What Is So Special About The Solar Eclipse To You??

Soyuz MS-10 experiences launch anomaly; crew aborts to safe landing.

One of Russia’s most reliable launchers experienced a rare, in-flight anomaly earlier this morning, forcing the two-man crew of Soyuz MS-10 to abort the mission.

Following a normal liftoff at 4:40am EST (2:40pm local time), a malfunction in the Soyuz FG rocket two minutes into the flight forced Expedition 57 crewmembers Alexey Ovchinin and Nick Hague to abort a manual abort profile. The anomaly occurred immediately following the separation of the rocket’s four strap-on boosters and jettisoning of the Launch Escape System. However, the protective fairing covering the spacecraft during flight through the thick atmosphere was still on, and solid rocket motors attached to the fairing pulled the crew capsule away from the failing booster. Following a ballistic trajectory through the upper atmosphere, the Soyuz’s Descent module separated from the Orbital Module and payload fairing and descended to a safe landing 20 kilometers east of Zezkezhan, Kazakhstan, 34 minutes after launch. Roscosmos reported that the crewmembers experienced around seven times the force of gravity, or 7G’s, during their abort. 

Recovery forces reached the landing site immediately following touchdown. Both astronauts were reported to be in good health following their ordeal, and returned to their families at the Baikonur launch site around six hours after liftoff.

Recovery forces at the Soyuz MS-10 emergency landing site. Source: Ruptly.

Soyuz MS-10 crewmembers Alexey Ovchinin and Nick Hague embrace their families following their return to the Baikonur Cosmodrome after today’s launch mishap. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls. This marks the first crewed launch mishap of the International Space Station program, the first crewed launch mishap since the Challenger disaster in 1986, and the first crewed Soyuz launch malfunction since Soyuz T-10 in 1983.

That incident saw the two-man crew of Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov abort away from their exploding rocket shortly before its scheduled liftoff time.  While no cause of the mishap is currently known, Russian authorities have begun an investigation of the incident and have temporarily grounded all future Soyuz flights.  The current three-member crew of Expedition 57 is slated to return to Earth December 13, followed by the launch of Expedition 58 December 20. Following today’s anomaly, it is unclear whether Expedition 57 will remain on orbit longer, or when the next crew will launch to the station. Expedition 57 is able to remain on orbit until early January, when their Soyuz reaches its certified orbital lifetime.

Expedition 57 commander Alexander Gerst captured this image of the Soyuz MS-10 launch from the International Space Station. The anomalous nature of the launch is evidenced by multiple points of light along the ascent path. Source: NASA. Watch NASA TV coverage of the Soyuz MS-10 launch below.

P/c: NASA.

Planetary Kiss, coming to a sky near you on 21 Dec. (image: Pete Lawrence) https://www.instagram.com/p/CIdav8cnXYN/?igshid=1tjshkkdl24f4

Io and Jupiter.

Cost per kg for human spaceflight

via reddit

Ep. 17 Dark Sky Reserves - HD and the Void

Dark Sky Reserves exist to prevent light pollution in select areas. Learn about the reasons why these reserves are so important, and also hear about the Bortle Scale, which amateur astronomers use to quantify sky conditions when they are out obser...

Stargazing is a difficult task, especially under adverse weather conditions, but human beings have also made it much harder for ourselves with all these pesky electrical lights and such. Light pollution affects vast swathes of inhabited land, but the introduction of Dark Sky Reserves helps to improve observational conditions for amateur and professional astronomers. Today, you get to hear more about Dark Sky Reserves as well as the Bortle Scale, which is used to judge the amount of light pollution affecting stargazing within an area.

Below the cut are my sources, music credits, a vocab list, and the transcript of this episode. Suggest what you think I should research next by messaging me here, tweeting at me at @HDandtheVoid, or asking me to my face if you know me. Please subscribe on iTunes, rate it and maybe review it, and tell friends if you think they’d like to hear it!

(My thoughts on the next episode are space race history, the transit of Venus, Shen Kuo, or Walter Baade. The next episode will be up on December 18th.)

Glossary

airglow - a very faint, bluish, naturally occurring glow that hangs around the horizon on Earth, usually within about 15 degrees of the horizon line.

