Space Thread

[spaminator]

New rocket site could reduce Canada’s dependence on U.S. launches
Canada is one of the only space-faring nations without a sovereign launch capability

Author of the articleavid Pugliese • Ottawa Citizen
Published Jan 10, 2025 • Last updated 1 day ago • 3 minute read

The Department of National Defence says that a new commercial rocket launch facility being built in Nova Scotia will help reduce Canada's reliance on other countries for launching its own spacecraft.
The Department of National Defence says that a new commercial rocket launch facility being built in Nova Scotia will help reduce Canada's reliance on other countries for launching its own spacecraft.
A rocket launch facility being developed on the east coast could provide valuable services to the U.S. as well as score Canada points in convincing Americans it is doing its part on the security front, according to federal government officials.


An internal Department of National Defence briefing on Maritime Launch Services also pointed out that the new capability will help reduce Canada’s reliance on other countries for launching its own spacecraft.

Maritime Launch Services, a Canadian firm founded in 2016 and headquartered in Nova Scotia, is building the country’s first spaceport. The company completed its first suborbital launch on July 7, 2023 and is planning its first orbital launch in 2026 from its location near Canso, N.S.

The DND memorandum, prepared in January 2024, noted that Canada is one of the only space-faring nations without a sovereign launch capability. It has relied on other countries including, in the past, Russia to launch spacecraft.


The Maritime Launch Services project could be a definite asset for Canada, noted the document prepared for Defence Minister Bill Blair by then deputy minister Bill Matthews.

Such a capability would reduce Canada’s dependency on other nations, give it the flexibility to launch its own satellites when needed, and possibly reduce launch costs.

“It would also contribute to the broader defence and security goals across North America, and would further raise Canada’s standing in the eyes of allies, in particular the US, who has been critical of Canada’s insufficient investments in defence,” noted the document, obtained by the Ottawa Citizen using the Access to Information Act. “Canada adding a launch capability on the east coast of North America will allow access to a range of key orbits of interest to the U.S. and would add to Canada’s relevance and credibility in the international space community by also offering additional launch options to other allies and partners.”


But despite the highly positive briefing, the DND and Canadian Forces are non-committal to the Maritime Launch Services (MLS) initiative.

“The Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces has not provided any funding for Maritime Launch nor has it committed to using its capabilities in the future,” DND spokeswoman Andrée-Anne Poulin said in an email.

No further comment or information was provided.

Maritime Launch Services did not respond to a request for comment.

The company announced in September that is working with another firm to install a new ground station at its spaceport. That is expected to be operational sometime this year.

The Canadian government provided a $120,000 repayable contribution to Maritime Launch Services to prepare for the installation of specialized tracking and communications equipment at its spaceport.


Access to space is becoming more difficult because of a lack of launch facilities, according to various studies.

A 2023 study by Deloitte consultants noted the space launch infrastructure in the U.S. is running out of capacity as public and private sector demand for access to space is accelerating faster than ever before.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 5 that U.S. government officials and industry executives fear that backed-up launch sites would restrict payloads from getting to space in a timely manner. In 2024, there were 145 orbital launches from the U.S., five times as many as in 2017, the newspaper noted. SpaceX, a commercial firm headed by Elon Musk, conducted 134 of the launches in 2024.

China has also expanded its launch capabilities, opening up the first commercial facility last year to supplement government-run spaceports. It conducted its first launch in December, according to Chinese state media.


Some in the Canadian military and government have long advocated for the country to develop its own launch capabilities, in particular a rocket system.

In 2011, the Ottawa Citizen reported that government officials argued Canada has the technological ability to build its own rocket to launch small satellites.

In addition, a 2009 briefing package produced by the military’s Chief of Force Development noted that the development of a launcher for small satellites is a key focus area for DND’s future research and development.

But little progress has been made and Canada continues to rely on allies and foreign companies for rockets and launch capabilities.

New rocket site could reduce Canada’s dependence on U.S. launches

Canada is one of the only space-faring nations without a sovereign rocket launch capability.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to debut new rocket in SpaceX challenge
Author of the article:Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News
Loren Grush
Published Jan 10, 2025 • 4 minute read

(Bloomberg) — After more than a decade of development, hype and pent-up demand, Jeff Bezos’ aerospace venture Blue Origin will at long last attempt to put a rocket into orbit.


