Tag: space.com

David Scott flew in space three times, including one mission to the moon. He survived a harrowing spin aboard Gemini 8, piloted the command module on Apollo 9 for the first docking of the command module and the lunar module, and later drove the lunar rover for the first time on the moon’s surface during the Apollo 15 mission.

Scott’s skills as a pilot and scientist ranked high at NASA, earning him accolades to this day. After Apollo 15, he remained with NASA to play an important role in co-operating with the Russians as the Cold War cooled.

Facing fear

Scott’s career started in the Air Force, for which he did a tour of duty in the Netherlands. He also studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His selection by NASA in 1963 was in part a process to weed out those candidates who were unduly fearful, he said in an interview.

“It’s like a good New York Giants football team, right? They all depend on everybody else and they know the plays. There is no fear involved, but there is concern about how things are going to come out — and how you take care of problems,” Scott said in an Ask Men interview decades later.

Scott’s reaction to fear was well-tested during Gemini 8. The spacecraft’s thruster got stuck open, whipping the spacecraft around at a dizzying and dangerous rate. Scott’s crewmate and commander, Neil Armstrong, had to turn on the re-entry thrusters to get the spacecraft under control.

That ended Gemini 8 early, but it marked both astronauts as worthy people to be assigned to future flights. Scott flew again on Apollo 9, which featured the first docking between the command module (with Scott at the controls) and the lunar module.

Apollo 15

Scott’s last flight, Apollo 15, was one in which he vowed to put science first. The astronauts would have three spacewalks on the moon’s surface, and he wanted to make the most of that time. Scott and his crew — Al Worden and Jim Irwin — did hundreds of hours of geology training in preparation for their mission.

The commander’s first major act after landing was to do a site survey, in the tradition of geologists everywhere. Scott popped his head through the top of Falcon, the lunar module, to do a panoramic site survey and to describe the scene to a geology team assembled in Houston.

Scott and Irwin kept busy during their time on the surface. They tested out the lunar rover for the first time, driving it 17.5 miles (28 kilometers). This allowed them to do geology farther afield than previous missions.

The crew ended up finding one of the most famous rocks of the Apollo program — the Genesis Rock. About 4.5 billion years old, the rock came from about the time the moon was beginning to coalesce. In 2013, traces of chemical water were found in that rock, hinting that the moon’s crust may have been much wetter than believed.

Astronaut James B. Irwin, lunar module pilot, works at the Lunar Roving Vehicle during the first Apollo 15 lunar surface extravehicular activity at the Hadley-Apennine landing site.

Credit: NASA/David R. Scott

The stamp affair

After Apollo 15’s successful return, NASA opened an investigation into the conduct of its crew as well as that of several other astronauts. The issue was the crew’s decision to fly 398 unauthorized first-stamp covers to the moon on behalf of a private collector, as well as timepieces.

“It is the contention of the astronauts that there was to be no commercialization or advertising of these covers, and that nothing would be done with them until after completion of the Apollo program,” NASA wrote in a 1972 press release concerning the incident.

The astronauts, stated NASA, initially agreed to receive savings accounts, but later rejected the idea. Scott also flew two timepieces without authorization for a company that wanted to test them in space.

Scott and his crew were formally reprimanded for their actions, and several other astronauts were also revealed to be caught up in the stamp affair and punished. “Years later, Scott would blame his bad judgment on the pressures of getting ready for a lunar landing mission,” wrote Andrew Chaikin in his 1994 book “A Man on the Moon,” which chronicled the Apollo program.

“We made a few more changes for future flights,” wrote Chris Kraft, a past NASA manager and flight director, in his memoir “Flight: My Life in Mission Control.” “Everything in an astronaut’s personal pack had to be listed, sealed, then signed off … finally I insisted that each astronaut sign an agreement: They could give away items from those personal packs, but they couldn’t sell them.”

