MASS

 

Blog for Sunday, July 2, 2023

It started out as a rough week with computer problems but fortunately my younger son supplied me with a newer computer and some infrastructure modifications and all seems to be working well except for my Uverse TV which is doing a lot of pixelating. But that will be a problem for the coming week.

Virgin Galactic first commercial flight – On June 29, Virgin Galactic flew 4 persons of the Italian Air Force and 2 Virgin Galactic employees. The Italians were all space rookies and they brought the total of people in space up to 659. The flight lasted only 14 minutes from the dropping of VSS Unity from the carrier plane, the powered flight up to 85.1 km (52.9 miles) and finally the landing on the New Mexico runway. So far in 2023, the number of sub-orbital people (12) outnumber the orbital ones (11) for a total of 23 this year.

Asteroid Day on June 30 – Celebrating the Tunguska event from June 30, 1908 where an asteroid flattened 2000 square kilometers of Siberian Forest. The Planetary Society did an event but otherwise it has been a relatively quiet celebration this year.

Euclid Telescope launches – The telescope launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida on July 1. It will take 4 weeks to travel out to the L2 Lagrange Point 1.5 million km from earth like the JWST, but this European telescope is much different. It will be a survey telescope that will look at 1/3 of the sky detecting galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away and will use spectroscopy to determine the distance to those galaxies so that it can build a 3-D map of the universe. It will be limited to only 1/3 of the sky because dust in the plane of the Milky Way and ecliptic of the Solar System prevents observation of these faint objects. It will take Euclid 6 years to complete its survey but there will be a partial data release after 2 ½ years. The 3 major goals of the $1.8 billion telescope are: 1) how do galaxies change over time? 2) create a dark matter map by analyzing the distortion of galaxy shapes in its images; and 3) how does the expansion rate of the universe change over time? Those are all interested questions for me and I can’t wait until 2026 to start getting some answers.