Category Archives: Science

Science

Rocket Lab catches falling booster with helicopter before dropping it

Leave a comment

Axiom Space Executive Chairman Kam Ghaffarian discusses the company’s goals in space innovation as it is expected to have its first private mission to the International Space Station.

Rocket Lab caught the falling booster of its Electron rocket on Monday with a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter before dropping it in the Pacific Ocean.

After capturing the rocket stage, the helicopter crew was forced to let it go for safety reasons. 

It was later collected by a waiting boat. 

SPACEX’S STARLINK LANDS INFLIGHT WI-FI PARTNERSHIP WITH HAWAIIAN AIRLINES

The California-based aerospace company launched the Electron rocket in the late morning from New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula, sending 34 satellites into orbit before the main booster section began falling back to Earth.

Its descent was slowed to about 10 meters per second by a parachute.

The helicopter then used a long line and a hook to grab the booster’s parachute lines at around 6,500 feet.

In this image made from video supplied by Rocket Lab, a helicopter hovers above as it attempts to capture Electron’s first stage in mid-air by helicopter above New Zealand, Tuesday, May 3, 2022. (Rocket Lab via AP / AP Newsroom)

However, the load on the helicopter was greater than in tests and simulations. 

The event – named “There And Back Again,” a reference to J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic fantasy novel “The Hobbit” – was streamed live.

Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder, heralded the mission as a success. 

GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE

Ticker Security Last Change Change %
RKLB ROCKET LAB USA 7.09 -0.37 -4.96%

“Incredible catch by the recovery team, can’t begin to explain how hard that catch was and that the pilots got it,” he tweeted. “They did release it after hook up as they were not happy with the way it was flying, but no big deal, the rocket splashed down safely and the ship is loading it now.”

Beck noted that almost everything went according to plan and that the unexpected load issue was a “nothing in the scheme of things.”

In this image supplied by Rocket Lab, the Electron rocket blasts off for it’s “There and Back Again” mission from their launch pad on the Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand, Tuesday, May 3, 2022.  (Rocket Lab via AP / AP Newsroom)

“They got a great catch. They just didn’t like the way the load was feeling,” he said in a conference call after the launch.

Beck added that further analysis should reveal the reasons for the discrepancy in the load characteristics. 

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON FOX BUSINESS

The chief executive is pushing to make its Electron rockets reusable, in order to reduce costs and increase the number of launches Rocket Lab makes. 

Beck said he still hoped the company could salvage some or all of the spent rocket booster.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.



Read original article here

Science

Hear the Eerie Sounds of a Black Hole Echo – Search Reveals 8 New Sources of Black Hole Echoes

Leave a comment

In this illustration, a black hole pulls material off a neighboring star and into an accretion disk. Credit: Aurore Simonnet and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

New findings will help scientists trace a

Now

This final flash may be a sign that a black hole’s corona, the region of high-energy

In a similar fashion, the MIT team is looking to map the immediate vicinity of a black hole using X-ray echoes. The echoes represent time delays between two types of X-ray light: light emitted directly from the corona, and light from the corona that bounces off the accretion disk of inspiraling gas and dust.

The time when a telescope receives light from the corona, compared to when it receives the X-ray echoes, gives an estimate of the distance between the corona and the accretion disk. Watching how these time delays change can reveal how a black hole’s corona and disk evolve as the black hole consumes stellar material.

Echo evolution

In their new study, the team developed a search algorithm to comb through data taken by

As a side project, Kara is working with MIT education and music scholars, Kyle Keane and Ian Condry, to convert the emission from a typical X-ray echo into audible sound waves. Take a listen to the sound of a black hole echo here:


Credit: Sound computed by Kyle Keane and Erin Kara, MIT. Animation computed by Michal Dovciak, ASU CAS.

The researchers then ran the algorithm on the 10 black hole binaries and divided the data into groups with similar “spectral timing features,” that is, similar delays between high-energy X-rays and reprocessed echoes. This helped to quickly track the change in X-ray echoes at every stage during a black hole’s outburst.

The team identified a common evolution across all systems. In the initial “hard” state, in which a corona and jet of high-energy particles dominates the black hole’s energy, they detected time lags that were short and fast, on the order of milliseconds. This hard state lasts for several weeks. Then, a transition occurs over several days, in which the corona and jet sputter and die out, and a soft state takes over, dominated by lower-energy X-rays from the black hole’s accretion disk.

During this hard-to-soft transition state, the team discovered that time lags grew momentarily longer in all 10 systems, implying the distance between the corona and disk also grew larger. One explanation is that the corona may briefly expand outward and upward, in a last high-energy burst before the black hole finishes the bulk of its stellar meal and goes quiet.

