Space

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed homemade carbon dioxide on Jupiter's icy moon Europa, raising the possibility that the frigid waterworld could host life.

The new detection by JWST is intriguing because the carbon dioxide does not seem to have been carried by a meteorite or asteroid, and it appears in a geologically young region of the moon called Tara Regio, suggesting the gas may have formed within the moon itself.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/5560248

Seems like Blue Origin finally has some New Glenn hardware in production now, not just the mock-up we saw a couple years ago. After a decade of Gradatim, perhaps we'll see some Ferociter soon?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/5559772

I was disappointed when Bigelow Aerospace stalled, so I'm glad to see that other companies are pursuing inflatable modules. Sierra Space seems like an interesting company, and I'm eager to see more progress.

The Air Force and the FAA denied permission for Varda Space's capsule to return and land on Earth.

By Passant Rabie

After manufacturing crystals of an HIV drug in space, the first orbital factory is stuck in orbit after being denied reentry back to Earth due to safety concerns.

The U.S. Air Force denied a request from Varda Space Industries to land its in-space manufacturing capsule at a Utah training area, while the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did not grant the company permission to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, leaving its spacecraft hanging as the company scrambles to find a solution, TechCrunch first reported. A spokesperson from the FAA told TechCrunch in an emailed statement that the company’s request was not granted at this time “due to the overall safety, risk and impact analysis.”

Gizmodo reached out to Varda Space to ask which regulatory requirements have not been met, but the company responded with a two-word email that ominously read, “no comment.” The California-startup did provide an update on its spacecraft through X (formerly Twitter). “We’re pleased to report that our spacecraft is healthy across all systems. It was originally designed for a full year on orbit if needed,” Varda Space wrote on X. “We look forward to continuing to collaborate w/ our gov partners to bring our capsule back to Earth as soon as possible.”

Varda Space launched its spacecraft on board a Falcon 9 rocket on June 12. The 264-pound (120-kilogram) capsule is designed to manufacture products in a microgravity environment and transport them back to Earth. On June 30, its first drug-manufacturing experiment succeeded in growing crystals of the drug ritonavir, which is used for the treatment of HIV, in orbit. The microgravity environment provides some benefits that could make for better production in space, overall reducing gravity-induced defects. Protein crystals made in space form larger and more perfect crystals than those created on Earth, according to NASA.

“SPACE DRUGS HAVE FINISHED COOKING BABY!!” Delian Asparouhov, Varda’s co-founder, wrote on X. Unfortunately, the space drugs are not allowed to come back to Earth, baby. Varda’s capsule was originally scheduled for reentry on September 5 or 7, but the company’s application was denied on September 6, according to TechCrunch. Varda formally requested that the FAA reconsider its decision on September 8, and that request is still pending.

“It’s a very different type of re-entry capsule. If you think about it, both Dragon and Starliner, these are [SpaceX] vehicles that are $100 million-plus, minimum, to build, and billion-dollar-plus total programs. These are meant to carry humans, have active control, fully pressurized environments,” Asparouhov is quoted as saying in an interview in Ars Technica. “We are effectively the polar opposite type of re-entry vehicle. If those are luxurious limousines, we’re building like a 1986 Toyota Corolla that is meant to be less than a million bucks a pop, quickly refurbished, and then shot right back into space.”

Varda’s in-space manufacturing capsule is a byproduct of a growing space industry, which grants easier access to low Earth orbit. The current regulatory debacle is a also the result of a young space industry, one in which proper regulations of spacecraft are still taking shape.

AVATAR

Skylon

X-37

X-30

Venture Star

Direct Link to Report

In response to a recommendation by an independent study team for NASA to play a more prominent role in understanding Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), the agency announced Thursday it is appointing Mark McInerney as director of UAP research. The independent study was commissioned to better understand how NASA can contribute to ongoing government efforts to further the study of observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified.

A new investigation with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope into K2-18 b, an exoplanet 8.6 times as massive as Earth, has revealed the presence of carbon-bearing molecules including methane and carbon dioxide. Webb’s discovery adds to recent studies suggesting that K2-18 b could be a Hycean exoplanet, one which has the potential to possess a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a water ocean-covered surface.

The United States conducted another routine test of its nuclear deterrent system by launching an unarmed intercontinental ballistic missile.

The unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 1:26 a.m. local Pacific time (0526 GMT) on Sept. 6. The test launch saw the missile deploy three undisclosed reentry vehicles that splashed down into the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands some 4,200 miles (6,760 km) away.

Col. Bryan Titus, vice commander of Space Launch Delta 30, oversaw the launch on behalf of the U.S. Space Force and praised personnel tasked with maintaining the U.S. ground-based missile system.