New Glenn, originally intended to launch as early as 2020, is slated to fly on Sunday out of Cape Canaveral, Florida, during a nearly four-hour launch window that begins at 1 a.m. local time.

The mission aims to put a Blue Origin test satellite into orbit and then land the rocket’s lower portion on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

The flight will serve as a critical demonstration for Blue Origin, which has struggled for years to execute on its ambitious plans for space exploration. Though the company has shuttled paying tourists to the edge of space and back, it has lacked the capability of sending people and satellites to orbit.

That stands in stark contrast to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has been in operation for much of the same time as Blue Origin but has far surpassed Bezos’ firm in launch capability. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is the most prolific orbital vehicle globally. Like Musk, Bezos is one of the world’s richest people with numerous business interests, including having founded Amazon.com Inc. and owning the Washington Post.


A successful launch of New Glenn would at last put the company in an elite circle of US ventures that can send satellites to orbit, as well as put Blue Origin on a path toward challenging SpaceX’s ironclad grip on the launch market.

But perhaps even more critical for the company, New Glenn stands to become the much needed centerpiece for Bezos and his long-term dreams for the future of spaceflight. In the immediate future, New Glenn will help the company clear a $10 billion backlog in customer contracts. Longer term, Blue Origin plans to use the rocket to launch moon missions and eventually whole industries off the planet.

“We need to lower the cost of access to space,” Bezos said at the NYT Dealbook Summit last year.

“We can set up the preconditions where the next generation, or the generation after that, will be able to move polluting industry off Earth, and then this planet will be maintained as it should be,” he added later.


Long road
Before any of that can happen, though, New Glenn needs to fly, and it’s been a long and bumpy road to get to the launchpad.

Bezos formally announced plans for New Glenn in 2016, though the rocket had been in development many years prior, with a goal of flying it before the end of the decade.

But Blue Origin ran into numerous hurdles and delays – particularly with the development of the vehicle’s main BE-4 engines, built in-house. The engines were finished years behind schedule but have since successfully powered the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket.

And unlike SpaceX, which performs frequent test flights and breaks things along the way, Blue Origin has taken a more traditional engineering approach: years of painstaking development behind the scenes before attempting a full test flight, with the goal of minimizing any unplanned explosions.


Most new rockets do fail on their first launch, though. A successful debut would showcase Blue Origin’s engineering chops and mark a major achievement in Bezos’ attempt to catch up to SpaceX.

“Pulling it off would send a message,” said Carissa Christensen, chief executive officer of BryceTech, a space analytics firm. “A very meticulous performance would map to the ‘we took our time and got it right’ story.”

Blue Origin also hopes to show New Glenn’s potential for reusability. Similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the main core of New Glenn is designed to come back to Earth after launch and land upright on a barge nicknamed Jacklyn. Blue Origin aims to fly each booster a minimum of 25 times.

Sticking the landing is ultimately a secondary objective for this launch, but if Blue Origin can pull it off, it’ll make the company just the second one to perform this kind of landing technique after SpaceX.


“They have shown that they are just as ardent believers in reusability and some cutting edge technologies that legacy industry had shunned,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, a consulting firm.

Customer demand
New Glenn will be launching a demonstration satellite designed to test technologies for the company’s Blue Ring initiative, which aims to build satellites that can service other spacecraft in orbit.

Originally, New Glenn’s inaugural flight was supposed to fly satellites to Mars for NASA. However, Blue Origin switched up the manifest when it realized New Glenn wouldn’t be ready to launch in the fall, when Mars was closest to Earth.

Blue Origin plans to use this launch as one of a handful it needs to perform in order to receive certification from the US Defense Department to loft sensitive national security satellites.


And even with all of the delays, the company still managed to book significant commercial missions to launch satellites for Telesat, AST Space Mobile and Amazon.

Blue Origin hasn’t stated publicly how much one flight on the New Glenn costs, though Henry says the company has “priced contracts very competitively with SpaceX.”

New Glenn also boasts some capabilities the Falcon 9 doesn’t have. For one, it can launch more mass to orbit per mission than SpaceX’s workhorse rocket and send heavier payloads to higher orbits.

Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to develop its new Starship rocket, which is slated to become the most powerful, commercially operational rocket on the planet and could potentially overshadow New Glenn’s capabilities.

But even then, it’s likely there will be demand for New Glenn.

“They’re not SpaceX,” Henry said of Blue Origin. “And there are plenty of companies out there that are waiting for an alternative ride to space.”

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to debut new rocket in SpaceX challenge

Jeff Bezos’ aerospace venture Blue Origin will at long last attempt to put a rocket into orbit.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

2 private lunar landers head toward the moon in a roundabout journey
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Jan 15, 2025 • Last updated 1 day ago • 3 minute read

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and ispace's Resilience lunar landers, soars into orbit after lifting off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on January 15, 2025. USA's Firefly and Japan's ispace aim to build on the success of Texas-based Intuitive Machines, which last year became the first company to successfully touch down on Earth's celestial neighbor.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — In a two-for-one moonshot, SpaceX launched a pair of lunar landers Wednesday for U.S. and Japanese companies looking to jumpstart business on Earth’s dusty sidekick.


The two landers rocketed away in the middle of the night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the latest in a stream of private spacecraft aiming for the moon. They shared the ride to save money but parted company an hour into the flight exactly as planned, taking separate roundabout routes for the monthslong journey.

It’s take 2 for the Tokyo-based ispace, whose first lander crashed into the moon two years ago. This time, it has a rover on board with a scoop to gather up lunar dirt for study and plans to test potential food and water sources for future explorers.

Lunar newcomer Texas-based Firefly Aerospace is flying 10 experiments for NASA, including a vacuum to gather dirt, a drill to measure the temperature below the surface and a device that could be used by future moonwalkers to keep the sharp, abrasive particles off their spacesuits and equipment.


Firefly’s Blue Ghost — named after a species of U.S. Southeastern fireflies — should reach the moon first. The 6-foot-6-inches-tall (2-meter-tall) lander will attempt a touchdown in early March at Mare Crisium, a volcanic plain in the northern latitudes.

The slightly bigger ispace lander named Resilience will take four to five months to get there, targeting a touchdown in late May or early June at Mare Frigoris, even farther north on the moon’s near side.

“We don’t think this is a race. Some people say ‘race to the moon,’ but it’s not about the speed,” ispace’s founder CEO Takeshi Hakamada said this week from Cape Canaveral.

Both Hakamada and Firefly CEO Jason Kim acknowledge the challenges still ahead, given the wreckage littering the lunar landscape. Only five countries have successfully placed spacecraft on the moon since the 1960s: the former Soviet Union, the U.S., China, India and Japan.


“We’ve done everything we can on the design and the engineering,” Kim said. Even so, he pinned an Irish shamrock to his jacket lapel Tuesday night for good luck.

The U.S. remains the only one to have landed astronauts. NASA’s Artemis program, the successor to Apollo, aims to get astronauts back on the moon by the end of the decade.

Before that can happen, “we’re sending a lot of science and a lot of technology ahead of time to prepare for that,” NASA’s science mission chief Nicky Fox said on the eve of launch.

If acing their respective touchdowns, both spacecraft will spend two weeks operating in constant daylight, shutting down once darkness hits.

Once lowered onto the lunar surface, ispace’s 11-pound (5-kilogram) rover will stay near the lander, travelling up to hundreds of yards (meters) in circles at a speed of less than one inch (a couple centimetres) per second. The rover has its own special delivery to drop off on the lunar dust: a toy-size red house designed by a Swedish artist.

NASA is paying $101 million to Firefly for the mission and another $44 million for the experiments. Hakamada declined to divulge the cost of ispace’s rebooted mission with six experiments, saying it’s less than the first mission that topped $100 million.

Coming up by the end of February is the second moonshot for NASA by Houston-based Intuitive Machines. Last year, the company achieved the first U.S. lunar touchdown in more than a half-century, landing sideways near the south pole but still managing to operate.

2 private lunar landers head toward the moon in a roundabout journey

The two landers rocketed away in the middle of the night from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

torontosun.com

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

The two "stuck" astronauts on the space station are now scheduled for a (hoped) return in April. They'll have been there eleven months.

They'll be weak as kittens after nearly a year in free fall.

 

[spaminator]

SpaceX loses spacecraft after catching rocket booster at the launch pad in latest Starship test
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Jan 16, 2025 • Last updated 17 hours ago • 2 minute read

011625-SpaceX-Starship-Launch
SpaceX's mega rocket Starship booster returns to the launch pad during a test flight from Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025. Photo by Eric Gay /THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SpaceX launched its Starship rocket on its latest test flight Thursday, but the spacecraft was destroyed following a thrilling booster catch back at the pad.