“We’re at the beginnings of being able to use these light echoes to reconstruct the environments closest to the black hole,” Kara says. “Now we’ve shown these echoes are commonly observed, and we’re able to probe connections between a black hole’s disk, jet, and corona in a new way.”

Reference: “The NICER “Reverberation Machine”: A Systematic Study of Time Lags in Black Hole X-Ray Binaries” by Jingyi Wang, Erin Kara, Matteo Lucchini, Adam Ingram, Michiel van der Klis, Guglielmo Mastroserio, Javier A. García, Thomas Dauser, Riley Connors, Andrew C. Fabian, James F. Steiner, Ron A. Remillard, Edward M. Cackett, Phil Uttley and Diego Altamirano, 2 May 2022, The Astrophysical Journal.
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac6262

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.



Read original article here

Science

Eta Aquariids meteor shower: When to watch

Leave a comment

Predictions of the peak vary, however, and the shower still should be visible in the hours before dawn on May 4, 5 and 6, 2022, according to EarthSky.
The Eta Aquariids, named after the Aquarius constellation, derive from the debris of Halley’s Comet, the well-known comet that is visible from earth every 76 years, according to NASA. The last time the comet was spotted in our sky was in 1986, and it won’t appear again until 2061.
While the Eta Aquariids are visible from both the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere, they are best viewed in the Southern Hemisphere where the meteors will rise the highest in the night sky, according to NASA.
In the northern hemisphere, the meteors will appear lower in the sky as “earthgrazers,” meaning they will skim the Earth’s horizon, according to NASA.
The Eta Aquariids are known for how fast they travel, which can reach a rate of 148,000 miles per hour, according to NASA. The meteors will produce glowing “trains” that remain in the sky for several seconds after the meteor has streaked through the sky.

The shower will remain active until May 27.

More meteor showers to see

The Delta Aquariids are best seen from the southern tropics and will peak between July 28 and 29, when the moon is 74% full.

Interestingly, another meteor shower peaks on the same night — the Alpha Capricornids. Although this is a much weaker shower, it has been known to produce some bright fireballs during its peak. It will be visible for everyone, regardless of which side of the equator they are on.

The Perseid meteor shower, the most popular of the year, will peak between August 11 and 12 in the Northern Hemisphere, when the moon is only 13% full.

Here is the meteor shower schedule for the rest of the year, according to EarthSky’s meteor shower outlook.
  • October 8: Draconids
  • October 21: Orionids
  • November 4 to 5: South Taurids
  • November 11 to 12: North Taurids
  • November 17: Leonids
  • December 13 to 14: Geminids
  • December 22: Ursids

Full moons in 2021

There are eight full moons still to come in 2022, with two of them qualifying as supermoons.

Definitions of a supermoon can vary, but the term generally denotes a full moon that is brighter and closer to Earth than normal and thus appears larger in the night sky.

Some astronomers say that the phenomenon occurs when the moon is within 90% of perigee — which is its closest approach to Earth in orbit. By that definition, the full moon for June as well as the one in July will be considered supermoon events.

Here is a list of the remaining moons this year, according to the Farmers’ Almanac:
  • September 10: Harvest moon

Solar and lunar eclipses

A partial solar eclipse on October 25 will be visible to those in Greenland, Iceland, Europe, northeastern Africa, the Middle East, western Asia, India and western China. The first was on April 30.

Partial solar eclipses occur when the moon passes in front of the sun but only blocks some of its light. Be sure to wear proper eclipse glasses to safely view solar eclipses, as the sun’s light can be damaging to the eye.

There will also be two total lunar eclipses in 2022.

A total lunar eclipse will be visible to those in Europe, Africa, South America and North America (except for those in northwestern regions) between 9:31 p.m. ET on May 15 and 2:52 a.m. ET on May 16.

Another total lunar eclipse will also be on display for those in Asia, Australia, the Pacific, South America and North America on November 8 between 3:01 a.m. ET and 8:58 a.m. ET — but the moon will be setting for those in eastern regions of North America.

A lunar eclipse can occur only during a full moon when the sun, Earth and moon align, and the moon passes into Earth’s shadow. Earth casts two shadows on the moon during the eclipse. The penumbra is the partial outer shadow, and the umbra is the full, dark shadow.

When the full moon moves into Earth’s shadow, it darkens, but it won’t disappear. Sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere lights the moon in a dramatic fashion, turning it red — which is why this event is often referred to as a “blood moon.”

Depending on the weather conditions in your area, the moon may appear rusty, brick-colored or blood red.

This color variability happens because blue light undergoes stronger atmospheric scattering, so red light will be the most dominant color highlighted as sunlight passes through our atmosphere and casts it onto the moon.

