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Artemis 2 astronauts flying to the moon could phone home with ham radio

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It’s been 40 years since the first astronaut called an amateur radio operator on Earth. Now the moon is in the community’s sights.

Most of the astronauts aboard the Artemis 2 mission, which will send a quartet of people around the moon in late 2024, are certified ham radio (amateur radio) operators. There’s high hopes in the community that the astronauts may call home from deep space, the president of Radio Amateurs of Canada told Space.com.

“We feel it’s important that anyone, especially kids as they determine what they want to do with their life, have that opportunity” to talk with astronauts, Phil A. McBride said in a recent interview. After four decades of communication with low Earth orbit, he added, the hope is ham radio will reach further out with the moon.

Related: Four for the moon! NASA names Artemis 2 astronaut crew for 1st lunar mission since Apollo

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The first ham radio operator in space was NASA astronaut Owen Garriott (W5LFL), who on Dec. 1, 1983 called Lance Collister (WA1JXN) in Frenchtown, Montana. A ham radio was even aboard the Russian space station Mir, according to NASA (opens in new tab), during the shuttle-Mir program that saw NASA astronauts visit the orbiting complex.

Today’s ham operators communicate with astronauts through Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS), largely aiming to let students directly talk with spaceflyers, according to documentation from the group (opens in new tab). As of 2022, NASA reports that more than 100 crew members (opens in new tab) have connected with 250,000 participants on the ground via ARISS.

NASA astronaut Owen Garriott made the first amateur radio call from space in 1983. (Image credit: NASA)

It’s unclear if ham radio equipment will be onboard Artemis 2 as the mission manifest is not yet decided, Space.com confirmed with Chief Astronaut Joe Acaba and two of the crew members (NASA’s Reid Wiseman and the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen) in interviews last month. In theory, though, the main requirements would be adequate power and storage space for radio equipment, spare time for the crew to devote to the radio during their 10-day mission and a line of sight with Earth.

Three of the four Artemis 2 astronauts are certified hams, however, with call signs for Wiseman (KF5LKT), Hansen (KF5LKU) and NASA astronaut Victor Glover (KI5BKC). The other crew member, NASA astronaut Christina Koch, was studying for a 2019 amateur license exam when her record-setting one-year flight was abruptly rescheduled six months earlier than expected, according to the National Association for Amateur Radio (opens in new tab). Koch delayed the certification in favor of completing the mission training for her 328-day sojourn that ended on Feb. 10, 2020.

Related: International Women’s Day: Female astronauts keep making strides off Earth

 

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, now commander of the Artemis 2 moon mission, speaks with amateur radio operators during the International Space Station’s Expedition 40 on June 28, 2014. (Image credit: NASA)

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Participating in the ham community requires precious resources: Time to study for the required exams, equipment space to accommodate chatting with others and money to buy said equipment and obtain certification. Costs vary considerably by region. U.S. operators must pay around $70 to get their ham radio license from the Federal Communications Commission, according to Hamtronics.com (opens in new tab). Equipment costs can range from $30 handheld devices to more professional units that start at $400 and climb quickly into the thousands.

The community is an international collective that McBride says is quite welcoming of people from all ages, genders, backgrounds and all countries, to the extent that operators will often donate old equipment to those in need. That said, the barriers of cost and time do tend to favor males worldwide; detailed statistics on diversity are not easily available. Diversity and inclusion were the stated priorities of the American Radio Relay League in a December 2022 communique (opens in new tab) from its CEO, David Minster.

Students participate in a live education downlink with Expedition 33 astronauts Sunita Williams (left) and Kevin Ford in 2012. Some of these events use HAM radio. (Image credit: NASA)

The ham community is starting to think past the apparent conclusion of the ISS program in 2030, to a time when commercial space stations are expected to begin. McBride said conversations are ongoing about bringing hams onto these commercial venues, although the planning for the outposts are still in early stages.

Speaking to his own experience, McBride said ham radio tends to inculcate valuable cross-disciplinary skills in the community. Math skills are a definite must, along with comfort with technology. McBride, 43, said as an example that his interest in ham radio had him studying algebra ahead of his schoolmates around ages 13 and 14.

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“It encourages innovation,” McBride said of ham radio, which was estimated to have three million participants worldwide (opens in new tab) in 2015. The previous decade before that, based on U.S. statistics, appeared to show that number is growing.

The current ARISS collaboration involves all the major partners: NASA, the European Space Agency, Roscosmos and the Canadian Space Agency. Artemis will have a similarly international approach for its crews, so presumably, if ham radio is brought on board those missions several countries will be involved.

The astronauts themselves have said how much ham radio means to them. “I get choked up every time I read a report about a ham radio contact,” NASA astronaut Sunita Williams said in 2015 (opens in new tab).

