NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

August 30, 2024

Southern Moonscape

The Moon's south pole is toward the top left of this detailed telescopic moonscape. Captured on August 23, it looks across the rugged southern lunar highlands. The view's foreshortened perspective heightens the impression of a dense field of craters and makes the craters themselves appear more oval shaped close to the lunar limb. Prominent near center is 114 kilometer diameter crater Moretus. Moretus is young for a large lunar crater and features terraced inner walls and a 2.1 kilometer high, central peak, similar in appearance to the more northerly young crater Tycho. Mountains visible along the lunar limb at the top can rise about 6 kilometers or so above the surrounding terrain. Close to the lunar south pole, permanently shadowed crater floors with expected reservoirs of water-ice have made the rugged south polar region of the Moon a popular target for exploration.

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

NASA Awards Intuitive Machines Lunar South Pole Research Delivery

Aug 29, 2024

A new set of NASA science experiments and technology demonstrations will arrive at the lunar South Pole in 2027 following the agency’s latest CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative delivery award.

Intuitive Machines of Houston will receive $116.9 million to deliver six NASA payloads to a part of the Moon where nighttime temperatures are frigid, the terrain is rugged, and the permanently shadowed regions could help reveal the origin of water throughout our solar system.

Part of the agency’s broader Artemis campaign, CLPS aims to conduct science on the Moon for the benefit of all, including experiments and demos that support missions with crew on the lunar surface.

“This marks the 10th CLPS delivery NASA has awarded, and the fourth planned for delivery to the South Pole of the Moon,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington.

“By supporting a robust cadence of CLPS flights to a variety of locations on the lunar surface, including two flights currently planned by companies for later this year, NASA will explore more of the Moon than ever before.”

NASA has awarded Intuitive Machine’s four task orders. The company delivered six NASA payloads to Malapert A in the South Pole region of the Moon in early 2024.

With this lunar South Pole delivery, Intuitive Machines will be responsible for payload integration, launch from Earth, safe landing on the Moon, and mission operations.

“The instruments on this newly awarded flight will help us achieve multiple scientific objectives and strengthen our understanding of the Moon’s environment,” said Chris Culbert, manager of the CLPS initiative at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“For example, they’ll help answer key questions about where volatiles – such as water, ice, or gas – are found on the lunar surface and measure radiation in the South Pole region, which could advance our exploration efforts on the Moon and help us with continued exploration of Mars.”

The instruments, collectively expected to be about 174 pounds (79 kilograms) in mass, include:

• The Lunar Explorer Instrument for Space Biology Applications will deliver yeast to the lunar surface and study its response to radiation and lunar gravity. The payload is managed by NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California.

• Package for Resource Observation and In-Situ Prospecting for Exploration, Characterization and Testing is a suite of instruments that will drill down to 3.3 feet (1 meter) beneath the lunar surface, extract samples, and process them in-situ in a miniaturized laboratory, to identify possible volatiles (water, ice, or gas) trapped at extremely cold temperatures under the surface. This suite is led by ESA (European Space Agency).

• The Laser Retroreflector Array is a collection of eight retroreflectors that will enable lasers to precisely measure the distance between a spacecraft and the reflector on the lander. The array is a passive optical instrument and will function as a permanent location marker on the Moon for decades to come. The retroflector array is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

• The Surface Exosphere Alterations by Landers will investigate the chemical response of lunar regolith to the thermal, physical, and chemical disturbances generated during a landing, and evaluate contaminants injected into the regolith by the lander. It will give insight into how a spacecraft landing might affect the composition of samples collected nearby. This payload is managed by NASA Goddard.

• The Fluxgate Magnetometer will characterize certain magnetic fields to improve the understanding of energy and particle pathways at the lunar surface and is managed by NASA Goddard.

• The Lunar Compact Infrared Imaging System will deploy a radiometer – a device that measures infrared wavelengths of light – to explore the Moon’s surface composition, map its surface temperature distribution, and demonstrate the instrument’s feasibility for future lunar resource utilization activities. The imaging system is managed by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-awards-intuitive-machines-lunar-south-pole-research-delivery/

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/nasas-roman-space-telescope-to-investigate-galactic-fossils/

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope to Investigate Galactic Fossils

Aug 29, 2024

The universe is a dynamic, ever-changing place where galaxies are dancing, merging together, and shifting appearance.

