Tag: NASA

NISAR payload gets traditional send-off at Nasa lab for final journey to India; sat launch in 2024 – Times of India

NEW DELHI: Senior Nasa and Isro officials broke the ceremonial coconut on Friday (local time) at the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in southern California before the start of the 14,000-km final journey of the SUV-size payload for the world’s most expensive NISAR satellite to India for its launch from Sriharikota. JPL director Laurie Leshin also presented the Isro chairman S Somanath-led Indian delegation with a jar of JPL ”lucky” peanuts for the last leg of the $1.5 billion Indo-US satellite mission before its “launch in 2024”.
Later this month, Nasa officials will move the dual-band payload into a special cargo container for the flight to Bengaluru’s U R Rao Satellite Centre. There it will be merged with the spacecraft bus in preparation for its launch from the Indian soil. Since early 2021, engineers and technicians at JPL have been integrating and testing NISAR’s two radar systems – the L-band SAR provided by Nasa’s JPL and the S-band SAR built by Isro.

JPL director Leshin said, “This (send-off) marks an important milestone in our shared journey to better understand planet Earth and our changing climate. NISAR will provide critical information on Earth’s crust, ice sheets, and ecosystems. By delivering measurements at unprecedented precision, NISAR’s promise is a new understanding and a positive impact in communities. Our collaboration with Isro exemplifies what’s possible when we tackle complex challenges together.” The Isro chief, Indian ambassador and deputy chief of mission Sripriya Ranganathan, and Nasa officials toured the High Bay 2 clean room, where engineers were putting the payload through the final testing. Also present was Bhavya Lal, Nasa’s associate administrator for technology, policy, and strategy.
The Isro chairman said, “Today we come one step closer to fulfilling the immense scientific potential Nasa and Isro envisioned for NISAR when we joined forces more than eight years ago. This mission will be a powerful demonstration of the capability of radar as a science tool and help us study Earth’s dynamic land and ice surfaces in greater detail than ever before.”
NISAR is a low earth orbit observatory and carries L and S dual band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which operates with Sweep SAR technique to achieve large swaths with high resolution data. Over the course of its three-year prime mission, the satellite, which carries a 12m wide deployable mesh reflector mounted onto a deployable 9m boom, will observe nearly the entire planet every 12 days, making observations day and night, in all weather conditions. The satellite will help researchers measure ways in which Earth is constantly changing by detecting both subtle and dramatic movements. Slow-moving variations of a land surface can precede earthquakes, landslides and volcanic eruptions, and data about such movement could help countries prepare for natural hazards, Nasa said.

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February 4, 2023
US looks to include Indian firms in NASA lunar project; NISAR in 2024, Isro astronaut may visit NASA Centre – Times of India

BENGALURU: The White House, in a fresh statement issued on Indo-US strategic partnership said the countries would strengthen co-operation on human spaceflight, including establishing exchanges that will include advanced training for an Isro astronaut at NASA Johnson Space Center.
Another key aspect identified was innovative approaches for the commercial sectors of the two countries to collaborate, especially with respect to activities related to NASA’s commercial lunar payload services (CLPS) project.
“Within the next year, NASA, with Isro, will convene US CLPS companies and Indian aerospace companies to advance this initiative,” the statement read.

It added that the two countries would initiate new STEM talent exchanges by expanding the professional engineer and scientist exchange programme (PESEP) to include space science, Earth science, and human spaceflight and extending a standing invitation to Isro to participate in NASA’s biennial international programme management course.
There will be strengthening of bilateral commercial space partnership, including through a new US department of commerce and Indian Department of Space-led initiative under the civil space joint (Indo-US CSJ) working group.
“This initiative will foster commercial space engagement and enable growth and partnerships between US and Indian commercial space sectors,” the statement read, welcoming S Somanath’s (Isro chairman) visit to the US. While Somanath was in the US as of February 1, NASA administrator is scheduled to visit India later in 2023.
The countries will also expand the agenda of the Indo-US CSJ working group to include planetary defence.
The announcement comes in the backdrop of President Biden and PM Narendra Modi announcing the US-India initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET) in May 2022 to elevate and expand strategic technology partnership and defence industrial co-operation between governments, businesses, and academia.
“The US and India affirm that the ways in which technology is designed, developed, governed, and used should be shaped by our shared democratic values and respect for universal human rights. We are committed to fostering an open, accessible, and secure technology ecosystem, based on mutual trust and confidence, that will reinforce our democratic values and democratic institutions,” the White House said.
NISAR In 2024
In a separate statement, the US State Department, said officials from US and India gathered on January 30-31 for the eighth meeting of the Indo-US CSJ working group (CSJWG) co-chaired by principal deputy assistant secretary Jennifer R Littlejohn and the NASA associate administrator for international and interagency relations Karen Feldstein, Isro scientific secretary Shantanu Bhatawdekar.
The group discussions covered collaboration in Earth and space science as well as human space exploration, global navigation satellite systems, spaceflight safety and space situational awareness, and policies for commercial space. Participants also considered implementation of guidelines and best practices developed by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Use of Outer Space (COPUOS) to ensure the long-term sustainability of outer space activities.
“The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, planned to launch in 2024, is expected to systematically map Earth, using two different radar frequencies to monitor resources such as water, forests and agriculture. The mission will provide important Earth science data related to ecosystems, Earth’s surface, natural hazards, sea level rise and the cryosphere,” It read.

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February 1, 2023
Mars craters and cracks create adorable image of a teddy bear in latest NASA image

Listen to space rocks crashing into Mars

Listen to the sound of space rocks crashing into Mars

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NASA’s latest discovery on Mars may just be the cutest one yet. Last week, the operator of one of the space agency’s satellites shared a December photo of the red planet’s mysterious surface with a unique formation that resembles the face of a teddy bear.

NASA captured a satellite image of Mars that appears to show an adorable bear’s face on the red planet.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

The image was shared on Jan. 25 by the University of Arizona, which operates the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) that has been capturing images of the red planet since 2006. A scaled version of the photo, originally taken on Dec. 12, shows that the bear’s apparent head stretches roughly 2,000 meters across, nearly 1.25 miles.

So what caused the adorable tattoo-esque image on the planet’s surface? According to the University of Arizona, it was formed by a series of structural changes that happened to line up in just the right way.

The circle encompassing the bear’s head is actually a surface fracture that could have been caused by the “settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater,” the university said, as the eyes were formed by two craters. The most prominent feature – the bear’s snout – appears to be some kind of collapse structure, the school added, or perhaps some kind of volcanic vent with lava or mud flows.

But whatever it is, the university said that viewers should “maybe just grin and bear it.”

This isn’t the first time that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured unique images on the red planet’s surface. In 2019, it captured a snapshot of the “Star Trek” Starfleet logo that was created by wind, lava and dunes. A year prior, it also captured a spot that appeared strangely similar to the face of “The Muppet Show” character Beaker.

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January 30, 2023
Asteroid’s sudden flyby shows blind spot in planetary threat detection – Times of India

WASHINGTON: The discovery of an asteroid the size of a small shipping truck mere days before it passed Earth on Thursday, albeit one that posed no threat to humans, highlights a blind spot in our ability to predict those that could actually cause damage, astronomers say.
NASA for years has prioritized detecting asteroids much bigger and more existentially threatening than 2023 BU, the small space rock that streaked by 2,200 miles from the Earth’s surface, closer than some satellites. If bound for Earth, it would have been pulverized in the atmosphere, with only small fragments possibly reaching land.
But 2023 BU sits on the smaller end of a size group, asteroids 5-to-50 meters in diameter, that also includes those as big as an Olympic swimming pool. Objects that size are difficult to detect until they wander much closer to Earth, complicating any efforts to brace for one that could impact a populated area.
The probability of an Earth impact by a space rock, called a meteor when it enters the atmosphere, of that size range is fairly low, scaling according to the asteroid’s size: a 5-meter rock is estimated to target Earth once a year, and a 50-meter rock once every thousand years, according to NASA.
But with current capabilities, astronomers can’t see when such a rock targets Earth until days prior.
“We don’t know where most of the asteroids are that can cause local to regional devastation,” said Terik Daly, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
The roughly 20-meter meteor that exploded in 2013 over Chelyabinsk, Russia is a once-every-100-years event, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It created a shockwave that shattered tens of thousands of windows and caused $33 million in damage, and no one saw it coming before it entered Earth’s atmosphere.
Some astronomers consider relying only on statistical probabilities and estimates of asteroid populations an unnecessary risk, when improvements could be made to NASA’s ability to detect them.
“How many natural hazards are there that we could actually do something about and prevent for a billion dollars? There’s not many,” said Daly, whose work focuses on defending Earth from hazardous asteroids.
AVOIDING A REALLY BAD DAY
One major upgrade to NASA’s detection arsenal will be NEO Surveyor, a $1.2 billion telescope under development that will launch nearly a million miles from Earth and surveil a wide field of asteroids. It promises a significant advantage over today’s ground-based telescopes that are hindered by daytime light and Earth’s atmosphere.
That new telescope will help NASA meet a goal assigned by Congress in 2005: detect 90% of the total expected amount of asteroids bigger than 140 meters, or those big enough to destroy anything from a region to an entire continent.
“With Surveyor, we’re really focusing on finding the one asteroid that could cause a really bad day for a lot of people,” said Amy Mainzer, NEO Surveyor principal investigator. “But we’re also tasked with getting good statistics on the smaller objects, down to about the size of the Chelyabinsk object.”
NASA has fallen years behind on its congressional goal, which was ordered for completion by 2020. The agency proposed last year to cut the telescope’s 2023 budget by three quarters and a two-year launch delay to 2028 “to support higher-priority missions” elsewhere in NASA’s science portfolio.
Asteroid detection gained greater importance last year after NASA slammed a refrigerator-sized spacecraft into an asteroid to test its ability to knock a potentially hazardous space rock off a collision course with Earth.
The successful demonstration, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), affirmed for the first time a method of planetary defense.
“NEO Surveyor is of the utmost importance, especially now that we know from DART that we really can do something about it,” Daly said.
“So by golly, we gotta find these asteroids.”