Read original article here

Science

Rocket Lab captures booster in mid-air with a helicopter for the first time

Leave a comment

Rocket Lab has taken a huge step towards making its Electron orbital launch vehicle a reusable rocket. The company has successfully captured Electron’s first stage mid-air with a helicopter for the first time upon its return to Earth after deploying 34 satellites to orbit. To ensure that the first stage will survive its re-entry into the atmosphere, Rocket Lab re-oriented it into the ideal angle that would give it the best chances to withstand tremendous heat and pressure. A drogue parachute then deployed to increase drag before the main parachute opened up in the final part of its descent.

The company sent a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter to rendezvous with the returning stage at 6,500 feet in the air, using a hook on a cable to capture the booster’s parachute line. While the catch was a success, Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said on Twitter that the pilots weren’t happy with the way the booster was hanging below the helicopter and opted to drop it into the ocean. It was eventually retrieved and loaded onto a vessel for transport back to Rocket Lab’s HQ for re-flight assessment. 

Rocket Lab says the test gave its helicopter pilot “different load characteristics than previously experienced in testing” and will provide important information for future helicopter captures. The goal is to be able to grab the booster mid-air and bring it straight back to land instead of having to drop it into the sea, since salt water could damage the booster. If the company successfully proves that it can reuse its boosters similar to what SpaceX can do, it can ramp up launch frequency and reduce mission costs for small satellites.

Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said:

“Bringing a rocket back from space and catching it with a helicopter is something of a supersonic ballet. A tremendous number of factors have to align and many systems have to work together flawlessly, so I am incredibly proud of the stellar efforts of our Recovery Team and all of our engineers who made this mission and our first catch a success. From here we’ll assess the stage and determine what changes we might want to make to the system and procedures for the next helicopter catch and eventual re-flight.”

The company has another launch scheduled for May, but it’s unclear if it will attempt another helicopter recovery.

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.



Read original article here

Science

Stanford’s Futuristic Gravity Telescope Could Image Exoplanets – 1,000x More Powerful Than Current Technology

Leave a comment

A futuristic technique conceptualized by Stanford University scientists could empower astronomical imaging far more advanced than what is presently possible. Credit: Alexander Madurowicz

A futuristic “gravity telescope” technique conceptualized by Stanford astrophysicists could enable astronomical imaging significantly more advanced than any present today.

In the time since the first

To sidestep the physical constraints of telescopes, Stanford University astrophysicists have been developing a new conceptual imaging technique that would be 1,000 times more precise than the strongest imaging technology currently in use. By taking advantage of gravity’s warping effect on space-time, called gravitational lensing, scientists could potentially manipulate this phenomenon to create imaging far more advanced than any currently available.

In a paper published today (May 2, 2022) in The Astrophysical Journal, the researchers describe a way to manipulate solar gravitational lensing to view planets outside our solar system. By positioning a telescope, the sun, and exoplanet in a line with the sun in the middle, scientists could use the gravitational field of the sun to magnify light from the exoplanet as it passes by. As opposed to a magnifying glass which has a curved surface that bends light, a gravitational lens has a curved space-time that enables imaging far away objects.

An example of a reconstruction of Earth, using the ring of light around the Sun, projected by the solar gravitational lens. The algorithm that enables this reconstruction can be applied to exoplanets for superior imaging. Credit: Alexander Madurowicz

“We want to take pictures of planets that are orbiting other stars that are as good as the pictures we can make of planets in our own solar system,” said Bruce Macintosh, a physics professor at in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford and deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC). “With this technology, we hope to take a picture of a planet 100 light-years away that has the same impact as Apollo 8’s picture of Earth.”

The catch, at present, is that their proposed technique would require more advanced space travel than is currently available. Still, the promise of this concept and what it could reveal about other planets, makes it worth continued consideration and development, said the researchers.

The perks of light bending

Gravitational lensing wasn’t experimentally observed until 1919 during a solar eclipse. With the moon obstructing the light from the sun, scientists were able to see stars near the sun offset from their known positions. This was unequivocal proof that gravity could bend light and the first observational evidence that Einstein’s theory of relativity was correct. Later, in 1979, Von Eshleman, a Stanford professor, published a detailed account of how astronomers and spacecraft could exploit the solar gravitational lens. (Meanwhile, astronomers including many at Stanford’s KIPAC now routinely use the powerful gravity of the most massive galaxies to study the early evolution of the universe.)

But it wasn’t until 2020 that the imaging technique was explored in detail in order to observe planets. Slava Turyshev of California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory described a technique where a space-based telescope could use rockets to scan around the rays of light from a planet to reconstruct a clear picture, but the technique would require a lot of fuel and time.

