Astronomy and space exploration

[eloic]

NASA Wants Its Deep Space Gateway Habitat To Orbit The Moon By 2024
It’s no secret that humans (well, at least presidents) are aching to go back to the Moon. And now, we have more concrete plans on how we might do that. Earlier this week, the Human Exploration and Operations Committee for NASA’s Advisory Council presented the most detailed plan to date of how, exactly, it will go about it.

NASA’s plan involves something called the Deep Space Gateway, aka the Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway. First announced in March 2017, the Gateway would be a small habitat that would orbit the Moon and would act as a “spaceport for human and robotic exploration to the Moon and beyond.”

https://futurism.com/nasa-deep-space-gateway-2024/

We need to start seeing some substantial progress with the SLS first, though. Its maiden flight was delayed to 2020, so... Or maybe they'll come up with alternate solutions with less powerful rockets such as current SpaceX rockets or wait for the BFR.

 

[eloic]

Ok, so Elon smoked a joint in a show and now people are going crazy about it. I hope this doesn't affect SpaceX's goals.

 

[eloic]

Pluto should be reclassified as a planet, experts say

The reason Pluto lost its planet status is not valid, according to new research from the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union, a global group of astronomy experts, established a definition of a planet that required it to "clear" its orbit, or in other words, be the largest gravitational force in its orbit.

Since Neptune's gravity influences its neighboring planet Pluto, and Pluto shares its orbit with frozen gases and objects in the Kuiper belt, that meant Pluto was out of planet status. However, in a new study published online Wednesday in the journal Icarus, UCF planetary scientist Philip Metzger, who is with the university's Florida Space Institute, reported that this standard for classifying planets is not supported in the research literature.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180907110422.htm

Should we welcome our old friend Pluto into our family of solar system planets again?

 

[Lightman]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180907110422.htm

Should we welcome our old friend Pluto into our family of solar system planets again?

Yes!

It has all the properties of a planet, including acive geology, so why discriminate?

 

[eloic]

Life on Mars? 40 Years Later, Viking Lander Scientist Still Says 'Yes'

In 1976, NASA's twin Viking landers touched down on Mars in an attempt to answer a weighty question: Is there life on the Red Planet?

Gilbert Levin was the principal investigator of the Vikings' Labeled Release (LR) life-detection experiment. The instrument got positive responses at both landing locales. However, scientists did not reach a consensus on whether his results were proof of life.

In 1997, Levin concluded that the experiment had, indeed, detected life on Mars — and he has championed that viewpoint ever since.

https://www.space.com/41689-nasa-viking-mars-life-search-gil-levin.html

Maybe those scientists look like old stubborn folks now, but who knows... Maybe yes, all these "clues" point to microbial life, but it's true we must be cautious, patient and gather irrefutable proof. Hopefully, this will happen soon.

 

[eloic]

The Closest Exoplanet to Earth Could Be 'Highly Habitable'

Just a cosmic hop, skip and jump away, an Earth-size planet orbits the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri.

Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet — known as Proxima Centauri b— in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of sustaining life.

Now, using computer models similar to those used to study climate change on Earth, researchers have found that, under a wide range of conditions, Proxima Centauri b can sustain enormous areas of liquid water on its surface, potentially raising its prospects for harboring living organisms.

https://www.space.com/41806-proxima-b-nearest-exoplanet-habitable.html

 

[eloic]

SpaceX Will Fly a Private Passenger Around the Moon on Its Giant BFR Rocket

​

SpaceX's giant Mars vehicle has a crewed moon mission on its docket.

A "private passenger" has signed up for a trip around the moon aboard SpaceX's BFR rocket-spaceship combo, company representatives announced via Twitter this evening (Sept. 13). SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk will fill in the details Monday (Sept. 17), during a webcast that begins at 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT on Sept. 18). You can watch the SpaceX moon shot webcast live here, courtesy of SpaceX.

https://www.space.com/41822-spacex-bfr-rocket-moon-passenger-flight.html

I hope we will get more details about the timeline on Monday, not just the identity of the passenger.

 

[cheapchips]

It's an hour and half, so hopeful they will share some good details. If Musk's presenting, he loves to throw around performance numbers.

The updated design, with the big fins, is really floating my boat as a bit of retrofuturism.

The new engine config is interesting. 4 vac + 2/3 sea level to 7 partially expanded ones. It's either a good trade off for a Mars burn or they do something funky with the 'petals' around the seven engines. Deploying them to make 8m vacuum nozzle around the engines would be super cool, if unlikely.

 

[eloic]

It's an hour and half, so hopeful they will share some good details. If Musk's presenting, he loves to throw around performance numbers.