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January 30, 2023
Green comet zooming our way, last visited 50,000 years ago – Times of India

CAPE CANAVERAL: A comet is streaking back our way after 50,000 years. The dirty snowball last visited during Neanderthal times, according to NASA. It will come within 26 million miles (42 million kilometers) of Earth Wednesday before speeding away again, unlikely to return for millions of years.
So do look up, contrary to the title of the killer-comet movie “Don’t Look Up.”
Discovered less than a year ago, this harmless green comet already is visible in the northern night sky with binoculars and small telescopes, and possibly the naked eye in the darkest corners of the Northern Hemisphere. It’s expected to brighten as it draws closer and rises higher over the horizon through the end of January, best seen in the predawn hours. By Feb. 10, it will be near Mars, a good landmark.
Skygazers in the Southern Hemisphere will have to wait until next month for a glimpse.
While plenty of comets have graced the sky over the past year, “this one seems probably a little bit bigger and therefore a little bit brighter and it’s coming a little bit closer to the Earth’s orbit,” said NASA’s comet and asteroid-tracking guru, Paul Chodas.
Green from all the carbon in the gas cloud, or coma, surrounding the nucleus, this long-period comet was discovered last March by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility, a wide field camera at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. That explains its official, cumbersome name: comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF).
On Wednesday, it will hurtle between the orbits of Earth and Mars at a relative speed of 128,500 mph (207,000 kilometers). Its nucleus is thought to be about a mile (1.6 kilometers) across, with its tails extending millions of miles (kilometers).
The comet isn’t expected to be nearly as bright as Neowise in 2020, or Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake in the mid to late 1990s.
But “it will be bright by virtue of its close Earth passage … which allows scientists to do more experiments and the public to be able to see a beautiful comet,” University of Hawaii astronomer Karen Meech said in an email.
Scientists are confident in their orbital calculations putting the comet’s last swing through the solar system’s planetary neighborhood at 50,000 years ago. But they don’t know how close it came to Earth or whether it was even visible to the Neanderthals, said Chodas, director of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
When it returns, though, is tougher to judge.
Every time the comet skirts the sun and planets, their gravitational tugs alter the iceball’s path ever so slightly, leading to major course changes over time. Another wild card: jets of dust and gas streaming off the comet as it heats up near the sun.
“We don’t really know exactly how much they are pushing this comet around,” Chodas said.
The comet – a time capsule from the emerging solar system 4.5 billion years ago – came from what’s known as the Oort Cloud well beyond Pluto. This deep-freeze haven for comets is believed to stretch more than one-quarter of the way to the next star.
While comet ZTF originated in our solar system, we can’t be sure it will stay there, Chodas said. If it gets booted out of the solar system, it will never return, he added.
Don’t fret if you miss it.
“In the comet business, you just wait for the next one because there are dozens of these,” Chodas said. “And the next one might be bigger, might be brighter, might be closer.”
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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January 27, 2023
Asteroid about to zoom oh-so-close to Earth, NASA says

Cape Canaveral, Fla. — An asteroid the size of a delivery truck will whip past Earth on Thursday night, one of the closest such encounters ever recorded.

NASA insists it will be a near miss with no chance of the asteroid hitting Earth.

NASA said Wednesday that this newly discovered asteroid will zoom 2,200 miles above the southern tip of South America. That’s 10 times closer than the bevy of communication satellites circling overhead.

The closest approach will occur at 7:27 p.m. EST.

Even if the space rock came a lot closer, scientists said most of it would burn up in the atmosphere, with some of the bigger pieces possibly falling as meteorites.