Video depicting how this conceptual exoplanet imaging technique compares to an existing imaging idea. Credit: Alexander Madurowicz

Building on Turyshev’s work, Alexander Madurowicz, a PhD student at KIPAC, invented a new method that can reconstruct a planet’s surface from a single image taken looking directly at the sun. By capturing the ring of light around the sun formed by the exoplanet, the algorithm Madurowicz designed can undistort the light from the ring by reversing the bending from the gravitational lens, which turns the ring back into a round planet.

Madurowicz demonstrated his work by using images of the rotating Earth taken by the satellite DSCOVR that sits between Earth and the sun. Then, he used a computer model to see what Earth would look like peering through the warping effects of the sun’s gravity. By applying his algorithm to the observations, Madurowicz was able to recover the images of Earth and prove that his calculations were correct.

In order to capture an exoplanet image through the solar gravitational lens, a telescope would have to be placed at least 14 times farther away from the sun than

“By unbending the light bent by the sun, an image can be created far beyond that of an ordinary telescope,” Madurowicz said. “So, the scientific potential is an untapped mystery because it’s opening this new observing capability that doesn’t yet exist.”

Sights set beyond the solar system

Currently, to image an exoplanet at the resolution the scientists describe, we would need a telescope 20 times wider than the Earth. By using the sun’s gravity like a telescope, scientists can exploit this as a massive natural lens. A Hubble-sized telescope in combination with the solar gravitational lens would be sufficient to image exoplanets with enough power to capture fine details on the surface.

“The solar gravitational lens opens up an entirely new window for observation,” said Madurowicz. “This will allow investigation of the detailed dynamics of the planet atmospheres, as well as the distributions of clouds and surface features, which we have no way to investigate now.”

Madurowicz and Macintosh both say that it will be a minimum of 50 years before this technology could be deployed, likely longer. In order for this to be adopted, we will need faster spacecraft because, with current technology, it could take 100 years to travel to the lens. Using solar sails or the sun as a gravitational slingshot, the time could be as short as 20 or 40 years. Despite the timeline’s uncertainty, the possibility to see whether some exoplanets have continents or oceans, Macintosh said, drives them. The presence of either is a strong indicator that there may be life on a distant planet.

“This is one of the last steps in discovering whether there’s life on other planets,” Macintosh said. “By taking a picture of another planet, you could look at it and possibly see green swatches that are forests and blue blotches that are oceans – with that, it would be hard to argue that it doesn’t have life.”

Reference: “Integral Field Spectroscopy with the Solar Gravitational Lens” by Alexander Madurowicz and Bruce Macintosh, 2 May 2022, The Astrophysical Journal.
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac5e9d

Macintosh is also a member of Stanford Bio-X. The research was sponsored by the



Read original article here

Science

The Universe Could Start Shrinking ‘Remarkably’ Soon, Scientists Say

Leave a comment

After nearly 13.8 billion years of nonstop expansion, the Universe could soon grind to a standstill, then slowly start to contract, new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests.

 

In the new paper, three scientists attempt to model the nature of dark energy – a mysterious force that seems to be causing the Universe to expand ever faster – based on past observations of cosmic expansion.

In the team’s model, dark energy is not a constant force of nature, but an entity called quintessence, which can decay over time.

The researchers found that, even though the expansion of the Universe has been accelerating for billions of years, the repellent force of dark energy may be weakening.

According to their model, the acceleration of the Universe could rapidly end within the next 65 million years – then, within 100 million years, the Universe could stop expanding altogether, and instead it could enter an era of slow contraction that ends billions of years from now with the death – or perhaps the rebirth – of time and space.

And this could all happen “remarkably” quickly, said study co-author Paul Steinhardt, Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University in New Jersey.

“Going back in time 65 million years, that’s when the Chicxulub asteroid hit the Earth and eliminated the dinosaurs,” Steinhardt told Live Science. “On a cosmic scale, 65 million years is remarkably short.”

 

Nothing about this theory is controversial or implausible, Gary Hinshaw, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the study, told Live Science.

However, because the model hinges on past observations of expansion alone – and because the present nature of dark energy in the Universe is such a mystery – the predictions in this paper are currently impossible to test. For now, they can only remain theories.

Energy of the void

Since the 1990s, scientists have understood that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up; the space between galaxies is widening faster now than it was billions of years ago.

Scientists named the mysterious source of this acceleration dark energy – an invisible entity that seems to work contrary to gravity, pushing the Universe’s most massive objects farther apart rather than drawing them together.

Though dark energy makes up approximately 70 percent of the total mass-energy of the Universe, its properties remain a total mystery.

A popular theory, introduced by Albert Einstein, is that dark energy is a cosmological constant  – an unchanging form of energy that’s woven into the fabric of space-time. If that’s the case, and the force exerted by dark energy can never change, then the Universe should continue expanding (and accelerating) forever.