The updated design, with the big fins, is really floating my boat as a bit of retrofuturism.

The new engine config is interesting. 4 vac + 2/3 sea level to 7 partially expanded ones. It's either a good trade off for a Mars burn or they do something funky with the 'petals' around the seven engines. Deploying them to make 8m vacuum nozzle around the engines would be super cool, if unlikely.

SpaceX Has Apparently Tweaked Its Giant BFR Rocket Design. And It Looks Awesome!
SpaceX's giant Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) has a sleek new look for an audacious private passenger flight around the moon. If an early rendering is anything to go by, the BFR is going to have some wild fins.

Late last night (Sept. 13), SpaceX announced that it has signed a deal to launch a private passenger flight around the moon with its new BFR megarocket sometime in the future. Details are scant — SpaceX will unveil more on Monday (Sept. 17) during a live webcast — but the private spaceflight company did unveil a new artist's concept of a BFR passenger rocket around the moon.

https://www.space.com/41825-spacex-giant-bfr-rocket-moon-flight-design-art.html

 

[cheapchips]

Musk tweeted a couple of new BFR renders

https://twitter.com/x/status/1041552262286389253

 

[eloic]

So....

SpaceX Will Fly a Japanese Billionaire (and Artists, Too!) Around the Moon in 2023
A Japanese billionaire and a coterie of artists will visit the moon as early as 2023, becoming the first private citizens ever to fly beyond low-Earth orbit, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced tonight.

Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of Japanese e-commerce giant Zozo, has signed up to fly a round-the-moon mission aboard SpaceX's BFR spaceship-rocket combo, he and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced during a webcast tonight (Sept. 17) from the company's rocket factory in Hawthorne, California.

And the new BFR spaceship will feature three rear "actuated fins" that also serve as landing pads, as well as two fins near its nose. The previous spaceship iteration sported just two finlike "delta wings" in the back.
The BFR spaceship can fit about 100 people, but the "Dear Moon" trip will carry just a skeleton crew to accommodate extra fuel, food, water and spare parts, as a precaution in case something goes wrong, Musk said.

https://www.space.com/41854-spacex-unveils-1st-private-moon-flight-passenger.html

 

[nutball]

In other news, TESS has announced its first planet today:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.05967

 

[eloic]

In other news, TESS has announced its first planet today:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.05967

^_^^_^^_^^_^^_^

I've been regularly monitoring TESS' progress but I didn't know this. I will read it now.

 

[nutball]

^_^^_^^_^^_^^_^

I've been regularly monitoring TESS' progress but I didn't know this. I will read it now.

They released a list of 73 candidates to the community a couple of weeks ago, as they were bound to by their agreement with NASA before being allowed to follow up any of them. The list was pretty rough and unfiltered - there were 19 already known transiting planets in it, along with some fairly suspect detections. Nevertheless it was fairly obvious that they either knew or strongly suspected that they had something quite nice. From a skim of the paper it looks like they are relying on archival RV data, so my guess is that they'd probably done a lot of this work before making the candidates public.

I think there might be another one coming, maybe more, based on what HARPS and ESPRESSO have been doing since the list went public.

 

[nutball]

This one seems to have come out in a bit of a rush...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07242

If was refereeing that I'd send them packing, tell them to get some more RV data to nail down the mass, especially as they spend a paragraph in the conclusions telling us how easy it would be. So why haven't you done it folks?

 

[eloic]

This one seems to have come out in a bit of a rush...

https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07242

11 hours orbit? How can a planet be so fast?

 

[nutball]

11 hours orbit? How can a planet be so fast?

There are planets with shorter periods, quite a few in fact. Probably not very pleasant places to live...

 

[eloic]

There are planets with shorter periods, quite a few in fact. Probably not very pleasant places to live...

 

[eloic]

Astronauts Going to Mars Will Absorb Crazy Amounts of Radiation. Now We Know How Much.
There are plenty of challenges to putting people on Mars, whether you look at the rocket, the astronaut or the planet itself.

New data from one of the many spacecraft at work around Mars confirm just how dangerous a round-trip human journey would be by measuring the amount of radiation an astronaut would experience.

https://www.space.com/41887-mars-radiation-too-much-for-astronauts.html

Ok, but, what can we do about it? I missed that in the article and then I saw some people posted the same thought in the comments.

 

[pcchen]

It's long been predicted that solar flare could cause interplanetary astronauts with large amount of radiation (astronauts on ISS are largely protected by the earth's magnetic fields, though they are still hide in a more protected area when there's a large solar flare).
I guess that once we have a spaceship large enough to house and sustain several people for a few years, it's possible to build a better protected room so people can hide inside before a large solar flare hits.