Scott did not fly again, but he remained in NASA for six years in management positions. He was special assistant for mission operations for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which brought American and Russian vehicles together in space for the first time. Later, Scott took on several private industry positions and served as an adviser for the movie “Apollo 13.”

In 2004, he and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov co-authored “Two Sides Of The Moon,” a look at the space race from both sides of the Cold War.

Additional resources

Haumea is a dwarf planet that orbits the sun far beyond Neptune. It is about the same size as Pluto and has two moons. One of its notable characteristics is how fast it spins on its axis. 

Discovery

Just after Christmas of 2004, a team from the Palomar Observatory, led by Mike Brown, discovered a tiny, Pluto-size body in images taken the previous spring. The astronomers nicknamed the rock “Santa.”

About the same time that Brown’s team published their information online, a group of astronomers from the Sierra Nevada Observatory, led by José Luis Ortiz Moreno, announced their discovery of the body in images taken in March of 2003.

Originally designated as 2003 EL61, the object was classified as a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) until the International Astronomical Union reclassified it as the fifth dwarf planet in the solar system, following Ceres, Pluto, Eris and Makemake. (Updated estimates in 2017 put the “dwarf planet” status in doubt, however.)

The object was renamed after the Hawaiian goddess of childbirth and fertility. Its two moons were named for daughters of the goddess, Hi’iaka and Namaka, who were said to have been born from the body of Haumea.

Haumea’s characteristics

Haumea takes 285 Earth-years to orbit the sun. At its closest, it only comes within 34 times the Earth-sun distance, while at its farthest, it lies more than 51 times as far away. These distances, combined with Haumea’s tiny size, would generally make it difficult for scientists to accurately determine its mass and density. However, in 2005, the first of two moons was found orbiting the body, enabling scientists to determine the mass of the bodies.

Haumea spins on its axis once every four hours, the fastest spin of any known large object in the solar system.

Haumea’s rapid spin keeps it from attaining a spheroid shape, instead causing it to look more like a slightly flattened football spinning end over end, as though it had been kicked. Haumea is 1,430 miles (2,300 kilometers) across at its longest axis, but less than half as wide — 619 miles (996 km) — at its shortest. Updated estimates of its mass and shape in 2017 showed that Haumea’s density is likely similar to Pluto and that its shape may be too elongated to let it qualify as a dwarf planet after all.

The rapid spin allowed scientists to calculate its density, because different materials would stretch out differently. As a result, scientists think that Haumea is made up almost entirely of rock.

Observations of Haumea, however, reveal a brightly gleaming surface. Scientists have concluded that, though most of Haumea’s interior is rocky, it is covered by a thin icy shell.

Haumea also appears to have a dark red spot on its surface that may contain more minerals and organic compounds than the ice around it. In 2017, astronomers also discovered a ring systemaround Haumea, which was discovered when it passed in front of the star URAT1 533-182543 on Jan. 21, 2017. The starlight also helped astronomers more accurately measure Haumea’s longest axis, finding it to be roughly 17 percent larger than previous estimates.

The moons of Haumea

The two moons of Haumea were discovered after observations at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii in 2005. They are far smaller than Haumea. The largest, Hi’iaka, is only about 1 percent as massive as Haumea, while the smaller, fainter Namaka weighs only about a tenth as much. 

Hi’iaka takes 49 days to travel around Haumea in a nearly circular orbit. The inner satellite, Namaka, takes 18 days to travel around its parent body in an elliptical orbit. Both moons are thought to be composed of almost pure water-ice, which may have originally come from Haumea itself.

Although roughly a tenth of all known Kuiper Belt objects have a satellite, very few of them have multiples, making Haumea somewhat unusual.

A violent formation

Astronomers think that, in the early solar system, Haumea was much like Pluto, composed half of rock and half of water. Billions of years ago, a large object may have collided with the body, knocking most of the surface ice away and imparting a rapid spin to Haumea. The spin, in turn, elongated Haumea into its unusual shape.

