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Scientists Want to Send a Probe to Catch Up With ‘Oumuamua by 2054
It’s the what-ifs that hurt the most.
‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object to be observed in our Solar System, might be an alien spacecraft, but it could also be a cigar-shaped rock. If only it had hung around in our neck of the galaxy long enough for us to have figured it out.
While many in the scientific community are resigned to never finding out the true answer, one team has outlined an ambitious plan to send a probe to catch up with the mysterious space object as it travels farther and farther away from Earth, a report from Forbes reveals.
Chasing the ‘extraordinary’ ‘Oumuamua
After ‘Oumuamua was discovered on October 19, 2017, by the Pan-STARRS1 Near-Earth Object survey, astronomers pointed out several anomalies that meant the object didn’t resemble other asteroids observed in our Solar System.
Shortly after ‘Oumuamua was first observed, for example, it changed speed, taking it off the initially predicted path. The strange object also left no trail of debris in its wake. An astrophysicist from Harvard, Professor Avi Loeb, and his team then famously suggested ‘Oumuamua was an interstellar alien spacecraft, or at least a piece of one.
Now, ‘Oumuamua is beyond the reach of our most powerful telescopes, but those discrepancies are just too intriguing not to follow up. That’s why a team from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (I4IS) published a new paper outlining their plans for Project Lyra, a mission that would send a solar sail probe to catch up with and analyze ‘Oumuamua before it’s lost to us forever.
“Theories to explain the nature of 1I/’Oumuamua have included a fractal dust aggregate, a hydrogen iceberg, a nitrogen iceberg, an alien solar sail, fragments of a tidally disrupted planet, and so on,” the authors of the paper wrote. “All explanations have one feature in common — they are extraordinary.”
A solar sail mission with a gravity boost from Jupiter
The new paper says a mission could launch in early 2028 and reach ‘Oumuamua, based on its speed and travel direction as it left our Solar System, between 2050-2054. For the first four years of the mission, it would orbit around the Earth twice, and Venus and Jupiter once to gain gravity assists, sending it on its way towards the mystery space object.
Solar sail technology, which was proven to work by the Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 proof-of-concept mission, would help to power the probe on its way to catching up with ‘Oumuamua. However, the mission would utilize a photon sail at least partially powered by a laser on Earth, in a similar fashion to Breakthrough Starshot’s concept for a light sail probe that could reach our nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, within two decades of launch.
Though other teams have proposed missions to ‘Oumuamua, most of these have relied on performing an Oberth maneuver around the Sun. In other words, as the probe starts falling into the Sun’s gravitational well, it will power up its thruster giving it a massive speed boost. As this would require a massive shield to protect against the Sun’s heat and radiation, the I4IS team proposed employing an Oberth maneuver around Jupiter instead. “The mission would much more resemble existing interplanetary missions,” the authors explained. However, the launch date would have to be set no earlier than February 2028, due to Jupiter’s current orbital alignment.
Since ‘Oumuamua was first observed, one other interstellar object, named C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), was discovered. Unlike ‘Oumuamua the comet was found to much more closely resemble other space rocks observed throughout history. All the more reason to chase ‘Oumuamua and discover its mysteries. That’s, of course, if it didn’t already make a beeline to its nearest spaceport.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article featured errors in the spelling of ‘Omuamua. It has since been corrected.
How to See Venus and Antares in the Night Sky This Week
You’ll find the pair in the southwest sky just after sunset. Unlike the grouping between Saturn, Jupiter, and the moon this week, Venus and Antares are going to be just about on top of each other. Venus isn’t at its brightest right now, but it’s still relatively bright. If you’re looking for a hand tracking down the planet, an app like SkyView can be helpful.
It won’t be too long after this pairing that Antares will dip below the horizon for the season, not coming back into sight for months, per EarthSky.
If you look just a little further south, you’ll also be able to see Saturn, Jupiter, and the moon, which will not be as close together as they were earlier in the week. They’re easy to see because they’re some of the brightest objects in the night sky. Jupiter is currently the brightest object in the sky other than the moon. It’s a great night to be out early peering around the night sky.
