Science
Russian Cosmonauts Undock From Space Station and Return to Earth – SciTechDaily
Yesterday, September 29, the Soyuz spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) at 3:34 a.m. EDT (12:34 a.m. PDT), carrying Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, and Sergey Korsakov back to Earth.
Expedition 68 officially began onboard the station at the time of undocking. Samantha Cristoforetti of ESA (European Space Agency) is the station commander for the crew consisting of <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="
” data-gt-translate-attributes=”["attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"]”>NASA astronauts Bob Hines, Kjell Lindgren, Frank Rubio, and Jessica Watkins, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin.
The trio of cosmonauts landed backon Earth at 6:57 a.m. EDT in Kazakhstan (4:57 p.m. Kazakhstan time), southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan.
The trio of Russian comonauts arrived at the station on March 18 aboard the Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft. The trio returns to Earth after 195 days in space that spanned 3,120 orbits of Earth and over 78 million miles.
This was the first flight for both Matveev and Korsakov. At the time of landing, the two cosmonauts will have each logged 195 days in space.
Artemyev completed five spacewalks totaling 33 hours, 12 minutes during the mission. He has now logged a combined 561 days in space on his three flights.
During the mission, Matveev completed four spacewalks totaling 26 hours, 7 minutes. He logged 195 days in space on his first flight.
On his first voyage, Korsakov spent 195 days in space as well.
The trio will return to the recovery staging city in Karaganda, Kazakhstan via Russian helicopters, before boarding a Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center aircraft to return to their training base in Star City, Russia.
Remaining aboard the station is the seven-person crew of Expedition 66. This includes Station Commander Samantha Cristoforetti of ESA (European Space Agency), NASA astronauts Bob Hines, Kjell Lindgren, Frank Rubio, and Jessica Watkins, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin.
In October, NASA’s <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="
” data-gt-translate-attributes=”["attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"]”>SpaceX Crew-5 members will join the Expedition 68 members aboard the station. This four person team is comprised of NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="
” data-gt-translate-attributes=”["attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"]”>JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina. Crew-5 will be the fifth crew rotation mission of SpaceX’s human space transportation system, and its sixth flight with astronauts, to the ISS for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
The ISS has already surpassed 20 years of continuous human presence, providing opportunities for unique technological demonstrations and research that help prepare for long-duration missions to the Moon and <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="
” data-gt-translate-attributes=”["attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"]”>Mars while also improving life on Earth. Thus far, 260 people from 20 countries have visited the orbiting laboratory that has hosted more than 3,000 research investigations from scientists in more than 100 countries and areas.
Science
Marine plankton could act as alert in mass extinction event: UVic researcher – Langley Advance Times
A University of Victoria micropaleontologist found that marine plankton may act as an early alert system before a mass extinction occurs.
With help from collaborators at the University of Bristol and Harvard, Andy Fraass’ newest paper in the Nature journal shows that after an analysis of fossil records showed that plankton community structures change before a mass extinction event.
“One of the major findings of the paper was how communities respond to climate events in the past depends on the previous climate,” Fraass said in a news release. “That means that we need to spend a lot more effort understanding recent communities, prior to industrialization. We need to work out what community structure looked like before human-caused climate change, and what has happened since, to do a better job at predicting what will happen in the future.”
According to the release, the fossil record is the most complete and extensive archive of biological changes available to science and by applying advanced computational analyses to the archive, researchers were able to detail the global community structure of the oceans dating back millions of years.
A key finding of the study was that during the “early eocene climatic optimum,” a geological era with sustained high global temperatures equivalent to today’s worst case global warming scenarios, marine plankton communities moved to higher latitudes and only the most specialized plankton remained near the equator, suggesting that the tropical temperatures prevented higher amounts of biodiversity.
“Considering that three billion people live in the tropics, the lack of biodiversity at higher temperatures is not great news,” paper co-leader Adam Woodhouse said in the release.
Next, the team plans to apply similar research methods to other marine plankton groups.
Read More: Global study, UVic researcher analyze how mammals responded during pandemic
Science
Scientists Say They Have Found New Evidence Of An Unknown Planet… – 2oceansvibe News
In the new work, scientists looked at a set of trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, which is the technical term for those objects that sit out at the edge of the solar system, beyond Neptune
The new work looked at those objects that have their movement made unstable because they interact with the orbit of Neptune. That instability meant they were harder to understand, so typically astronomers looking at a possible Planet Nine have avoided using them in their analysis.
