The giant SpaceX spacecraft has been given the green light for the test flight, a particularly detailed mapping of the Milky Way, and Israelis discover distant planets – this week’s summary of the universe
After many months of delays and discussions, the United States Civil Aviation Administration, FAA, has authorized SpaceX to launch the giant Starship spacecraft from the company’s space base in Texas. The Starship’s first test flight into orbit was scheduled to take place about three months ago, but was delayed due to a requirement from the Aviation Administration to examine the environmental impacts expected from the spacecraft’s launches aboard the giant Super Heavy missile. The administration set the company a list of 75 requirements in the environmental field, but waived its need to conduct an extensive environmental survey, which would have delayed the launch for many months, and even a few years.
Among other things, the administration requires the company to provide an earlier warning about launch dates; To fund a biologist who monitors the flora and fauna in the area of the Boca Chica launch site; Coordinate with the authorities operations for collecting waste from sensitive habitats after each launch; And reduce the lighting intensity at the site to prevent harm to animals, such as sea turtles. The administration also imposed restrictions on the closure of the road near the site during launches.
In the planned test flight, SpaceX will attempt to land the launch missile in a controlled manner in the Gulf of Mexico, not far from the launch site. The spacecraft itself said to complete Earth’s partial coffee, and land in the sea not far from the shores of Hawaii. The company has not yet announced the planned launch date, though its owner, Elon Musk, has previously said it will be ready to launch about two months after receiving approval. SpaceX’s starship has been chosen to be the landing vehicle that will bring American astronauts to the moon in the Artemis program, and in the longer term Musk plans to use it to launch humans to Mars.
This is how it should be: A simulation video of the Starship launching the first spaceflight:
The lost satellites
A failure to launch another private company resulted in the loss of two US space agency satellites, NASA. The tiny satellites were launched from the Canadian Space Center in Florida on an ASTRA missile. Than expected, and the satellites did not reach their orbit.
The two satellites were to be the first of six the company will launch under NASA’s TROPICS program to more closely monitor the evolution of hurricanes, to improve understanding of the phenomenon and forecasting capabilities. NASA paid Astra about $ 8 million to place the six satellites in space In three launches.
Astra, founded in 2016, successfully launched a research satellite in March, but in the previous month it lost four more NASA satellites in a failed launch. This week’s failure puts its dismal record at just two successful launches, compared to eight failures.
Started well, ended in loss of satellites. The launch of “Astra” from the Canadian Space Center this week Photo: NASASpaceflight LLC / Astra Space Inc
Expanding the neighborhood
An international team of researchers has discovered two rocky planets, relatively similar in size to Earth, in one of the solar systems closest to us. The discovery was made using the TESS space telescope, which searches for planets in other solar systems. TESS measures with great accuracy the light intensity of the suns, and looks for cyclical changes that may indicate a planet passing between us and one of the distant suns. The researchers, including Israeli astrophysicist Avi Shporer, located the two planets around a red dwarf named HD 260655, about 33 light-years from our sun. The planet closest to its sun has a diameter 1.2 times larger than Earth, and the other is slightly larger, 1.5 times larger than Earth.
Both planets probably have a rocky composition, but are too hot for life as we know them. Although their sun is weaker than ours, they are very close to it, and the average temperature on their faces is estimated at 435 degrees Celsius on the planet closest to the sun, and 285 degrees in the second. However, both are excellent candidates for the existence of an atmosphere, and are close enough to us to allow study of the atmosphere, if it exists, with the help of the James B. and Space Telescope, which should begin its research activities very soon.
Very warm, but maybe they have interesting atmospheres. Imaging of two planets in the HD 260655 system:
The most detailed map
The European Space Agency this week officially released the new data collection of the GAIA space telescope (GAIA), which maps the space path in unprecedented detail. This is the telescope’s third data set, launched in 2013, and it provides more detailed data than ever before on the 1.8 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The newly released data includes, among other things, accurate measurements of the light composition of hundreds of millions of stars, and particularly accurate measurements of about nine million of them. They also include data on about ten million stars of varying brightness, and the discovery of more than 800,000 binary systems – including two stars orbiting each other.
Gaia’s study also involves an Israeli team from Tel Aviv University, led by Shai Zucker and Zvi Maza. This team uncovered 41 new planets in other solar systems using the data. Of the stars, “Zucker explained to the Davidson Institute website.” We completed the data on two of them, by measuring the radial velocity of the stars they orbit. “The joint work with the research students Aviad Pinchi, Avraham Binenfeld and Sahar Shahaf has made it possible to verify that these are indeed two huge planets, like Jupiter, but hot because they are much closer to their stars.”
Documentation of 1.8 billion stars. A short video about Gaia’s findings: