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Canadian astronaut to join NASA’s first crewed Artemis mission around the moon

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The moon as seen from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

A Canadian space flier will join three NASA crew members on the first piloted flight of the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft around the moon, becoming the first non-U.S. astronaut on a lunar voyage, officials announced last week.

There will be a second flight opportunity for a Canadian astronaut on a later NASA mission to the international Gateway station in orbit around the moon.

NASA and the Canadian Space Agency announced the agreement for Canadian astronaut flights Dec. 16, as the agencies affirmed details of Canada’s contribution to the Gateway station, which is intended to serve as a waypoint, spacecraft refueling station, and deep space research outpost in the vicinity of the moon.

“Canada will join the U.S. on the first crewed mission to the moon since the Apollo missions,” said Navdeep Bains, Canada’s minister of innovation, science and industry. “Launching in 2023, a Canadian Space Agency astronaut will be part of Artemis 2, the first mission to carry humans to lunar orbit in over 50 years. This will make Canada only the second country after the U.S. to have an astronaut in deep space.”

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Monica Witt, a NASA spokesperson, said the Artemis 2 crew will consist of three NASA astronauts and one Canadian space flier. The Artemis 2 mission is currently scheduled to launch in 2023.

The signature of a final agreement solidifies Canada’s participation in the NASA-led Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the surface of the moon in the 2020s. The Trump administration has a schedule goal of 2024 for landing humans on the moon’s south pole, a timetable widely viewed as ambitious and one that could be reset for later in the 2020s by the incoming Biden administration.

Under NASA’s Artemis architecture, astronauts will take off from Earth atop NASA’s Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, fly to the moon’s vicinity in an Orion capsule, then link up with a human-rated lander for the trip to and from the lunar surface. The astronauts will then return to Earth in the Orion spacecraft.

An outpost named the Gateway, about one-sixth the size of the International Space Station, will be assembled in orbit around the moon. NASA has said the first two U.S.-owned elements of the Gateway could launch as soon as the end of 2023, although a report by the NASA inspector general in November suggested the launch of the station’s power and propulsion module and habitation section was likely to slip into 2024.

Canadian astronauts Jeremy Hansen, Jennifer Sidey-Gibbons, Joshua Kutryk, and David Saint-Jacques. Credit: NASA/Bill Stafford

Canada plans to build an upgraded robotic arm, named Canadarm3, for placement on the Gateway in the 2026 timeframe, according to NASA. The Canadian Space Agency has also formally agreed to provide robotic interfaces for Gateway modules, allowing the elements to host scientific instruments.

“Canada was the first international partner to commit to advancing the Gateway in early 2019, they signed the Artemis Accords in October, and now we’re excited to formalize this partnership for lunar exploration,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “This agreement represents an evolution of our cooperation with CSA providing the next generation of robotics that have supported decades of missions in space on the space shuttle and International Space Station, and now, for Artemis.”

The Canadarm3 robotic arm will be delivered to the Gateway by a commercial logistics mission, NASA said.. NASA has contracted with SpaceX to fly a bigger version of its Dragon cargo capsule to the Gateway in deep space. The Dragon XL will launch on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.

“Gateway will enable a robust, sustainable, and eventually permanent human presence on the lunar surface where we can prove out many of the skills, operations, and technologies that will be key for future human Mars missions,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations.

Earlier this month, NASA announced the selection of 18 U.S. astronauts to begin training for Artemis lunar missions. NASA has not revealed which of the astronauts will fly on the Artemis 2 mission — the first crewed test flight of the Space Launch System and Orion capsule — or on the first lunar landing mission.

Canadian officials did not announce which of its four active astronauts would take the seat on the Artemis 2 mission or the later flight to the Gateway.

“Canada’s fortunate to have a strong corps of highly trained professional astronauts, any one of whom would be an excellent choice,” said Lisa Campbell, president of CSA. “These decisions are made with all sorts of specific considerations at a moment in time when we get closer to flight.”

Artist’s concept of an Orion spacecraft at the moon. Credit: NASA

The Artemis 2 mission will follow an uncrewed SLS/Orion test flight, named Artemis 1, scheduled to launch no earlier than late 2021 on a trip to lunar orbit and back to Earth.

On the Artemis 2 mission, the four-person Orion crew will fly on a “hybrid free return trajectory” around the moon.

After launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Space Launch System will place the Orion crew capsule into orbit around Earth, where the astronauts will perform checkouts, test out the ship’s rendezvous and docking systems, and then fire Orion’s service module engine to fly to the moon a quarter-million miles away.

The crew will not enter orbit around the moon, but the trajectory will naturally bring the Orion spacecraft directly back to Earth after the astronauts arc out to a distance of 4,600 miles (7,400 kilometers) beyond the far side of the moon, farther than any humans have ever traveled into space.

The Artemis 2 mission will last around 10 days, paving the way for future landing expeditions and longer-duration flights to the Gateway.

NASA is also working with other international partners on the Artemis program, although those partnerships have not yet yielded a firm commitment for flight assignments for astronauts from other nations.

The European Space Agency and NASA signed a memorandum of understanding in October for cooperation on the Gateway. ESA will provide a habitation module developed together with Japan, along with a module to support enhanced communications, in-space refueling, and equipped with a window similar to the European-built cupola on the International Space Station.

ESA is also building service modules for Orion missions. The service modules include solar panels to produce the craft’s electrical power, and propellant tanks to feed the capsule’s rocket thrusters.

NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency have signed a joint exploration declaration of intent to begin negotiations for Japanese contributions on the Artemis program. In addition to helping ESA with the habitation module, Japan’s space agency has also expressed interest in launching resupply missions to the Gateway using the country’s next-generation HTV-X cargo freighter.

Artist’s illustration of the Gateway space station with Canada’s Canadarm3 robotic arm. Credit: CSA/NASA

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced last year that his country would provide robotics systems for the Gateway station near the moon. The government has committed 2.05 billion Canadian dollars (about $1.6 billion) over the next 24 years for the Canadarm3 program and associated robotic aids.

Canada’s four active astronauts, based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, have been training for space missions for years. Only one of the four astronauts, David Saint-Jacques, has flown in space aboard the International Space Station.

“I’m pretty excited that Canada has had the vision and the leadership to commit to something that we do so very well — space robotics — (and) to take it into its next evolution,” said Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. “This is a significant leap in technology. It has a lot of trickle down effects with respect to artificial intelligence.”

“The international (astronaut) corps here in Houston is over the moon excited by the prospect of these missions and for the opportunity for scientific discovery and innovation that they represent,” said Joshua Kutryk, one of Canada’s four active astronauts.

 

 

Source: – Spaceflight Now

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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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