Space News As I write this article there is a lot going on in space. The first civilian space walk has taken place thanks to SpaceX, but just as important new space suits from SpaceX are being tested. They are a lot less bulky making it easier for the astronauts to move around. The ship had no airlock so all the air had to be vented when the door was opened for the space walk, so all the crew had to be suited up. The craft had been modified with guide rails for the civilian astronauts to hold onto when they went outside. When the flight returns to earth it should be hailed as the beginning of civilian space flight. NASA’s Hubble telescope with the help of Chandra, an X-Ray space telescope, has discovered two supermassive black holes. Scientists call them dual but that term is relative when talking about distances in space. The two black holes are 300 light-years apart. When you consider the forces they put out, that really is close. If they were not black holes, but stars they would not be considered dual stars. The find was made by accident. There was also radio waves picked up from the black holes by the Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico. The miniaturization of electronics has spawned the era of the cubesat, a very small satellite which sometimes is as powerful and maybe more than its full-size ancestors. The different size categories in satellites have increased and range from 220 pounds to about 3.5 ounces. Can you imagine if you told someone years ago there was a satellite which weighed 3.5 ounces being launched? They would have laughed at you. The shrinking of the size of electronics also allows much more to be piled into what would have been considered a normal sized satellite in the past. Having tiny capable satellites means you could launch them in swarms similar to a drone swarm, making it hard for an enemy to shoot all of them down. Did you know that bubbles sometimes appear on the surface of a star? Scientists are watching these bubbles on a star named R Doradus. What I find amazing is the fact this can be accomplished on a distant star. This star is about 178 light years away. This is a tribute to how powerful some of our instruments are getting. It is turning out there seems to be more rogue planets and stars than expected. It does make one wonder if one or more planets or dwarf planets in our solar system could have been rogue but got caught by gravity when they were trying to pass through. It could also have happened to moons. The word rogue is used to define a body which was knocked out of its orbit and traveled or is traveling through space. Scientists linked eight radio telescopes from all over the earth to create an earth sized radio telescope. This is called a radio interferometer. It allows for a virtual aperture much larger than the combined individual apertures. They used it to study the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. They came to the conclusion there had been some sort of collision which created the black hole or made it larger. It seems like NASA is becoming a victim of politics. Many have complained its budget is too small and this will ultimately make it ineffective in the future. It is already canceling some projects. I believe NASA is very important for America if we want to continue to lead the space race. Yes, we are in a space race again and this time it is with several countries not just one as it was in the old days. These countries were able to build on our past successes, giving them a head start. It is being said NASA is already too committed to the Boeing Starliner for its plans to go back to the moon to cancel it. It is getting the next rocket ready. There had been some talk around about why the program should be cancelled, but apparently NASA was not listening to it. They have committed a lot of money to this project, and in time are hoping things will work out. Not everyone agrees with the idea an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, but most do. Scientists are saying they looked into the crash and found It. Not only have they discovered it came from very far away, but it was loaded with water. New space probe photos of Io, one of Jupiter’s moons is sporting a volcano which has never been seen before. There had been earlier photos of the moon which showed nothing. It is hard for me to believe, but the last space shuttle launch was on July 21, 2011. It was over 13 years ago, when the shuttle Atlantis was launched as designation STS-135, and so came the end of an era. It was supposed to make space flight cheaper but did just the opposite. To launch into low orbit by the space shuttle was $72 per kg in today’s dollars, and today SpaceX charges $2.94 per kg. A kilogram is 2 pounds, 3 ounces. The first magnetic field maps of the sun’s corona have been produced. The Daniel K. Inouye solar telescope was used to accomplish this feat. The telescope is the most powerful solar telescope in the world right now. The telescope is owned and operated by the National Solar Observatory or NSO and is part of the National Science Foundation known as the NSF. Some might ask why bother, but the sun’s magnetic field is important to us because it effects the solar wind and solar eruptions which can disrupt electronics on earth. Understanding it, could be a help in this area. There has been talk lately about where the dwarf planet Ceres may have originated. Some scientists thought it could have come from the edge of our solar system from the Oort cloud, an area beyond Neptune which seems to contain many bodies. It was thought that because an ammonium deposit was found and is only stable in the outer solar system. A second idea has been put forward and that is the ammonium might have been put there from the inside of the dwarf planet. Ceres is in the asteroid belt.
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