“You go through the questions and it sounds like only 10 kids, then you read a report about how many people were at that event and how much preparation and time the kids took. It is nice to know it makes such a huge impact.”

Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).

 

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NASA to launch sounding rockets into moon's shadow during solar eclipse – Phys.org

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This photo shows the three APEP sounding rockets and the support team after successful assembly. The team lead, Aroh Barjatya, is at the top center, standing next to the guardrails on the second floor. Credit: NASA/Berit Bland

NASA will launch three sounding rockets during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, to study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet.

The Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) sounding rockets will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to study the disturbances in the created when the moon eclipses the sun. The sounding rockets had been previously launched and successfully recovered from White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, during the October 2023 .

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They have been refurbished with new instrumentation and will be relaunched in April 2024. The mission is led by Aroh Barjatya, a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where he directs the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab.

The sounding rockets will launch at three different times: 45 minutes before, during, and 45 minutes after the peak local eclipse. These intervals are important to collect data on how the sun’s sudden disappearance affects the ionosphere, creating disturbances that have the potential to interfere with our communications.

The ionosphere is a region of Earth’s atmosphere that is between 55 to 310 miles (90 to 500 kilometers) above the ground. “It’s an electrified region that reflects and refracts and also impacts as the signals pass through,” said Barjatya. “Understanding the ionosphere and developing models to help us predict disturbances is crucial to making sure our increasingly communication-dependent world operates smoothly.”

A sounding rocket is able to carry science instruments between 30 and 300 miles above Earth’s surface. These altitudes are typically too high for science balloons and too low for satellites to access safely, making sounding rockets the only platforms that can carry out direct measurements in these regions. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The ionosphere forms the boundary between Earth’s lower atmosphere—where we live and breathe—and the vacuum of space. It is made up of a sea of particles that become ionized, or electrically charged, from the sun’s energy or .

When night falls, the ionosphere thins out as previously ionized particles relax and recombine back into neutral particles. However, Earth’s terrestrial weather and space weather can impact these particles, making it a dynamic region and difficult to know what the ionosphere will be like at a given time.

It’s often difficult to study short-term changes in the ionosphere during an eclipse with satellites because they may not be at the right place or time to cross the eclipse path. Since the exact date and times of the are known, NASA can launch targeted sounding rockets to study the effects of the eclipse at the right time and at all altitudes of the ionosphere.

As the eclipse shadow races through the atmosphere, it creates a rapid, localized sunset that triggers large-scale atmospheric waves and small-scale disturbances or perturbations. These perturbations affect different radio communication frequencies. Gathering the data on these perturbations will help scientists validate and improve current models that help predict potential disturbances to our communications, especially high-frequency communication.

This conceptual animation is an example of what observers might expect to see during a total solar eclipse, like the one happening over the United States on April 8, 2024. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The APEP rockets are expected to reach a maximum altitude of 260 miles (420 kilometers). Each rocket will measure charged and neutral particle density and surrounding electric and magnetic fields. “Each rocket will eject four secondary instruments the size of a two-liter soda bottle that also measure the same data points, so it’s similar to results from fifteen rockets while only launching three,” explained Barjatya. Embry-Riddle built three secondary instruments on each rocket, and the fourth one was built at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

In addition to the rockets, several teams across the U.S. will also be taking measurements of the ionosphere by various means. A team of students from Embry-Riddle will deploy a series of high-altitude balloons. Co-investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts and the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico will operate a variety of ground-based radars taking measurements.

Using this data, a team of scientists from Embry-Riddle and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are refining existing models. Together, these various investigations will help provide the puzzle pieces needed to see the bigger picture of ionospheric dynamics.

The animation depicts the waves created by ionized particles during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Credit: MIT Haystack Observatory/Shun-rong Zhang. Zhang, S.-R., Erickson, P. J., Goncharenko, L. P., Coster, A. J., Rideout, W. & Vierinen, J. (2017). Ionospheric Bow Waves and Perturbations Induced by the 21 August 2017 Solar Eclipse. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(24), 12,067-12,073. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076054

When the APEP- launched during the 2023 annular solar eclipse, scientists saw a sharp reduction in the density of charged particles as the annular eclipse shadow passed over the atmosphere.

“We saw the perturbations capable of affecting radio communications in the second and third rockets, but not during the first rocket that was before peak local eclipse,” said Barjatya. “We are super excited to relaunch them during the total eclipse to see if the perturbations start at the same altitude and if their magnitude and scale remain the same.”

The next total solar eclipse over the contiguous U.S. is not until 2044, so these experiments are a rare opportunity for scientists to collect crucial data.

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Royal Sask. Museum research finds insect changes may have set stage for dinosaurs' extinction – CTV News Regina

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Research by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) shows that ecological changes were occurring in insects at least a million years before dinosaur extinction.

Papers published in the scientific journal, Current Biology, describe the first insect fossils found in amber from Saskatchewan and the unearthing of three new ant species from an amber deposit in North Carolina, according to a release from the province.

