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Momentus’ Vigoride space tug is dealing with some issues

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Momentus’ newly launched space tug has been experiencing some issues in orbit.

The Vigoride spacecraft, built by California-based company Momentus, launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on May 25, riding to Earth orbit along with dozens of other payloads on a mission called Transporter 5. 

It’s the first spaceflight for Vigoride and serves primarily as a demonstration mission, though the tug is carrying nine small satellites to deploy for three different customers, according to SpaceNews (opens in new tab). (Vigoride’s main envisioned job is to ferry customer payloads to specific orbital locations after launch.)

Related: 8 ways that SpaceX has transformed spaceflight

Two days after liftoff, however, Momentus announced that Vigoride had run into “some initial anomalies.”

“We are using an unplanned frequency as we work through this and are applying for a Special Temporary Authority (STA) with the FCC to address that in order to help command the vehicle back to nominal configuration,” company representatives wrote in an update (opens in new tab), referring to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. “Our engineering and operations team is working to address the anomalies.”

Use of that unplanned frequency was apparently required because Vigoride’s communications system was tuned incorrectly. The space tug was initially operating at an uplink frequency of 2,067.5 megahertz and a downlink frequency of 8,250 megahertz, both of which are slightly off its FCC-licensed bands (2,075 megahertz and 8,200 megahertz, respectively), SpaceNews reported, citing a recent filing by the company.

Momentus has not specified the nature of the anomalies it is working to resolve. But company CEO John Rood did say during a June 1 webinar that the problems aren’t associated with Vigoride’s primary propulsion system, which had not been tested at that point, according to SpaceNews.

That propulsion system uses microwave electrothermal thrusters (METs), which heat propellant using microwave energy. In Vigoride, this propellant is water, which is then expelled from a nozzle to create thrust.

“The MET can transmit a very large amount of energy into a small amount of propellant and turn it into a hot plasma — reaching about half the temperature of the sun’s surface,” Momentus wrote in a description of the thrusters (opens in new tab). “This technology is well-suited for use in Vigoride — and future vehicles Momentus is developing.”

Momentus’ early attempts to deal with the Vigoride anomalies have apparently met with some success. On May 31, the company announced in another update (opens in new tab) that the tug had managed to deploy two satellites.

Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).  



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You can see 5 planets align this month in a rare astronomical conjunction

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Earthlings are able to see five of their closest planetary neighbors all lined up in a row this month.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are aligned in their natural order across the morning sky in a rare conjunction.

In astronomical terms, conjunction is when two or more objects appear to line up in the sky.

Over the next week, Mercury will become easier to spot as it moves away from the sun. The planet is typically difficult to view, but Mercury will reach its greatest elongation, or farthest point from the sun, on June 16, making it easier to see, according to EarthSky.org.

And on June 24, about an hour before sunrise, skygazers can peep an extremely rare solar system extravaganza. The waning crescent moon will also be in position between Venus and Mars — taking the place of Earth in the planetary lineup.

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It’s the icing on the conjunction cupcake.

Sky & Telescope says the best time to see the planet conjunction on June24 is 45 minutes before sunrise looking East to South. (Sky & Telescope)

“Planets are often getting closer to each other and farther away from each other, but this is just a particularly fun order. It’s just coincidence,” Michelle Thaller, an astronomer at NASA told the Washington Post. “It’s just kind of this really sort of fun tour of the solar system that you can take for free.”

Over the next few months, the planets will appear to spread out across the morning sky. And by September, Venus and Saturn won’t be viewable for most morning sky observers, according to NASA.

All eight planets will never perfectly align due to our different orbits and tilts. Conjunctions of several planets happen fairly often, but the conjunction of five planets only happens about every 20 years.

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According to the Washington Post, the last time five planets aligned was in Dec. 2004 and the next time it will happen will be in 2040.

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Copyright 2022 by KSAT – All rights reserved.

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Mysterious repeating radio signal detected from space – study

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Scientists have managed to discover a new mysterious burst of radio waves from space, known as a fast radio burst (FRB) that is raising new questions.

The findings surrounding this mysterious phenomenon designated FRB 190520 were published Wednesday in a study in the peer-reviewed academic journal Nature.

