster to Earth at about 13,000 light-years.
These qualities make Westerlund 1 an excellent target for studying the impact of a super star cluster’s environment on the formation process of stars and planets as well as the evolution of stars over a broad range of masses.
This new deep Chandra dataset of Westerlund 1 has more than tripled the number of X-ray sources known in the cluster. Before the EWOCS project, Chandra had detected 1,721 sources in Westerlund 1.
The EWOCS data found almost 6,000 X-ray sources, including fainter stars with lower masses than the Sun. This gives astronomers a new population to study.
One revelation is that 1,075 stars detected by Chandra are squeezed into the middle of Westerlund 1 within four light-years of the cluster’s center.
For a sense of how crowded this is, four light-years is about the distance between the Sun and the next closest star to Earth.
The diffuse emission seen in the EWOCS data represents the first detection of a halo of hot gas surrounding the center of Westerlund 1, which astronomers think will be crucial in assessing the cluster’s formation and evolution, and giving a more precise estimate of its mass.
A paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, led by Mario Guarcello from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Palermo, discusses the survey and the first results.
Follow-up papers will discuss more about the results, including detailed studies of the brightest X-ray sources.
This future work will analyze other EWOCS observations, involving NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and NICER (Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer).
Visual Description:
This is an image of the Westerlund 1 star cluster and the surrounding region, as detected in X-ray and optical light. The black canvas of space is peppered with colored dots of light of various sizes, mostly in shades of red, green, blue, and white.
At the center of the image is a semi-transparent, red and yellow cloud of gas encircling a grouping of tightly packed gold stars. The shape and distribution of stars in the cluster call to mind effervescent soda bubbles dancing above the ice cubes of a recently poured beverage.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/super-star-cluster-shines-in-new-look-from-nasas-chandra/
SpaceX Starlink Mission
On Friday, June 7 at 9:56 p.m. ET, Falcon 9 launched 22 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
This was the 16th flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched CRS-24, Eutelsat HOTBIRD 13F, OneWeb 1, SES-18 and SES-19, and now 12 Starlink missions.
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=sl-10-1
Researchers discover Earth and space share the same turbulence
JUNE 7, 2024
In a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers have discovered that the turbulence in the thermosphere exhibits the same physical laws as the wind in the lower atmosphere.
Furthermore, wind in the thermosphere predominantly rotates in a cyclonic direction, in that it rotates counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
The findings reveal a new unified principle for the Earth's varied environmental systems and can potentially improve future forecasting of both earth and space weather.
One time or another, we've tuned in to see the latest weather forecast, and while they give us a good idea of our daily atmospheric conditions, the research that goes into studying how Earth's air moves around is dizzyingly complex.
"At the fundamental level, we study the interplay of kinetic energy in the atmosphere at different sizes and scales. That energy is mostly in the form of wind and turbulence.
Over the decades, a massive amount of data has given us insight into how this energy flows and dissipates to affect the weather in the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere," explains Professor Huixin Liu of Kyushu University's Faculty of Science who led the study.
"My research focuses on the movements in the upper atmosphere, specifically the thermosphere, where we explore the corresponding laws governing the dynamics and energy flow in the region."
The thermosphere is a section of the atmosphere roughly 80–550 km above sea level and is often referred to as the gateway to space. It is a critical region for space operation, and is where you will find the International Space Station as well as most satellites.
It is also where auroras are formed.
Liu collaborated with meteorology researcher Dr. Facundo L. Poblet of Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Rostock, whose work focuses on the dynamics and turbulence in the lower atmosphere below an altitude of 100 km.
"My research is in space physics, and I wanted to see if we could apply his meteorological methods to my research domain," explains Liu.
The team analyzed the thermosphere wind data from two satellites, the Challenging Minisatellite Payload (CHAMP) and the Gravity Field and Steady State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE).
With the data, the team calculated the third-order structure function of the wind, a statistical quantity that provides information on the underlying turbulence. To their astonishment, they discovered that the thermosphere exhibits a similar scaling law to that of the lower atmosphere.
"This means that both the thermosphere and the troposphere—despite having drastically different atmospheric compositions and dynamics—follow the same physical laws. How turbulence moves, forms, and dissipates in these two regions is very similar," continues Liu.
Despite remarkable strides in understanding the thermosphere, the intricate interplay of turbulence has remained largely elusive, and the team is happy that their findings shed new light onto this underexplored aspect of near-space dynamics.
"Similar to atmospheric weather forecasting, comprehending the energy distributions in the thermosphere is vital to advance our understanding of space dynamics," concludes Liu.
"We hope these findings can be used to improve space weather forecasting and ensure the continued functionality and safety of satellite-based technologies essential to everyday life."
https://phys.org/news/2024-06-earth-space-turbulence.html
SpaceX wants to build 1 Starship megarocket a day with new Starfactory
June 8, 2024
Sure, the test flight of the world's most powerful rocket this week was nail-biting. But it was also a massive win for SpaceX with a successful fourth test for Starship.
The company's goals for this test flight were accomplished as Starship's first-stage booster, Super Heavy, made a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico and the 165-foot tall (50 m) upper stage, referred to simply as Ship, made a controlled landing burn during reentry before landing in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX now aims to build on the progress with its Starship program as continues work on Starfactory, a new manufacturing facility under construction at the company's Starbase site in South Texas. As it looks to use Starship to eventually make humanity interplanetary, SpaceX has stated the ambitious goal of producing one new Starship rocket every single day at the new facility.
"We have Ships and Super Heavy boosters built and either ready to launch or in testing for the next several flights with more coming off of the production line as SpaceX's Starfactory continues to grow," Jessie Anderson, SpaceX's Falcon Structures Manufacturing Engineering Manager, said during SpaceX's livestream of the Starship flight test Thursday. "The latest phase of the factory currently under construction will come online this summer, giving us several 100,000 more square feet of space."
The facility is part of SpaceX’s Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, one of the first-ever commercial spaceports in the world devoted to a single vehicle; in this case, Starship. Once completed, the company's goal for the facility will be to create one Starship megarocket every day at Starfactory.
"When you step into this factory, it is truly inspirational. My heart jumps out of my chest," Kate Tice, manager of SpaceX Quality Systems Engineering, said during the same livestream. "Now this will enable us to increase our production rate significantly as we build toward our long-term goal of producing one Ship per day and coming off the production line soon, Starship Version Two."
This new version of Starship is designed to be more easy to mass produce, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on social media. "Note, a newer version of Starship has the forward flaps shifted leeward. This will help improve reliability, ease of manufacturing and payload to orbit," Musk shared on X.
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-one-a-day-starfactory