Unfortunately, because these changes take millions or billions of years, telescopes can only provide snapshots, squeezed into a human lifetime.

However, galaxies leave behind clues to their history and how they came to be. NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have the capacity to look for these fossils of galaxy formation with high-resolution imaging of galaxies in the nearby universe.

Astronomers, through a grant from NASA, are designing a set of possible observations called RINGS (the Roman Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey) that would collect these remarkable images, and the team is producing publicly available tools that the astronomy community can use once Roman launches and starts taking data.

The RINGS survey is a preliminary concept that may or may not be implemented during Roman’s science mission.

Roman is uniquely prepared for RINGS due to its resolution akin to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and its wide field of view – – 200 times that of Hubble in the infrared – – making it a sky survey telescope that complements Hubble’s narrow-field capabilities.

Scientists can only look at brief instances in the lives of evolving galaxies that eventually lead to the fully formed galaxies around us today.

As a result, galaxy formation can be difficult to track.

Luckily, galaxies leave behind hints of their evolution in their stellar structures, almost like how organisms on Earth can leave behind imprints in rock.

These galactic “fossils” are groups of ancient stars that hold the history of the galaxy’s formation and evolution, including the chemistry of the galaxy when those stars formed.

These cosmic fossils are of particular interest to Robyn Sanderson, the deputy principal investigator of RINGS at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

She describes the process of analyzing stellar structures in galaxies as “like going through an excavation and trying to sort out bones and put them back together.”

Roman’s high resolution will allow scientists to pick out these galactic fossils, using structures ranging from long tidal tails on a galaxy’s outskirts to stellar streams within the galaxy.

These large-scale structures, which Roman is uniquely capable of capturing, can give clues to a galaxy’s merger history.

The goal, says Sanderson, is to “reassemble these fossils in order to look back in time and understand how these galaxies came to be.”

RINGS will also enable further investigations of one of the most mysterious substances in the universe: dark matter, an invisible form of matter that makes up most of a galaxy’s mass.

A particularly useful class of objects for testing dark matter theories are ultra-faint dwarf galaxies.

According to Raja GuhaThakurta of the University of California, Santa Cruz, “Ultra faint dwarf galaxies are so dark matter-dominated that they have very little normal matter for star formation.

With so few stars being created, ultra-faint galaxies can essentially be seen as pure blobs of dark matter to study.”

Roman, thanks to its large field of view and high resolution, will observe these ultra-faint galaxies to help test multiple theories of dark matter.

With these new data, the astronomical community will come closer to finding the truth about this unobservable dark matter that vastly outweighs visible matter: dark matter makes up about 80% of the universe’s matter while normal matter comprises the remaining 20%.

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Ultra-faint galaxies are far from the only test of dark matter.

Often, just looking in an average-sized galaxy’s backyard is enough. Structures in the halo of stars surrounding a galaxy often give hints to the amount of dark matter present.

However, due to the sheer size of galactic halos (they are often 15-20 times as big as the galaxy itself), current telescopes are deeply inefficient at observing them.

At the moment, the only fully resolved galactic halos scientists have to go on are our own Milky Way and Andromeda, our neighbor galaxy.

Ben Williams, the principal investigator of RINGS at the University of Washington in Seattle, describes how Roman’s power will amend this problem: “We only have reliable measurements of the Milky Way and Andromeda, because those are close enough that we can get measurements of a large number of stars distributed across their stellar halos.

So, with Roman, all of a sudden we’ll have 100 or more of these fully resolved galaxies.”

When Roman launches by May 2027, it is expected to fundamentally alter how scientists understand galaxies.

In the process, it will shed some light on our own home galaxy.

The Milky Way is easy to study up close, but we do not have a large enough selfie stick to take a photo of our entire galaxy and its surrounding halo.

RINGS shows what Roman is capable of should such a survey be approved. By studying the nearby universe, RINGS can examine galaxies similar in size and age to the Milky Way, and shed light on how we came to be here.

