This Week in Space: Spaceports, Failed Stars, and the Lunar New Year

Stranded ISS Crew Strip Seat Liner From Damaged Soyuz MS-22

Just over a month ago, the Soyuz MS-22 capsule docked with the International Space Station took a direct hit from a micrometeoroid or a piece of orbital debris. The resulting damage punctured the capsule’s external radiator and cooling loop, and emptied its coolant into space. This left its passengers, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, without a ride back planetside. NASA and Roscosmos have been in a group chat with SpaceX ever since the debris strike, working to find the semi-stranded crew members a way to get home.

The current plan is to send up an empty MS-23 Soyuz as soon as Russia can scramble it. Roscosmos was going to launch in mid-March, but it pulled up the launch date to Feb. 20. Meanwhile, ISS crew members have been working to change the seating configuration in the damaged MS-22 capsule, in case some emergency should befall the station before MS-23 arrives.

On Wednesday, they finished the job. Without its cooling system, MS-22 can’t muster life support for all three of the people it carried into space. If push came to shove, Roscosmos is betting Petelin and Prokopyev would do okay in the MS-22 capsule. (Then again, this is the agency whose spacecraft has a “ballistic re-entry” mode that one NASA astronaut compared with riding a tin can through a car crash.) For his part, Rubio would join Crew-5 inside Endurance, the SpaceX Dragon capsule.

Cosmonaut Anna Kikina used the robotic Canadarm2 to capture this shot of Soyuz after the leak. (Image: NASA)

But the trio can’t leave as soon as MS-23 gets there. If they did, the space station would be understaffed, since the crew who were supposed to arrive on MS-23 won’t be coming until the next mission. That means Rubio, Petelin, and Prokopyev are going to be in space for about double their expected six-month stay.

Artemis 1 Mannequins Are Back At Kennedy Space Center

Artemis 1 launched carrying several mannequins that NASA sent to space to help test new astronaut safety gear. The new kit includes the new AstroRad safety vest, which is also in field testing aboard the International Space Station. While the agency quickly retrieved the Orion capsule from its splashdown site in the Pacific, it took a while to get from there overland to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Then the Artemis team had to strip Orion for sensor data and parts they’ll use in the future. Now, finally, the mannequins — Helga, Zohar, and Cmdr. ‘Moonikin’ Campos — are all unpacked and breathing free.

NASA’s Zohar mannequin wearing the AstroRad vest on the Artemis 1 mission. Here you can see the AstroRad vest up close. In the background, Helga. (Image: NASA)

Bristling with sensors, the mannequins were the vanguard for Artemis II, which will have humans aboard. Now that mission scientists have unpacked the mannequins, the next stop for Cmdr. Campos will be the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Meanwhile, Helga and Zohar will head back to the German Space Agency.

NASA Awards $425M for Next-Gen Aircraft Design

Wednesday, NASA awarded Boeing nearly half a billion dollars toward the development of next-gen aircraft.

Due to their heavy usage, according to NASA, single-aisle aircraft account for nearly half of worldwide aviation emissions. So, the agency set out to develop a more sustainable ‘workhorse’ airplane. Through its Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, NASA spent years working with industry partners including Boeing. Out of that collaboration came the Transonic Truss-Braced Wing concept aircraft, whose demo won Boeing the $425M prize.

I CAN HEAR THIS IMAGE. NASA administrator Bill Nelson shows a scale model of the Transonic Truss-Braced Wing aircraft design. (Image: NASA/Joel Kowsky, via NASA HQ Twitter)

The design involves an aircraft with long, slender wings stabilized by diagonal struts. This cuts drag, resulting in an aircraft that uses up to 30% less fuel than a traditional airliner. The wing design alone evidently accounts for up to a third of the savings. NASA plans to complete testing for the project by the late 2020s. Hopefully, the technologies it successfully demonstrates can start coming into service in the 2030s.

