Alan Boyle, Author at Universe Today

April 3, 2023April 3, 2023 by Alan Boyle

Meet the Four Astronauts Who’ll Fly Around the Moon for Artemis II

Artemis II crew portrait — The Artemis II crew includes, clockwise from left, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen and Reid Wiseman. (Credit: Josh Valcarcel / NASA)

The four astronauts chosen for NASA’s Artemis II mission will check off a string of firsts during their flight around the moon, scheduled for next year. It’ll mark the first trip beyond Earth orbit for a woman, for a person of color and for a Canadian. Artemis II will represent yet another first for Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen: Based on the current crew schedule, it’ll be his first-ever space mission.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Christina Koch round out the first crew for NASA’s Artemis moon program, which picks up on the legacy of the Apollo moon program. If all goes according to plan, they’ll be the first humans to circle the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

March 28, 2023March 28, 2023 by Alan Boyle

Type One Energy Raises $29M to Work on a Crazy Fusion Device

Stellarator schematic — A stellarator uses a contorted configuration of magnets to confine superheated plasma. (Credit: Type One Energy)

A Wisconsin-based startup called Type One Energy says it’s closed an over-subscribed $29 million financing round to launch its effort to commercialize a weird kind of nuclear fusion device known as a stellarator.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the $2 billion clean-energy fund created by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, partnered with TDK Ventures and Doral Energy Tech Ventures to co-lead the investment round. Other backers include Darco, the Grantham Foundation, MILFAM, Orbia Ventures, Shorewind Capital, TRIREC and Vahoca.

Stellarator fusion devices rely on a pretzel-shaped torus of magnets to contain the plasma where fusion takes place. They have a design that’s strikingly different from, say, the giant tokamak that’s being built for the multibillion-dollar ITER experimental fusion reactor in France, or the laser-blasting device at the National Ignition Facility in California that recently hit an energy-producing milestone. Some have gone so far as to call stellarators the “fusion reactor designed in hell.”

March 27, 2023March 27, 2023 by Alan Boyle

Beads of Lunar Glass Boost Hopes for Using the Moon’s Water

Glass beads from the moon — Chinese researchers detected water trapped within beads of glass created by lunar impacts. (Credit: He et al., IGG /CAS)

Beads of glass could become a key source of water for future crewed settlements on the moon, researchers say.

That claim is based on an assessment of the water contained within a sampling of glassy beads that were created over the course of millennia by cosmic impacts on the moon, and ended up being brought back to Earth in 2020 by China’s Chang’e-5 sample return mission.

A spectroscopic analysis determined that the beads contained more water than the researchers expected based on past studies. They surmised that interactions between hydrogen ions in the solar wind and oxygen-bearing materials in lunar soil created H₂O molecules that could be trapped within the glass — and then diffused under the right conditions.

Based on an extrapolation of such findings, the research team — headed by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences — estimates that glass beads in lunar soil may contain up to 270 trillion kilograms (595 trillion pounds, or 71 trillion gallons) of water.

“We propose that impact glass beads in lunar soils are a prime water reservoir candidate able to drive the lunar surface water cycle,” the researchers report in Nature Geoscience.

March 14, 2023March 14, 2023 by Alan Boyle

Pluto Team Updates Science From the Solar System’s Edge

Since its last flyby, of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, the New Horizons mission has been exploring objects in the Kuiper Belt as well as performing heliospheric and astrophysical observations. Courtesy: Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute//Roman Tkachenko

Nearly eight years after its historic Pluto flyby, NASA’s New Horizons probe is getting ready for another round of observations made from the icy edge of the solar system — and this time, its field of view will range from Uranus and Neptune to the cosmic background far beyond our galaxy.

Scientists on the New Horizons team shared their latest discoveries, and provided a preview of what’s ahead, during this week’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

March 13, 2023May 7, 2023 by Alan Boyle

Don’t Panic Over the Risk of an Asteroid Smashup in 2046

NASA visualization of asteroid 2023 DW — A visualization from NASA's "Eyes on Asteroids" app shows asteroid 2023 DW's location in space. (Credit: NASA)

A newly discovered asteroid called 2023 DW has generated quite a buzz over the past week, due to an estimated 1-in-670 chance of impact on Valentine’s Day 2046. But despite a NASA advisory and the resulting scary headlines, there’s no need to put an asteroid doomsday on your day planner for that date.