 

However, a competing theory suggests that dark energy doesn’t need to be constant in order to fit with observations of past cosmic expansion.

Rather, dark energy may be something called quintessence – a dynamic field that changes over time. (Steinhardt was one of three scientists who introduced the idea in a 1998 paper in the journal Physical Review Letters.)

Unlike the cosmological constant, quintessence can be either repulsive or attractive, depending on the ratio of its kinetic and potential energy at a given time. Over the last 14 billions years, quintessence was repulsive. 

For most of that period, though, it contributed insignificantly compared to radiation and matter to the expansion of the Universe. That changed about five billion years ago, when quintessence became the dominant component and its gravitational repulsion effect caused the expansion of the universe to speed up.

“The question we’re raising in this paper is, ‘Does this acceleration have to last forever?'” Steinhardt said. “And if not, what are the alternatives, and how soon could things change?”

The death of dark energy

In their study, Steinhardt and his colleagues, Anna Ijjas of New York University and Cosmin Andrei of Princeton, predicted how the properties of quintessence could change over the next several billion years.

 

To do this, the team created a physical model of quintessence, showing its repellent and attractive power over time, to fit with past observations of the Universe’s expansion. Once the team’s model could reliably reproduce the Universe’s expansion history, they extended their predictions into the future.

“To their surprise, dark energy in their model can decay with time,” Hinshaw said. “Its strength can weaken. And if it does so in a certain way, then eventually the antigravitational property of dark energy goes away and it transitions back into something that’s more like ordinary matter.”

According to the team’s model, the repellent force of dark energy could be in the midst of a rapid decline that potentially began billions of years ago.

In this scenario, the accelerated expansion of the Universe is already slowing down today. Soon, perhaps within about 65 million years, that acceleration could stop altogether – then, within as few as 100 million years from now, dark energy could become attractive, causing the entire universe to start contracting.

In other words, after nearly 14 billion years of growth, space could start to shrink.

“This would be a very special kind of contraction that we call slow contraction,” Steinhardt said. “Instead of expanding, space contracts very, very slowly.”

Initially, the contraction of the Universe would be so slow that any hypothetical humans still alive on Earth wouldn’t even notice a change, Steinhardt said. According to the team’s model, it would take a few billion years of slow contraction for the Universe to reach about half the size it is today.

The end of the Universe?

From there, one of two things could happen, Steinhardt said. Either the Universe contracts until it collapses in on itself in a big “crunch”, ending space-time as we know it – or, the Universe contracts just enough to return to a state similar to its original conditions, and another Big Bang  – or a big “bounce” – occurs, creating a new Universe from the ashes of the old one.

In that second scenario (which Steinhardt and another colleague described in a 2019 paper in the journal Physics Letters B), the Universe follows a cyclical pattern of expansion and contraction, crunches and bounces, that constantly collapse and remake it.

If that’s true, then our current Universe may not be the first or only Universe, but just the latest in an infinite series of Universes that have expanded and contracted before ours, Steinhardt said. And it all hinges on the changeable nature of dark energy.

How plausible is all this? Hinshaw said the new paper’s interpretation of quintessence is a “perfectly reasonable supposition for what the dark energy is”.

Because all of our observations of cosmic expansion come from objects that are millions to billions of light-years away from Earth, current data can only inform scientists about the Universe’s past, not its present or future, he added.

So, the Universe could very well be barreling toward a crunch, and we’d have no way of knowing until long after the contraction phase began.

“I think it really just boils down to how compelling do you find this theory to be and, more importantly, how testable do you find it to be?” Hinshaw added.

Unfortunately, there is no good way to test whether quintessence is real, or whether cosmic expansion has started to slow, Steinhardt admitted. For now, it’s just a matter of fitting the theory with past observations – and the authors do that capably in their new paper.

Whether a future of endless growth or rapid decay awaits our Universe, only time will tell.

This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.

 

Read original article here

Science

Rocket Lab catches, then drops booster in helicopter capture attempt

Leave a comment

This mission, labeled “There and Back Again,” took off at 6:50 pm ET.

Company communications advisor, Murielle Baker, after initially declaring success, came onto the companies webcast to acknowledge the pilot of the helicopter dropped the rocket “at his discretion” after experiencing a “different load characteristic” than he had during test runs of the catch.

“We witnessed a spectacular catch,” she said.

The webcast showed the helicopter snag the rocket’s parachute about 15 minutes after launch, and a cheer arose from mission control, but moments later a disappointed sigh could be heard and the feed cut out.

“They did release it after hook up as they were not happy with the way it was flying,” Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, added on Twitter.

“It demands extreme precision. Several critical milestones need to align perfectly to ensure a successful capture,” Baker had said earlier in the webcast.