What are FRBs?

FRBs are a phenomenon in the field of radio astronomy that refers to a very short burst of radio pulse associated with the release of a very large amount of energy. 

What causes them is unknown, though it seems to be a high-energy astrophysical process of some sort.

Radio telescopes, which are used to find radio broadcasts from space (Illustrative). (credit: PIXABAY)

What is known is that the average FRB, despite being very short by lasting from a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds (a millisecond is one one-thousandth of a second), releases as much energy per millisecond as our sun releases in three days.

This field of study is still relatively new, with the first FRB having been discovered in 2007.

Several FRBs have been discovered since then, but some are especially strange. One of these, in particular, FRB 180916, pulsates on a regular basis every 16.35 days.

Another FRB that is particularly noteworthy is FRB 121102. Discovered in 2016, this radio burst was a major breakthrough in the field of study because its location was pinpointed.

At the time, researchers, writing in articles in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal Letters, wrote that it had originated from a dwarf galaxy over three billion light-years from Earth.

The new FRB

What makes this new mysterious FRB so interesting is that it, too, was able to be pinpointed.

FRB 190520 was first identified by a five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China in November 2019, with the burst itself having taken place on May 20 of that year.

Scientists made use of other telescopes, such as the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), to better study FRB 190520.

In 2020, VLA observations were able to pinpoint its location. Then, using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, they were able to pinpoint its origin near another dwarf galaxy three billion light-years away.

But this raises all kinds of questions, especially when examining the similarities and differences between these two FRBs and all others.

One possibility: There may be two kinds of FRBs.

“Are those that repeat different from those that don’t? What about the persistent radio emission — is that common?” Kshitij Aggarwal, a graduate student at West Virginia University (WVU), said in a statement.

“Are those that repeat different from those that don’t? What about the persistent radio emission — is that common?”

Kshitij Aggarwal

Another question being asked is what causes FRBs in the first place. The two leading possibilities are the superdense neutron stars left over after a supernova or neutron stars with strong magnetic fields called magnetars.

But another curious feature about FRB 190520 is the strange interference.

One useful feature of FRBs is that scientists hoped they could use them to study material between them and the Earth through the use of radio waves.

Essentially, they could act as sort of measuring sticks.

This is measured through dispersion, which is when radio waves pass through spaces with free electrons, and higher-frequency waves would move faster than lower-frequency ones.

But this is where the problem lies.

As stated previously, FRB 190520’s point of origin seemed to have been at a dwarf galaxy around three billion light-years away. But that was just calculations from an independent measurement. 

Calculating it from the signal and dispersion, the distance should actually be eight to 9.5 billion light-years away.

“This means that there is a lot of material near the FRB that would confuse any attempt to use it to measure the gas between galaxies,” Aggarwal said. “If that’s the case with others, then we can’t count on using FRBs as cosmic yardsticks.” 

There are possible explanations. For instance, if FRB 190520 is still surrounded by material from a supernova, it would interfere with the measurement of dispersion.

But ultimately, many questions still remain in a still-mysterious field of study.



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Radio Signals Coming From Space Detected For The Second Time

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Scientists are not sure about what causes fast radio bursts or FRBs

New Delhi:

Astronomers have detected a strange radio signal coming from another galaxy, nearly 3 billion light-years away from Earth. This is the second time ever that such a repeating signal was detected by scientists.

Researchers detected a new Fast Radio Bursts (FRB), known as FRB 20190520B.   The researchers noted that the signal was “co-located with a compact, persistent radio source and associated with a dwarf host galaxy of high specific-star-formation.” The observations were published in the science journal Nature.

The FRB was detected using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in Guizhou, China, in May 2019. Additional observations recorded nearly 75 more FRBs in a five-month period in 2020. The signal was then localized using the US National Science Foundation’s Karl G Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). 

Observations revealed that the emitting object was also responsible for emitting smaller, weaker radio bursts between the FRBs. These characteristics mark the signal from FRB 20190520B as being extremely similar to the very first FRB which was located in 2016, FRB 12110. 

