Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the last Week in Space of September. This week's space news is full of delays and setbacks, including the unfortunate confirmation that the Arecibo Observatory is no more. But it's not all bad: The OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample flyby was a success, India's moon rover knocked its objectives out of the park, and the three men stranded on the ISS last winter have finally made it home safe.
Astronaut, Cosmonauts Touch Down After 6 Months Stranded in Space
A historic mission ended this week when NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev touched down in Kazakhstan on Wednesday after spending more than a year in space. Last December, the Soyuz capsule that brought the trio to space sustained a direct orbital debris strike that destroyed its external coolant loop, canceling the spacefarers' ride home and enforcing a surprise six-month mission extension. Roscosmos tore up its 2023 launch schedule and scrambled an empty Soyuz, bringing Rubio, Prokopyev, and Petelin home after 377 days in orbit. Tuesday, in a handover ceremony before the trio departed the station, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen formally took command of the ISS.
"Hugging my wife and kids is going to be paramount, and I’ll probably focus on that for the first couple of days," Rubio said during a media appearance shortly after landing, adding that he's looking forward to the "peace and quiet" of his backyard. "Up here, we kind of have the constant hum of machinery that’s keeping us alive." Rubio said he expects to take up to six months to recover from his extended stay in microgravity.
NASA to Livestream Bennu Sample Unveil
Bright and early Tuesday morning, NASA started unboxing the Bennu asteroid sample capsule, returned safe and whole by OSIRIS-REx over the weekend. When it did, it found a scattering of black dust, which the agency believes is bonus asteroid dust from Bennu. Technicians popped the top inside a literal glovebox: the Touch And Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), a sealed science box built to open up the samples in a nitrogen atmosphere without contaminating them. From there, they'll transfer the sample into another, larger glovebox, where scientists will start their work.
Wednesday, Oct. 11, in a livestreamed event starting at 11 a.m. ET, a team of scientists and engineers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston will finish opening the capsule and reveal its contents to the world. Check it out at NASA.gov/live.
NSF Confirms Arecibo Observatory Will Not Reopen
It's official: There will be no more astronomy at the Arecibo Observatory. Years of damage had already taken a toll on the satellite array, including a radio antenna shorn off by Hurricane Maria in 2017 and widespread structural problems from a series of earthquakes over the next few years. But in 2020, a main support cable gave way, dropping a 900-ton instrument array clear through the observatory's flagship thousand-foot-wide radio dish and bringing the whole thing down. After years of review, this Wednesday, the NSF formally announced that the mangled main dish at Arecibo would not be repaired.
Instead, the agency means to repurpose the funding it formerly supplied to the Arecibo Observatory. Over the next five years, the NSF will send about $5.5 million to four handpicked institutions, which will rebuild the site into a STEM outreach center focusing on biology: the Arecibo Center for Culturally Relevant and Inclusive Science Education, Computational Skills, and Community Engagement (Arecibo C3). Barring further calamity, the site will reopen in 2024.
NASA Begins Assembly on IMAP Solar Study Satellite
NASA's seasoned Voyager probes and Solar Dynamics Observatory will soon find themselves with a new cousin: the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) heliophysics probe, which NASA hopes to launch in 2025. The IMAP mission will chart the heliosphere—the electromagnetic "bubble" blown by the solar wind, which surrounds the entire solar system and marks the boundary between us and interstellar space. IMAP will also study the wide variety of particles in interplanetary space and the behavior of the solar wind at its boundary with the interstellar medium.
A continuous YouTube livestream of the cleanroom where IMAP will be built and tested is available on the IMAP mission website.
Psyche Asteroid Mission Launch Delayed
Unspecified issues with the spacecraft have reportedly delayed the launch of NASA's Psyche asteroid probe by at least a week. Already running more than a year behind, the spacecraft is scheduled to launch during a window beginning Oct. 5.
India's Moon Lander Probably Won't Wake Up
Morning has broken at the Moon's south pole after the two-week lunar night, but the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) says it's unlikely that its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander will ever wake up to see the sunrise. In a Monday interview, former ISRO chief AS Kiran Kumar told the BBC that "chances of reawakening are dimming with each passing hour." Thermal strain from the bitter cold of the lunar night may have spelled the end for the lander and rover, which weren't designed for long-term life on the Moon.
Whether or not the mission's Vikram lander and Pragyaan rover ever boot up again, ISRO says Chandrayaan-3 has been a huge success. In addition to achieving all its primary science objectives, the mission put India in the history books as the fourth nation to make a successful soft landing on the Moon.
FAA Orders Blue Origin to Take 'Corrective Actions' Before Flying Again
Just over a year ago, Blue Origin's New Shepherd launch vehicle failed as the rocket passed through max Q, the point of maximum aerodynamic stress. The FAA completed its investigation into the failure in March of this year and has just released a summary of its findings. According to the FAA, the full report "cites the proximate cause of the Sept. 12, 2022, mishap as the structural failure of an engine nozzle caused by higher-than-expected engine operating temperatures."