“NASA is working toward an ambitious goal of developing game-changing technologies to reduce aviation energy use and emissions over the coming decades toward an aviation community goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050,” said Bob Pearce, NASA associate administrator for the Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. “The Transonic Truss-Braced Wing is the kind of transformative concept and investment we will need to meet those challenges and, critically, the technologies demonstrated in this project have a clear and viable path to informing the next generation of single-aisle aircraft, benefiting everyone that uses the air transportation system.”

Sweden Opens Europe’s First Orbital Launch Facility

On Jan. 13, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden met with other European officials to cut the ribbon on the first orbital launch facility in mainland Europe. The new Spaceport Esrange is an expansion of an existing rocket range built by the European Space Research Organization (ESRO). ESRO was the predecessor of the modern European Space Agency, or ESA.

Esrange has handled hundreds of suborbital rocket launches since the facility first became functional. However, handling orbital launches requires additional facilities and equipment. This became all the more important to get right after Russia revoked the ESA’s access to Baikonur.

Today we inaugurated a new launch complex in Kiruna in northern Sweden. Spaceport Esrange is a critical asset that will strengthen Europe’s launch capability, improve our competitiveness, and continue to guarantee European access to space.https://t.co/4BK1sREEij pic.twitter.com/AXOUSM5FV3

— Josef Aschbacher (@AschbacherJosef) January 13, 2023

Typically, launch companies (and countries) have preferred launch sites near the equator. The Earth’s rotational velocity is highest at the equator. The closer a rocket launch facility is to the equator, the less delta-v is required to deliver a payload to geostationary orbit. That’s one of the reasons why the United States built its launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, and why both SpaceX and the French company Arianespace have facilities in Boca Chica, TX, and French Guiana, respectively. But while equatorial launch facilities are more common, they are not the only option. Russia has operated northerly launch sites like Baikonur for decades.

Sweden hasn’t announced Esrange’s first commercial satellite customer, but the spaceport will host testing for the ESA’s reusable rocketry program, codenamed Themis. Both the Themis first-stage hop tests and the satellite launch should happen by late 2023.

New Images Show ‘Guest Star’ Supernova Was a Stellar Collision

In 1181 CE, Asian astronomers noted the appearance of a mysterious ‘guest star’ that flared up suddenly, shining brightly for six months before fading away. Ever since, we’ve been working on pinning down the surprise visitor’s true identity, but these days astronomers call it Pa 30. In 2021, we wrote about a team of astronomers who had identified Pa 30 as a rare and powerful type of supernova, originating in a star system near Earth. It left behind a star and an associated nebula. Now an astronomer from Dartmouth College has captured images of the star that confirm its identity — and much more.

(Image: Robert Fesen via Dartmouth College)

Robert Fesen, an astronomer at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, took three long-exposure shots of Pa 30 in the visual spectrum, using a 2.4-meter Hiltner telescope associated with the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. The images show a highly structured, firecracker-shaped explosion, with dozens of fine filaments ejected outward in the blast. They’re moving at ten thousand miles per second. Unfortunately, we don’t yet know what they’re made of.

The new observations confirm that both the nebula and the star are remnants of a type 1ax (pronounced “one-A-X”) supernova. These explosions occur when two white dwarf stars — most often, a binary pair — collide. Astronomers have now calculated the nebula’s age more precisely, confirmed the speed of its winds, and concluded that Pa 30 really is what remains of the “guest star” of 1181.

The new findings have been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters for publication. Fesen and co-authors also described their report at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society. In a statement afterward, Fesen said, “I have never seen any object — and certainly no supernova remnant in the Milky Way galaxy — that looks quite like this, and neither have any of my colleagues.”

Gaia Directly Images a ‘Failed Star’

Astronomers have used data from the Gaia satellite to directly image a gigantic exoplanet about 13 times more massive than Jupiter. According to the ESA, the planet’s “apparent brightening” suggests that the core of this giant planet is undergoing nuclear fusion using deuterium. These celestial bodies form in the same way as stars, but they just don’t quite have the mass to sustain fusion, so they’re sometimes called ‘failed stars.’

