Matt Williams, Author at Universe Today

August 6, 2020August 6, 2020 by Matt Williams

NASA Astronauts are Back on Earth After a Successful Crew Dragon Splashdown

NASA astronauts Robert Behnken, left, and Douglas Hurley are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft onboard the SpaceX GO Navigator recovery ship shortly after having landed in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, Sunday, Aug. 2, 2020. The Demo-2 test flight for NASA's Commercial Crew Program was the first to deliver astronauts to the International Space Station and return them safely to Earth onboard a commercially built and operated spacecraft. Behnken and Hurley returned after spending 64 days in space. Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls

On Sunday, August 2nd, astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley splashed down with their Crew Dragon spacecraft (Endeavour) in the Gulf of Mexico. This brought their historic mission (Demo-2) to a close and marked the beginning of a new era in space exploration. For the first time in almost ten years, astronauts bound for the ISS had been launched from American soil – effectively restoring domestic launch capability to the US.

August 5, 2020August 5, 2020 by Matt Williams

Finally! SpaceX Starship Prototype SN5 Flies Just Over 150 Meters Into the Air

Yesterday (on Tuesday, August 4th), ground crews at the SpaceX launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas, accomplished a major milestone. After 11 months of prototyping, testing, and more than a few explosions, the fifth Starship prototype (SN5) successfully completed a 150 meter (~500 ft) hop test and landed safely again. This latest test puts SpaceX on track towards full-scale orbital testing of their future launch vehicle.

August 4, 2020August 4, 2020 by Matt Williams

Some Stars Could Support as Many as 7 Habitable Planets

Most exoplanets orbit red dwarf stars because they're the most plentiful stars. This is an artist's illustration of what the TRAPPIST-1 system might look like from a vantage point near planet TRAPPIST-1f (at right). Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In recent decades, over 4,000 extrasolar planets have been confirmed beyond our Solar System. With so many planets available for study, astronomers have learned a great deal about the types of planets that exist out there and what kind of conditions are prevalent. For instance, they have been able to get a better idea of just how common habitable planets are (at least by our standards).

As it turns out, a surprisingly high number of planets out there could support life. That is the conclusion reached by a team of astronomers and planetary scientists who conducted a study of the possible sizes of habitable zones (HZ) based on stellar classification. After considering many planets could stably orbit within them, they came to the conclusion that stars with no Jupiter-sized gas giants can have as many as seven habitable planets!

August 3, 2020August 3, 2020 by Matt Williams

Perseverance Went Into Safe Mode Shortly After Launch, But it’s Fine

Artist's impression of the Perseverance rover on Mars. Credit: NASA-JPL

On Thursday, July 30th, NASA launched the most sophisticated Mars rover ever built atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.This mission includes the Perseverance rover (Curiosity‘s sister vehicle) and the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, both of which are being flown on a seven-month journey by the Mars 2020 spacecraft.

In a minor hiccup, the Mars 2020 spacecraft entered safe mode a few hours after launch, apparently due to a temperature anomaly. This was the conclusion reached by mission controllers after receiving telemetry data on the spacecraft via the NASA Deep Space Network. Luckily, the spacecraft is working nominally and is on its way toward Mars to join in the search for evidence of past (and present) life!

August 3, 2020August 3, 2020 by Matt Williams

SpaceX Just Completed a Static Fire of Starship Prototype SN5. Next Comes the Hop

It’s been a busy week for SpaceX! Yesterday (Sunday, Aug. 2nd), astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley returned from the International Space Station (ISS) aboard the same Crew Dragon spacecraft that had carried them to space two months before. With their safe return, the first crewed mission to launch from US soil in almost a decade (Demo-2) was complete, signaling that NASA has restored domestic launch capability to the US.

In all the hubbub, another major SpaceX accomplishment went largely unnoticed. This was the successful completion of a full-duration static fire test by the SN5 Starship prototype, which took place at the company’s South Texas Launch Facility near Boca Chica on Thursday, July 30th. With this milestone reached, SpaceX is moving ahead with the next major test of the SN5, the long-awaited 150 meter (~500 foot) hop test!

August 1, 2020August 1, 2020 by Matt Williams

Juno Captures Pictures of Ganymede for the First Time

On July 5, 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft arrived around Jupiter, becoming the second mission in history to study the gas giant from orbit – the last being the Galileo spacecraft, which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. Since then, the spacecraft has gathered data on Jupiter’s atmosphere, composition, gravity field, and magnetic field in the hopes of learning more about how the planet formed and evolved.

In addition, the spacecraft has gathered some of the most breathtaking images ever taken of Jupiter and its system of moons. In fact, as the spacecraft was making another approach towards Jupiter on December 26th, 2019, it managed to capture the first infrared images of the moon Ganymede’s northern polar region. These images will inform future missions to this satellite, which could host life beneath its icy mantle.

