Science
Earth has captured a new mini-moon – CBC.ca
Earth has a tiny new companion in its journey around the sun — at least for now.
The new “mini-moon” is an asteroid called 2020 CD3. It’s about 1.9 to 3.5 metres in diameter, roughly between the size of a cow and a hippopotamus.
It was confirmed to have been captured and “temporarily bound to Earth” by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Centre at the Smithsonian Astronomical Observatory on Tuesday. The organization is responsible for the designation of minor bodies in the solar system.
The asteroid was discovered by Kacper Wierzchos and Theodore Prune, astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey, on Feb. 15, Wierzchos said in a tweet that described it as “big news.”
BIG NEWS (thread 1/3). Earth has a new temporarily captured object/Possible mini-moon called 2020 CD3. On the night of Feb. 15, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Teddy Pruyne and I found a 20th magnitude object. Here are the discovery images. <a href=”https://t.co/zLkXyGAkZl”>pic.twitter.com/zLkXyGAkZl</a>
—@WierzchosKacper
The Catalina Sky Survey is a NASA-funded project based at the University of Arizona that catalogues potentially hazardous asteroids.
“It’s a big deal as out of ~1 million known asteroids, this is just the second asteroid known to orbit Earth,” Wierzchos said.
(3/3) The object has a diameter between 1.9 – 3.5 m assuming a C-type asteroid albedo. But it’s a big deal as out of ~ 1 million known asteroids, this is just the second asteroid known to orbit Earth (after 2006 RH120, which was also discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey).
—@WierzchosKacper
The first was 2006 RH120, also found by the Catalina Sky Survey, which most recently orbited Earth between Sept. 2006 and June 2007. It has since resumed orbiting the sun.
The reason mini-moons orbit Earth for such a short time — compared to the moon, which has been orbiting Earth for more than four billion years — is that they’re pulled by the Earth’s, the moon’s and the sun’s gravity at the same time, producing irregular orbits.
(2/3) The object has just been announced by the MPC and its orbit shows that it entered Earth’s orbit some three years ago. Here is a diagram of the orbit created with the orbit simulator written by Tony Dunn: <a href=”https://t.co/2wsJGtexiO”>pic.twitter.com/2wsJGtexiO</a>
—@WierzchosKacper
At some point, the sun’s gravity will win, and the object will break free from its orbit around Earth.
However, so far, astronomers estimate that 2020 CD3 has already been orbiting the Earth for about three years.
Even though mini-moons are rarely discovered, a University of Hawaii study in 2011 calculated that there should be at least one asteroid with a diameter of at least one metre orbiting Earth at any given time. On average, such a mini-moon would orbit Earth for nine months, but some could orbit for decades, it estimated.
Science
SpaceX sends 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit
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April 23 (UPI) — SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit Tuesday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Liftoff occurred at 6:17 EDT with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sending the payload of 23 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after separating from the rocket’s second stage and its payload.
The entire mission was scheduled to take about an hour and 5 minutes to complete from launch to satellite deployment.
The mission was the ninth flight for the first-stage booster that previously completed five Starlink satellite-deployment missions and three other missions.
Science
NASA Celebrates As 1977’s Voyager 1 Phones Home At Last
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Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.
Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022. However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.
Slow Work
Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.
The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to re-insert that code into a new location.
Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can return to sending science data.
Beyond The ‘Heliopause’
The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.
Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
Pale Blue Dot
Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.
On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back towards the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019.
Science
NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.
The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
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