Artist’s rendering of Gaia: the most advanced galaxy mapping mission ever devised. (Image: ESA)

Gaia is an ESA project in the process of creating the largest ever 3D map of the Milky Way galaxy. The team followed up on the Gaia data with the GRAVITY instrument on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to confirm the presence of the newfound planet, known as HD 206893 c. The VLT is a terrestrial telescope that lives at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) facility in the Chilean Andes.

The report is accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics, but it’s available as a preprint on arXiv.

Skywatchers Corner

One beloved jewel hanging high in the January night sky is an asterism known as the Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters. Since ancient times, cultures around the world have called these stars by the same idiom of the Seven Sisters (or at least seven siblings). In classical Greek mythology, the Seven Sisters were nymphs, daughters of Pleione, and companions of Artemis. However, the constellation’s name probably derives from plein, “to sail,” because of its importance to Mediterranean sailors. The rise and set of the Pleiades demarcated the sailing season on the Mediterranean Sea. Poor Pleione was probably invented after the fact, to put a backstory behind the name.

An apocryphal story says that the Iroquois used the Pleiades as a test of visual acuity. Hunters were considered keen of sight if they could pick out a certain number (usually given as seven) of the stars in this grouping. Under absolutely optimal Earthly viewing conditions, there are fourteen Pleiades visible to the naked eye. But for those of us without access to an observatory in, say, a desert in the Chilean Andes, a lot of the time you can see five or six.

In this visual-spectrum image from NASA’s Share the Science STEM outreach program, you can see what a high-powered terrestrial telescope sees looking at the Pleiades. They’re laid out a little like Ursa Major and Minor, the Big and Little Dippers (respectively). (Image Credit & Copyright: Raul Villaverde Fraile, via Share the Science)

Most constellations are chance visual groupings of bright stars. This means they change over time. However, the Pleiades are actually physically related to one another, traveling together across the sky with the same proper motion. High-powered telescopes have shown us that the asterism is part of a globular cluster containing more than a thousand stars. Two-thirds of the stars in the cluster are thought to be binaries, and a quarter of its total population may be brown dwarf stars. Using detailed observations of the lithium in those brown dwarfs, astronomers estimate the Pleiades to be about 115 million years old.

Elsewhere in the Sky…

This month, the ethereal green comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is visible through “binoculars or a small telescope” in the predawn sky, for observers in the Northern Hemisphere. It made its closest approach to the Sun about a week ago. The comet will work its way swiftly across the northern sky during the next couple of weeks, and on Feb. 2 it will make its closest approach to the Earth. (Check your favorite skywatching app for the comet’s position on the date you’re observing.)

As Mars goes back into prograde motion, it grazed past the Moon near the Pleiades, early in the week. Next up in the planetary parade, Venus and Saturn will be in conjunction on Sunday night, barely a third of a degree apart. Monday night they’ll still be within one degree of visual separation. To see the pair, look low in the southwestern sky, about 45 minutes after sunset. Then, Tuesday night, look to the southwest shortly after sundown to see the Moon just a degree separated from Jupiter, about halfway up the sky.

Lunar New Year Begins on Jan. 22

Solar calendars like the Gregorian calendar mark time in increments of 365 days. However, lunar calendars mark the year in lunar months, which are 29.5 days long. This means a purely lunar calendar year isn’t the same length as a solar calendar year. Many cultures use a lunisolar calendar, each one choosing its own date for the start of the year. In the widely used Chinese lunisolar calendar, the new year begins on the second (or third) new moon after the winter solstice. This year, that day is Jan. 22: this Sunday.

For the curious, the new year is the Year of the Water Rabbit in China’s twelve-year zodiac cycle. (The Cat takes the place of the Rabbit in the Vietnamese zodiac, while the Malay zodiac names the year for the mousedeer.) Folks in the East Asian cultural sphere often celebrate the New Year with tokens of prosperity, tucked inside the iconic red envelope. There’s a Lunar New Year event going on in League of Legends, too — if you’re into that sort of thing.

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