Scientists are not sure about what causes FRBs but they have theorised that the FRB is newborn and that it is emitting the signals as it is still surrounded by the “dense material ejected by the supernova explosion that left behind the neutron star.” Under the ‘newborn’ theory, it is expected that the signals will gradually weaken as the FRB gets older. 

“The FRB field is moving very fast right now and new discoveries are coming out monthly. However, big questions still remain, and this object is giving us challenging clues about those questions,” said Sarah Burke-Spolaor, co-author of the study. 

Over a dozen FRBs have been localized before, five of which include repeating sources of FRBs. These discoveries, hastened by technological advances in radio telemetry and astronomy, allow scientists to slowly piece together more information about cosmic events like the death of massive and super-massive stars, and the merging of neutron stars and magnetars.

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NASA Says a Tiny Space Rock Has Impacted The James Webb Space Telescope

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In its new home far from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope maybe isn’t quite as alone as it seems.

The pocket of space occupied by the telescope isn’t a total vacuum – and now the inevitable has happened, with a tiny piece of rock, a micrometeorite, colliding with one of Webb’s mirror segments.

 

But there’s no need to panic. The engineers that built the telescope are extremely cognizant of the rigors of space, and Webb has been carefully designed to withstand them.

“We always knew that Webb would have to weather the space environment, which includes harsh ultraviolet light and charged particles from the Sun, cosmic rays from exotic sources in the galaxy, and occasional strikes by micrometeoroids within our Solar System,” says engineer and technical deputy project manager Paul Geithner of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

“We designed and built Webb with performance margin – optical, thermal, electrical, mechanical – to ensure it can perform its ambitious science mission even after many years in space.”

Webb’s position in L2. (NASA)

Webb occupies a region 1.5 million kilometers (just under 1 million miles) from Earth called L2.

It’s what is known as a Lagrange or Lagrangian point, where the gravitational interaction between two orbiting bodies (in this case, Earth and the Sun) balances with the centripetal force of the orbit to create a stable pocket where low-mass objects can be “parked” to reduce fuel consumption.

 

This is very useful for science, but these regions can collect other things, too.

Jupiter, for example, has swarms of asteroids sharing its orbit in two of the Lagrange points it shares with the Sun. Other planets also have asteroids in their Lagrange points, albeit rather fewer than Jupiter.

It’s unclear exactly how much dust L2 has collected, but it would be foolish to expect that the region had not collected any at all.

So, Webb was specifically engineered to withstand bombardment from dust-sized particles traveling at extremely high speeds. Not only did the design of Webb involve simulations, the engineers conducted test impacts on mirror samples to understand what the effects of the space environment might be, and attempt to mitigate them.

Impacts can move mirror segments, but the telescope has sensors to gauge its mirror positions, and the ability to adjust them, to help correct for any distortions that may result.

Mission Control here on Earth can send adjustments to Webb, too, to place the mirrors back where they should be. Its optics can even be turned away from known meteor showers in advance.

And Webb was built with massive error margins, so that the physical degradation that is expected over time will not bring the mission to a premature end.

Orbital debris impact damage to Hubble panels returned to Earth after a service mission. (NASA)

It’s likely in a better position than Hubble, which, in low-Earth orbit, has been subject not just to micrometeorite impacts, but a constant bombardment of space debris.

Unlike Hubble, however, the distance to Webb means that technicians will not be able to physically visit and conduct repairs. (Not that Hubble has been serviced recently; the last such mission was in 2009, and it won’t be receiving another.)

 

The micrometeoroid that struck the telescope – sometime between 23 and 25 May – was a random event. The impact was, however, larger than expected, which means it represents an opportunity to better understand the L2 environment, and try to find strategies for protecting the telescope in the future.

“With Webb’s mirrors exposed to space, we expected that occasional micrometeoroid impacts would gracefully degrade telescope performance over time,” says Webb optical telescope element manager Lee Feinberg of NASA Goddard.

“Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeoroid strikes that were consistent with expectations and this one more recently that is larger than our degradation predictions assumed.

“We will use this flight data to update our analysis of performance over time and also develop operational approaches to assure we maximize the imaging performance of Webb to the best extent possible for many years to come.”

The first full-color and spectroscopic images from Webb are still due to arrive on schedule, on 12 July 2022. We absolutely can’t wait.