The Electron rocket, Rocket Lab’s small rocket which had launched nearly two dozen successful missions prior to Monday’s launch, did successfully complete its primary objective: It deployed 34 satellite payloads for a number of commercial operators, bringing the total number of Electron-launched satellites in space to 146.

After separating from the first-stage booster, the Electron’s second-stage continued to orbit to fulfill the satellite deployment while the booster fell back to Earth at nearly 5,150 miles per hour. Once near enough to the Earth’s surface, the booster deployed parachutes to slow its descent. A helicopter waited to snag the booster’s parachute with a hook.

Catching the rocket booster mid-air is a big part of Rocket Lab’s eventual goal of reusable rockets.

Other companies have used reusable rockets as a way to make the space business more cost effective. In 2015, Blue Origin was the first company to land a reusable rocket on a landing pad. The company said that the future of space tourism and people living on other planets would depend on reusable transport after sending founder Jeff Bezos to space. Elon Musk’s SpaceX uses reusable boosters in its Falcon 9 rockets.
Rocket Lab, however, says it has other reasons for focusing on reusability than just profit. “Our biggest problem is building rockets fast enough to support all our customers,” Beck told CNN Business in 2019. Rocket Lab wants to launch satellite payloads more frequently — 50 times or more a year. That kind of volume requires rocket reuse.

NASA has retrieved spent rocket boosters from the Atlantic Ocean after a Space Shuttle launch. Rocket Lab plans to pursue the helicopter technique to recover its boosters. The company has said Electron is not large enough to carry the fuel supply needed for an upright landing, and a saltwater ocean landing can cause corrosion and physical damage.

A customized Sikorsky S-92 helicopter, a large twin-engine chopper usually used for search and rescue missions and offshore oil and gas transportation, was used in Monday’s grab. After the successful capture of the booster, the company planned to fly the machinery to an at-sea recovery vessel before moving to the company’s production complex for assessment. But, ultimately it was jettisoned into the ocean and recovered form there. Ocean landings aren’t optimal — the sea water can cause corrosion, which is why Rocket Lab hopes to snag the booster before it meets the water.

The launch was postponed several times due to weather conditions. “For our first mid-air helicopter capture, we want ideal weather conditions so we can focus on the catch,” Rocket Lab tweeted on Monday. “Just like our weather tolerances for launch have increased over time, so will our tolerance for weather in the recovery zone. For this first one though, we want to eliminate weather as a consideration so we can focus solely on the catch and supporting operations.”
The California-based company also released a video showing a successful practice run in the days leading up to launch, with a helicopter capturing a dummy booster as it fell to the ground.

Rocket Lab has previously fished boosters from the ocean in three of Electron’s 25 earlier missions. This was the first attempt at a mid-air catch.

This isn’t the first time humans have attempted to catch an object falling from space with aircraft. During the 1960s, the United States would use planes equipped with long hooks to grab film canisters containing film from spy satellites out of the sky. The Cold War-era technique was similar to the one attempted by Rocket Lab: the film canister fell to Earth from outer space and used parachutes to slow its descent so that planes could nab the intel. NASA also attempted in 2004 a mid-air grab of a capsule carrying samples of particles that had streamed off the sun, but the helicopter recovery attempt failed when the capsule’s parachutes failed to release, causing it to crash into the Utah desert.

Since its start in 2006, Rocket Lab has deployed satellites to orbit for customers including NASA, the US Space Force, the National Reconnaissance Office and Canon.



Read original article here

Science

How to Watch the Rocket Lab Launch Today

Leave a comment

Catch a falling rocket and bring it back to shore …

On Tuesday (Monday evening in New York), Rocket Lab, a small company with a small rocket, pulled off an impressive feat during its latest launch from the east coast of New Zealand.

After sending a payload of 34 small satellites to orbit, the company used a helicopter to catch the 39-foot-long used-up booster stage of the rocket before it splashed into the Pacific Ocean.

If the booster is in good shape, Rocket Lab may refurbish the vehicle, and then use it for another orbital mission, an achievement so far pulled off by only one company, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

A video stream from the helicopter showed a long cable dangling from the aircraft with cloudy skies below. Then the booster came into view dangling under the parachute.

“There we go, we’ve got our first glimpse of it,” said Murielle Baker, the commentator during the Rocket Lab broadcast. The grappling hook at the end of the helicopter’s cable snagged the parachute line before the captured booster swung and exited the camera view.

Cheers from Rocket Lab’s mission control confirmed success.

Rocket Lab gives most of its missions whimsical names. This one was called “There and Back Again,” a nod to the recovery of the booster as well as the subtitle of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” novel. The trilogy of Hobbit movies by director Peter Jackson was shot in New Zealand.

Rocket Lab’s booster catch is the latest advance in an industry where rockets used to be expensive single-use throwaways. Reusing all or part of one helps lower the cost of delivering payloads to space and could speed the pace of launching by reducing the number of rockets that need to be manufactured.