The moons of Haumea may have once been part of its surface, forming much like Earth’s moon did after a collision.

The discovery of small, icy debris in orbits similar to Haumea’s seemed to further substantiate the idea of an ancient collision.

A rapidly changing field

Haumea’s status as an object in the Kuiper Belt puts it at the frontiers of science. Small objects such as Haumea have only been studied extensively since the early 2000s, as search techniques improved to look for dwarf planets and Kuiper Belt Objects. Science also took a leap forward in 2015, when the New Horizons probe flew by Pluto and got a close-up look of the dwarf planet. 

That flyby showed that many of our assumptions about dwarf planets need some examining. For example, Pluto’s terrain showed mountains and extensive evidence of liquid flow in its ancient past, meaning that Pluto had active geology — a surprise to astronomers. New Horizons will fly by the KBO 2014 MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019, providing more information about these distant objects.

Meanwhile, astronomers continue studying other dwarf planets and KBOs for more information about their formation histories. A NASA web page about dwarf planets has several general insights about these bodies, based on years of research. For example, most dwarf planets are smaller than our moon and, except for Haumea, no dwarf planet is known to have rings. 

Days on dwarf planets vary, as do the number of moons. For example, Ceres, the largest dwarf planet, has none. A moon was discovered around Makemake in 2016. “Snow White” — the temporary name for the large dwarf planet 2007 OR10 — also has a moon, astronomers announced in 2016. 

LOS ANGELES — A new season of the science TV series “Cosmos” is set to premiere in the spring of 2019, penned by one of the show’s original creators, Ann Druyan. Earlier this month, Druyan talked with reporters about what fans can expect from the new series, and discussed the role of science in the modern world.

Druyan, a long-time science communicator, co-wrote the original 1980 TV series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” together with her late husband, astronomer Carl Sagan (who also hosted the series), and astrophysicist Steven Soter. Druyan and Soter reunited to write the 2014 follow-on series, “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” for which they shared an Emmy Award for writing. Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson will return as host for the new series, titled “Cosmos: Possible Worlds.” 

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of Druyan’s interview with a small group of reporters on Jan. 13 at a press event hosted by National Geographic in Los Angeles.  

What can viewers expect from the new season of “Cosmos”?

Ann Druyan: We have some new, recurring set pieces. You may recall from the previous season we had the Halls of Extinction, the Cosmic Calendar and the Ship of the Imagination. They will be back. But we also have a Palace of Life, which we’re very excited about. It’s kind of the opposite of the Halls of Extinction. [For the latter,] the idea was, these are the halls of the broken branches of the tree of life. This Palace of Life is the ever-branching beauty of life and the glory of it.

Ann Druyan at the 74th Annual Peabody Awards Ceremony on May 31, 2015 in New York City.

Credit: Mike Coppola/Getty

Another thing we’re doing is that “Cosmos” has a view of the future which I believe has the power to inspire. So much of what we see, and so much of what our kids and grandchildren see, is so dystopic and despairing. It’s like … our punishment for all our sins is just around the corner, and humanity doesn’t have a future, except the one that’s choking and dying. And in “Cosmos” we imagine the future that we can still have.

In one of the episodes, we go to other worlds, because this is the golden age of discovery of other worlds. As dismal and hopeless as things may seem to all of us, there is something extraordinary happening, which is that in only the last 10 years we’ve discovered thousands of new planets around other [stars]. We’re now developing new strategies to be able to assess whether or not life is present on these worlds at the interstellar distances that are involved. It’s really remarkable, and yet, our kids don’t feel that, I don’t think. And I think it’s wrong to expect them to do the hard work that it takes to know a complicated subject deeply if we don’t give them a reason [to do that], to become a mathematician, a scientist, an engineer, a technician. 