Florida photographer befriends, documents first all-civilian crew’s preparation for SpaceX launch
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – As a high schooler on the Space Coast, John Kraus thought he would try photography as a passing hobby. Now he’s tackling something new: Photographing the first all-civilian crew as they prepare to blast off in a SpaceX rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Sept. 15.
“I just randomly picked up a camera when I was 15. And I didn’t really think it’d be anything other than a fleeting interest or hobby. And it just slowly snowballed once I shot my first rocket launch into this, you know, obsessive hobby, looking weeks ahead to the next launch and planning my shots,” Kraus, now 21, said. “And I kind of blinked and now I’m doing it professionally full time.”
When Shift4Payment CEO Jared Isaacman launched the Inspiration 4 contest on Feb. 1, putting out a call for anyone in the U.S. to win a flight on the Crew Dragon along with him and 29-year-old St. Jude’s physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, interested space travelers could enter the competition by either donating to St. Jude or using Shift4Shop to share their business stories on social media.
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The completed crew includes Chris Sembroski, a graduate from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University who works in the aerospace industry in Seattle, and Dr. Sian Proctor, a science communicator, artist and geoscience professor from Phoenix who has completed four simulated space missions on Earth.
Kraus could have been on board after he raised $10,000 for St. Jude’s Children’s hospital in an attempt to score one of the two seats up for grabs but after not being selected, he got the next best thing.
“The mission’s commander, Jared Isaacman, reached out a few weeks later said, ‘Hey, I like your work, would you like to come on board as our photographer?’ and here I am now taking pictures of the astronauts as they prepare to go to space.”
To Kraus, he says he feels like he “99.9% won the competition even though I didn’t win.”
He’s now been documenting their journey training to go to space for the last seven months, which for Kraus was a whole new skill set. He normally photographs the hardware launching people not so much the astronauts on board.
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“The overwhelming majority of my work with this campaign is photographing these four people and their team members as they prepare to go to space and the final kind of bit of it is the rocket launch,” Kraus explained. “So learning to photograph people in the way that I’ve been doing has definitely been a challenge.”
Over the past few months, the crew has hiked Mount Rainer in Washington, flown fighter jets in Montana, taken multiple zero-G flights and been training at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
Photographing the crew during fighter jet training in and zero-G proved fun and challenging, said the 21-year-old.
On a parabolic flight out of Las Vegas, Kraus also experienced zero-G and was there to document the Inspiration 4 crew as they did for the first time, too.
“It was the single hardest photoshoot I’ve ever done,” he said. “Trying to focus on four different people who are all moving on their own different planes, as well as, you know, I’m moving because you don’t really have anything to keep you anchored unless you’re like holding on to a wall. And then you got to shoot at a fast shutter speed to make sure you’re freezing them but … everyone’s moving. It was just such a dynamic environment. And I think I got decent stuff considering that it was the first time I had done that.”
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An unexpected benefit of this gig has been getting to know the four people who are preparing to blast off into space. He’s also gotten to know their families.
“I did not expect to build the relationship that I have with the crew, you know, a week or two in I had already built the dynamic with them that I was expecting to maybe build by the launch,” Kraus said. “Just seeing them become such good friends with each other, and then sort of being in there with them. And developing a great rapport with them has been amazing. And better than anything I could have thought going in.”
The Inspiration 4 crew members are an electric bunch: A billionaire businessman, a St. Jude’s physician’s assistant, an engineer and a one-time NASA astronaut candidate turned educator. The thing they all have in common is they are not NASA astronauts, they have not trained for years to go to space but they happened to be at the right place at the right time and on Sept. 15 will launch from Kennedy Space Center in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
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“Inspiration 4 is the first time that we’ll have an orbital mission to space where all the participants are not from a government agency,” Kraus explained. “All four of these astronauts, Jared Isaacman, Haley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, they’re just, you know, more or less everyday people like you and me that are going on this mission.”
The crew will launch and spend three days orbiting the Earth, documenting their experience, conducting some low-gravity science and, according to Kraus, eating some comfort food they bring along.
