Brave New Space
If you signed up for the newsletter last year or asked to be kept in the loop after the book announcement, welcome to the new and improved Astroholic.
It's been a while! If you signed up for the newsletter last year or asked to be kept in the loop after the book announcement, welcome to the new and improved Astroholic.
We are now in business, and I shall restart the 'I Need Space' newsletter very soon, but I wanted to give you a chance to escape again if you did not want to get my biweekly missives! So hello or farewell, below is a taster of what's to come:
So what's been going on in space recently? Well, a comet was caught thoroughly changing the way it spins, thanks to archival data! As comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák approached the Sun during its closest passage (AKA perihelion) back in April 2017, its spin appeared to first have slowed down massively, then stopped completely.
Hubble observations from December of that year show that it was spinning quickly again... but the other way round!
First Use Of Extragalactic Archeology
A cool story I worked on was the first use of extragalactic archeology to reconstruct the past of a galaxy.
The oxygen distribution of spiral galaxy NGC 1365, located about 56 million light-years from us, was studied in exceptional detail, and those observations were then matched to 20,000 simulated galaxies. Only one of those models matched the observations and told the researchers what had happened to that celestial island of stars over the last 12 billion years.
NASA'S PLANS FOR THE MOON
And event low-Earth orbit
Hopefully on Wednesday, Artemis II will take astronauts back to deep space and around the Moon for the first time in 50 years.
NASA has announced in the last few weeks that it will increase the number of launches to the Moon in the future but also decided that the next Artemis, Artemis III, will no longer land on the Moon. Stated reasons were reasonable, but the unstated one was also really important: the Moon lander vehicle for Artemis III is Elon Musk's Starship, and it is not ready at all. Probably won't be ready until late 2028.
NASA has also decided to postpone the Lunar Gateway, the space station that was going to be built around the Moon, and focus on a Moon base. It also extended the plan for the International Space Station a little longer. Two important facts came out of that conference:
1) The cost of going to space is no longer going down, so less investment.
2) Private companies do not seem interested in human-led space research, so the push for a private space station in low-Earth orbit has lost momentum, and NASA is worried that when the ISS retires, only the Chinese's Tiangong will remain in LEO.
The push for the privatization of space might not be so inevitable as it might have been suggested.
Last But Not Least: We Can Transport Antimatter!
I know, technically not space, but it was too cool not to mention: the first-ever transportation of antimatter (on the back of a truck, no less) has been successfully done this week! From the Antimatter Factory, and around CERN twice!
How awesome is that?!
Have a great start of April and wishing you very clear skies!
Out May 21!