2024-02-08 17:06:47
Layoffs at NASA
A dispute in Congress – the legislative branch of the United States – over the approval of the budget for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the American space agency NASA, is currently forcing the research and development center lay off 530 workers, which are about eight percent of his workforce. The work of forty external contractors is also expected to stop. The layoffs are expected to disrupt the progress of the center’s flagship project – the planning of the mission to bring the samples from Mars, which should be carried out in cooperation with the European Space Agency, ESA.
JPL director Lori Leshin She wrote this week in a memo to employees Because since a budget for fiscal year 2024 has not yet been approved and no funding has been allocated for the Mars mission, “we are forced to take steps to reduce expenses, which will lead to layoffs of JPL employees and further release of contractors.”
Bringing the samples from Mars was supposed to be a continuation of the mission of the Perseverance rover, which has been operating for three years on the neighboring planet. The vehicle took soil samples from several interesting sites, packed them in sealed metal containers and piled the containers in several places, for collection in a future mission that should be equipped with an all-terrain vehicle and a spacecraft that can take off from Mars, something that has never been done before, but in July 2023 The Senate Appropriations Committee refused to approve the mission’s budgetafter an inspection report determined that the chances of it being ready for launch on the planned date, in 2028, are zero. The chances of it doing so without exceeding the budget are even smaller, the authors of the report determined.
Originally, $300 million was approved for the development of the sample collection mission in 2024, out of an estimated cost of at least eight billion dollars for the entire mission. This budget is tens of percent lower than the amount allocated to it last year, which has already forced JPL to take a series of efficiency measures. Now it turns out that this was not enough, and in order not to exceed the budget of other activities, the center, operated under an agreement with the California Institute of Technology, had to reduce its personnel even more, and to a considerable extent.
Adventure too expensive? Components of the mission to collect the samples from Mars, whose future is now unclear Source: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Move and… new moon
The International Astronomical Union, which is entrusted among other things with determining agreed names for celestial bodies, approved this week to give the strange name Zoozve to the “half moon” of the planet Venus. It was the end of a long and entertaining story, which began with human error. The object is actually an asteroid with a diameter of about 240 meters, and is in orbit around the sun, but is temporarily captured in orbit around Venus, and will probably be ejected from it in a few hundred years.
About a year ago, when he put his toddler son to bed, Latif Nasser looked at a cartoon poster of the solar system hanging above his son’s bed, and noticed for the first time that near the planet Venus there was a moon named Zozbe. Naser, who is one of the presenters of the popular scientific podcast Radiolabknew that Venus has no moons, and decided to check the meaning of the illustration on the poster.
After a long investigation, it turned out to be an object that astronomers had identified in 2002, and since it appeared close to Venus at that time, it was automatically given the temporary name 2002VE86. At some point Mayer mistakenly replaced the number 2 with the letters Z, omitted the suffix, and thus ZOOZVE was born. Nasser and the podcast team set out on a journey following the discovery, and dessert submitted an official request to recognize the name given to the asteroid by mistake. The full story aired In an episode of Radiolab at the end of January. This week, as mentioned – the effort was crowned with success, and the half moon of Venus is now called 524522 Zoozve. Mazel Tov!
temporary guest The approximate orbit of Zozbe around the planet Venus from 1600 to 2500 | Image: Phoenix7777, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
space man
Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko became a person who stayed at the beginning of the week The most accumulated time in space. Kononko, who is on the International Space Station on his fifth mission there, completed 879 days in space and passed the previous record set by his compatriot Gennady Padalka, who was satisfied with 878 days in orbit around the Earth. Kononko’s current mission is scheduled to last a year, and if he completes it as planned he will have accumulated 1,100 days in space, just over three years of his life. Kononko (59) is an aeronautical engineer who grew up in Turkmenistan, and in 1996 was accepted as a cosmonaut for the Russian space program. In 2008 he flew into space for the first time, and during his five missions on the station he also performed six spacewalks, with a cumulative stay of almost 40 hours in space outside the station.
The plan: to reach three cumulative years in space. Kononko after his return to Earth from the previous visit to the space station, in 2019 | Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls
A small step for the environment
United States space agency launched the PACE satellite on Thursday morning for environmental research and monitoring phenomena related to climate change. The satellite, which is the size of a commercial car, is equipped with several types of cameras to monitor phenomena such as cloud cover, the concentration of particles in the atmosphere, air pollution levels and plankton concentrations in the oceans. It should help researchers better understand the The complex interrelationships between the oceans and the atmosphereand try to identify, for example, connections between the levels of particles in the air and the amount of plankton in the sea, or between the concentration of polluting particles in the air and the development of clouds and the effect of clouds on the warming and cooling of the earth.
The person who actually launched the satellite for NASA is SpaceX. A Falcon 9 rocket carried it into an orbit at an altitude of 677 kilometers, where it is supposed to circle the Earth every 98 minutes in a sun-synchronous orbit, where it passes over the same latitudes with the sun at the same angle , so it is possible to compare the photographs and measurements over time, in order to identify trends. According to the plan, it should operate for at least three years. In practice, its amount of fuel is much greater than the minimum necessary for the mission, and if there are no malfunctions, it will allow the mission to continue for up to ten years.
To try to better understand the mechanisms of global warming. PACE satellite in space | Image: NASA
#Layoffs #moon #week #space