Elon Musk’s company said Starship broke apart — what it called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” The spacecraft’s six engines appeared to shut down one by one during ascent, with contact lost just 8 1/2 minutes into the flight.

The spacecraft — a new and upgraded model making its debut — was supposed to soar across the Gulf of Mexico from Texas on a near loop around the world similar to previous test flights. SpaceX had packed it with 10 dummy satellites for practice at releasing them.

A minute before the loss, SpaceX used the launch tower’s giant mechanical arms to catch the returning booster, a feat achieved only once before. The descending booster hovered over the launch pad before being gripped by the pair of arms dubbed chopsticks.

The thrill of the catch quickly turned into disappointment for not only the company, but the crowds gathered along the southern tip of Texas.

“It was great to see a booster come down, but we are obviously bummed out about ship,” said SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot. “It’s a flight test. It’s an experimental vehicle,” he stressed.



The last data received from the spacecraft indicated an altitude of 146 kilometres and a velocity of 21,317 km/h.

Musk said a preliminary analysis suggests leaking fuel may have built up pressure in a cavity above the engine firewall. Fire suppression will be added to the area, with increased venting and double-checking for leaks, he said via X.

The 400-foot (123-metre) rocket had thundered away in late afternoon from Boca Chica Beach near the Mexican border. The late hour ensured a daylight entry halfway around the world in the Indian Ocean. But the shiny retro-looking spacecraft never got nearly that far.

SpaceX had made improvements to the spacecraft for the latest demo and added a fleet of satellite mockups. The test satellites were the same size as SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites and, like the spacecraft, were meant to be destroyed upon entry.


Musk plans to launch actual Starlinks on Starships before moving on to other satellites and, eventually, crews.

It was the seventh test flight for the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket. NASA has reserved a pair of Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. Musk’s goal is Mars.

Hours earlier in Florida, another billionaire’s rocket company _ Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin — launched the newest supersized rocket, New Glenn. The rocket reached orbit on its first flight, successfully placing an experimental satellite thousands of miles above Earth. But the first-stage booster was destroyed, missing its targeted landing on a floating platform in the Atlantic.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1880024050048589841

SpaceX loses spacecraft after catching rocket booster at the launch pad in latest Starship test

The spacecraft was supposed to soar across the Gulf of Mexico on a near loop around the world similar to previous test flights.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket reaches orbit on first test flight
The rocket carried an an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their proper orbits

Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Jan 16, 2025 • Last updated 1 day ago • 4 minute read

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025, in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Photo by John Raoux /THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Blue Origin launched its massive new rocket on its first test flight Thursday, sending up a prototype satellite to orbit thousands of miles above Earth.


Named after the first American to orbit Earth, the New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida, soaring from the same pad used to launch NASA’s Mariner and Pioneer spacecraft a half-century ago.

Years in the making with heavy funding by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the 320-foot (98-meter) rocket carried an an experimental platform designed to host satellites or release them into their proper orbits.

All seven main engines fired at liftoff as the rocket blazed through the predawn sky to the delight of spectators lining nearby beaches. Bezos took part in the action from Mission Control and Blue Origin employees erupted in cheers once the craft successfully reached orbit 13 minutes later, a feat that drew praise from SpaceX’s Elon Musk.


The first-stage booster missed its landing on a barge in the Atlantic, but the company stressed that the more important goal was achieved. Bezos said before the flight it was “a little crazy” to even try to land the booster on the first try.

“We did it!” Blue Origin’s CEO Dave Limp said via X about reaching orbit. “On to spring and trying again on the landing.”

For this test, the satellite was meant to remain inside the second stage while circling Earth. Plans called for the second stage to be placed in a safe condition to stay in a high, out-of-the-way orbit in accordance with NASA’s practices for minimizing space junk.

New Glenn was supposed to fly before dawn Monday, but ice buildup in critical plumbing caused a delay. The rocket is built to haul spacecraft and eventually astronauts to orbit and also the moon.


Founded 25 years ago by Bezos, Blue Origin has been launching paying passengers to the edge of space since 2021, including himself. The short hops from Texas use smaller rockets named after the first American in space, Alan Shepard. New Glenn, which honors John Glenn, is five times taller.

