Article's subject
He joined the stars..
Article's subject
Exploration of space creates lot of waste : we have to be aware of what could become an important issue in few years.
Listen this !
by Damien Roux
He joined the stars..
Exploration of space creates lot of waste : we have to be aware of what could become an important issue in few years.
Listen this !
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket hasn’t flown space tourists yet, but it has found a business niche with NASA and private science experiments.
West Texas is not quite like the moon. But it can serve as a handy stand-in.
On Tuesday, Blue Origin, the rocket company started by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, launched — and landed — its small New Shepard rocket and capsule for the 13th time as part of tests to verify safety before any passengers climb aboard.
One day, this will be New Shepard’s main business: flying well-to-do people above the 62-mile altitude generally considered the beginning of outer space where they will experience a few minutes of weightlessness as the capsule arcs.
Blue Origin is not a new company — Mr. Bezos founded it in 2000 — but for most of its existence, it operated in secret without generating much revenue. Three years ago, Mr. Bezos said he was selling a billion dollars a year in Amazon stock to finance Blue Origin’s research and development. And he has declared broad ambitions for its business, such as competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and others in the orbital launch business, building a moon lander for NASA astronauts and eventually making it possible for millions of people to live and work in space.
But the cargo of Tuesday’s launch from a test site near Van Horn, Texas, shows that the company is finding a more modest business in the short term: turning the reusable New Shepard rocket and capsule into an effective, and profitable, platform for testing new technologies and performing scientific experiments.
“It was fantastic,” said Erika Wagner, Blue Origin’s payload sales director, who was in West Texas. “We were watching across the valley and watching the rocket climb up.”
Tucked under the collar at the top of the booster on Tuesday’s launch were prototypes of sensors that could help NASA astronauts safely reach the lunar surface in a few years. It is part of NASA’s Tipping Point program, which seeks to push innovative technologies.
“Although not identical to a lunar lander, it is representative in that full-flight profile of approaching at a high rate of speed, and then throttling up an engine and doing a propulsive landing,” said Stefan Bieniawski, who leads the Blue Origin side of the partnership with NASA. “In fact, I think we’re actually at slightly higher speeds than you would be approaching the moon. So it gives a little bit of a stress test for some of these sensors.”
Unlike NASA’s Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972, which visited different parts of the moon, the space agency’s current Artemis program aims to make repeated visits near the lunar South Pole, where eternally shadowed craters contain large amounts of water ice. That will require the ability to land close to the same spot again and again.
To that end, NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., has spent years developing a system that bounces light off the surface to measure altitude and velocity of a descending spacecraft. This technology, lidar, short for light detection and ranging, is similar to radar, but it should be able to provide more precise readings.
He was a scientist who succeeded in seeing the unseeable and hoped to tune in to extraterrestrial life.
Only the hottest stars shine with the searing but invisible blue-beyond-blue light called ultraviolet. When Stuart Bowyer arrived as a rangy and voluble young professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968, no telescopes could see these stars in their glory.
Nor did astronomers, or the rest of humanity, know whether anybody else was Out There — whether the airwaves might be full of alien beeps and crackles from cosmic ham radio operators trying to say “Hi” or to warn with a “Watch out” about those nukes and that rising carbon dioxide.
Dr. Bowyer devoted his career to closing the cognitive gap on both counts.
At Berkeley, he led teams that sent instruments into space on balloons, sounding rockets, the space shuttle and finally his own satellite to reveal more than a thousand stars, galaxies and raging gas clouds illuminating the cosmos in a new color.
On the ground, he also pioneered the search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, if they were there, building Berkeley into a world center in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.
Dr. Bowyer died on Sept. 23 at his home in Orinda, Calif. He was 86. The university said the cause was complications of Covid-19.
His former colleagues described Dr. Bowyer as bigger than life, both in size and in spirit, a brash man you either loved or hated. “He put his whole body and soul into things,” said Dan Werthimer, the Marilyn and Watson Alberts chair and chief scientist at the Berkeley SETI Research Center.
Dr. Werthimer recalled that Dr. Bowyer and his wife, Jane Baker Bowyer, an education professor at nearby Mills College, had cultivated a Japanese garden in their backyard, “the most serene place you could imagine,” and also attended Burning Man.
Hundreds of thousands of man-made objects are zipping around our planet—from dead satellites to errant nuts and bolts, putting our working satellites at risk.
In 2009, nearly 500 miles above Siberia, two satellites collided at some 22,300 mph, bursting into a cloud of thousands of pieces of debris. The culprits of this high-speed accident were the inactive Russian satellite Cosmos 2251 and the active U.S.-based communication satellite Iridium 33. Their catastrophic end was the first known time that two satellites collided in space, and a startling reminder of the growing problem of space junk.
More than 23,000 known man-made fragments larger than about 4 inches, which is a little wider than two golf balls across, zip around our planet. But those are just the pieces large enough to track. An estimated 500,000 pieces between 0.4 inches and 4 inches across join those larger fragments.
Most of that debris sits within 1,250 miles of Earth's surface in what is known as low Earth orbit, home to lots of satellites, such as NASA’s Earth Observing System fleet and the International Space Station. And while space is big—so even 23,000 fragments tend to be far from each other—even the tiniest bits of man-made flotsam can be problematic for active earth orbiters because of their breakneck speeds.
Space junk can impact other objects at over 22,300 mph, faster than a speeding bullet. Collisions with those tiny pieces often leave pits and dings in the many satellites, telescopes, and other objects orbiting our planet. In 2006, for example, a tiny piece of space junk collided with the International Space Station, taking a chip out of the heavily reinforced window.
What is all this trash?
Space junk has been amassing since the first human-made satellite, Sputnik 1, escaped Earth's gravitational pull on October 4, 1957. The momentous event heralded the start of the Space Age as humans began to explore ever further away from our home world, a feat that has been repeated in more than 4,700 launches around the globe. But that also means we've left our mark on space in the form of trash. The junk includes the stages from rockets that jettison satellites into orbit and the satellites themselves once they die. But it also includes smaller bits and pieces lost to space including paint chips that flake away from the outsides of devices, nuts and bolts, garbage bags, a lens cap, screwdriver, and even a spatula.
But the number has increased sharply in recent decades thanks to both the 2009 satellite collision and China's 2007 destruction of the Fengyun-1C weather satellite during an anti-satellite missile test. On March 27, 2019, India announced it also successfully completed an anti-satellite missile test, creating a new cloud of at least 400 pieces of debris, which increased the risk of impacts to the ISS by an estimated 44 percent over a 10-day period. (The ISS can be maneuvered away if it's in danger.)
There are a few positives, however, for that particular cloud of space junk. Unlike China's high-altitude test in 2007, India's missile is thought to have targeted a low-altitude satellite, Microsat-R, which means most of this debris is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere over time. Even so, in a town hall following the event, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called the debris cloud's creation “unacceptable”.