Bortle Scale - an objective scale to measure the clarity and effect of light pollution on a night’s stargazing. Black and grey zones are the best for stargazing, blue is for rural skies, green and yellow are the rural/suburban transition zone, orange is the suburban sky, red is bright suburbia, and white is for cities and inner cities.

deep-sky object - any cosmological object that isn’t individual stars or something from our Solar System. It’s a classification that includes nebulae, galaxies, and star clusters, and it has its roots in amateur astronomy.

ecliptic - the path of the Sun across the sky over the course of a year.

gegenschein - a faint brightening in the night sky directly opposite the Sun. Astronomers think it’s caused by the reflection of sunlight off of dust ejected by comets or resulting from asteroid destruction.

light pollution - the excessive, misdirected, or intrusive use of artificial, human-made lighting. There are several major types of light pollution:

glare - when too-bright and poorly directed lights blind people.

light trespass - when neighboring lights are so bright that their light spills over and illuminates others’ property.

overillumination - when excessive lights are used in a small area.

skyglow - the visible glow caused by light scattering and reflecting off of the droplets of atmospheric molecules.

lumen - a measurement of a light’s brightness.

magnitude - the measurement of a star’s brightness as seen from Earth. The brighter it is, the lower its magnitude value. Ex. the Sun has an apparent magnitude of -27.

Messier object - a deep-sky object included on a list of 103-110 deep-sky objects made by Charles Messier and his colleagues in the 18th century in an attempt to prevent fuzzy, bright objects from being confused with comets.

zodiacal light - a faint brightening in the night sky along the ecliptic that results from sunlight scattered forward off dust in the direction of the Sun.

Transcript

Sources

Sodium lamp light pollution reduction effects via Flagstaff Dark Skies Coalition

Types of light pollution via the British Astronomical Association’s Campaign for Dark Skies, 2009

Light pollution via Sky and Telescope, Dec 2008

The World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness via the Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute

Lumens and watts via Lowes

UNESCO World Heritage Site list

Invention of the light bulb via SPS Industrial

Lightbulb components via CIO

Walter Baade bio via the Royal Astronomy Society of Canada

International Dark-Sky Association

“An IDA International Dark Sky Reserve is a public or private land possessing an exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights and nocturnal environment that is specifically protected for its scientific, natural, educational, cultural, heritage and/or public enjoyment. Reserves consist of a core area meeting minimum criteria for sky quality and natural darkness, and a peripheral area that supports dark sky preservation in the core. Reserves are formed through a partnership of multiple land managers who have recognized the value of the natural nighttime environment through regulations and long-term planning.”

“The core area must provide an exceptional dark sky resource, relative to the communities and cities that surround it, where the night sky brightness is routinely equal to or darker than 20 magnitudes per square arc second.”

John Bortle’s article on his magnitude scale via Sky and Telescope, July 2006

“I have created a nine-level scale. It is based on nearly 50 years of observing experience. I hope it will prove both enlightening and useful to observers — though it may stun or even horrify some! Should it come into wide use, it would provide a consistent standard for comparing observations with light pollution.”

John E. Bortle receives the Leslie C. Peltier Award in 2013 via the Astronomical Society

Bortle dark sky scale via Big Sky Astronomy Club

Bortle dark sky scale via LSU

Gegenschein via Sky and Telescope, Oct 2015

Messier List via Fred Espenak’s website, Astropixels

Caldwell List via Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS)

Intro Music: ‘Better Times Will Come’ by No Luck Club off their album Prosperity

Filler Music: ‘New Son/Burnt Iron’ by Trampled by Turtles off their album Palomino

Outro Music: ‘Fields of Russia’ by Mutefish off their album On Draught

Equal opportunity benefits can be far-reaching

https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/818682610712866817

Jupiter’s moon, Callisto.

September 15

This one is technically not yet history, because at the time of posting, the little craft has about half an hour left to go.  That said, let’s proceed.

In 2017, NASA’s Cassini space probe ended its twenty-year mission at Saturn.  After a nearly-seven-year-long journey there, it orbited the ringed planet for 13 years and just over two months, gathering copious amounts of information about the planet, said rings, and many of its moons.  It landed an ESA probe called Huygens on Titan, the first-ever soft landing in the outer Solar System.  It discovered lakes, seas, and rivers of methane on Titan, geysers of water erupting from Enceladus (and passed within 50 miles of that moon’s surface), and found gigantic, raging hurricanes at both of Saturn’s poles.  