“When you think about the grand scheme of humans, we’ve only been going to space for, for not too long. But I’ve never befriended a payload. I’ve never become friends with Starlink satellites or GPS satellites. But I’ve become friends with these four people. So it’s definitely personal for me to see them launch,” Kraus said of how he will feel on launch day.
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The Inspiration 4 campaign will eventually raise more than $200 million for St. Jude. Isaacman donated the first $100 million and the other half is coming from the contest and a Netflix documentary and other fundraising efforts. Kraus sold prints of his photography to raise money for the hospital and Proctor is still fundraising through her space art campaign.
As part of his work with the crew, Kraus has been teaching them some photography skills so they can document their spaceflight.
“The crew came to me and said, ‘How are you going to teach us how to take photos in space?’” Kraus said. “Now, it’s a bit hard because I haven’t yet done it. But I was able to combine a lot of resources from NASA imagery, some of my experience with just various types of photography, compiled into a written guide, a video guide. And once we finally got our cameras on hand, and I split up the kits into their hands, I’ve been helping them learn how to take photos. And I hope they come back with some stunning imagery.”
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The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft will look a little different than the previous ones to dock at the International Space Station because it will have a cupola on top.
Currently, the launch window for the Inspiration 4 mission is 24 hours but is expected to be narrowed down closer to launch.
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Scientists observe ‘space hurricane’ swirling above Earth for first time
Scientists have long suspected conditions in space could create storm-like conditions above Earth but now they have picture proof of what researchers are calling a plasma space hurricane.
The authors of a new paper published this week in Nature Communications say they have the first observations of a swirling mass of plasma above the North Pole resembling a hurricane.
Using satellite imagery in 2014, the teams at the University of Reading and Shandong University were able to create a 3D image of the 1,000 km-wide mass that rains down electrons instead of water. The space storms above Earth are created when solar wind from the sun smacks into Earth’s atmosphere.
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“Tropical storms are associated with huge amounts of energy, and these space hurricanes must be created by unusually large and rapid transfer of solar wind energy and charged particles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere,” Professor Mike Lockwood, space scientist at the University of Reading, said in a news release.
Lockwood and his team believe these space hurricanes could also be created beyond our solar system.
“Plasma and magnetic fields in the atmosphere of planets exist throughout the universe, so the findings suggest space hurricanes should be a widespread phenomena,” Lockwood said.
What makes this find so special is that hurricanes have also been observed in the lower atmospheres of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn but the existence of space hurricanes in the upper atmosphere of planets has not been detected before.
Hurricanes occur in Earth’s oceans over warm bodies of water. When warm, moist air rises, it creates an area of low pressure near the surface that sucks in the surrounding air, causing extremely strong winds and creating clouds that lead to the hurricane conditions we are used to.
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But in the upper atmosphere, solar wind is responsible for creating space hurricanes.
The solar wind is a stream of charged particles that emanate from the corona or sun’s atmosphere. The particles travel in all directions and interact with anything they encounter, even Earth. Thankfully, our planet has a shield, the magnetosphere. If it wasn’t for this magnetic field, Earth would be in big trouble. Instead, most of the solar wind is deflected safely away and continues on its journey through space. If there was no magnetic field, harmful radiation carried by the solar wind would make it to the surface, threatening life.
Some of the particles that don’t get deflected into space are guided toward the north and south poles. Those particles then interact with gases in our atmosphere causing those gases to move into a higher-energy state, producing vibrant displays of light, or the Auroras, also known as the northern or southern lights.
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The auroral oval is the footprint in the atmosphere of the boundary between the highly stretched field lines of the polar cap and the more normal field lines at lower latitudes. When the solar wind is strong, this boundary moves closer to the equator.
The auroral oval typically clings close to the poles, but space hurricanes occur even closer to the pole.
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SpaceX to launch another batch of Starlink satellites on Monday
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – SpaceX plans to continue weekly launches of 60 Starlink satellites at a time with at least two planned for the coming week.
The private space company, and now growing internet provider, has not disclosed its next Falcon 9 launches but Federal Aviation Authority flight restrictions show several potential windows for two launches.