 

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NASA’s $10 Billion Webb Space Telescope Struck by Micrometeoroid

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This artist’s conception shows the fully unfolded James Webb Space Telescope in space. Credit: Adriana Manrique Gutierrez, NASA Animator

Micrometeoroid strikes are an unavoidable aspect of operating any spacecraft, which routinely sustain many impacts over the course of long and productive science missions in space. Between May 23 and 25, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope sustained an impact to one of its primary mirror segments.

After initial assessments, the team found the telescope is still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements despite a marginally detectable effect in the data. Thorough analysis and measurements are ongoing. Impacts will continue to occur throughout the entirety of Webb’s lifetime in space; such events were anticipated when building and testing the mirror on the ground. After a successful launch, deployment, and telescope alignment, Webb’s beginning-of-life performance is still well above expectations, and the observatory is fully capable of performing the science it was designed to achieve.

Webb’s mirror was engineered to withstand bombardment from the micrometeoroid environment at its orbit around Sun-Earth L2 of dust-sized particles flying at extreme velocities. While the telescope was being built, engineers used a mixture of simulations and actual test impacts on mirror samples to get a clearer idea of how to fortify the observatory for operation in orbit. This most recent impact was larger than was modeled, and beyond what the team could have tested on the ground.

“We always knew that Webb would have to weather the space environment, which includes harsh ultraviolet light and charged particles from the Sun, cosmic rays from exotic sources in the galaxy, and occasional strikes by micrometeoroids within our solar system,” said Paul Geithner, technical deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “We designed and built Webb with performance margin – optical, thermal, electrical, mechanical – to ensure it can perform its ambitious science mission even after many years in space.”

For example, due to careful work by the launch site teams, Webb’s optics were kept cleaner than required while on the ground; their pristine cleanliness improves the overall reflectivity and throughput, thereby improving total sensitivity. This and other performance margins make Webb’s science capabilities robust to potential degradations over time.

Furthermore, Webb’s capability to sense and adjust mirror positions enables partial correction for the result of impacts. By adjusting the position of the affected segment, engineers can cancel out a portion of the distortion. This minimizes the effect of any impact, although not all of the degradation can be canceled out this way. Engineers have already performed a first such adjustment for the recently affected segment C3, and additional planned mirror adjustments will continue to fine-tune this correction. These steps will be repeated when needed in response to future events as part of the monitoring and maintenance of the telescope throughout the mission.

To protect Webb in orbit, flight teams can use protective maneuvers that intentionally turn the optics away from known meteor showers before they are set to occur. This most recent hit was not a result of a meteor shower and is currently considered an unavoidable chance event. As a result of this impact, a specialized team of engineers has been formed to look at ways to mitigate the effects of further micrometeoroid hits of this scale. Over time, the team will collect invaluable data and work with micrometeoroid prediction experts at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center to be able to better predict how performance may change, bearing in mind that the telescope’s initial performance is better than expected. Webb’s tremendous size and sensitivity make it a highly sensitive detector of micrometeorites; over time Webb will help improve knowledge of the solar system dust particle environment at L2, for this and future missions.

“With Webb’s mirrors exposed to space, we expected that occasional micrometeoroid impacts would gracefully degrade telescope performance over time,” said Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager at NASA Goddard. “Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeoroid strikes that were consistent with expectations and this one more recently that is larger than our degradation predictions assumed. We will use this flight data to update our analysis of performance over time and also develop operational approaches to assure we maximize the imaging performance of Webb to the best extent possible for many years to come.”

This recent impact caused no change to Webb’s operations schedule, as the team continues to check out the science instruments’ observing modes and prepares for the release of Webb’s first images and the start of science operations.



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NASA’s new powerful space telescope gets hit by larger than expected micrometeoroid

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NASA’s new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, got pelted by a larger than expected micrometeoroid at the end of May, causing some detectable damage to one of the spacecraft’s 18 primary mirror segments. The impact means that the mission team will have to correct for the distortion created by the strike, but NASA says that the telescope is “still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements.”