"The Airmen and Guardians who perform this vital mission are some of the most skillfully trained and dedicated personnel in America's Air Force," Titus said in a Space Force statement. "These test launches demonstrate the readiness of U.S. nuclear forces and provide confidence in the lethality and effectiveness of the nation's nuclear deterrent."

I got a telescope for christmas that I took a break from for personal reasons but want to get back in it now that we are heading toward a less humid time of year.

Is there an app or blog that you use to keep track of these events? I feel like knowing when certain things are coming up will help me plan a little better.

I live in bortle 7 and I've learned from this spring that bortle 7 and 6 is not dark enough for certain targets with a 4 inch refractor lol. I have access to bortle 5 and 4 areas within an hour and 3 in just above an hour. I would just need to plan going out there in advance, if the weather cooperates.

Anyway, do you guys have any favorites? TIA!

NASA is making the final preparations to recover samples from an asteroid that a spacecraft will bring back to Earth in September.

NASA is making the final preparations to recover samples from an asteroid that a spacecraft will bring back to Earth in September.

Teams conducted a dress rehearsal Aug. 30 of the recovery of the sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. In the test, a helicopter dropped a replica of the capsule from an altitude of more than 2,000 meters. The capsule descended under a parachute to land at the Utah Test and Training Range west of Salt Lake City, where personnel went through procedures to get the capsule ready for transport to NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

“We put our teams in the field, in the environment they’re going to be in, using the communications tools and the equipment they’re actually going to use on the day of recovery,” said Rich Burns, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, during a briefing after the rehearsal.

The rehearsal was part of final planning for the return of the actual OSIRIS-REx capsule, which will arrive early Sept. 24. The capsule is carrying an estimated 250 grams of material from the asteroid Bennu that the spacecraft collected during a “touch-and-go” collection process in October 2020.

The goal of the mission, whose full name is Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Regolith Explorer, is to return those samples to Earth for analysis by scientists, who hope the material will offer new insights into the formation of the solar system.

“Boy, is the science team excited to get that,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, of the samples. “We’re going back to the dawn of the solar system.”

There are still several key milestones before those samples are in the labs of Lauretta and other scientists. The spacecraft is scheduled to perform a maneuver Sept. 10 that will line its trajectory up with the Utah Test and Training Range. Another maneuver a week later will further refine its trajectory, aiming for an elliptical region of 650 square kilometers within the range. “We have a relatively small area to fit in, but we’re highly confident we’ll hit that,” Burns said.

A final go/no-go decision will come just a few hours before OSIRIS-REx releases the capsule at about 108,000 kilometers from the Earth. “We have a very long four hours from release until reentry,” said Sandra Freund, OSIRIS-REx program manager at Lockheed Martin. The capsule will reenter at more than 43,000 kilometers per hour, slowing down during reentry and deployment of drogue and main parachutes to less than 20 kilometers per hour for landing, 13 minutes after reentry.

The main OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will perform a “divert” maneuver about 20 minutes after releasing the capsule to avoid reentering itself. It will pass the Earth at a distance of 800 kilometers, putting it on a trajectory for an extended mission to visit the asteroid Apophis shortly after it makes a close flyby of Earth in 2029.

If something goes wrong with the maneuvers setting up the reentry that might cause it to miss the landing ellipse or otherwise jeopardize safety of the capsule or people on the ground, NASA will not release the capsule, Burns said. In that case, OSIRIS-REx will swing by the Earth on a trajectory that will bring it back in two years to make another attempt.

Mission teams are preparing for other problems that might come up during reentry and landing, including those that cause the capsule to crash into the ground at high speed. That is not unprecedented: NASA’s Genesis mission collected samples of the solar wind, but its parachutes failed to deploy on reentry, causing the capsule to crash in Utah upon its return in 2004.

“We learned a lot from Genesis,” said Freund. “We are very confident that we have taken the lessons learned forward from Genesis into OSIRIS-REx.” However, she said that the team has trained for various contingencies if the capsule does not land intact to preserve as much of the sample as possible.

If all goes well, though, analysis of the samples will begin almost immediately after the sample container is delivered to a clean room at a curation facility at JSC. Lauretta said an Oct. 11 press conference will discuss initial analysis of the samples, followed by presentations at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December.

Lauretta, who has been involved with OSIRIS-REx since the mission was proposed nearly two decades ago, said he will be part of the teams in Utah recovering the samples. “I wanted to personally be out there to greet these pieces of Bennu to our home planet, welcome them to the curation facility at Johnson Space Center and get them ready for the adventure we’re about to put them on.”

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