September 10, 2023

SafetyIQ and Vaya Space Announce Partnership to Set New Benchmarks in Space Safety (Source; Aerospace Industry News)
In a move that promises to redefine the aerospace industry’s approach to safety, SafetyIQ and Vaya Space have announced a groundbreaking long-term partnership. The collaboration aims to bring a new level of predictability to space safety, leveraging advanced software solutions and data analytics. Both companies are eagerly looking forward to their first major milestone: Vaya Space’s inaugural launch, scheduled for 2025. (9/6)

Asteroid Hit by NASA's DART Spacecraft is Behaving Unexpectedly (Source: ExtremeTech)
NASA’s attempt to adjust the speed of an asteroid’s orbit has had some unintended consequences. Just under a year ago, the agency intentionally crashed DART—its Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft—into Dimorphos, an asteroid roughly 6.8 million miles away from Earth. The operation was successful but led to something baffling: Instead of maintaining a steady orbit, Dimorphos’ course around its parent asteroid has been shrinking.  

According to a high school teacher and his students, DART’s impact had even more downstream effects than NASA could have predicted. Jonathan Swift, who teaches at California’s Thatcher School, helped his students use the campus observatory to track DART’s results. Together, they found that Dimorphos’ orbit was shrinking: A month after DART’s collision with the asteroid, Dimorphos was circling Didymos two minutes faster than it did immediately after impact. (9/8)

New Mosaic of Mars Could Enable Humans to Settle on Another World (Source: CNN)
It’s a good idea to check the map and weather forecast of your destination before any long trip — especially if it’s another planet. This map of Mars, created by researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi, uses color photographs of the entire planet. That’s what researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi are aiming to do with the Mars Atlas. The project combined thousands of images taken by the United Arab Emirates’ Hope probe to create a detailed color mosaic of the entire planet. The spacecraft has been orbiting the red planet since 2021. The Mars Atlas could be used to identify weather patterns, resources and safe landing sites for future explorers. Click here. (9/9)

Chinas Secret Force Gun Can Move Things, Manipulate Satellites — Should US Be Worried? (Source: The News)
A new type of coaxial cannon that can produce magnetised plasma rings to move objects at a distance without physical touch has reportedly been invented by Chinese scientists. A gadget that employs plasma rings to move items at a distance is being developed by Chinese scientists. The team behind the programme is optimistic that the gadget will, in theory, function for contactless satellite retrieval, delivery, or space object deflection, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

The gadget, if proved successful, might be revolutionary for many industries. It is comparable to the "Jedi" skills of "Force Push" and "Force Pull" in the science fiction series "Star Wars" (though it may be closer in idea to a real "tractor beam"). But unlike the fiction of "Star Wars," the study team thinks that harnessing magnetic fields would allow for the remote manipulation of items as a form of telekinesis. (9/8)

Crashed Lunar Lander Might Have Brought a Colony of Microscopic "Water Bears" to the Moon (Source: My Modern Met)
In 2019, the Israel Aerospace Industries sent the Beresheet probe to the Moon, which carried thousands of tardigrades. The Beresheet crashed into the surface, but scientists have been wondering if these “water bears” might have survived. The tardigrades were part of a “lunar library,” a DVD-sized object made of thin sheets of nickel created by the Arch Mission Foundation. It contained “a backup of planet Earth”—including DNA samples, all of the English Wikipedia, and a linguistic key to 5,000 languages. (9/9)

Was Our Universe Created by a Black Hole in Another Universe? (Source: Popular Mechanics)
It’s perfectly possible that black hole singularities are not the ends of the story–that they’re not mere ultra-compressed lumps of matter. At incredibly tiny scales, physics can get truly weird, and remarkably unfamiliar. The enormous strength of gravity coupled with the exotic workings of quantum mechanics can lead to massive instabilities in the structure of spacetime itself.

These massive instabilities might grow, leading to the formation of branched-off “bubbles” that are completely isolated from the universe hosting the original black hole. These bubbles would have their own Big Bangs, their own expansions, their own everything totally separate from anything else. They would be their own universes, split off from the parent universe that spawned them. (9/8)

NASA May Have Unknowingly Found and Killed Alien Life on Mars 50 Years Ago, Scientist Claims (Source: Space.com)
NASA may have inadvertently discovered life on Mars almost 50 years ago and then accidentally killed it before realizing what it was. But other experts are split on whether the new claims are a far-fetched fantasy or an intriguing possible explanation for some puzzling past experiments. After landing on the Red Planet in 1976, NASA's Viking landers may have sampled tiny, dry-resistant life-forms hiding inside Martian rocks, said astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch.

If these extreme life-forms did and continue to exist, the experiments carried out by the landers may have killed them before they were identified, because the tests would have "overwhelmed these potential microbes," Schulze-Makuch wrote. (9/9)

ULA Atlas V Launches National Security Mission at Cape Canaveral Spaceport (Source: Florida Today)
The most powerful verison of United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket leapt off its Cape Canaveral pad Sunday morning, for a national security mission for the U.S. Space Force and National Reconnaissance Office. The 196-foot rocket took to the skies at 8:47 a.m. EDT on Sunday with the SILENTBARKER/NROL-107 payloads destined for geosynchronous orbit. The flight came after teams were forced to stand down last month to roll the rocket back to ULA's vertical integration facility for protection from Hurricane Idalia. (9/10)