MASS

 Blog for Sunday, May 14, 2023

Third weekly blog, starting to become a habit, hope you enjoy. Any feedback is appreciated.

JUICE is loose! – The 16-meter RIME (Radar for Icy Moons Exploration) antenna finally escapes its mounting bracket. Flight controllers warmed JUICE with sunlight and then fired a non-explosive actuator that jostled the antenna helping it to unfold. The radar should now be able to penetrate down to a depth of 9 km below an icy moon’s surface when it arrives at Jupiter in July 2031.

Moons, moons, moons, they’re everywhere! – With the discovery of 62 more moons around Saturn, the planet is up to a total of 145. Ground based telescopes were used to detect objects as small as 1.6 miles (2.5km) in diameter. Astronomers had to track them for 2 years to confirm they were orbiting Saturn. 121 of Saturn’s moons are classified as “irregular”, meaning they orbit opposite or at a large angle from the planet’s rotational plane. All of these new discoveries are in this category and are probably captured objects. Jupiter was in the lead as of February this year when 12 new moons were discovered around it, giving that planet a solar system leading 92 moons. The current total count for the Solar System is 286 moons.

Vast partners with SpaceX to launch first commercial space station – It was announced this week that Vast, a privately held American aerospace company headquartered in Long Beach, California, will partner with SpaceX to launch the first commercial space station, known as Vast Haven-1. The station is based on SpaceX’s design for the lunar Dragon supply module called Dragon XL. Vast said its ultimate goal is to create a massive orbiting space station with artificial gravity. But the initial module will be able to house 4 astronauts for 30 days with the help of a crewed Dragon capsule. The first module would launch on a Falcon 9 rocket in August of 2025. NASA is interested in handling off the scientific work occurring on the ISS to a commercial entity before the ISS is deorbited in 2030. Four companies have received some NASA money to begin maturing their designs: 1) Orbital Reef from Blue Origin plans for a 2027 launch; 2) Axiom Space plans to launch its first module to attach to the ISS in 2024; 3) StarLab from Lockheed Martin plans to be operational by 2027; and 4) a station from Northrup Grumman would begin launching in 2028. If it sticks to its schedule, Vast will beat all the other competitors to a free-standing station because although Axiom would launch first in 2024, its early modules would stay attached to the ISS until 2028.

Dragonfly budget reduced by 18% -- Since we’ve been talking about this quad-copter to Saturn’s moon Titan, I thought I’d share this concerning headline. NASA has requested $327.7 million for the project in the upcoming FY 2024. This is an 18% reduction from the 2023 budget of $400 million. NASA says it should not jeopardize the June 2027 launch date but project scientists are not that sure. NASA’s reduced commitment might be due to the escalating cost of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. Its requested budget is $1.2 billion for 2024 which is a $300 million increase over the previous year. There is concern that these NASA requested budget amounts for 2024 will be cut by 22% if the Republican demands for reduced government spending are realized in the debt ceiling negotiations. Let’s hope the Congress looks at the long-term advantage for the US of funding science and technology development.

Virgin Galactic targets a late May return to sub-orbital spaceflight – On May 9, the company will target its 5^th suborbital spaceflight with a crew of 2 pilots and 3 employees to demonstrate the capability of VSS Unity to perform the mission. They will then move on to a flight with Italian Air Force personnel later this year. VG has a backlog of 1000 seats for spaceflights at $450,000 per seat.

Scott Kelly inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame – Kelly, age 59, is a former astronaut who is currently studying Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) with NASA. Scott’s brother Mark is an Arizona Senator, who is married to, Gabby Giffords, a former Arizona Congresswoman. Scott weighed in on UAPs recently when he said, there are things that have been observed from some really sharp individuals, like Navy Pilots, that warrant further investigation. He’s not convinced they are extra-terrestrial, but maybe objects from a foreign adversary.

Axions the new dark matter candidate – I’m learning a little more about this theoretical particle every day. I watched a YouTube video that explained that dark matter candidates are broken into two major categories at the 1 electron volt (ev) mass dividing line. To show the range of particle masses you have an electron which weighs in at 500,000 ev, an axion which might weigh about 10^-6 ev (1 millionth ev), and a WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) which weighs about 10^11 (100 billion ev or about the mass of a xenon atom). WIMPs were the old darling of dark matter possibilities but the lack of detecting them over the last few decades are making them lose favor. The new candidate is the very light axion. Scientists are searching for it in tunable, extremely cold, electromagnetic cylinders. Because the mass of the axion is not known, the detectors need to be tunable, like a radio. The lightness of the axion makes it easier to detect with its wave-like duality. The lightness also means the universe needs a lot of them to account for all the missing mass. Theorists calculate there may be 10^13 (10 trillion) axions in a square centimeter in Earth’s vicinity. Axions are starting to make the <.8 ev neutrinos look like a heavy weight particle.