And that’s one of the reasons why I’m particularly excited about the new stories [in the upcoming season]. They are new in the sense that they have truly never been told before. I can say this with such authority because I’ve talked to some of the great historians of science who had never even heard of these people. And yet, in each case, they were willing to give it all — to die even — in the service of science, of just adding another brick in the wall of our understanding of the universe. And so, we hope to tell those stories to inspire a whole new generation of kids to want to do those things.

Who are some of these scientists whose stories you’ll be telling?

I kind of want to keep those close to the vest, because in my research, I was really surprised to discover some of these people. 

One of them is someone who [I discovered] just after Carl [Sagan] died. I was kind of really depressed and heartbroken, and I was going through our library and I found this very thin volume, which was about the life of a [particular] scientist. [Carl and I] had worked together on all these books and shows and everything — we were together 24/7, but he and I had never discussed this one little book. But I found his notes in the margin, in his tiny Brooklyn-public-schools scrawl. And I realized that if I ever got the chance, I was going to tell the story of this person and their colleagues, who were heroic on a scale that I don’t even understand. And so, I’m really thrilled that we’re going to be doing that this season. I can’t wait to tell the world this story. Because to me, it’s the opposite of the nightmare that we’re living right now. It’s the polar opposite. It’s a world in which it matters so much what’s true. And human dignity matters so much that you’re willing to stand up to one of the scariest and most heartless people who ever lived. That’s the seed at the heart of “Cosmos.” 

Ann Druyan with her late husband, astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan, in 1984.

Credit: Mickey Adair/Getty

The previous season of “Cosmos” premiered in 2014; why such a long delay between seasons? 

It takes that long for me to figure out what stories I want to tell. Because you have to really educate yourself, or I do, because my ignorance is vast. And because I am looking for stories that are [about] lives that are motivated by an idea in science that turns out to be valid and changes the world for all of us even though we don’t know it. So that’s kind of the criteria. It can’t just be “So-and-so did this really good scientific thing.” It has to also be her life story. We’re a story-driven species. We need to know these stories to understand the meaning of the work. And I think one of the great tragedies of my own education … was that the science was denuded of all the passion and the feeling. Now, obviously, when you’re doing the science you have to be dispassionate, but once you’ve figured something out, that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t really feel [the passion that went into the discovery]. And I think that’s the reason “Cosmos” remains so special to people. I think it works on many different levels, and it’s not afraid of the visual beauty and the feeling. But I don’t think we ever cut corners on the rigors of the science and the data. We try not to. We never do that knowingly. 

Cosmos is a show largely about astronomy and astrophysics, which are both fields constantly being updated with new discoveries. And yet, the show has always had a timeless quality about it; we can still watch the original 1980 series today. Are you taking that approach in the new season, or will we see some of the cutting-edge discoveries that have come about in recent years? 

You’re absolutely right — that was Carl’s original idea. He didn’t want the flavor of the month. He wanted [to include] the stuff that was still going to be true 10 years from now. We’re not a science magazine show. 

What we’re more interested in is creating a kind of global scientific literacy. Because we really believe that science is a birthright that belongs to every one of us. And the degree to which we’re excluded from science is the degree to which we are powerless. We can’t be informed decision-makers. 

But in the new season, we do feature some of the most astonishing findings of the last few years. Some of the great leaps forward in science that we can’t ignore and we know have been borne out on many independent lines of confirmation. So, yeah, we’re not afraid of some of the cutting-edge aspects of science, but it has to be … not arcane. 

What is your target age group for “Cosmos”? 

When I first started pitching the second season and it went to all the networks, I said, “We’re going to bring back the family hour on network television. People are going to watch this with their kids, with their spouses, with everybody.” And that was the enormous gratification of the Twitter feed when [“Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”] premiered — people were tweeting, “I can’t believe I’m in the same room with my whole family and we’re watching ‘Cosmos!’” And that’s our idea. We feel that it has to work on so many different levels in order to succeed. Like any work of art, it can’t just be for one group or one moment. 

What’s your general approach to the current distrust of science, and is that something you incorporate into the show? 

