Science
Boeing’s Starliner Won't Meet Up With Space Station After Failure to Reach Proper Orbit – Gizmodo
Update 11:15 a.m. ET: NASA and Boeing officials shared more details about the anomaly at a press conference this morning, which opened with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine saying, “This is in fact why we test.”
As he and his colleagues explained, it’s still too early to be sure, but the problem appears to be related to a software automation glitch. During separation from the Atlas V rocket, for reasons that aren’t yet clear, Starliner switched to the wrong clock. By not having the correct time, Starliner mistakenly believed it needed to perform an orbital insertion burn. Accordingly, the spacecraft “tried to maintain a control that it wouldn’t normally have done,” and it burned excessive fuel as a result, said Bridenstine. This forced the flight team to rule out the planned docking with the ISS.
The NASA chief noted that, had a crew been on board, they would have been safe and capable of operating the vehicle themselves. Perhaps ironically, it was the lack of human control that resulted in the error, showing the limitations of uncrewed testing.
“Had we been on board, we could’ve given the flight team more options,” said NASA astronaut Mike Fincke at the press conference. His colleague NASA astronaut Nicole Mann agreed, saying astronauts could have taken manual control of the thrusters or performed a de-orbit, among many other tasks. “That’s our job—that’s what we’re trained to do,” she said, adding: “We don’t have any safety concerns.”
When Starliner went off the rails, the flight team attempted to send backup commands to the spacecraft using the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). But, “we were between TDRSS satellites,” said Bridenstine, which made a link impossible. At the press conference, Jim Chilton, senior vice president of the Space and Launch division of Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS), said, “We found ourselves in a place where it was hard to get that link in.”
Bridenstine said it was premature to know if this setback would delay a future Starliner crewed mission to the ISS, but he made it clear that the successful docking of an uncrewed spacecraft is not a requirement for moving forward. The Space Shuttle missions, he said, involved crews that had to dock with various spacecraft for the very first time. This is a strong hint that the mission will move forward without much delay and that a crewed mission aboard Starliner is still very much in the cards.
Indeed, it appears that everything else went right with this mission, from the performance of the Atlas V rocket to the performance of Starliner itself, software glitch notwithstanding. The crew cabin, though empty, is operating as planned, according to the NASA and Boeing officials.
That said, this test mission is not over. Later today, the spacecraft will make a series of burns to raise its orbit higher, and it’s expected to make an atmospheric re-entry in about 48 hours, landing at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.
The original article appears below.
Early Friday morning, Boeing launched its uncrewed CST-100 Starliner from Cape Canaveral in Florida, but the spacecraft experienced an “off-nominal” orbital insertion that will prevent it from rendezvousing with the International Space Station. It’s a disappointing setback to Boeing’s aspirations to eventually deliver astronauts to the ISS on behalf of NASA.
All seemed well at first, as the uncrewed CST-100 Starliner departed Cape Canaveral this morning atop an Atlas V rocket, blasting off at 6:36 a.m. ET. Around 30 minutes into the launch, however, it became clear that the spacecraft did not reach its intended orbit, and it won’t be able to rendezvous with the International Space Station as planned due to lack of fuel, according to NASA chief Jim Bridenstine.
As Bridenstine explained in a series of tweets, Starliner experienced a “Mission Elapsed Time” anomaly, which made the spacecraft believe “it was in an orbital insertion burn, when it was not.” As a result, Starliner burned more fuel than it was supposed to, which will now prevent it from meeting up with the ISS. That said, Starliner is currently in a “safe and stable configuration,” according to a Boeing press release.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, shared some insight into the incident in a tweet, saying the anomaly wouldn’t have posed a risk to human life.
This is definitely discouraging news. Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program, which is seeking to restore America’s ability to independently deliver astronauts to space—something the U.S. hasn’t been able to do since the retirement of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Had this mission gone well, Boeing and NASA could have proceeded toward the next step, namely a crewed launch early next year. It’s unclear how today’s setback might influence that timeline.
NASA will be holding a press conference at 9:30 a.m. today, at which time we’ll learn more about this incident. We will update this post accordingly, so stay tuned.
Science
NASA to launch sounding rockets into moon's shadow during solar eclipse – Phys.org
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 ionosphere 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 annular solar eclipse.
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 radio signals and also impacts satellite communications 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.”
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 solar radiation.
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 total solar eclipse 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.
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.
When the APEP-sounding rockets 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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Science
Royal Sask. Museum research finds insect changes may have set stage for dinosaurs' extinction – CTV News Regina
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.
“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.”
Science
Meteors, UFOs or something else? Dawson City, Yukon, residents puzzled by recent sightings in night sky – CBC.ca
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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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