Blue Origin poured more than $1 billion into New Glenn’s launch site, rebuilding historic Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The pad is 9 miles (14 kilometers) from the company’s control centers and rocket factory, outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Blue Origin envisions six to eight New Glenn flights this year, with the next one coming up this spring.

In a weekend interview, Bezos declined to disclose his personal investment in the program. He said he does not see Blue Origin in a competition with Musk’s SpaceX, long the rocket-launching dominator.


“There’s room for lots of winners” Bezos said, adding that this was the “very, very beginning of this new phase of the space age, where we’re all going to work together as an industry … to lower the cost of access to space.”

New Glenn is the latest in a series of big, new rockets to launch in recent years, including United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Europe’s upgraded Ariane 6 and NASA’s Space Launch System or SLS, the space agency’s successor to the Saturn V for sending astronauts to the moon.

The biggest rocket of all, at approximately 400 feet (123 meters), is SpaceX’s Starship. Musk said the seventh test flight of the full rocket could occur later Thursday from Texas. He hopes to repeat what he pulled off in October, catching the returning booster at the launch pad with giant mechanical arms.


Starship is what NASA plans to use to land astronauts on the moon later this decade. The first two moon landings under the space agency’s Artemis program, which follows the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, will see crews descending from lunar orbit to the surface in Starships.

Blue Origin’s lander, dubbed Blue Moon, will make its debut on the third lunar touchdown by astronauts.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson pushed for competing moon landers similar to the strategy to hire two companies to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Nelson will step down when President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Monday.

Trump has tapped tech billionaire Jared Isaacman to run NASA. Isaacman, who has twice rocketed into orbit on his own privately financed SpaceX flights, must be approved by the Senate.

New Glenn’s debut was supposed to send twin spacecraft to Mars for NASA. But the space agency pulled them from last October’s planned flight when it became clear the rocket wouldn’t be ready in time. They will still fly on a New Glenn rocket, but not until spring at the earliest. The two small spacecraft, named Escapade, are meant to study the Martian atmosphere and magnetic environment while orbiting the red planet.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1879793206973591769

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1879827723516092583

Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket reaches orbit on first test flight

Named after the first American to orbit Earth, the New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

How to glimpse a parade of planets in the January night sky
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Adithi Ramakrishnan
Published Jan 17, 2025 • 1 minute read

NEW YORK — Six planets grace the sky this month in what’s known as a planetary parade, and most can be seen with the naked eye.


These planetary hangouts happen when several planets appear to line up in the night sky at once.

“They’re not in a straight line, but they’re pretty close together on one side of the sun,” said Hannah Sparkes, planetarium supervisor at the Bishop Museum of Science and Nature in Florida.

The astronomical linkup is fairly common and can happen at least every year depending on the number of planets. A similar parade took place last June, but only two planets could be seen without any special equipment.

Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are visible to the naked eye this month and for part of February. Uranus and Neptune can be spotted with binoculars and telescopes.

During this latest spectacle, Mars shines especially bright because it’s located directly opposite the sun. And on Friday and Saturday night, skygazers will see Venus and Saturn snuggle up extra close — just two degrees apart.


Any clear, cloudless night this month is ideal to spot the planets. To get in on the sighting, go outside on a clear night a few hours after sunset and face south, said Kevin Williams, planetarium director at Buffalo State University.

Venus and Saturn will glow in the southwestern sky, with Jupiter in the southern sky and Mars in the southeast or east. The planets will shine brighter than the stars, and Mars will look like a reddish-orange dot.

Consider downloading stargazing apps to help with where to look, Sparkes said.

A faint Mercury is set to join the parade as a bonus seventh planet at the end of February, and the planets will slowly make their exit through the spring.

“It gives us a little bit better sense of our place in the solar system and the universe,” Williams said.

How to glimpse a parade of planets in the January night sky

Six planets grace the sky this month in what's known as a planetary parade, and most can be seen with the naked eye.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

SpaceX launch accident likely caused by fire that sent trails of flaming debris near the Caribbean

Jan. 16, 2025.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX suspects a fire may have caused its Starship to break apart during liftoff and send trails of flaming debris near the Caribbean.


SpaceX’s Elon Musk said preliminary indications are that leaking fuel built up pressure in the cavity above the engine firewall. The resulting fire would have doomed the spacecraft.

On Friday, the company promised “a thorough investigation” in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration.

