Science
SpaceX launches 2000th Starlink satellite – Spaceflight Now – Spaceflight Now
A package of 49 Starlink satellites that rode a Falcon 9 rocket into orbit Tuesday night from Florida included the 2,000th spacecraft to launch into SpaceX’s broadband internet network.
The successful orbital deployment of SpaceX’s newest 49 satellites brought the total number of Starlink spacecraft built and launched to 2,042, including prototypes and testbeds no longer in service.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, tweeted Saturday that the company has 1,469 active Starlink satellites, plus 272 spacecraft still maneuvering to their operational orbits. He added the laser inter-satellite links, used to beam internet traffic from spacecraft to spacecraft without going through a ground station, will activate soon.
More than 200 Starlink satellites have failed or been decommissioned. Some of those Starlink spacecraft were earlier models, either used as test versions or obsolete.
The latest Starlink mission was the 35th dedicated Falcon 9 launch to build out the network.
The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) launcher lifted off from pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 9:02:40 p.m. EST Tuesday (0202:40 GMT Wednesday) and climbed into moonlit sky, arcing downrange toward the southeast over the Atlantic Ocean.
The mission was originally supposed to take off Monday night, but SpaceX delayed the flight by a day to wait for improved weather conditions at the Falcon 9 booster’s offshore recovery site near the Bahamas.
SpaceX bypassed another launch opportunity at 7:04 p.m. EST Tuesday without explanation, and instead targeted a backup launch slot at 9:02 p.m.
Nine Merlin engines ramped up to full throttle, generating 1.7 million pounds of thrust, to power the Falcon 9 off the launch pad.
A high-magnification night-vision tracking camera showed the rocket’s first stage shutting down its engines two-and-a-half minutes into the mission. The booster stage jettisoned moments later, and the second stage lit its Merlin engine with a puff of exhaust to continue the climb into orbit.
The first stage followed a parabolic trajectory, briefly soaring above the atmosphere beyond the edge of space before plunging back to Earth for a propulsive landing on SpaceX’s drone ship “A Shortfall of Gravitas” around 400 miles (650 kilometers) southeast of Cape Canaveral near the Bahamas.
The on-target landing completed the 10th flight of the booster used on Tuesday night’s mission. The booster — tail number B1060 — debuted on June 30, 2020, with the launch of a U.S. military GPS navigation satellite.
Liftoff of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket with 49 Starlink internet satellites, lighting up the night sky over Florida’s Space Coast. https://t.co/lRbPiUzMJS pic.twitter.com/NGuDsNgnBB
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) January 19, 2022
The booster has sent 487 satellites toward space on its 10 missions, and the successful landing Tuesday night give the rocket a chance for an 11th flight once the drone ship returns to Port Canaveral. SpaceX has now flown four of its reusable boosters at least 10 times, with one rocket already logging 11 missions.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage delivered its 49 Starlink satellites payloads into orbit nearly nine minutes after liftoff Tuesday night.
The rocket passed out of range of SpaceX’s ground stations before releasing the satellites, so ground teams were unable to confirm the deployment event until the Falcon 9 flew around the world and back over a tracking site in Alaska around 10:30 p.m. EST (0330 GMT).
Telemetry relayed through the Kodiak Island site indicated the 49 Starlink satellites had separated into orbit close to the intended altitude and inclination. The target orbit ranged in altitude between 130 miles and 210 miles (210 by 339 kilometers), with an inclination of 53.2 degrees to the equator.
An infrared tracking camera showed spectacular views of main engine cutoff, stage separation, and second stage ignition two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Watch live: https://t.co/lRbPiUzMJS pic.twitter.com/hdnZmKbbxO
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) January 19, 2022
The confirmation of satellite separation wrapped up the third Falcon 9 launch of the year, following missions Jan. 6 and Jan. 13 from Florida’s Space Coast with an earlier batch of Starlink satellite and the Transporter 3 small satellite rideshare flight.
Tuesday night’s mission, officially named Starlink 4-6, clears the way for two more SpaceX launches from Florida on Jan. 27 and Jan. 29, carrying an Italian radar remote sensing satellite and another group of Starlink spacecraft, respectively.
SpaceX has a long-term plan to launch as many as 42,000 Starlink satellites, according to a company filing with the International Telecommunication Union. The company’s initial focus is on deploying thousands of satellites into five orbital “shells.”
The 53.2-degree inclination shell, the target for Tuesday night’s launch, is one of the five orbital shells at different inclination angles that SpaceX plans to fill with around 4,400 satellites to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband connectivity around the world. The first shell, at 53.0 degrees, was filled with its full complement of satellites last May.
To space and back for a 10th time!
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster stage — numbered 1060 in the reusable rocket fleet — has completed its 10th mission after landing on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean near the Bahamas.https://t.co/lRbPiUzMJS pic.twitter.com/Y0cOY5BybY
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) January 19, 2022
As of earlier the month, SpaceX said the Starlink network is now live in 25 countries and regions, serving more than 145,000 users worldwide. SpaceX builds its Starlink satellites on an assembly line in Redmond, Washington, and the company is developing and iterating its own user terminals.
SpaceX hopes to use revenue from the Starlink business unit to help fund the company’s ambitions to complete development of the heavy-lift Starship rocket, a massive fully reusable launcher designed to eventually replace the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.
The 49 Starlink satellites launched Tuesday night — each about a quarter-ton in mass — will unfurl solar panels and use ion thrusters to climb to an operational altitude of 335 miles (540 kilometers).
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.
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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