Researchers instead looked towards those objects and tried to understand their movements. And, Dr Bogytin claimed, the best explanation is that they result from another, undiscovered planet.
The team carried out a host of simulations to understand how those objects’ orbits were affected by a variety of things, including the giant planets around them such as Neptune, the “Galactic tide” that comes from the Milky Way, and passing stars.
The best explanation was from the model that included Planet 9, however, Dr Bogytin said. They noted that there were other explanations for the behaviour of those objects – including the suggestion that other planets once influenced their orbit, but have since been removed – but claim that the theory of Planet 9 remains the best explanation.
A better understanding of the existence or not of Planet 9 will come when the Vera C Rubin Observatory is turned on, the authors note. The observatory is currently being built in Chile, and when it is turned on it will be able to scan the sky to understand the behaviour of those distant objects.
Planet Nine is theorised to have a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbit about 20 times farther from the Sun on average than Neptune. It may take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to make one full orbit around the Sun.
You may be tempted to ask how an entire planet could ‘hide’ in our solar system when we have zooming capabilities such as the new iPhone 15 has, but consider this: If Earth was the size of a marble, the edge of our solar system would be 11 kilometres away. That’s a lot of space to hide a planet.
[source:independent]
Science
Dragonfly: NASA Just Confirmed The Most Exciting Space Mission Of Your Lifetime – Forbes
NASA has confirmed that its exciting Dragonfly mission, which will fly a drone-like craft around Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, will cost $3.35 billion and launch in July 2028.
Titan is the only other world in the solar system other than Earth that has weather and liquid on the surface. It has an atmosphere, rain, lakes, oceans, shorelines, valleys, mountain ridges, mesas and dunes—and possibly the building blocks of life itself. It’s been described as both a utopia and as deranged because of its weird chemistry.
Set to reach Titan in 2034, the Dragonfly mission will last for two years once its lander arrives on the surface. During the mission, a rotorcraft will fly to a new location every Titan day (16 Earth days) to take samples of the giant moon’s prebiotic chemistry. Here’s what else it will do:
- Search for chemical biosignatures, past or present, from water-based life to that which might use liquid hydrocarbons.
- Investigate the moon’s active methane cycle.
- Explore the prebiotic chemistry in the atmosphere and on the surface.
Spectacular Mission
“Dragonfly is a spectacular science mission with broad community interest, and we are excited to take the next steps on this mission,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Exploring Titan will push the boundaries of what we can do with rotorcraft outside of Earth.”
It comes in the wake of the Mars Helicopter, nicknamed Ingenuity, which flew 72 times between April 2021 and its final flight in January 2023 despite only being expected to make up to five experimental test flights over 30 days. It just made its final downlink of data this week.
Dense Atmosphere
However, Titan is a completely different environment to Mars. Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan, which will make buoyancy simple. Gravity on Titan is just 14% of the Earth’s. It sees just 1% of the sunlight received by Earth.
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The atmosphere is 98% nitrogen and 2% methane. Its seas and lakes are not water but liquid ethane and methane. The latter is gas in Titan’s atmosphere, but on its surface, it exists as a liquid in rain, snow, lakes, and ice on its surface.
COVID-Affected
Dragonfly was a victim of the pandemic. Slated to cost $1 billion when it was selected in 2019, it was meant to launch in 2026 and arrive in 2034 after an eight-year cruise phase. However, after delays due to COVID, NASA decided to compensate for the inevitable delayed launch by funding a heavy-lift launch vehicle to massively shorten the mission’s cruise phase.
The end result is that Dragonfly will take off two years later but arrive on schedule.
Previous Visit
Dragonfly won’t be the first time a robotic probe has visited Titan. As part of NASA’s landmark Cassini mission to Saturn between 2004 and 2017, a small probe called Huygens was despatched into Titan’s clouds on January 14, 2005. The resulting timelapse movie of its 2.5 hours descent—which heralded humanity’s first-ever (and only) views of Titan’s surface—is a must-see for space fans. It landed in an area of rounded blocks of ice, but on the way down, it saw ancient dry shorelines reminiscent of Earth as well as rivers of methane.
The announcement by NASA makes July 2028 a month worth circling for space fans, with a long-duration total solar eclipse set for July 22, 2028, in Australia and New Zealand.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
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