We deal with this much more directly in the new season. I think [distrust of science] is a completely legitimate point of view, because science has been misused. It will always be misused, because humans are using it. Think of how religion has been misused, how politics have been misused, manufacturing, medicine — every human undertaking has been and will be misused because that’s who we are. 

But my theory is that … the more people [there are] who are comfortable with the ethos, the language and the methodology of science, then the less likely [it is that misuse] can happen. It’s our ignorance which puts us more at the mercy of science than anything else. And if we’re supposed to be informed decision-makers about where we allow science to go and where we don’t allow it to go, then we have to understand it. 

In the previous season, there was an episode about Venus being a harbinger of what could happen to the Earth if we don’t address human-induced climate change. Is there any kind of follow-up to that in the new season? 

Oh, yes. I think the most emotional episode will be that one. 

What we did in that [episode about Venus] is that we tried to take every objection to climate change that anyone could have — things like, “Maybe it’s a natural cycle,” “Maybe it’s the sun,” “Maybe it’s this other thing.” We addressed every single objection that we could think of. And so, we made our argument there. 

This new season is a little bit more visionary in terms of our approach to that: what it means to be on the brink of making a mistake with the whole planet. You know, the planet will go on, other species will survive. The tardigrades will be fine. But whenever I think of this, I always think of all the generations of our ancestors who struggled so hard to create the civilization that we live off of now, and the idea that we could render all of that meaningless with our short-term thinking and our selfishness. Its horrifying. So, I’m really hoping that the new episode on that very subject may be a kind of gut punch. 

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Scott Kelly is a former NASA astronaut who is best known for spending nearly a year on the International Space Station and for spending 520 days in space, which puts him on the list of Americans who have spent the most time in space. (The current record-holder is Peggy Whitson, at 665 days.)

He did two long-duration space station missions and two shorter-duration space shuttle missions between 1999 and 2015. Kelly is the twin brother of Mark Kelly, who also was a NASA astronaut.

Kelly’s scientific goal during the one-year mission was to better understand how the human body adapts to lengthy periods in space. Most ISS missions are only five to six months in length. While longer missions of approximately a year (in one case more than 400 days) took place on the Mir space station in the 1990s, modern medicine has made it easier to measure changes in the genes.

Kelly and Russian colleague Mikhail Kornienko both spent 340 consecutive days on the ISS tracking how their bodies changed. Kelly also did a “twin study” with his brother to see if there are any genetic changes from spending long periods of time in space.

Kelly snaps one of the coolest selfies ever taken—himself suited up for a spacewalk.

Credit: Scott Kelly (via Twitter as @StationCDRKelly)

Applying for NASA

Scott was the second of the two brothers to be born, on Feb. 21, 1964. According to the twins in a 2010 NASA interview, their parents didn’t tell them who was the oldest until the boys were in their teens.

“Our parents weren’t — they didn’t want to tell who was older because they thought maybe that person would then have some leverage or something like that,” Kelly said at the time. “So, we didn’t know who was older or who was younger until probably, you know, thirteen to fifteenish.”

The brothers were born and grew up in West Orange, New Jersey, also known as one of the places where Thomas Edison lived. They were close enough to Manhattan to spend the weekend there or head to a museum. In high school, they were co-captains of the swim team and participated in track, baseball and football.

Initially, Mark and Scott took different paths after university. Mark joined the Navy, and received a bachelor’s degree in marine engineering and nautical science from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in 1986. In 1994, he received a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School.

Scott received a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the State University of New York Maritime College in 1987 and a master’s degree in aviation systems from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 1996. He then went to the University of Maryland and considered becoming a doctor. After spending a year there, Scott decided to follow his interest in flying airplanes and switched into the Navy — putting him a year behind Mark. 