This diagram made available by NASA shows the estimated trajectory of asteroid 2023 BU, in red, affected by the Earth’s gravity, and the orbit of geosynchronous satellites, in green.

NASA /JPL-Caltech

NASA’s impact hazard assessment system, called Scout, quickly ruled out a strike, said its developer, Davide Farnocchia, an engineer at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“But despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with Earth,” Farnocchia said in a statement. “In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.”

Discovered Saturday, the asteroid known as 2023 BU is believed to be between 11 feet and 28 feet feet across. It was first spotted by the same amateur astronomer in Crimea, Gennady Borisov, who discovered an interstellar comet in 2019. Within a few days, dozens of observations were made by astronomers around the world, enabling them to refine the asteroid’s orbit.

The asteroid’s path will be drastically altered by Earth’s gravity once it zips by. Instead of circling the sun every 359 days, it will move into an oval orbit lasting 425 days, according to NASA.

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January 26, 2023
Alabama’s iconic rest stop rocket to be removed

Alabama’s iconic rest stop rocket to be removed – CBS News

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After nearly 50 years of serving as an iconic landmark to Alabama’s welcome center and rest stop, the Saturn 1-B Rocket is expected be taken down. Chris Davis with CBS affiliate WTVF has more on the rocket’s final mission.

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January 22, 2023
Greenland at its warmest in 1,000 years: Study – Times of India

COPENHAGEN: Temperatures in parts of Greenland are warmer than they have been in 1,000 years, the co-author of a study that reconstructed conditions by drilling deep into the ice sheet told AFP on Friday.
“This confirms the bad news that we know already unfortunately … (It is) clear that we need to get this warming under control in order to stop the melting of the Greenlandic ice sheet”, climate physics associate professor Bo Mollesoe Vinther of the University of Copenhagen told AFP.
By drilling into the ice sheet to retrieve samples of snow and ice from hundreds of years ago, scientists were able to reconstruct temperatures from north and central Greenland from the year 1000 AD to 2011.
Their results, published in the scientific journal Nature, show that the warming registered in the decade from 2001-2011 “exceeds the range of the pre-industrial temperature variability in the past millennium with virtual certainty”.
During that decade, the temperature was “on average 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the 20th century”, the study found.
The melting of the Greenland ice sheet is already leading to rising sea levels, threatening millions of people living along coasts that could find themselves underwater in the decades or centuries to come.
Greenland’s ice sheet is currently the main factor in swelling the Earth’s oceans, according to NASA, with the Arctic region heating at a faster rate than the rest of the planet.
In a landmark 2021 report on climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the Greenland ice sheet would contribute up to 18 centimetres to sea level rise by 2100 under the highest emissions scenario.
The massive ice sheet, two kilometres thick, contains enough frozen water to lift global seas by over seven metres (23 feet) in total.
Under the Paris climate deal, countries have agreed to limit warming to well under 2C.
“The global warming signal that we see all over the world has also found its way to these very remote locations on the Greenland ice sheet”, Vinther said.
“We need to stop this before we get to the point where we get this vicious cycle of a self-sustaining melting of the Greenland ice”, he warned.
“The sooner the better”.

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January 20, 2023
Indian scientist-led team first to find evidence of solitary waves in Mars magnetosphere – Times of India

NEW DELHI: In a significant discovery, Indian scientists have reported the first evidence of the presence of solitary waves or electric field fluctuations in the Martian magnetosphere. Despite several global missions to Mars, the presence of solitary waves in the Martian magnetosphere had never been reported by any space agency or institute in the world.
The Navi Mumbai-based Indian Institute of Geomagnetism (IIG), an autonomous institute of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), has identified and reported the solitary waves in the Martian magnetosphere with the help of high-resolution electric field data recorded by a Nasa spacecraft. The study of the solitary waves is crucial as they directly control particle energisation, plasma loss and transport through wave-particle interactions.
Speaking to