The amber deposit from in the Big Muddy Badlands of Saskatchewan, which was formed about 67 million years ago, preserved insects that lived in a swampy redwood forest about one million years before the extinction of dinosaurs.

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“Fossils in the amber deposit seem to show that common Cretaceous insects may have been replaced on the landscape by their more modern relatives, particularly in groups such as ants, before the extinction event,” Elyssa Loewen, curatorial assistant, said.

The research team was led by Loewen and Dr. Ryan McKellar, the RSM’s curator of paleontology.

“These new fossil records are closer than anyone has gotten to sampling a diverse set of insects near the extinction event, and they help researchers fill in a 17-million-year gap in the fossil record of insects around that time,” Dr. McKellar said.

The three ant species discovered in North Carolina also belonged to extinct groups that didn’t survive past the Cretaceous period.

“When combined with the work in Saskatchewan, the two recent papers show that there was a dramatic change in ant diversity sometime between 77 and 67 million years ago,” Dr. McKellar said in the release.

“Our analyses of body shapes in the fossils suggests that the turnover was not related to major differences in ecology, but it may have been related to something like the size and complexity of ant colonies. More work is needed to confirm this.”

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Meteors, UFOs or something else? Dawson City, Yukon, residents puzzled by recent sightings in night sky – CBC.ca

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Some residents in Dawson City, Yukon, say they’ve been seeing unusual things in the night sky lately — and it’s not the Northern Lights. 

But some might say it’s equally as fascinating.

Over the past few weeks, some residents have taken to social media to report seeing what they described as a fireball or meteor overhead. And last week, two residents said they both saw something similar.

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Naomi Gladish lives in Henderson Corner, a subdivision approximately 20 kilometres from downtown Dawson City. She told CBC News she saw something while walking her dog Friday morning.

“I looked up and saw a bright star,” Gladish said. “Or what I thought was a star.” 

“Within a fraction of a second, I realized it was actually moving quickly. And then as I watched it, a second later it grew a long tail.”

Dawson City resident Naomi Gladish said she saw something similar to the fireball shown in this image from the American Meteor Society. (American Meteor Society)

Gladish said the unknown object started to change into a pale blue colour, like a gas flame. Then, a few seconds later, it appeared to burn out.

“I could see fire, or coal,” Gladish said. “Like red glowing bits, breaking off of it. And then that was it. I tried watching to see if I could see any dark chunks falling from that spot, or carrying on from that spot, but the sky was dark.”

A minute or two after Gladish saw what she thought was a meteor, she heard a boom in the distance.

“My dog and I both turned our head to that exact direction that I had just seen it,” she said.”I figured it was related.”

Two women walking through snowy mountain terrain.
Naomi Gladish hiking with her sister at Tombstone Park. (Submitted by Naomi Gladish)

Dawson resident Jeff Delisle reported seeing something similar at about the same time. He then took to social media to ask if anyone else had seen it. Two people responded saying they had. 

“It flew right above me,” Delisle wrote.

“Pretty cool looking…. What is it?”

Likely not a meteor, says astronomer

Christa Van Laerhoven, president of the Yukon Astronomical Society, came across Delisle’s post and got in touch. She asked about what he’d seen, such as how long it was in the sky and the colour.

Van Laerhoven told CBC News that based on descriptions from both Delisle and Gladish, she doesn’t believe it could have been a meteor.

She says a meteor would have been moving much faster, and the colouring would have appeared differently. 

“Meteors can be any colour but … as a rule, are a consistent colour. What these people were describing had different colours. So the head looked blue and then the tail was more of an orange,” van Laerhoven said.

“That’s just something that doesn’t happen with meteors.”

a meteor
This zoomed-in still from a dashcam video captured in 2020 by Louise Cooke from Mount Lorne, Yukon, shows what one space science expert said appears to be an unusually-bright meteor travelling across the sky. (Submitted by: Louise Cooke)

Van Laehoven believes there may be another explanation for the recent unusual sightings: space junk, falling to earth.

“Space junk, when it comes in … comes through the atmosphere and starts glowing that can be more irregular, because of the variety of materials that go into a spacecraft.”

Van Laerhoven also suggested it could a very fast plane, or someone playing with rockets.

Gladish, however, doesn’t think anyone in Dawson was playing with rockets on Friday morning.

“Unless they’re talking about someone in China, or like a distant land playing with very high, powerful rockets … then sure,” she said.

“This was not something that someone in Dawson was doing … This came from much, much higher and it was much, much different to anything that would be locally caused.”

Van Laerhoven also dismissed another possibility: alien visitors.

“If aliens were coming to Earth, we would know,” she said.

“Simply because it would take them so much effort to get here that it would be very hard to imagine them getting here and not doing something dramatic enough that we would actually know about it.”

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