Blue Origin will be required to implement 21 corrective actions to prevent this issue from reoccurring, including redesigning engine and nozzle components "to improve structural performance during operation." The same document also refers to unspecified "organizational changes" and notes that Blue Origin may not resume launches until it implements all corrective actions and receives a license modification from the FAA.
It's not clear how long it will take Blue Origin to make these changes, but this announcement may explain why the company's (former) CEO, Bob Smith, was replaced by David Limp earlier this week. Smith's tenure at Blue Origin was already controversial, but the loss of NS-23 last September temporarily halted New Shepherd manned space launches. That said, it's genuinely not clear why Bezos specifically tapped Limp, who mostly recently oversaw the development of Amazon Alexa, Kindle Fire, Fire TV, and Amazon Echo.
SpaceX Lands $70M Defense Contract for Starshield Secure Internet Service
SpaceX has signed on a high-profile client for its Starshield secure internet services: the US Department of Defense, which my colleague Ryan Whitwam notes was probably the company's plan all along. The contract will begin with a payment of $15 million to SpaceX this month. The Defense Dept. already uses SpaceX rockets for a fair number of national-security payload launches, so using the company's satellites for communications does make some sense.
However, Elon Musk has come under scrutiny after recent reports that he used Starlink satellites to impose his personal values on the conflict in Ukraine. Fearing a new "mini-Pearl Harbor," Musk refused to turn on additional Starlink services to Ukraine, scuttling a planned attack on Russia's Black Sea fleet. Still, he said on X (formerly Twitter) that the Space Force would "own" the Starshield network, which the DoD would be free to use to its own ends. This, Musk said, is "the right order of things."
Webb Looks Back in Time to Study First Galaxies Ever Formed
One great strength of the James Webb Space Telescope is its ability to look deep into the skies, and in doing so, to look back into the extreme reaches of deep time. This week, Webb astronomers announced new conclusions about some of the most ancient galaxies ever discovered, deeply redshifted sky objects whose metal content is so low it suggests they were still forming when they emitted the light we see today.
With a redshift of z = 7 to 10, these galaxies were likely formed no more than 750 million years after the Big Bang. In a paper newly appeared in Nature Astronomy, scientists describe a model of galactic formation wherein early galaxies are "still intimately connected with the intergalactic medium and subject to continuous infall of pristine gas, which effectively dilutes their metal abundances."
No Atmosphere, No Problem: JWST Studies First TRAPPIST-1 Planet
With its onboard instruments, the JWST can make detailed spectral analyses of the chemistry of distant galaxies, stars, and even exoplanets. But the JWST can also derive a lot of information from what it doesn't see. TRAPPIST-1 is a star system about forty light years away, which hosts at least seven exoplanets. The innermost, TRAPPIST-1b, resembles Mercury because it has scarcely any atmosphere. Pointing the JWST at TRAPPIST-1b, scientists recently discovered that the light reflected from the planet is no different than the naked, unaltered light of the TRAPPIST-1 star itself.
To be clear, they weren't expecting to find an atmosphere. But the research validates prior studies of the system, and that's always valuable. Earlier measurements using the transit method suggested that TRAPPIST-1b whips around its star, each orbit just 36 Earth hours long. While TRAPPIST-1b has little hope of habitability, it still serves as a handy baseline by which scientists can calibrate their models of the system and thereby learn more about this and other star systems.
Skywatchers Corner
Here's one for space fans and art lovers: A paper recently published in Nature Communications reports that the same kind of spiraling waves pictured in Vincent Van Gogh's beloved 1889 painting, "The Starry Night," can cause geomagnetic storms here on Earth.
"We have found Kelvin-Helmholtz waves rippling down the flanks of Earth's magnetosphere," said lead author Shiva Kavosi of Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University. "NASA spacecraft are surfing the waves and directly measuring their properties." The waves create fractal eddies in the turbulent layer between Earth's atmosphere and space, which you can see modeled in this satisfying gif (by Shiva Kasovi via spaceweather.com).
One surprising finding from the paper is that these waves prefer equinoxes. The authors report that Kelvin-Helmholtz waves appear three times more often around the start of spring and fall than at the turn of summer or winter. It's been observed before that geomagnetic activity often peaks around equinoxes. (Last week's solar storms are a great example, even if the plural of anecdote is not data.) Kelvin-Helmholtz wave activity could be one reason why.
Speaking of the equinox, the September full moon—which reached its full stage this morning, just a week after the equinox—is often called the Harvest Moon. Farmer's Almanac lore holds that before electric lights became commonplace, farmers prized the moonlight, as they had to work late to bring in the autumn harvest on time. This year, the Harvest Moon coincides with the lunar perigee, the nearest it comes to Earth. The orbits of Earth and the Moon are technically eccentric ovals, not perfect circles, but the difference is subtle: at perigee, the Moon is just 50,000 km or so closer to the Earth than at apogee, the far side of the ellipse. Still, tonight's Moon will appear up to 5% bigger and 13% brighter than usual.