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https://www.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/nasa-jpl-developing-underwater-robots-to-venture-deep-below-polar-ice/

NASA JPL Developing Underwater Robots to Venture Deep Below Polar Ice

Aug 29, 2024

On a remote patch of the windy, frozen Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California huddled together, peering down a narrow hole in a thick layer of sea ice.

Below them, a cylindrical robot gathered test science data in the frigid ocean, connected by a tether to the tripod that had lowered it through the borehole.

This test gave engineers a chance to operate their prototype robot in the Arctic.

It was also a step toward the ultimate vision for their project, called IceNode: a fleet of autonomous robots that would venture beneath Antarctic ice shelves to help scientists calculate how rapidly the frozen continent is losing ice — and how fast that melting could cause global sea levels to rise.

If melted completely, Antarctica’s ice sheet would raise global sea levels by an estimated 200 feet (60 meters). Its fate represents one of the greatest uncertainties in projections of sea level rise.

Just as warming air temperatures cause melting at the surface, ice also melts when in contact with warm ocean water circulating below.

To improve computer models predicting sea level rise, scientists need more accurate melt rates, particularly beneath ice shelves — miles-long slabs of floating ice that extend from land. Although they don’t add to sea level rise directly, ice shelves crucially slow the flow of ice sheets toward the ocean.

The challenge: The places where scientists want to measure melting are among Earth’s most inaccessible.

Specifically, scientists want to target the underwater area known as the “grounding zone,” where floating ice shelves, ocean, and land meet — and to peer deep inside unmapped cavities where ice may be melting the fastest.

The treacherous, ever-shifting landscape above is dangerous for humans, and satellites can’t see into these cavities, which are sometimes beneath a mile of ice.

IceNode is designed to solve this problem.

“We’ve been pondering how to surmount these technological and logistical challenges for years, and we think we’ve found a way,” said Ian Fenty, a JPL climate scientist and IceNode’s science lead.

“The goal is getting data directly at the ice-ocean melting interface, beneath the ice shelf.”

Harnessing their expertise in designing robots for space exploration, IceNode’s engineers are developing vehicles about 8 feet (2.4 meters) long and 10 inches (25 centimeters) in diameter, with three-legged “landing gear” that springs out from one end to attach the robot to the underside of the ice.

The robots don’t feature any form of propulsion; instead, they would position themselves autonomously with the help of novel software that uses information from models of ocean currents.

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Released from a borehole or a vessel in the open ocean, the robots would ride those currents on a long journey beneath an ice shelf.

Upon reaching their targets, the robots would each drop their ballast and rise to affix themselves to the bottom of the ice.

Their sensors would measure how fast warm, salty ocean water is circulating up to melt the ice, and how quickly colder, fresher meltwater is sinking.

The IceNode fleet would operate for up to a year, continuously capturing data, including seasonal fluctuations.

Then the robots would detach themselves from the ice, drift back to the open ocean, and transmit their data via satellite.

“These robots are a platform to bring science instruments to the hardest-to-reach locations on Earth,” said Paul Glick, a JPL robotics engineer and IceNode’s principal investigator.

“It’s meant to be a safe, comparatively low-cost solution to a difficult problem.”

While there is additional development and testing ahead for IceNode, the work so far has been promising.

After previous deployments in California’s Monterey Bay and below the frozen winter surface of Lake Superior, the Beaufort Sea trip in March 2024 offered the first polar test.

Air temperatures of minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 45 Celsius) challenged humans and robotic hardware alike.

The test was conducted through the U.S. Navy Arctic Submarine Laboratory’s biennial Ice Camp, a three-week operation that provides researchers a temporary base camp from which to conduct field work in the Arctic environment.

As the prototype descended about 330 feet (100 meters) into the ocean, its instruments gathered salinity, temperature, and flow data.

The team also conducted tests to determine adjustments needed to take the robot off-tether in future.

“We’re happy with the progress. The hope is to continue developing prototypes, get them back up to the Arctic for future tests below the sea ice, and eventually see the full fleet deployed underneath Antarctic ice shelves,” Glick said.

