“Despite the U.S. space agency playing host, none of the crew are from its astronaut corps. And the private aerospace company SpaceX is providing the mission’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft—as well as new spacesuits, operational protocols and upgraded life-support systems. All of these innovations will be put to the test in a daring bout of extravehicular activity (EVA), more commonly called a space walk, that will be the first ever for a commercial mission. During the five-day flight, the spacecraft will reach altitudes as high as 1,400 kilometers—surpassed only by moon-bound Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and 1970s—and the crew will conduct nearly 40 science experiments, as well as laser communications tests with SpaceX Starlink satellites.”
When Artemis I lifts off (scheduled for 8.33 am on August 29) an artificial thunder will roll across Florida’s Merritt Island as four RS-25 rocket engines and two solid-fuel boosters—the largest ever built—create up to 8.8 million pounds of thrust,”
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all bright enough to be seen with the naked eye, and they will align in order before sunrise near the end of June.
The rare alignment will appear just before sunrise on June 24 across the eastern sky. The crescent moon will also be in line with the planets, shining between Venus and Mars.
While we were at Joshua Tree National Park in California last weekend, Margaret and I went to the monthly Dark Sky Program at the nearby Sky's The Limit (STL) Observatory and Nature Center in Twenty Nine Palms
We had a bit of cloud cover that evening but Ann Congdon, President of STL, kindly shared with me couple of photos of spectacular skies other guests have captured above their dome.
Nonetheless, it was a thrill to get a tour of the skies by Allen Schiano, who has a doctorate in Astronomy and Astrophysics and teaches at Irvine Valley College in Irvine. He previously worked at UC Irvine as a Director of Instructional and Research Computing. He was on stage with John Hill who is the Technical Director at the Large Binocular Telescope operated by the Steward Observatory of U of Arizona.
With their laser pointer as guide, us amateurs got to see
Sirius, the brightest star in the sky
The three stars in a straight line in Orion’s Belt
The Big Dipper and the North Star
The open star cluster, Pleiades, also known as The Seven Sisters
They answered a bunch of questions including how the recently launched James Webb Space telescope will be able to look farther back in time than previous telescopes using infrared light and will allow scientists to look through dust to see stars forming inside.
But the highlight was an experiment they ran as the clouds cleared. Allen describes it:
“It's a long story but the video at the end is worth the time it takes to read what it's all about.
My buddies John Hill and John Hoey and I had a crazy idea to try to see something with a 14 inch telescope that had only been seen with telescopes larger that twice that size. And we didn't use the method usually employed - a spinning disk in the focal plane - since it requires more equipment and expertise than most people could achieve. That was our goal- something simple others with amateur telescopes could do.
What were we trying to do, you say? We wanted to see the Crab Nebula pulsar 'pulse' on its close to 30 Hz frequency by taking 30 second images at the scope. Those could easily be shown to people watching with current amateur level equipment.
We rigged my Celestron C14HD SCT telescope with 'woofer' speakers and pumped nearly 30 Hz signals into speakers we had taped to its side (Data from the Jodrell Bank, UK ephemeris of the Crab were used to calculate the exact frequency which is critical). We aimed the scope at the Crab Nebula, specifically at the pulsar in the nebula which is the remnants of the star that exploded in a supernova which people saw on Earth in 1054 AD. The neutron star is 1.4 times the mass of the Sun and is about 10 km in diameter. It spins at a dizzying 30 times per second. Like a lighthouse, with every rotation it sweeps a beam of light past us. We see it as a 30 Hz pulse. That's too fast to detect visually for most people.
This video consists of four frames captured while aimed at the pulsar and with the speakers vibrating the scope just below 30Hz. You can see the stars bouncing around while the pulsar remains stationary. The pulsar does bounce around in the same direction as the stars since the location of the pulse is defined by the exact timing of each frame which we did not control.
As far as we know, this is a brand new technique for capturing the pulses of the pulsar and requires only a modest investment in equipment that almost any amateur astronomer could afford.
Instead of seeing it blink on and off this video captures its image as it vibrates 30 times per second. All the stars and background bounce back and forth as does the pulsar. But the pulsar is only lit for a brief moment every 1/30 of a second so it seems to stand still.
The images aren't perfect. This was our first attempt. But this definitely proves this concept works. And that is totally cool!