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, is the agency’s incredibly powerful next-generation space telescope, designed to look into the farthest reaches of the Universe and see back in time to the stars and galaxies that formed just after the Big Bang. It cost NASA nearly $10 billion to build and more than two decades to complete. But, on Christmas Day 2021, the telescope finally launched to space, where it underwent an extremely complex unfolding process before reaching its final destination roughly 1 million miles from Earth.

Since its launch, JWST has already been hit by at least four different micrometeoroids, according to a NASA blog post, but all of those were small and about the size of what NASA expected the observatory to encounter. A micrometeoroid is typically a small fragment of an asteroid, usually smaller than a grain of sand. The one that hit JWST in May, however, was larger than what the agency had prepared for, though the agency didn’t specify its exact size. NASA admits that the strike, which occurred between May 23rd and May 25th, has caused a “marginally detectable effect in the data” and that engineers are continuing to analyze the effects of the impact.

NASA expected JWST to get hit by tiny space particles during its lifetime; fast-moving specks of space rock are just an inescapable feature of the deep space environment. In fact, NASA designed the telescope’s gold-coated mirrors to withstand strikes by tiny space debris over time. The space agency also did a combination of simulations and ground testing with mirror samples to determine how to best strengthen the mirrors to withstand micrometeoroid impacts. However, NASA says that the models they used for these simulations didn’t have a micrometeoroid this large, and it was “beyond what the team could have tested on the ground.”

Still, this doesn’t come as a total surprise. “We always knew that Webb would have to weather the space environment, which includes harsh ultraviolet light and charged particles from the Sun, cosmic rays from exotic sources in the galaxy, and occasional strikes by micrometeoroids within our solar system,” Paul Geithner, technical deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.

The primary mirror of JWST undergoing testing on Earth
Image: NASA

Engineers do have the capability to also maneuver JWST’s mirror and instruments away from showers of space debris, if NASA can see them coming. The problem, though, was that this micrometeoroid was not part of a shower, so NASA considers it an “unavoidable chance event.” Still, the agency is forming an engineering team to come up with ways to potentially avoid or lessen the effects of micrometeoroid strikes of this size. And since JWST is so sensitive, the telescope will also help NASA get a better understanding of just how many micrometeoroids there are in the deep space environment.

Despite the strike, NASA remained optimistic in its post about JWST’s future. “Webb’s beginning-of-life performance is still well above expectations, and the observatory is fully capable of performing the science it was designed to achieve,” according to the blog. Engineers can also adjust the impacted mirror to help cancel out the data distortion. The mission team has done this already and will continue to tinker with the mirror over time to get the best results. It’s a process that will be ongoing throughout JWST’s planned five to 10 years of life as new observations are made and events unfold. At the same time, NASA warns that the engineers will not be able to completely cancel out the impact of the strike.

NASA engineers had to build JWST to be incredibly robust since the telescope is on its own out in space. Unlike its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, which is currently in orbit around Earth, JWST was not designed to be serviceable. That means if something significant breaks on the spacecraft, engineers will have to troubleshoot a way to fix it from the ground. There’s no capability at the moment to send humans or a robotic spacecraft to give JWST a tune-up. That means JWST will have to live with its slightly damaged mirror until the end of its mission, and NASA expects the spacecraft to get hit by even more debris over time.

In the meantime, the strike doesn’t appear to be impacting JWST’s schedule. In fact, the news of this micrometeoroid comes just a month before a huge milestone for the mission. After spending the last few months finely calibrating JWST’s instruments and delicately aligning the spacecraft’s mirrors, the mission team is set to unveil the first full-color images from JWST on July 12th. NASA won’t say what the images will be, but they should be spectacular.

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Hubble Captures Record-Breaking ‘Sneak Peek’ of James Webb Space Telescope Discoveries

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What’s happening

The Hubble Space Telescope just captured the largest-ever near-infrared image of the sky.

Why it matters

This giant survey could pave the way for next-gen James Webb Space Telescope discoveries, and eventually, help humans understand some of the most elusive regions of our universe.

Amid the thrill of discussing astronomy’s shiny new toy, the James Webb Space Telescope, we can’t forget about Hubble.

