SLS rolls out on Thursday!
It’s just a rehearsal but will be quite the sight to behold.
OneWeb, after having their launch cancelled by the Ruskies, are going to use SpaceX:
https://oneweb.net/resources/oneweb-resume-satellite-launches-through-agreement-spacex
Gwynne Shotwell is classy and I’m sure she didn’t rub in the fact that OneWeb is now buying launches from their competitor. Hopefully Musk wasn’t in the room when they signed the paperwork or there might have been a bit of snark…
This is going to be a very busy year for SpaceX. They may well pull off the one-launch-per-week cadence they were shooting for. They’ve managed it off so far (11 launches in ~11 weeks). Their latest launch flew for the 12th time, too.
Looks like OneWeb might not the only satellite provider that has to reluctantly buy launches from SpaceX:
This is not confirmed yet, but SpaceX is still the only company that can reasonably fit more launches into their manifest. It’s another significant advantage of resusability: they are much less constrained by the throughput of their factory. They do still have to manufacture second stages, but that’s a relatively small portion of the total.
It seems that planets are the rule, rather than the exception. Maybe the Drake Equation just got a little simpler.
I think that most people thought that there would probably be planets around other stars, confirming it doesn’t change anything, just reinforces that.
It’s really the terms starting with life, intelligence, and finally communication that are the complicated ones that will not be solved easily.
Exactly. I know I’d be surprised if there were few exoplanets, and I think most people would be the same.
But I do note that there are two erroneous kinds of thinking I’ve seen in discussions about exoplanets. One is that “if it didn’t happen here, it won’t happen elsewhere”. The primary example is a hypothesis that superEarths should be rare. They base this on a theory of planetary formation based on how our solar system formed. It doesn’t take into account that conditions may be different in other systems.
The other faulty thinking is forgetting or ignoring the biases in the methods we use to find exoplanets. All the methods are heavily biased towards finding large planets close to their star. But all too often I’ve seen articles assuming that the planets we’ve so far discovered are typical of all planets. The latest ones assume that superEarths and miniNeptunes are the most common size of planet because those are mostly what we’ve discovered. But early on, when we’d mostly found hot Jupiters, there were articles assuming those were in most solar systems.
When I find my keys, I always find them near the lamp post. Therefore, that’s where my keys must be lost, even when I don’t find them.
But yes, our knowledge of exoplanets is very biased towards the ones that stand out, that make themselves detectable in some way.
One of the biggest is actually orbital period. We don’t really know of exoplanets with more than a couple year orbit(though there are a couple out there with around a million year orbit discovered by direct imaging, rather than transit), because we need to observe the planet transit 3 times before we know it’s there. At least twice before we can even put forth reasonable suspicion.
You’d have to be watching our solar system for at least 3 years to see Earth. 36 years to see Jupiter.
It’s kinda funny, though–in terms of Bayesian probability, searching by the lamp post is what you want to do. This reasoning was used to successfully search for shipwrecks. You don’t just want to search where the wreck is most likely to be. You want to maximize the likelihood of the wreck being there times your likelihood of finding the wreck, if it was there. Which means that it’s very reasonable to prefer searching near “lamp posts.”
I still remember my primary/middle school science textbooks where people had no clue if planets were a common part of stellar formation or a rare fluke. Multiple theories of planetary formation were tossed out, including, I believe, that they might have formed from streams of matter thrown out by the early Sun. (The books also still had the theory of the moon being a chunk of the Earth that got tossed up from the area that is now Pacific.)
While working to extend the range of the light cast from them.
I’m certainly not criticizing, you either look where you can find things, even if you don’t find them there, or you look where you cannot find things, in which case, you can’t find them even if they are there.
At least in the former scenario, you have a chance.
NASA announced their “Sustaining Lunar Development” program:
This is essentially the second-source selection for the HLS (Human Landing System) that SpaceX won last year, and which only gave out one award. Everyone was expecting or hoping for two awards, but the budget wasn’t there and so only SpaceX won.
It appears the budget is there now, although how much remains to be determined (it’ll be announced with Biden’s budget next week).
SpaceX won’t be able to compete for the award, effectively because they’ve already won it. The HLS contract had an “Option B” provision for continued development that NASA plans to exercise. And of course the original contract is still in place. NASA seems happy with the HLS/Starship development so far.
The new program will have more stringent requirements. The Blue Origin/National Team lander was just barely capable enough to meet the HLS standards, and will need to be beefed up to meet the new ones. The Dynetics lander didn’t even meet the original requirements and it’s hard to see how they’ll meet the new ones. I wonder if anyone except Blue Origin will bid on this one.
Record Broken: Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang – the farthest individual star ever seen to date.
…
The newly detected star is so far away that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, appearing to us as it did when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at redshift 6.2. The smallest objects previously seen at such a great distance are clusters of stars, embedded inside early galaxies.
This is fascinating. The previous record was 9 billion years old so this is quite a leap backwards. The light path of this star takes it past a big magnifying part of space. The co-author of the paper that describes this is expecting JWT to follow up on the observation to gather more data about the light and to find more distant stars.
Is that just one star ? Or a galaxy of them ?
It’s one star (or maybe a very small cluster, like a few stars).
It’s a very neat approach, and I wasn’t aware that gravitational lensing worked this way. I’d been aware of multiple images of distant objects via lensing, but this case analyzes a “lensing critical curve”. It’s a line where all objects on the line just show up once, but at maximum magnification. The objects on the curve are magnified anywhere from 1000x to 40000x.
Ars Technica actually has a more informative article than the NASA release:
Thanks for that link. It’s incredible to see that curve of light which I assume is a window crack into an older universe we never thought we could see with contemporary equipment. It makes me even more excited for JWT which will be able to tell us more about this truly ancient object.
I also like the fact that the star’s name sound like something from Lord of the Rings.
It is a name from Tolkien; same root word origin, different modern spelling. Note that Eärendil’s ship in The Simarillion was placed in the heavens to become the morning star, and this object was named Earendal, “morning star” in Old English, because of it’s ancient origin at the “morning” of the universe. Tolkien was a linguistics scholar and was surely appropriating the same word in the same way.
I assume that such gravitational lensing is a slowly changing structure, essentially “permanent” on human timescales, so there’s no great hurry to get images before the phenomena goes away?
Yes; Tolkien lifted the name Earendel from old Saxon mythology.