“Eighty percent of the cost of the whole rocket is in that first stage, both in terms of materials and labor,” Peter Beck, the chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in an interview on Friday.

SpaceX pioneered a new age in reusable rockets and now regularly lands the first stages of its Falcon 9 rockets and flies them over and over. The second stages of the Falcon 9 (as well as Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket) are still discarded, typically burning up while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. SpaceX is designing its next-generation super rocket, Starship, to be entirely reusable. Competitors like Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, and companies in China, are similarly developing rockets that would be at least partially reusable.

NASA’s space shuttles were also partially reusable, but required extensive and expensive work after each flight, and they never lived up to their promise of airliner-like operations.

For the Falcon 9, the booster fires several times after it separates from the second stages, slowing it en route to a setting down softly on either a floating platform in the ocean or a site on land. The Electron is a much smaller rocket, which makes reuse more challenging.

“You have to spend every bit of your propellant just to get missions up,” Mr. Beck said. That ruled out the possibility of propulsive landings like the Falcon 9 boosters.

Instead, Rocket Lab engineers figured out a more fuel-efficient approach, adding a system of thrusters that expels cold gas to orient the booster as it falls, and thermal protection to shield it from temperatures exceeding 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The booster separated from the second stage at an altitude of about 50 miles, and during the descent, it accelerated to 5,200 miles per hour.

“If we came in flat, for example, on the side, the rocket would just burn up,” Mr. Beck said. “So we have to orientate and control that first stage to have the heat shield and engines down during the entire flight profile.”

The friction of the atmosphere acted as a brake. Around 7 minutes, 40 seconds after liftoff, the speed of the booster’s fall slowed to under twice the speed of sound. At that point, a small parachute called the drogue deployed, adding additional drag. A larger main parachute further slowed the booster to a more leisurely rate.

Rocket Lab had demonstrated on three earlier launches that Electron boosters can survive re-entry. But on those missions, the boosters splashed in the ocean and were then pulled out for examination.

This time, a Sikorsky S-92 helicopter hovering in the area met the booster midair, dragging a cable with a grappling hook across the line between the drogue and main parachutes.

With almost all of its propellant expended, the booster was much lighter than at launch. But it was still a weighty piece of metal — a cylinder four feet in diameter and about as tall as a four-story building and weighing nearly 2,200 pounds or a metric ton. After catching the booster, the helicopter began carrying it back to land.

Mr. Beck said eventually Rocket Lab would like to catch boosters for about half of its missions. The added weight of the thrusters, parachutes and thermal protection reduces the payload of 550 pounds by 10 to 15 percent.

Later this month, Rocket Lab could launch CAPSTONE, a NASA-financed but privately operated mission, that will study a highly elliptical path around the moon to be used by a future American lunar space station. Before the end of this year, Rocket Lab hopes to start using a second launch site on Wallops Island in Virginia.

Read original article here

Science

Fuzzy ‘halo’ envelops Venus as it cozies up to Jupiter in photo of planetary conjunction

Leave a comment

An astrophotographer captured a beautiful picture of two planets aligned in the sky above Rome — and a little rain didn’t stop him.

Gianluca Masi spotted Venus and Jupiter hiding behind a thin cloud shortly after scuttling a planned livestream of the conjunction Sunday (May 1) on his astronomy broadcast service, the Virtual Telescope Project.

“Luckily, I had my imaging gear ready to go on a sturdy tripod, when suddenly I could spot the bright planetary couple through a less dense layer of clouds,” Masi told Live Science, adding he could even see three of Jupiter’s moons — Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

But a rainy bonus came as he looked at the planets. “I noticed a colorful corona around Venus. That was due to diffraction of its light by individual small water droplets. So that thin cloud was precious,” he said.

Venus (lower left) and Jupiter during a close conjunction over Rome on May 1, 2022. (Image credit: Gianluca Masi)

Masi estimated the two planets were roughly 21 arcminutes apart at the time of the shot, as close together as two-thirds of the angular size of the moon. “I used a Canon 5D mark IV body + EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM, working at 200mm-f/2.8. I worked at 400 ISO and the exposure time was 0.8 seconds,” he said.

Masi was working from home at the time, in a chimney-dotted view from his balcony on the west side of Rome. He plans to go to a “scenic location” in June, however, when five planets at once will be visible in the sky, to capture the event on a livestream. (That’s of course assuming the weather improves.)

“I love these natural events; they always amaze us,” Masi said. “I’m always amazed to see how many people from all around the planet love these kind of views. I always invite them to go out and see these kind of things personally, but I know that for many people my live feeds are the only opportunity to see those cosmic shows.”