“This is valuable data that scientists need. Anything that gets us closer to accomplishing that goal is exciting.”

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==Boeing's 1st crewed Starliner to return to Earth without astronauts on Sept. 6

August 29, 2024

Boeing's Starliner capsule now has a homecoming date.

NASA announced this evening (Aug. 29) that Starliner will depart the International Space Station (ISS) no earlier than next Friday (Sept. 6), provided the weather cooperates and no technical issues pop up.

If all goes according to plan, the capsule will undock at 6:04 p.m. EDT (2204 GMT) on Sept. 6 and land under parachutes six hours later in White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.

Starliner launched June 5 on its first-ever crewed mission, carrying NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore toward the ISS.

The capsule docked successfully a day later, but there was some drama; Starliner experienced a few helium leaks, and five of its 28 reaction control system thrusters failed on the way to the orbiting lab.

Starliner's mission, known as Crew Flight Test (CFT), was supposed to last just 10 days or so.

But NASA and Boeing kept extending the capsule's orbital stay as they studied the thruster issue, seeking to understand what had caused it and whether it might crop up again on Starliner's journey back to Earth.

In the end, NASA decided that putting Williams and Wilmore back on Starliner was just too risky: The agency announced this past weekend that the two astronauts would come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule in February of next year.

(That Dragon will launch two astronauts to the ISS on the Crew-9 mission next month.) The Boeing capsule, meanwhile, would return home uncrewed.

We didn't have a target departure date for Starliner until today, however. That information came at the conclusion of a flight readiness review, held jointly by NASA and Boeing.

"The uncrewed Starliner spacecraft will perform a fully autonomous return with flight controllers at Starliner Mission Control in Houston and at Boeing Mission Control Center in Florida," NASA officials wrote in an update this evening.

"Teams on the ground are able to remotely command the spacecraft if needed through the necessary maneuvers for a safe undocking, re-entry, and parachute-assisted landing in the southwest United States," they added.

As NASA's update noted, Starliner has come back to Earth autonomously twice before, at the end of uncrewed test flights in December 2019 and May 2022.

Starliner failed to reach the ISS as planned on the first of those missions but succeeded on the second.

https://www.space.com/boeing-starliner-return-earth-september-6

Firefly names space industry veteran Jason Kim as new CEO

August 29, 2024

Firefly Aerospace, a developer of launch vehicles, lunar landers and orbital vehicles, announced Aug. 29 the appointment of space industry veteran Jason Kim as its new chief executive officer, effective Oct. 1.

The move comes just weeks after former CEO Bill Weber stepped down amid misconduct allegations.

Kim joins Firefly from Millennium Space, a Boeing subsidiary specializing in small satellites primarily for U.S. government agencies, where he served as CEO.

He previously held executive positions at Raytheon Intelligence & Space, and Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems.

The appointment follows a collaboration between Firefly and Millennium Space on the U.S. Space Force’s Victus Nox mission last year.

The mission, which demonstrated rapid spacecraft delivery and launch capabilities, saw Millennium Space produce a satellite launched aboard a Firefly Alpha rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California in September 2023.

Kirk Konert, chairman of Firefly Aerospace’s board, expressed confidence in the new leadership, stating, “Jason Kim’s deep industry expertise, coupled with his proven ability to lead high-performing teams and execute on strategic growth initiatives, makes him the ideal leader for Firefly Aerospace.”

Kim will oversee Firefly’s workforce of more than 700 employees and lead various projects, including:

The Alpha small-satellite launcher

The recently delivered Blue Ghost lunar lander

The Elytra orbital vehicle for commercial and defense missions

Development of a medium launch vehicle in collaboration with Northrop Grumman for the national security market

Commenting on his appointment, Kim said, “I have long admired Firefly’s relentless drive and innovative spirit, particularly during our collaboration on the Victus Nox mission for the U.S. Space Force.

I look forward to building on Firefly’s success and leading the company into a new era of category-defining achievements in the industry.”

https://spacenews.com/firefly-aerospace-names-space-industry-veteran-jason-kim-as-new-ceo/