Space

CNN —

Space is full of extreme phenomena, but the “Tasmanian devil” may be one of the weirdest and rarest cosmic events ever observed.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/9260970

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/9260347

https://nitter.net/SpaceX/status/1724899815686029329#m

Targeting Friday, November 17 for Starship’s second flight test. A two-hour launch window opens at 7:00 a.m. CT → spacex.com/launches

View in your local timezone.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/9137702

NSF was invited as part of a media event inside the company’s facility in Louisville, Colorado, to see the first flight article named Tenacity prior to departing for environmental testing.

Highlights:

Sierra Space’s CEO Tom Vice said the company expects to be able to turn Tenacity around in six months following its landing, seeing it fly again aboard United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket.

“We’d like to turn the vehicle and be prepared to fly potentially twice next year, but again, that’s really dependent upon NASA,” Vice said. “NASA has a manifest, when they can take the cargo, when they need cargo.”

Vice said a crew variant isn’t expected until 2026. The crewed version will feature an abort system with a different fuel system, but no details on this system were offered.

Sierra Space is now working on a product known as Ghost. The system would act as an inflatable ablative shield that would protect the cargo module before parachuting down to a designated location to be recovered. Economically, Vice said it would be a game changer to be able to reuse the cargo module and vehicles 15 times each.

“Even on [SpaceX’s] Dragon, you know, the trunk of Dragon gets burned up every time,” Vice said. “We took one step back and said, you know, can we reuse the entire system? And again, that would change everything.”

While no launch date has officially been set, Sierra Space expects to launch no earlier than March 2024, using ULA’s second-ever Vulcan Centaur launcher.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/9197063

NSF anniversary tweet and short video: https://nitter.net/NASASpaceflight/status/1724639242251272429#m

NSF full article: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/11/remembering-buran-shuttles-estranged-soviet-cousin/

Everything appears to be “go” for launch Friday of the tallest rocket ever built.

Becoming an astronaut is a fairly romanticized career path, but there are a lot of less-than-romantic aspects to working 50 miles or more above the Earth’s surface. Case in point: just being in zero G makes the human body do all sorts of embarrassing things.

A new story from the New York Times exhaustedly points out that living in space comes with all sorts of “bodily indignities” which should give even the most eager potential space explorer pause. It turns out, it’s not just deadly radiation or muscle loss due to weightlessness astronauts traveling to spots in our own solar system will have to put with:

In microgravity, however, the blood volume above your neck will most likely still be too high, at least for a while. This can affect the eyes and optic nerves, sometimes causing permanent vision problems for astronauts who stay in space for months, a condition called spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. It also causes fluid to accumulate in nearby tissues, giving you a puffy face and congested sinuses. As with a bad cold, the process inhibits nerve endings in the nasal passages, meaning you can’t smell or taste very well. (The nose plays an important role in taste.) The I.S.S. galley is often stocked with wasabi and hot sauce.

These sensory deficits can be helpful in some respects, though, because the I.S.S. tends to smell like body odor or farts. You can’t shower, and microgravity prevents digestive gases from rising out of the stew of other juices in your stomach and intestines, making it hard to belch without barfing. Because the gas must exit somehow, the frequency and volume (metric and decibel) of flatulence increases.

Other metabolic processes are similarly disturbed. Urine adheres to the bladder wall rather than collecting at the base, where the growing pressure of liquid above the urethra usually alerts us when the organ is two-thirds full. “Thus, the bladder may reach maximum capacity before an urge is felt, at which point urination may happen suddenly and spontaneously,” according to “A Review of Challenges & Opportunities: Variable and Partial Gravity for Human Habitats in L.E.O.,” or low Earth orbit. This is a report that came out last year from the authors Ronke Olabisi, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and Mae Jemison, a retired NASA astronaut. Sometimes the bladder fills but doesn’t empty, and astronauts need to catheterize themselves.

Link to NYT article (paywalled)

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/9127545

New video from Tim Dodd. A nice overview of the various geographical trade-offs to consider when choosing a location for your spaceport.

Astronomers have spotted the eroding remains of 100 dwarf galaxies that have been violently stripped of their outer layer of stars by larger galaxies. These disrupted galaxies represent the "missing link" in the evolution of a puzzling type of galaxy called ultra-compact dwarf galaxies (UCDs).

The discovery shows that UCDs  — which are  among the densest collections of stars in the universe —  are the fossilized remains of normal dwarf galaxies that have been destroyed in violent gravitational encounters with other galaxies.

But it works. The space agency uses two different logos to perfect effect.

The Milky Way can't hold onto all of its stars. Some of them get ejected into intergalactic space and spend their lives on an uncertain journey. A team of astronomers took a closer look at the most massive of these runaway stars to see what they could find out how they get ejected.

When astronomers observe a field of stars in the Milky Way, one of the things they measure is the velocity distribution. The overall velocity distribution of the stellar population reflects the rotation of the galaxy. And when a star isn't harmonized with the galaxy's rotation, it catches astronomers' attention.

T-30 minutes until the launch of CRS SpX-29!

Launch thread for the mission has been posted over on c/SpaceX: https://sh.itjust.works/post/8853397

I will be posting updates there. Come and join us in that thread!

The oldest continents in our galaxy may have arisen 5 billion years before Earth’s, new research suggests — and that means there may be multiple worlds in the Milky Way harboring alien life even more advanced than our own.

Astrobiologists think a planet needs to have certain features to support life: oxygen in its atmosphere, something to shield organisms from dangerous radiation and liquid water, for a start. Although big land masses aren't strictly necessary for living things to emerge, Earth's history shows that they're important for life to thrive and exist for long periods of time. So, if an exoplanet had continents before Earth, it follows that there might be older, more advanced life on that world.

This line of thought led Jane Greaves, an astronomer at Cardiff University astronomer in the U.K., to answer the question: When did the first continents appear on a planet in our galaxy? Turns out, two exoplanets' continents — and perhaps life — may have arisen four to five billion years before Earth's.

If life on another planet had a five-billion-year head start, it "could potentially host life more evolved than us," Greaves wrote in a study, published in the September issue of the journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society.