The 400-foot Starship — the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket — launched from the southern tip of Texas on a test flight early Thursday evening. The booster made it back to the pad for a catch by giant mechanical arms, only the second time in Starship history. But the engines on the still ascending spacecraft shut down one by one, and communication was lost 8 1/2 minutes into the flight.

Dramatic video taken near the Turks and Caicos Islands showed spacecraft debris raining down from the sky in a stream of fireballs. Flights near the falling debris had to be diverted.


SpaceX said Starship remained in its designated launch corridor over the Gulf of Mexico and then the Atlantic. Any surviving wreckage would have fallen along that path over water, the company said on its website.

Starship had been shooting for a controlled entry over the Indian Ocean, halfway around the world. Ten dummy satellites, mimicking SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites, were on board so the company could practice releasing them.

It was the seventh test flight of a Starship, but it featured a new and upgraded spacecraft. The booster and spacecraft for the eighth demo are already built and undergoing testing.

Musk said on X the accident was “barely a bump in the road” in his plans to build a fleet of Starships to carry people to Mars.


NASA already has booked two Starships to land astronauts on the moon later this decade under its Artemis program, the successor to Apollo.

“Spaceflight is not easy. It’s anything but routine,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted on X after the accident. “That’s why these tests are so important.”

Earlier Thursday, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company also had mixed results with the debut of its massive New Glenn rocket. It achieved orbit on its first try, putting a test satellite thousands of miles above Earth. But the booster was destroyed after failing to land on a floating platform in the Atlantic.

SpaceX launch accident likely caused by fire that sent trails of flaming debris near the Caribbean

SpaceX suspects a fire may have caused its Starship to break apart during liftoff and send trails of flaming debris near the Caribbean.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

Scientists detect chirping cosmic waves in an unexpected part of space
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Adithi Ramakrishnan
Published Jan 22, 2025 • 2 minute read

NEW YORK — Scientists have detected cosmic waves that sound like birds chirping in an unexpected place.


These bursts of plasma, called chorus waves, ripple at the same frequency as human hearing. When converted to audio signals, their sharp notes mimic high-pitched bird calls.

Researchers have captured such sounds in space before, but now they have sensed the chirping waves from much farther away: over 100,000 kilometres from Earth, where they’ve never been measured before.

“That opens up a lot of new questions about the physics that could be possible in this area,” said Allison Jaynes, a space physicist at the University of Iowa who was not involved with the work.

Scientists still aren’t sure how the perturbations happen, but they think Earth’s magnetic field may have something to do with it.

The chorus has been picked up on radio antennas for decades, including receivers at an Antarctica research station in the 1960s. And twin spacecraft — NASA’s Van Allen Probes — heard the chirps from Earth’s radiation belts at a closer distance than the newest detection.


The latest notes were picked up by NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale satellites, launched in 2015 to explore the Earth and sun’s magnetic fields. The new research was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Chorus waves have also been spotted near other planets including Jupiter and Saturn. They can even produce high-energy electrons capable of scrambling satellite communications.

“They are one of the strongest and most significant waves in space,” said study author Chengming Liu from Beihang University in an email.

The newfound chorus waves were detected in a region where Earth’s magnetic field is stretched out, which scientists didn’t expect. That raises fresh questions about how these chirping waves form.

“It’s very captivating, very compelling,” Jaynes said. “We definitely need to find more of these events.”

— The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Scientists detect chirping cosmic waves in an unexpected part of space

Scientists have detected cosmic waves that sound like birds chirping in an unexpected place.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

Newly spotted asteroid has a tiny chance of hitting Earth in 2032
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Jan 29, 2025 • 2 minute read

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A newly discovered asteroid has a tiny chance of smacking Earth in 2032, space agency officials said Wednesday.


Scientists put the odds of a strike at slightly more than 1%.

“We are not worried at all, because of this 99 percent chance it will miss,” said Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. “But it deserves attention.”

First spotted last month by a telescope in Chile, the near-Earth asteroid — designated 2024 YR4 — is estimated to be 130 to 330 feet (40 to 100 mettrs) across.

Scientists are keeping close watch on the space rock, which is currently heading away from Earth. As the asteroid’s path around the sun becomes better understood, Chodas and others said there’s a good chance the risk to Earth could drop to zero.

The asteroid will gradually fade from view over the next few months, according to NASA and the European Space Agency. Until then, some of the world’s most powerful telescopes will keep monitoring it to better determine its size and path. Once out of sight, it won’t be visible until it passes our way again in 2028.