SpaceX received approval Friday from the 45th Space Wing, which oversees the eastern range, for a Falcon 9 lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base Sunday night carrying more Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit.
A planned launch on Sunday night was delayed due to unfavorable weather conditions and rescheduled for 10:59 p.m. on Monday.
Due to unfavorable weather tonight, now targeting Monday, February 15 at 10:59 p.m. EST for Falcon 9’s launch of 60 Starlink satellites
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 15, 2021
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Up range, another Falcon 9 is scheduled to liftoff in the early hours of Tuesday at 1:17 a.m. from Kennedy Space Center Launchpad 39A, also with about 60 Starlink satellites. That launch is approved by the 45th Space Wing and Space Force weather officers are predicting a 60% chance of favorable liftoff conditions.
The launch from KSC was delayed several times last week. The company said in a tweet that it needed “additional inspections before flying one of our fleet-leading boosters.”
Combined, the launches will send the Starlink constellation above 1,000 orbiting the Earth. The Starlink constellation is part of CEO Elon Musk’s plan to create a space-based internet using a network of, eventually, 42,000 satellites. In the past several weeks, the company has expanded its Beta testing of the internet service to include more than 10,000 customers.
Potential customers can visit Starlink.com and request a $499 Starlink kit with a $99 per month service. The kit includes a Wi-Fi router and dish. However, it depends on where a customer lives as to when their kit and service will begin, according to SpaceX. For an address in Orlando, the estimate given is mid to late 2021.
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Laura Forczyk, the owner of space consulting company Astralytical said outside of signing up more customers, the company must also prove to the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates broadband usage for satellites, it can perform, providing the services SpaceX says it will with the Starlink constellation.
“The FCC has granted SpaceX the ability to use the certain broadband that they’ve given them, if they have success with Starlink with a certain number of customers and a certain number of satellites launched over a certain period of time,” Forcyk told News 6.
SpaceX is attempting to succeed where other companies have failed. Musk said in a tweet this week Starlink could be the first.
“SpaceX needs to pass through a deep chasm of negative cash flow over the next year or so to make Starlink financially viable,” the CEO tweeted. “Every new satellite constellation in history has gone bankrupt. We hope to be the first that does not.”
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SpaceX readies for 2nd launch this week with ridesharing mission
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – After successfully launching its own payload from Florida earlier this week, SpaceX is preparing another Falcon 9 rocket to liftoff with satellites from several customers, including DARPA, NASA and more of its own Starlink satellites.
The SpaceX rideshare mission includes government and private customer payloads as well as a dozen smaller nanosatellites. The rocket will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Launch Complex 40. The launch window opens at Saturday at 9:40 a.m. It was delayed from Friday morning.
The mission, known as Transporter-1, also includes a somewhat last-minute addition of 10 Starlink satellites, after receiving Federal Communications Commission approval earlier this month to include those.
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According to the 45th Space Wing forecast, the current concern for the launch window will be thick cloud cover. Space Force forecasters are giving the launch window a 60% chance of favorable weather. A front will be bringing showers to the Space Coast Saturday morning.
After launch, the Falcon 9 will head south toward polar orbit, a rare trajectory sending the rocket down Florida’s coast. Due to the unusual path SpaceX’s droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, won’t be north of the launch site waiting to catch the rocket booster but due south in the Atlantic Ocean.
Earlier in the week, another Falcon 9 launched 60 Starlink internet-beaming satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The successful delivery to low-Earth orbit was the 17th batch part of SpaceX’s constellation designed to provide global internet to even remote areas of the world. There were nearly 1,000 Starlink satellites already in orbit.
SpaceX plans to continue to grow that constellation this year with launches every other week.
Meanwhile in Texas, SpaceX teams are working toward another test flight of the company’s interplanetary spaceship undergoing development at the Boca Chica site. The most recent flight of Starship wowed online viewers all over the world when the spaceship prototype launched, performed an aerial flip and came down for an explosive landing.
This weekend’s launch will mark the third for SpaceX this year.
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