Tech Specs: Celestron C14HD at f11/Mallincam DS10cTEC camera/30 sec exposures at gain=110/160 and bin=1/image processing by GIMP (cropping, rotation), Topaz Labs DeNoise AI (noise reduction), and PixInsight (animation)
In preparation for the trip, Margaret had tried out several monocular lenses to attach to her iPhone. Assembly turned out to be a bridge too far in the dark. So it is a bit embarrassing to see how deftly Allen assembles his 250 lb. telescope.
Talking about the dark, Margaret did bring along a tactical flashlight with red/green/blue lights. We used the red light to walk around and not spoil the viewing for others. Red light has a wavelength of around 650 nm. That can be detected by cone cells, but not rod cells in our eyes. Cone cells dark adapt much quicker than rod cells.
BTW, even a day trip to STL is worthwhile. It has an Orrery – walkable model of the solar system at 20 billion-to-1 scale, trails with desert flora and a variety of sculptures. It is off the grid thanks to eight solar panels plus a bank of reclaimed batteries donated by the USMC which has a large base in town. This system provides the power for computers, projectors, a weather station, and more.
In the space between satellites, DARPA wants there to be a shared language. The Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node (Space-BACN) is a program designed to place satellites that can talk to other satellites in orbit, overcoming existing design barriers and adapting to the future. It’s the promise of robust infrastructure in space, capable of routing signals around damaged satellites.
“In simpler terms, the goal of this program is to eliminate stovepipes and ‘connect space,’ which will in turn enable the joint all-domain fight.”
“Joint all-domain fight” is Pentagon-speak for across all branches, and in land, air, space, and anywhere else the military might fight. Getting there means first breaking communications free of stovepiping.
NASA, for decades, has led the effort to study sonic booms, the loudness of which are considered the key barrier to enabling a future for overland, commercial supersonic aircraft. That future will be closer to reality when the agency’s X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) airplane takes to those familiar skies in 2022, taking the first steps to demonstrating the ability to fly at supersonic speeds while reducing the sonic boom to a significantly quieter sonic thump.
While NASA will fly the X-59 over communities around the U.S. as early as 2024 to analyze the public’s perception and acceptability of quiet supersonic flight, the agency will first need to prove that the X-plane is as quiet as it’s designed to be.
To do this, NASA will measure the sound of the sonic thumps in the Mojave Desert using cutting edge technology – a brand new, state-of-the-art ground recording system for a brand new, state-of-the-art X-plane.
In 2022, the night sky promises to be full of cosmic wonders. A pair of total lunar eclipses—nicknamed “blood moons” for the deep shade of red the moon turns when bathed in Earth’s shadow—will be visible to billions. Brilliant shooting stars will streak across the heavens with no bright moon to drown out the light. And sky-watchers can look out for an eye-catching huddle of five of our brightest neighboring planets, all visible to the unaided eye. In the right conditions, distant Uranus may even join the five other visible planets, seen as a tiny, greenish point of light in the sky.
At 10:21 p.m. Pacific Time on November 23, a NASA mission called DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, to embark on a nearly year-long voyage around the sun. If all goes well, DART’s journey will end on the evening of September 26, 2022, when the golf cart-size spacecraft will intentionally slam into a little, unsuspecting asteroid called Dimorphos.
Dimorphos is a harmless space potato, a 525-foot-wide “moonlet” that orbits a bigger asteroid called Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. DART’s mission is to smash into Dimorphos at roughly 15,000 miles an hour, altering the moonlet’s orbit around its parent body. The name Dimorphos, Greek for “having two forms,” was chosen because the asteroid will have one form before DART and one form after.
Scientists briefly estimated that Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, as it's now known, was the largest such icy body identified to date, perhaps more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) across. Additional observations have cast that into doubt, but given the "megacomet" a new distinction: it sprouted a tail remarkably far from the sun, suggesting more revelations to come. All told, the object offers astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to watch the antics of a comet.
The launch, which will propel the (James Webb Space Telescope) to nearly a million miles away, is now scheduled for December 18, 2021. When it fully deploys in space, the Webb will usher in a new age of astronomy, scientists say, and show humanity things it has never seen before.
“The Webb represents the culmination of decades, if not centuries, of astronomy,” says Sara Seager, a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at MIT. “We’ve been waiting for this a very long time.
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