Video from the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captures a closeup view of the 13th flight of the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, on Sept. 4, 2021.
For more information about Perseverance:
mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
nasa.gov/perseverance.
Credits:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS.
It is a lesson the U.S. space program has had to learn many times over: don’t voluntarily give up a space capability without having a successor ready to go or already operational.
But for the ISS (International Space Station), a gap in LEO (low Earth orbit) scientific research capability will likely not occur when the iconic outpost ends its career, whenever that may be.
And that is in large part due to Axiom, a private space organization with private funding that will begin adding modules to the ISS in 2024 — with the goal that those added modules will then be easily disconnected from the ISS at the end of its life, thus ensuring no gap in low Earth orbit space station capability for the United States.
Using spacecraft and ground-based facilities, Russian astronomers have inspected the Orion Bar photodissociation region, focusing on the mid-infrared emission from this source. Results of the study could help astronomers to better understand the evolution of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in space. The research was published November 10 on arXiv.org.
At a distance of about 1,300 light years away, the Orion Nebula is the nearest region of massive star formation to Earth, with a complex and extensive gas structure. It hosts the so-called “Orion Bar”—a ridge-like feature of gas and dust formed by the intense radiation from nearby, hot, young stars, which appears to be shaped like a bar.
The Orion Bar is a photodissociation region or photon-dominated region (PDR). In general, PDRs are regions in the interstellar medium (ISM) at the interface between hot ionized gas and cool molecular gas that are energetically dominated by non-ionizing ultraviolet photons.
Dozens of space-based telescopes operate near Earth and provide incredible images of the universe. But imagine a telescope far away in the outer solar system, 10 or even 100 times farther from the Sun than Earth. The ability to look back at our solar system or peer into the darkness of the distant cosmos would make this a uniquely powerful scientific tool.
I’m an astrophysicist who studies the formation of structure in the universe. Since the 1960s, scientists like me have been considering the important scientific questions we might be able to answer with a telescope placed in the outer solar system.
So what would such a mission look like? And what science could be done?
The next full Moon is a near-total lunar eclipse, the Beaver, Frost/Frosty, or Snow Moon; Kartik Purnima, the full Moon of the Festivals of Karthika Deepam, Karthikai Vilakkidu, Thrikarthika, Loi Krathong, Bon Om Touk, and Tazaungdaing; and Ill (or Il) Poya.
The next full Moon will be early on Friday morning, November 19, 2021, appearing opposite the Sun (in Earth-based longitude) at 3:58 a.m. EST. While this will be on Friday for much of the Earth, it will be Thursday night from Alaska’s time zone westward to the International Date Line in the Pacific Ocean. The Moon will appear full for about three days around this time, from Wednesday night through Saturday morning.
This should be a good month for skywatching, with Venus.
Using ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescopes, astronomers have made an important step in the quest to find a planet outside of the Milky Way. Spotting a planet in another galaxy is hard, and even though astronomers know that they should exist, no planetary systems outside of…
Using ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA
Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It’s vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”