OrbitalHub

NASA dicit:

While NASA is working aggressively to meet our near-term goal of landing the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, our Artemis program also is focused on taking steps that will establish a safe and sustainable lunar exploration architecture. NASA is taking a critical step forward by releasing a solicitation for commercial companies to provide proposals for the collection of space resources.

To meet NASA’s requirements, a company will collect a small amount of Moon “dirt” or rocks from any location on the lunar surface, provide imagery to NASA of the collection and the collected material, along with data that identifies the collection location, and conduct an “in-place” transfer of ownership of the lunar regolith or rocks to NASA. After ownership transfer, the collected material becomes the sole property of NASA for our use.

NASA’s goal is that the retrieval and transfer of ownership will be completed before 2024. The solicitation creates a full and open competition, not limited to U.S. companies, and the agency may make one or more awards. The agency will determine retrieval methods for the transferred lunar regolith at a later date.

Over the next decade, the Artemis program will lay the foundation for a sustained long-term presence on the lunar surface and use the Moon to validate deep space systems and operations before embarking on the much farther voyage to Mars. The ability to conduct in-situ resources utilization (ISRU) will be incredibly important on Mars, which is why we must develop techniques and gain experience with ISRU on the surface of the Moon.

Video credit: NASA/Sonnet Apple

Wikipedia dicit:

Dark matter is hypothesized to be a form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe and about a quarter of its total mass–energy density or about 2.241×10−27 kg/m3. Support for its presence is drawn from a variety of astrophysical observations, including gravitational effects that under current theories of gravity do not make sense, unless more matter is present than can be seen. For this reason, the hypothesis has been created that dark matter exists, is abundant in the universe, and has had a strong influence on its structure and evolution. The name is due to the fact that by all observations, should dark matter exist, it does not appear to interact with the electromagnetic field, which means it does not absorb, reflect or emit electromagnetic radiation, and is therefore difficult to detect.

Primary support for dark matter comes from calculations showing that many galaxies would fly apart, or that they would not have formed or would not move as they do, if they did not contain a large amount of unseen matter. Other lines of evidence include observations in gravitational lensing and in the cosmic microwave background, along with astronomical observations of the observable universe’s current structure, the formation and evolution of galaxies, mass location during galactic collisions, and the motion of galaxies within galaxy clusters. In the standard Lambda-CDM model of cosmology, the total mass–energy of the universe contains 5% ordinary matter and energy, 27% dark matter and 68% of a form of energy known as dark energy. Thus, dark matter constitutes 85% of total mass, while dark energy plus dark matter constitute 95% of total mass–energy content.

Because dark matter has not yet been observed directly, if it exists, it must barely interact with ordinary baryonic matter and radiation, except through gravity. Most dark matter is thought to be non-baryonic in nature; it may be composed of some as-yet undiscovered subatomic particles. The primary candidate for dark matter is some new kind of elementary particle that has not yet been discovered, in particular, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). Many experiments to directly detect and study dark matter particles are being actively undertaken, but none have yet succeeded. Dark matter is classified as “cold”, “warm”, or “hot” according to its velocity (more precisely, its free streaming length). Current models favor a cold dark matter scenario, in which structures emerge by gradual accumulation of particles.

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Paul Morris (USRA): Lead Producer/Cassandra Morris: Voice over Talent/Visualizations and Additional Footage: ESA/Hubble — Gravitational Lensing Animation/ESA/Hubble — Gravitational Lensing Simplified Visualization/R. Wesson/ESO — Very Large Telescope Footage

NASA dicit:

In pursuit of understanding why the Sun’s atmosphere is so much hotter than the surface, and to help differentiate between a host of theories about what causes this heating, researchers turn to NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission. IRIS was finely tuned with a high-resolution imager to zoom in on specific hard-to-see events on the Sun.

A paper published in Nature on September 21, 2020, reports on the first ever clear images of nanojets — bright, thin lights that travel perpendicular to magnetic structures in the solar atmosphere called the corona — in a process that reveals the existence of one of the potential coronal heating candidates: nanoflares.

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio/Scientist: Patrick Antolin (Northumbria University)/Data Visualizer: Tom Bridgman (GST)/Producer: Joy Ng (USRA)/Writer: Susannah Darling (ADNET)

NASA dicit:

A cold and stable Antarctic vortex supported the development of the 12th-largest ozone hole on record in 2020. The hole reached its peak extent on September 20 at 24.8 million square kilometers.

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio/Kathleen Gaeta (GSFC Interns): Lead Producer/Eric Nash (SSAI): Visualizer/Kathryn Mersmann (USRA): Graphics/Paul Newman (NASA/GSFC): Scientist/Susan Strahan (USRA): Scientist

NASA dicit:

Cameras outside the International Space Station captured dramatic views of Hurricane Zeta at 12:50 p.m. Eastern time Wednesday October 28, 2020 as the storm churned 200 miles south-southwest of New Orleans packing winds of 90 miles an hour.

Zeta is expected to make landfall near New Orleans later in the day Wednesday October 28 as a Category 2 hurricane before accelerating to the northeast.

Video credit: NASA

SpaceX dicit:

On Saturday, October 24, 2020, SpaceX completed its 100th successful flight since Falcon 1 first flew to orbit in 2008. Over the course of these flights, SpaceX landed Falcon’s first stage booster 63 times and re-flew boosters 45 times.

Video credit: SpaceX