OrbitalHub

NASA dicit:

“One small box of technology is getting NASA one step closer to future exploration missions. The Robotic Refueling Mission 3, or RRM3, will prove technologies to transfer and store common consumables, like spacecraft fuel, in space. NASA has its eyes on human exploration, including venturing forward to the Moon and Mars. First, the agency must develop and perfect the technologies and capabilities needed for these missions. Affixed to the International Space Station, RRM3 will use a suite of three tools and the station’s robotic handyman, Dextre, to transfer and store cryogenic propellant (e.g., liquid methane). These capabilities have applications ranging from in-situ resource utilization to solar electric propulsion to maintaining long-term life support systems.

RRM3 builds on the first two phases of International Space Station technology demonstrations that tested tools, technologies and techniques to refuel and repair satellites in orbit. It is developed and operated by the Satellite Servicing Projects Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, under direction of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.”

Video Credit: NASA Goddard

NASA dicit:

“A new NASA-led study has determined that an increase in snowfall accumulation over Antarctica during the 20th century mitigated sea level rise by 0.4 inches. However, Antarctica’s additional ice mass gained from snowfall only makes up for about a third of its current ice loss. These findings don’t necessarily mean that Antarctica is growing; it’s still losing mass, even with the extra snowfall. However, without these gains, the planet would have experienced even more sea level rise in the 20th century. The polar ice sheets grow via snow accumulation and shrink through melting and the production of icebergs. Presently, both ice sheets are imbalanced –losing more ice annually than they are gaining– and their ice loss is estimated to be currently causing about a half of the observed sea level rise.”

Video Credit: NASA Goddard

NASA dicit:

“Scientists have mapped the environment surrounding a black hole that is 10 times the mass of the Sun using NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) payload aboard the International Space Station. NICER detected X-ray light from a recently discovered black hole, called MAXI J1820+070 (J1820 for short), as it consumed material from a companion star. Waves of X-rays formed “light echoes” that reflected off the swirling gas near the black hole and revealed changes in the environment’s size and shape.

A black hole can siphon gas from a nearby star and into a ring of material called an accretion disk that glows in X-rays. Above this disk is the corona, a region of subatomic particles that glows in higher-energy X-rays.

Astrophysicists want to better understand how the inner edge of the accretion disk and the corona change in size and shape as a black hole accretes material from its companion star. If they can understand how and why these changes occur in stellar-mass black holes over a period of weeks, they could shed light on how supermassive black holes evolve over millions of years and how they affect the galaxies in which they reside.

One method used to chart those changes is called X-ray reverberation mapping, which uses X-ray reflections in much the same way sonar uses sound waves to map undersea terrain. From 10,000 light-years away, the scientists estimated that the corona contracted vertically from roughly 100 to 10 miles — that’s like seeing something the size of a blueberry shrink to something the size of a poppy seed at the distance of Pluto.”

Video Credit: NASA Goddard