The risk assessment doesn’t have as much to do with the probabilistic roll of the cosmic dice than it does with the uncertainty that’s associated with a limited set of astronomical observations. If the case of 2023 DW plays out the way all previous asteroid scares have gone over the course of nearly 20 years, further observations will reduce the risk to zero. (Update: After further observations, 2023 DW was removed from the list of potential impacts on March 20.)

The hubbub over a space rock that could be as wide as 165 feet (50 meters) highlights a couple of trends to watch for: We’re likely to get more of these asteroid alerts in the years to come, and NASA is likely to devote more attention to heading off potentially dangerous near-Earth objects, or NEOs.

March 6, 2023March 6, 2023 by Alan Boyle

Want to Soar to the Stratosphere? Japan Joins the Balloon Tourism Race

T-10 Earther capsule for Iwaya Giken's Open Universe balloon venture — A Japanese venture aims to send balloon tourists into the stratosphere in a pressurized capsule. (Credit: Iwaya Giken)

A Japanese company has put out the call for passengers who’d be willing to pay more than $175,000 for an hours-long ride in a balloon-borne capsule that will rise as high as 15 miles (25 kilometers).

Technically, that’s nowhere near the boundary of outer space, but it’s high enough to get an astronaut’s-eye view of the curving Earth beneath a black sky.

“It’s safe, economical and gentle for people,” the CEO of a startup called Iwaya Giken, Keisuke Iwaya, told reporters in Tokyo. “The idea is to make space tourism for everyone.”

Other companies are planning similar stratospheric tourist ventures. But if Iwaya’s venture sticks to its announced timeline and begins flying customers around the end of this year, it would be the first to get to market.

February 20, 2023February 19, 2023 by Alan Boyle

Happy Presidents Day: George Washington’s Hair Set to Go to Deep Space

Illustration: Vulcan Centaur rocket launch — An artist's conception shows a Vulcan Centaur rocket lifting off. (United Launch Alliance Illustration)

If it turns out that a future extraterrestrial invasion force is headed by a clone of George Washington, we’ll have only ourselves to blame.

Admittedly, that would be the unlikeliest outcome of a space shot that aims to send hair samples from America’s first president — and from Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan — into deep space.

The samples, which include bits of DNA, are to be included on Houston-based Celestis’ “Enterprise Flight,” a memorial space mission that will also carry DNA and cremated remains from the late astronaut Philip Chapman, Star Trek celebrities and scores of Celestis clients. The time capsule will be sent into space later this year as a secondary payload aboard United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, and eventually settle into stable orbit around the sun.

February 13, 2023February 13, 2023 by Alan Boyle

Axiom’s U.S.-Saudi Crew Approved for Private Mission to Space Station

Ax-2 crew portraits — The Ax-2 crew includes, from left, Peggy Whitson, John Shoffner, Ali AlQarni and Rayyanah Barnawi. (Axiom Space Photos)

NASA and its international partners have approved the crew lineup for Axiom Space’s second privately funded mission to the International Space Station — a lineup that includes the first Saudi woman cleared to go into orbit.

Two of the former crew members — former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and John Shoffner, a Tennessee business executive, race car driver and aviator — had previously been announced.

They’ll be joined by Ali AlQarni and Rayyannah Barnawi, representing Saudi Arabia’s national astronaut program. Only one other Saudi citizen — Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, who flew on the space shuttle Discovery in 1985 — has ever been in space. The 10-day Axiom Space mission, known as Ax-2, is currently scheduled for this spring.

January 13, 2023January 13, 2023 by Alan Boyle

UFO Update Says Pentagon’s Case Count Is Rising Rapidly

UFO encounter video — Cockpit video shows an anomalous aerial encounter in 2015. Credit: U.S Navy Video

A new report to Congress says the Pentagon’s task force on UFOs — now known as unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs — has processed more reports in the past couple of years than it did in the previous 17 years. But that doesn’t mean we’re in the midst an alien invasion.

The unclassified report was issued this week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, in collaboration with the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO. The office was created by congressional mandate, and this week’s report serves as an update to a preliminary assessment of the Pentagon’s UAP reports issued in 2021.

January 12, 2023January 12, 2023 by Alan Boyle

JWST Pioneer Passes Along Advice for Future Space Telescope Builders

After a quarter-century of development, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is a smashing success. But senior project scientist John Mather, a Nobel-winning physicist who’s played a key role in the $10 billion project since the beginning, still sees some room for improvement.

Mather looked back at what went right during JWST’s creation, as well as what could be done better the next time around, during a lecture delivered today at the American Astronomical Society’s winter meeting in Seattle.