A piece of space junk travelling at 17,500 miles per hour has punctured the International Space Station, prompting Nasa to warn of the danger posed by the growing amount of debris orbiting Earth at high speed.
The ISS has taken a direct hit from a stray fragment, which pierced the thermal blanket of a robotic arm and damaged the boom beneath, leaving a 5mm-wide hole in the Canadarm2, otherwise known as the Space Station Remote Manipulator System.
Experts from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Nasa immediately rushed to take detailed images of the area and assess the damage, which first occurred in mid-May but was only disclosed late last week.
Evolution Of Earth-like Extended Exospheres Orbiting Solar-like Stars - Astrobiology
Density distribution in logarithmic scale for each planet-star configuration. Columns from left to right correspond to different exospheric densities: κ 0.01, κ 0.1, κ 1.0 and κ 2.0 respectively. Rows from top to bottom corresponds to stellar ages of 0.1, 1.0, 3.0 and 5.0 Gyr. Note that different maximum and minimum values for the logarithmic scale change from one stellar age to another.
Recent observations of the Earth's exosphere revealed the presence of an extended hydrogenic component that could reach distances beyond 40 planetary radii. Detection of similar extended exospheres around Earth-like exoplanets could reveal crucial facts in terms of habitability.
The International Space Station is about to get major power upgrade
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Currently, the ISS has eight solar arrays that generating about 160 kilowatts of power total. It's been more than 20 years since the first solar arrays were installed on the ISS and even with upgrades, solar cells degrade overtime.
The new Roll-Out Solar Arrays, or ROSA, are much smaller --but more powerful with new technology-- and will eventually provide 120 kilowatts, or 120,000 watts, of power during the daylight hours.
The first two out of six ROSAs will launch Thursday from Kennedy Space Center at 1:29 p.m. in a SpaceX Cargo Dragon spacecraft as it delivers more then 7,200 pounds of supplies, hardware and experiments to the ISS.
Cosmonauts decommission old space station docking module in 7-hour spacewalk | Space
Two Russian cosmonauts took a spacewalk outside the International Space Station today (June 2) to prepare an old docking module for disposal.
Expedition 65 Flight Engineers Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, both of the Russian space agency Roscosmos , opened the hatch of the Poisk airlock at 1:53 a.m. EDT (0553 GMT), marking the beginning of today's spacewalk.
"Congratulations, you are outside at last," Novitskiy said as Dubrov joined him outside the airlock. Neither of the two cosmonauts had been on a spacewalk before.
China successfully launches key cargo resupply spacecraft | Reuters
SHENZHEN, China, May 29 (Reuters) - China on Saturday successfully launched an automated cargo resupply spacecraft to rendezvous with an orbiting module, state media reported, in the second of a series of missions needed to complete the country's first permanent orbiting space station.
The Tianzhou-2, or "Heavenly Vessel" in Chinese, blasted off via a Long March-7 Y3 rocket from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan, state media reported. (Reporting by David Kirton; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
NASA reveals breathaking photo of the Milky Way's mysterious core - BBC Science Focus Magazine
NASA has released a new image showing the billions of stars and black holes that make up the centre of our Galaxy.
The image was created using data from almost 400 observations made over the past two decades by the orbiting Chandra X-ray observatory combined with those taken by the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa.
The image shows threads of superheated gas and magnetic fields that stretch out from the centre of the galaxy. The different colours show different X-rays of different energies in orange, green, blue and purple, while the radio data from MeerKAT is shown in lilac and grey.
Detecting mid-infrared light, one photon at a time
Suppose, for instance, that 10,000 photons emitted by the star travel through a planet's atmosphere. (There's an uncertainty of about 1 percent, or 100 photons, in that photon number.) If that atmosphere contains carbon dioxide, its presence would show up as a dip of about 500 photons at a particular mid-IR wavelength.
Conventional photon detectors have an extra noise component associated with the electronic amplifiers. If the noise produced by the amplifiers produces a spurious signal of 500 electrons, there's a big problem: The noise is just as large as the signal (a drop of 500 electrons due to the carbon dioxide in the planet's atmosphere.)
StarMesh Global Enters the LEO Satellite Communications Industry With Disruptive Patented
Star Mesh, LLC (d/b/a StarMesh Global TM ), a satellite communications company, is pleased to announce the development of pioneering technical advancements that provide fully secure and private global satellite communication networks at a fraction of the cost of current and under development satellite systems.
Depending on communication needs, companies or government entities could own their own private satellite communications system using only 50 equatorial or 300 inclined orbiting StarMesh™ satellites. An increase in the number of satellites reduces overall power requirements while permitting better antenna pairing with better signal reception.
A LEO space collision will create legal headaches |
Each of these constellations have a specific orbital height which must be strictly followed. But satellites will decay in orbit, and some might inevitably malfunction. At the same time, new batches will be launched into orbit to replace those that have been lost. These mostly get launched to lower orbits and then use on-board thrusters to transfer to their nominated orbital positions.
The end results, say some experts, is an increasingly congested zone for Low Earth orbiting satellites. With increased congestion comes the risk of collision.
Perseverance is the 1st spacecraft in years to carry fresh US plutonium. It won't be the last.
Deep inside some of NASA's most venerable space probes lie plutonium-filled hearts beating to warm and power the robots, which include the twin Voyager spacecraft , Cassini before its daring plunge through Saturn's rings and New Horizons trekking through the rubble of the Kuiper Belt.
But in the wake of the Cold War, the U.S. stopped producing its own plutonium. For a while, NASA could run its missions solely off existing or imported plutonium. But thanks to a change in the space agency's partnership with the Department of Energy, last summer, fresh American plutonium once again left Earth inside NASA's Mars-bound Perseverance rover — and more missions will do so in years to come. And for scientists who focus on the outer solar system, that's vital.
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