July 31, 2020July 31, 2020 by Matt Williams

There are Natural Starshades Out There, Which Would Help Astronomers Image Exoplanets

TOI 1338 b is a circumbinary planet orbiting its two stars. It was discovered by TESS. Image Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith

In the past few decades, the study of extrasolar planets has grown by leaps and bounds, with the confirmation of over 4000 exoplanets. With so many planets available for study, the focus of exoplanet-researchers is shifting from discovery to characterization. In the coming years, new technologies and next-generation telescopes will also enable Direct Imaging studies, which will vastly improve our understanding of exoplanet atmospheres.

To facilitate this process, astronomers will rely on costly technologies like coronagraphs and starshades, which block out the light of a star so any planets orbiting it will become more visible. However, according to a new study by an international team of astronomers and cosmologists, eclipsing binary stars could provide all the shading that’s needed to directly image planets orbiting them.

July 29, 2020February 7, 2022 by Matt Williams

Beyond “Fermi’s Paradox” IV: What is the Rare Earth Hypothesis?

Welcome back to our Fermi Paradox series, where we take a look at possible resolutions to Enrico Fermi’s famous question, “Where Is Everybody?” Today, we examine the possibility that planets capable of supporting life are simply too rare.

In 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had worked five years prior as part of the Manhattan Project. According to various accounts, the conversation turned to aliens and the recent spate of UFOs. Into this, Fermi issued a statement that would go down in the annals of history: “Where is everybody?“

This became the basis of the Fermi Paradox, which refers to the high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and the apparent lack of evidence. Seventy years later, we still haven’t answered that question, which has led to many theories as to why the “Great Silence” endures. Today, we address another, which is the possibility that life-bearing planets like Earth are just very rare.

July 27, 2020July 27, 2020 by Matt Williams

According to Globular Clusters, the Universe is 13.35 Billion Years Old

This dazzling image shows the globular cluster Messier 69, or M 69 for short, as viewed through the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Globular clusters are dense collections of old stars. In this picture, foreground stars look big and golden when set against the backdrop of the thousands of white, silvery stars that make up M 69. Another aspect of M 69 lends itself to the bejewelled metaphor: As globular clusters go, M 69 is one of the most metal-rich on record. In astronomy, the term “metal” has a specialised meaning: it refers to any element heavier than the two most common elements in our Universe, hydrogen and helium. The nuclear fusion that powers stars created all of the metallic elements in nature, from the calcium in our bones to the carbon in diamonds. Successive generations of stars have built up the metallic abundances we see today. Because the stars in globular clusters are ancient, their metallic abundances are much lower than more recently formed stars, such as the Sun. Studying the makeup of stars in globular clusters like M 69 has helped astronomers trace back the evolution of the cosmos. M 69 is located 29 700 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius (the Archer). The famed French comet hunter Charles Messier added M 69 to his catalogue in 1780. It is also known as NGC 6637. The image is a combination of exposures taken in visible and near-infrared light by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, and covers a field of view of approximately 3.4 by 3.4 arcminutes.

It is a widely-accepted theory today that when the first stars formed in our Universe (ca. over 13 billion years ago), they quickly came together to form globular clusters. These clusters then coalesced to others to form the first galaxies, which have been growing through mergers and evolving ever since. For this reason, astronomers have long-suspected that the oldest stars in the Universe are to be found in globular clusters.

The study of stars in these clusters is therefore a means of determining the age of the Universe, which is still subject to some guesswork. In this vein, an international team of astronomers and cosmologists recently conducted a study of globular clusters in order to infer the age of the Universe. Their results indicate that the Universe is about 13.35 billion years old, a result that could help astronomers learn more about the expansion of the cosmos.

July 27, 2020July 27, 2020 by Matt Williams

Astronauts Come Back to Earth on August 2nd, Completing the Full Crew Dragon Test

On Monday, March 30, 2020 at a SpaceX processing facility on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, SpaceX successfully completed a fully integrated test of critical crew flight hardware ahead of Crew Dragon’s second demonstration mission to the International Space Station for NASA's Commercial Crew Program; the first flight test with astronauts onboard the spacecraft. NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley participated in the test, which included flight suit leak checks, spacecraft sound verification, display panel and cargo bin inspections, seat hardware rotations, and more.

On May 30th, SpaceX and NASA made history when a Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying two astronauts (Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley) launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket and rendezvoused with the International Space Station (ISS). With this one flight, NASA and SpaceX demonstrated that the US once again has domestic launch capability, something they have not enjoyed since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011.

In one week, Sunday, August 2nd, Robert and Douglas will be returning to Earth using the same Crew Dragon spacecraft (named Endeavour) that took them to the ISS. This is the most crucial part of Demo-2 flight, where the spacecraft is tasked with bringing the astronauts home, safe and sound. As you can imagine, there are a lot of people who are understandably nervous, not the least of which is SpaceX founder Elon Musk.