The asteroid came closest to Earth on Christmas Day — passing within roughly 800,000 kilometres of Earth, about twice the distance of the moon. It was discovered two days later.

Chodas said scientists are poring over sky surveys from 2016, when predictions show the asteroid also ventured close.

If scientists can find the space rock in images from then, they should be able to determine whether it will hit or miss the planet, he told The Associated Press. “If we don’t find that detection, the impact probability will just move slowly as we add more observations,” he said.

Earth gets clobbered by an asteroid this size every few thousand years, according to ESA, with the potential for severe damage. That’s why this one now tops ESA’s asteroid risk list.

The potential impact would occur on Dec. 22, 2032. It’s much too soon to know where it might land if it did hit Earth.

The good news, according to NASA, is that for now, no other known large asteroids have an impact probability above 1%.

Newly spotted asteroid has a tiny chance of hitting Earth in 2032

A newly discovered asteroid has a tiny chance of smacking Earth in 2032, space agency officials said Wednesday.

torontosun.com

 

[spaminator]

NASA’s returned asteroid samples hold the ingredients of life from a watery world
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Marcia Dunn
Published Jan 29, 2025 • 3 minute read

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Asteroid samples fetched by NASA hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world, scientists reported Wednesday.


The findings provide the strongest evidence yet that asteroids may have planted the seeds of life on Earth and that these ingredients were mingling with water almost right from the start.

“That’s the kind of environment that could have been essential to the steps that lead from elements to life,” said the Smithsonian Institution’s Tim McCoy, one of the lead study authors.

NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft returned 122 grams (4 ounces) of dust and pebbles from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, delivering the sample canister to the Utah desert in 2023 before swooping off after another space rock. It remains the biggest cosmic haul from beyond the moon. The two previous asteroid sample missions, by Japan, yielded considerably less material.


Small amounts of Bennu’s precious black grains — leftovers from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago — were doled out to the two separate research teams whose studies appeared in the journals Nature and Nature Astronomy. But it was more than enough to tease out the sodium-rich minerals and confirm the presence of amino acids, nitrogen in the form of ammonia and even parts of the genetic code.

Some if not all of the delicate salts found at Bennu — similar to what’s in the dry lakebeds of California’s Mojave Desert and Africa’s Sahara — would be stripped away if present in falling meteorites.

“This discovery was only possible by analyzing samples that were collected directly from the asteroid then carefully preserved back on Earth,” the Institute of Science Tokyo’s Yasuhito Sekine, who was not involved in the studies, said in an accompanying editorial.


Combining the ingredients of life with an environment of sodium-rich salt water, or brines, “that’s really the pathway to life,” said McCoy, the National Museum of Natural History’s curator of meteorites. “These processes probably occurred much earlier and were much more widespread than we had thought before.”

NASA’s Daniel Glavin said one of the biggest surprises was the relatively high abundance of nitrogen, including ammonia. While all of the organic molecules found in the Bennu samples have been identified before in meteorites, Glavin said the ones from Bennu are valid — “real extraterrestrial organic material formed in space and not a result of contamination from Earth.”

Bennu — a rubble pile just one-half of a kilometre across — was originally part of a much larger asteroid that got clobbered by other space rocks. The latest results suggest this parent body had an extensive underground network of lakes or even oceans, and that the water evaporated away, leaving behind the salty clues.


Sixty labs around the world are analyzing bits of Bennu as part of initial studies, said the University of Arizona’s Dante Lauretta, the mission’s chief scientist who took part in both studies.

Most of the $1 billion mission’s cache has been set aside for future analysis. Scientists stress more testing is needed to better understand the Bennu samples, as well as more asteroid and comet sample returns. China plans to launch an asteroid sample return mission this year.

Many are pushing for a mission to collect rocks and dirt from the potentially waterlogged dwarf planet Ceres in the main asteroid belt. Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus also beckon as enticing water worlds. Meanwhile, NASA has core samples awaiting pickup at Mars, but their delivery is on hold while the space agency studies the quickest and cheapest way to get them here.

“Are we alone?” McCoy said. “That’s one of the questions we’re trying to answer.”

Are we all aliens? NASA’s returned asteroid samples hold the ingredients of life from a watery world

Asteroid samples fetched by NASA hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world.

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