TOI

, Prof Bharati Kakad, the author of the research paper and scientist with IIG, said, “We studied electric field data recorded by Langmuir Probe and Waves instrument on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft after Nasa put the data in the public domain. Usually any space agency retains and studies data from its payload for six months and then it has to put such data in the public domain as per a policy.When Nasa put that MAVEN data in public domain, our team of four members, which worked on the research papers, studied the data. After three-month analysis of that MAVEN -captured data and other research, we made the discovery of solitary waves in the Mars magnetosphere. Actually, the find was by chance.”
Prof Bharati Kakad and her husband, Amar Kakad, also a scientist in IIG, co-authored the research papers that were published in the Astrophysical Journal in August last year. “We present an analysis of 450 solitary wave pulses observed by the Langmuir Probe and Waves instrument on the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft during its five passes around Mars on February 9, 2015. The magnitude and duration of these pulses vary between 1 and 25 mVm-1 and 0.2-1.7ms, respectively. The ambient plasma conditions suggest that these pulses are quasi-parallel to the ambient magnetic field and can be considered electrostatic,” the abstract of the published research papers said.
“Our Earth is a giant magnet and its magnetic field protects us from high-speed charged particles that are continuously emitted from the Sun in the form of solar wind. Unlike the Earth, Mars doesn’t have any intrinsic magnetic field. This allows the high-speed solar wind to interact directly with the Mars atmosphere. Even in a weak and thin magnetosphere as that of Mars, one can observe frequent occurrences of solitary waves. But the presence of the solitary waves in the magnetosphere of Mars was never noticed by anybody earlier,” Kakkar told

TOI

.
Solitary waves are the distinct electric field fluctuations (bipolar or monopolar) that follow constant amplitude-phase relations. Their shape and size are less affected during their propagation. As these waves are known to be responsible for the plasma energisation and its transport in the Earth’s magnetosphere, the IIG team is further exploring their role in the particle dynamics in the Martian magnetosphere and whether such waves play any role in the loss of atmospheric ions on the Red planet.

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January 16, 2023
Hubble finds hungry black hole twisting captured star into donut shape – Times of India

WASHINGTON: Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by. When the star gets close enough, the black hole‘s gravitational grasp violently rips it apart and sloppily devours its gasses while belching out intense radiation.
Astronomers using NASA‘s Hubble Space Telescope have recorded a star’s final moments in detail as it gets gobbled up by a black hole.
These are termed ‘tidal disruption events’. But the wording belies the complex, raw violence of a black hole encounter. There is a balance between the black hole’s gravity pulling in star stuff, and radiation blowing material out. In other words, black holes are messy eaters. Astronomers are using Hubble to find out the details of what happens when a wayward star plunges into the gravitational abyss.
Hubble can’t photograph the AT2022dsb tidal event’s mayhem up close, since the munched-up star is nearly 300 million light-years away at the core of the galaxy ESO 583-G004. But astronomers used Hubble’s powerful ultraviolet sensitivity to study the light from the shredded star, which include hydrogen, carbon, and more. The spectroscopy provides forensic clues to the black hole homicide.
About 100 tidal disruption events around black holes have been detected by astronomers using various telescopes. NASA recently reported that several of its high-energy space observatories spotted another black hole tidal disruption event on March 1, 2021, and it happened in another galaxy. Unlike Hubble observations, data was collected in X-ray light from an extremely hot corona around the black hole that formed after the star was already torn apart.
“However, there are still very few tidal events that are observed in ultraviolet light given the observing time. This is really unfortunate because there’s a lot of information that you can get from the ultraviolet spectra,” said Emily Engelthaler of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adding, “We’re excited because we can get these details about what the debris is doing. The tidal event can tell us a lot about a black hole.”
Changes in the doomed star’s condition are taking place on the order of days or months.
For any given galaxy with a quiescent supermassive black hole at the center, it’s estimated that the stellar shredding happens only a few times in every 1,00,000 years.
This AT2022dsb stellar snacking event was first caught on March 1, 2022 by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN or ‘Assassin’), a network of ground-based telescopes that surveys the extragalactic sky roughly once a week for violent, variable, and transient events that are shaping our universe. This energetic collision was close enough to Earth and bright enough for the Hubble astronomers to do ultraviolet spectroscopy over a longer than normal period of time.
“Typically, these events are hard to observe. You get maybe a few observations at the beginning of the disruption when it’s really bright. Our program is different in that it is designed to look at a few tidal events over a year to see what happens,” said Peter Maksym of the CfA, adding “We saw this early enough that we could observe it at these very intense black hole accretion stages. We saw the accretion rate drop as it turned to a trickle over time.”
The Hubble spectroscopic data are interpreted as coming from a very bright, hot, donut-shaped area of gas that was once the star. This area, known as a torus, is the size of the solar system and is swirling around a black hole in the middle.
“We’re looking somewhere on the edge of that donut. We’re seeing a stellar wind from the black hole sweeping over the surface that’s being projected towards us at speeds of 20 million miles per hour (three percent the speed of light),” said Maksym, adding, “We really are still getting our heads around the event. You shred the star and then it’s got this material that’s making its way into the black hole. And so you’ve got models where you think you know what is going on, and then you’ve got what you actually see. This is an exciting place for scientists to be: right at the interface of the known and the unknown.”

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January 15, 2023