Since its launch in late December of last year, JWST has been making waves, carrying the hopes and dreams of wide-eyed scientists, along with gold-plated mirrors and an array of high-tech infrared cameras that can pierce stardust and help us solve long-standing black hole mysteries. But tried and true Hubble is still toiling away, and in fact, just hit a pretty big milestone. 

The Hubble Space Telescope, which ventured out into the cosmos way back in 1990, has captured its largest-ever near-infrared image of space and thus is even treading into waters that JWST is poised to explore. 

This remarkable image could cast a spotlight on some of the rarest objects in the universe, such as monster galaxies that are the product of massive galaxy mergers or super violent black holes lurking deep in interstellar space.

“It was difficult to study these extremely rare events using existing images, which is what motivated the design of this large survey,” Lamiya Mowla said in a statement. Mowla is an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto and lead author of a study on the survey, of which a preprint is available on arXiv. It’s soon to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Part of a new high-resolution survey dubbed 3D-Dash, which stands for “drift and shift,” Hubble’s latest dataset spans an area of the sky almost six times the size of the moon as seen from Earth. You can actually explore it for yourself here. What you’re looking at is a mosaic of multiple shots taken by Hubble that were later stitched together.

Try zooming out and dragging the screen around — it’s quite spectacular how much ground (sky?) this image covers.

Galaxies from the last 10 billion years witnessed in the 3D-Dash program.


Lamiya Mowla

“Since its launch more than 30 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope has led a renaissance in the study of how galaxies have changed in the last 10 billion years of the universe,” Mowla said. “The 3D-DASH program extends Hubble’s legacy in wide-area imaging, so we can begin to unravel the mysteries of the galaxies beyond our own.”

What is an infrared image?

When you look up at the sky, even if you’re situated in the darkest forest glen on Earth, you aren’t seeing all the stars. And it’s not because some of the stars aren’t in your field of view. 

They’re there — but they’re invisible.

Human eyes can only visualize light wavelengths within a certain region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Just beyond this region lies infrared light. And galaxies and stars that are really, really far away give off exactly this type of light – so they’re essentially hidden to our eyes, no matter what we try to do. 

But Hubble, and JWST too, have a way around our human restriction. Scientists embedded both these instruments with what are basically infrared light detectors. 

This infographic illustrates the spectrum of electromagnetic energy, highlighting the portions detected by NASA’s Hubble, Spitzer and Webb space telescopes.


NASA and J. Olmsted [STScI]

As evident from the diagram, JWST’s infrared powers are much (much) stronger — which is why it holds potential to show us tons of things our eyes can’t see — but Hubble does have some of these special light processing capabilities.

Plus, Hubble actually has a leg up on JWST here. 

Per the researchers behind the new study, JWST is designed to take highly sensitive, close-up images of deep space so we get very clear pictures of small interstellar areas. That’s incredibly exciting since we’ll probably get pictures of faraway stars, galaxies and other cosmic phenomena with a level of clarity similar to what we get for images of space-borne objects closer to Earth.

But Hubble can take extremely wide-field images like the new one we’re looking at. Eventually, such expansive datasets could inform future JWST studies, helping the next-gen scope point in the right direction for revealing observations.

As Ivelina Momcheva, data scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and principal investigator of the study, puts it, “It gives us a sneak peek of future scientific discoveries and allows us to develop new techniques to analyze these large datasets.”

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Fast radio bursts: New blast of energy coming from space is unlike previous signals, scientists say

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Scientists have found a new fast radio burst coming to us from space – from a strange and unexpected location.

The burst is only the second known example of its kind, and has led to new questions about what exactly they are and how they can be used to understand the universe.

The newly discovered object is sending out frequent, repeated blasts of energy, scientists say. It looks similar to the first fast radio burst, or FRB, that had its location found – but is otherwise different from many examples that have been found.

Fast radio bursts are very intense, very brief blasts of energy that come to us from deep in space. They were first detected in 2007, and scientists have found dozens since.

That vast catalogue has brought researchers closer to trying to understand where they are coming from, though their source remains a mystery. Researchers have suggested everything from black holes to alien technology – though probably the most likely explanation is a magnetar, which is a type of neutron star.

Recent research has also suggested that there are different kinds of FRBs, and the newly discovered object further strengthens that argument. Researchers have questions whether those that repeat their signals in this way could be fundamentally different from others.