Masi added his mission is to share the beauty of the sky with those living on the same planet as he. “This is the basic idea of the Virtual Telescope Project.”

If you’re looking for a telescope or binoculars to spot views like this one, check out our guide for the best binoculars deals and the best telescope deals available now. Our best cameras for astrophotography and best lenses for astrophotography can also help you pick the best imaging gear.

Editor’s Note: If you snap an amazing photo and would like to share it with Live Science readers, send your photo(s), comments, and your name and location to community@livescience.com.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. 

Read original article here

Science

Listen to the X-ray echoes of a black hole as it devours a companion star

Leave a comment

The sound of a binary black hole’s echoes, courtesy of MIT’s Erin Kara and Kyle Keane. Animation computed by Michal Dovciak.

Black holes feeding on companion stars can go through cycles where they emit high-energy outbursts. MIT astronomers are using X-ray echoes from those cycles to map out the environment around these exotic objects, similar to how bats map out their environment via echolocation. The astronomers hope to use this new data to learn more about the evolution of these kinds of black hole systems, and by extension, the formation of galaxies, according to a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.

“The role of black holes in galaxy evolution is an outstanding question in modern astrophysics,” said co-author Erin Kara of MIT. “These black hole binaries appear to be ‘mini’ supermassive black holes, and so by understanding the outbursts in these small, nearby systems, we can understand how similar outbursts in supermassive black holes affect the galaxies in which they reside.”

As we’ve reported previously, it’s a popular misconception that black holes behave like cosmic vacuum cleaners, ravenously sucking up any matter in their surroundings. In reality, only stuff that passes beyond the event horizon—including light—is swallowed up and can’t escape, although black holes are also messy eaters. That means that part of an object’s matter is ejected in a powerful jet.

If that object is a star—such as the companion star of a black hole binary system—the process of being shredded (or “spaghettified”) by the powerful gravitational forces of a black hole occurs outside the event horizon, and part of the star’s original mass is ejected violently outward. This process can form a rotating ring of matter (aka an accretion disk) around the black hole that emits powerful X-rays, visible light, and sometimes radio waves. Those jets are one way astronomers can indirectly infer the presence of a black hole.

The MIT team was particularly interested in systems where the companion star is about one solar mass and exhibits cyclical outbursts in the form of X-ray flashes. Per the authors, most scientists think that a hot plasma located close to the black hole, called the X-ray corona, plays a role in these cycles, but questions remain about how the X-ray corona is formed in the first place, as well as how it evolves throughout an outburst.

Enlarge / Illustration of a black hole pulling material off a neighboring star and into an accretion disk.

Aurore Simonnet/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The emitted X-rays can sometimes reflect off the accretion disk, creating ‘echoes’ of the initial emission. And detecting those echoes offers an excellent opportunity for tracing how the black hole evolves as it feeds. Specifically, it’s possible to estimate the time lag between when a telescope detects light from the corona and when it picks up the X-ray echoes and monitor how that lag shifts as the system works through an outburst cycle.

Astronomers had previously detected X-ray echoes (or reverberations) from two binary systems in the Milky Way galaxy. To hunt for more, the MIT team developed an automated search tool dubbed the “Reverberation Machine” and used it to analyze data collected by NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) on board the ISS.  The Reverberation Machine identified 26 candidate black hole binary systems, and of those, 10 (including the previously detected systems) were emitting detectable X-ray echoes.

All of the eight new black hole binary systems emitting echoes ranged from five to 15 solar masses, and all the companion stars were about the size of our Sun. “As far as we can tell, the fact that we only see detections in about half of the black holes is due to their higher quality of data, not because they are particularly unique,” Kara told Ars.

What does this new data tell astronomers about how a binary black hole evolves during an outburst? The MIT team was able to construct a reasonably universal picture. The system typically begins in a relatively quiescent state. As material falls onto the accretion disk faster, the X-ray emission also increases in luminosity, dominated by “hard” X-rays. This so-called “hard state” produces the corona and a jet of particles emitted into space at close to the speed of light. During this period, the team found that the time lags between emission and echo were short and fast, lasting mere milliseconds.

After several weeks, the outburst cycle has run its course—because the black hole has nearly finished its stellar meal—producing one last dramatic flash before it enters a “soft” lower-energy state, eventually returning to quiescence. The MIT team was intrigued to find that, during this transition, the time lags became longer for all 10 of the systems, implying an increase in the distance between the corona and the accretion disk. They suggested that this could result from the corona expanding during the final high energy burst.

“We’re at the beginnings of being able to use these light echoes to reconstruct the environments closest to the black hole,” said Kara. “Now we’ve shown these echoes are commonly observed, and we’re able to probe connections between a black hole’s disk, jet, and corona in a new way.”

Read original article here