And the images it returned are beautiful enough to make you weep.

On this day in 2017, with the fuel for Cassini’s directional thrusters running low, the probe was de-orbited into the Saturnian atmosphere to prevent any possibility of any contamination of possible biotic environments on Titan or Enceladus.  The remaining thruster fuel was used to keep the radio dish pointed towards Earth so the probe could transmit information about the upper atmosphere of Saturn while it was burning up due to atmospheric friction.

This is us at our best.  We spent no small amount of money on a nuclear-powered robot, launched it into space, sent it a billion miles away, and worked with it for two decades just to learn about another planet.  And when the repeatedly-extended missions were through, we made the little craft sacrifice itself like a samurai, performing its duty as long as it could while it became a shooting star in the Saturnian sky.

Rhea occulting Saturn

Water geysers on Enceladus

Strange Iapetus

Look at this gorgeousness

A gigantic motherfucking storm in Saturn’s northern hemisphere

Tethys

This image is from the surface of a moon of a planet at least 746 million miles away.  Sweet lord

Mimas

Vertical structures in the rings.  Holy shit

Titan and Dione occulting Saturn, rings visible

Little Daphnis making gravitational ripples in the rings

That’s here.  That’s home.  That’s all of us that ever lived.

Saturn, backlit

A polar vortex on the gas giant

Icy Enceladus

(All images from NASA/JPL)

Next Generation Spacesuit like Second Skin

Scientists from MIT have designed a next-generation spacesuit that acts practically as a second skin, and could revolutionize the way future astronauts travel into space. (Photo : Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT)

Astronauts are used to climbing into conventional bulky, gas-pressurized spacesuits, but this new design could allow them to travel in style. Soon they may don a lightweight, skintight and stretchy garment lined with tiny, muscle-like coils. Essentially the new suit acts like a giant piece of shrink-wrap, in which the coils contract and tighten when plugged into a power supply, thereby creating a “second skin.”

“With conventional spacesuits, you’re essentially in a balloon of gas that’s providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere [of pressure,] to keep you alive in the vacuum of space,” lead researcher Dava Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, said in astatement.

“We want to achieve that same pressurization, but through mechanical counterpressure - applying the pressure directly to the skin, thus avoiding the gas pressure altogether. We combine passive elastics with active materials. … Ultimately, the big advantage is mobility, and a very lightweight suit for planetary exploration.”

Newman, who has worked for the past decade on a design for the next-generation spacesuit, describes the new garment in detail in the journal IEEE/ASME: Transactions on Mechatronics.

The MIT BioSuit’s coils, which are a main feature of the outfit, are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA). At a certain temperature, the material can “remember” and spring back to its engineered shape after being bent or misshapen.

Skintight suits are not a novel idea, but in the past scientists have always struggled with the question: how do you get in and out of a suit that is so tight? That’s where the SMAs come in, allowing the suit to contract only when heated, and subsequently stretched back to a looser shape when cooled.

Though the lightweight suit may not seem at first like it can withstand the harsh environment that is outer space, Newman and his colleagues are sure that the BioSuit would not only give astronauts much more freedom during planetary exploration, but it would also fully support these space explorers.

Newman and his team are not only working on how to keep the suit tight for long periods of time, but also believe their design could be applied to other attires, such as athletic wear or military uniforms.

“An integrated suit is exciting to think about to enhance human performance,” Newman added. “We’re trying to keep our astronauts alive, safe, and mobile, but these designs are not just for use in space.”

How much of a daily threat is "Space junk"?

Good question, as this is a serious issue and one which we must monitor constantly in order to avoid harmful impacts on the International Space Station with objects in space.  For example, the US Space Command in Colorado is monitoring all objects bigger than a few inches in order to assess any potential impact with the Space Station.  We categorize the chance of impact and if there is a high probability, we will actually use thrusters to slightly change the position of the Space Station to avoid the impact.  If it is something that we are unable to avoid, we will have the astronauts shelter in place in their spacecrafts and in case of a catastrophic impact, they will return to Earth.