The increased number of such bursts that have been detected has also allowed scientists to use them as a way to study other parts of the cosmos, as well as being interesting in themselves. They can be used to measure the content of the intergalactic medium, or the space between galaxies.

By watching the way that the blasts travel through space, scientists can better understand the still largely mysterious material that covers much of the universe, between their source and Earth.

However, scientists must make assumptions about the signals and their source to use them correctly. Generally, for instance, scientists think their host galaxies do not make the fast radio bursts disperse, which is expressed using the “dispersion measure”.

But the new fast radio burst does not appear to fit with that picture. While it is in some ways similar to the first ever repeating radio burst to be detected, its galaxy has a vastly larger dispersion measure.

Estimates had suggested that the galaxy should be about 3 billion light years from Earth. But it is being dispersed as if it is coming from a galaxy around three times as far away.

“This means that there is a lot of material near the FRB that would confuse any attempt to use it to measure the gas between galaxies,” Kshitij Aggarwal, a graduate student at West Virginia University. “If that’s the case with others, then we can’t count on using FRBs as cosmic yardsticks.”

It adds yet another mystery to the blasts, which after 15 years and numerous examples remain fascinating and unknown to the astronomers who study them.

More research into FRBs such as the newly discovered one could help solve some of that mystery, as well as answering the questions posed by the recent papers. Scientists hope to better understand how repeating and non-repeating FRBs are different, for instance, and whether they might be coming from sources that are different ages or entirely distinct things.

The findings are reported in a paper, ‘A repeating fast radio burst associated with a persistent radio source’, published in Nature today.

The new FRB has been given the number 20190520B, and its host galaxy is J160204.31−111718.5. It was found using China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, or FAST, in 2019, and further work has been done to examine it since, using a range of different equipment.

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NASA Releases Video Game to Celebrate Upcoming Space Telescope

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A sampling of the gameplay.
Gif: NASA/Gizmodo

NASA is drumming up excitement for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with a super-retro 8-bit inspired video game, and it’s honestly really fun. In the game, players are Roman Space Telescope operators that have to collect different celestial objects ranging from exoplanets to dark matter.

What is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope?

Once launched, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will become a powerful tool in NASA’s arsenal for unravelling the secrets of the universe. The goal of the astronomical project is to study dark energy and dark matter, which make up about 95% of the known universe. The telescope will also be used to search for exoplanets, much like the James Webb Telescope.

NASA says the Roman Space Telescope will operate much like Hubble, but it’ll function with technology that’s three decades more advanced than its predecessor. That should allow Roman to capture infrared images that are 200 times larger than images collected by Hubble. While NASA hasn’t set a firm launch date yet, the telescope passed a design review in September 2021, and NASA aims to begin science operations no later than May 2027.

The Roman Space Observer Game

NASA released the Roman Space Observer Game last week much to the delight of space and vintage enthusiasts alike. With the 80s being so in right now, the Roman Space Observer Game fits right in as it’s a retro-style arcade game. Think Asteroids, but instead of blasting space rocks, players collect exoplanets and black holes. NASA said on the game’s homepage: “Our goal for this game is to inform and inspire players about the amazing cosmic objects in our universe and what Roman may be able to see in a fun and engaging way.”

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The game is named after the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is set to launch later this decade.
Graphic: NASA

I played the game for a bit and I had an absolute blast. I was given control of the Nancy Grace Space Telescope and had to catch as many astrophysical objects as possible in one minute using the telescope’s sights. Galaxies, supernovae, rogue planets, and even the James Webb Telescope zoom in and out of the view of the Roman Space Telescope while a kitschy soundtrack full of “bleeps” and “bloops” played in the background. There are also blobs of dark matter and black holes that zip across the screen, but those proved to be much harder to snag since they blended in with the black background, which probably explains why they’re worth so many more points.

It sounds easy, but its actually incredibly challenging and I spent way too much time living the dream of a NASA telescope operator. I’m not a video game expert by any means, but I do love science and I think that the Roman Space Observer Game is a super fun way to engage the public on the namesake telescope’s mission to study some of the more mysterious parts of our universe.

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