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Category: space – Page 804

Orionid meteor shower to peak soon, best times to see it

This fall sky show has some really bright meteors this year.

Two full moons with a meteor shower sandwiched in between? October has been a fun month for sky watchers.

The annual Orionid meteor shower is already heating up. It generally lasts from early October through about Nov. 7. This year, it’s expected to reach its peak before dawn on Oct. 21.

But don’t wait until then to start watching for meteors streaking across the sky.

Intercontinental comparison of optical atomic clocks through very long baseline interferometry

The comparison of distant atomic clocks is foundational to international timekeeping, global positioning and tests of fundamental physics. Optica l-fibre links allow the most precise optical clocks to be compared, without degradation, over intracontinental distances up to thousands of kilometres, but intercontinental comparisons remain limited by the performance of satellite transfer techniques. Here we show that very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), although originally developed for radio astronomy and geodesy, can overcome this limit and compare remote clocks through the observation of extragalactic radio sources. We developed dedicated transportable VLBI stations that use broadband detection and demonstrate the comparison of two optical clocks located in Italy and Japan separated by 9,000 km. This system demonstrates performance beyond satellite techniques and can pave the way for future long-term stable international clock comparisons.

Airbus wins ambitious ESA mission to bring first Mars samples back to Earth

Luxembourg, 14 October 2020. – Airbus has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) for its ambitious five-year mission to go to Mars and bring the first samples from the Red Planet back to Earth, the company announced in Toulouse.

Airbus acts as ESA’s prime contractor for the Earth Return Orbiter (ERO), the first ever spacecraft to bring Martian samples back to Earth, the company said. The value of the contract is € 491 million.

The Mars Sample Return mission is a joint campaign from ESA and NASA and the next step in the exploration of Mars, Airbus said. The Earth Return Orbiter (ERO) and the Sample Fetch Rover, both designed and built by Airbus, are the two main European elements of that campaign.

NASA is getting ready to land on an asteroid that may hold the building blocks of life

With NASA getting ready to land a spacecraft on the asteroid Bennu in just a few short days, the mysterious space rock is already revealing some of its secrets, including the presence of carbon-bearing materials.

Several studies were published on the matter in the journals Science and Science Advances, noting that carbon-bearing, organic material is “widespread” on the surface of the asteroid. This includes the area where NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will take its first sample from, known as Nightingale, on Oct. 20.

“The abundance of carbon-bearing material is a major scientific triumph for the mission. We are now optimistic that we will collect and return a sample with organic material – a central goal of the OSIRIS-REx mission,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a statement.

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