The twins, however, ended up in the same test pilot school class. “Most test pilots apply at some point to the astronaut program,” Mark recalled in the same interview, and the twins put in their applications for the 1996 NASA astronaut class. Both were accepted. [Related: Twins in Space: NASA’s Twin Astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly (Photos)]

Spaceflight experience

Scott Kelly made it to orbit very quickly after becoming an astronaut. Only three years later, he was the pilot for STS-103, a shuttle mission that upgraded the Hubble Space Telescope. His crew spent eight days in December 1999 in space (including celebrating Christmas there), where their main duties were to install instruments and upgrade systems on Hubble.

Kelly held many roles in between missions, including director of operations in Star City, Russia, and being a backup for ISS Expedition 5. His next mission, STS-118 on space shuttle Endeavour, was in 2007. This was a construction flight for the International Space Station that added a gyroscope, a truss and a new spare parts platform.

Kelly then switched launch vehicles to a Soyuz for his next flight into space, his first long-duration space station mission. He launched in October 2010 and spent 159 days aboard the ISS, including serving as commander of Expedition 26.

Around this time, NASA and Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, were discussing sending up an astronaut-cosmonaut team to the space station for an entire year. Scientists hailed it as a way to improve the knowledge of the human body in microgravity, especially because NASA is hoping to have a human mission to Mars someday.

Kelly ended up being one of only a few astronauts at NASA who qualified for the mission. This was both because of his experience (he was already a veteran of three spaceflights at this point) and also because his radiation exposure had not yet hit the lifetime limit for NASA astronauts. He later said in interviews that he initially was hesitant to take a year away from home, but as he warmed up to the idea he was happy to go. 

Astronaut Scott Kelly took this image of himself on the ISS on Feb. 11, 2016 and posted on his twitter account. He wrote, “Day 321 of my #YearInSpace, 500 days in space total.”

Credit: Scott Kelly (@StationCDRKelly)

Eventful expeditions

Kelly and Kornienko (along with veteran cosmonaut Gennady Padalka) launched to the ISS on March 27, 2015. The team took a fast track to the ISS that got them there in only a few hours, unlike the past procedure that would take about two days to get to the station.

The early days of Kelly’s mission were a bit more eventful than anyone expected. A series of cargo ships from different companies and countries failed upon launch to the ISS in the space of a few months. In a documentary that ran on PBS in March 2016, one commentator said the astronauts on board came close to rationing food until successful launches resumed.

Kelly, however, remained focused on doing a good job in space. He performed three spacewalks, took charge of a moldy plant experiment and saved the zinnia flowers within it, and served as commander for Expeditions 45 and 46. He also sent regular tweets and social media updates, and held press conferences, to keep the public informed. (In the documentary, he later said he was surprised by the amount of interest the public had in his mission.) [Infographic: How the Epic One-Year Space Station Mission Works]

The veteran astronaut arrived safely on Earth again on March 2, 2016, after 520 days in space (340 of them consecutively on the one-year mission). In a press conference after the long journey from Kazakhstan to the United States, Kelly expressed enthusiasm for going back to space— but as a part of a private spaceflight, as he felt it was time for younger NASA astronauts to get flight assignments. Kelly retired from NASA on April 1, 2016. [Related: Astronaut Scott Kelly is Home, But the Science Continues]

Post-flight activities

Kelly has remained active in spaceflight activities even after retiring from NASA. In fall 2017, his book “Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery” (Viking, 2017) was published. The name appeared to be inspired by Alfred Lansing’s 1959 book “Endurance“, about Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. Kelly brought a copy of Lansing’s book with him to space during his last mission, and left it behind in the space station’s small library when he came back to Earth, he recalled in the biography.

“At some point, somebody said to me that this really was a mission of endurance, not only in space, but from the time I was a kid,” Kelly said in an interview with collectSPACE in October 2017. “It was an example of sticking your nose to the grindstone and just plugging away at it … When I heard that, I thought it was a pretty good idea for a title for the book, especially because of the connection I had with ‘Endurance’ and Shackleton.”

In 2016, Sony Pictures announced it had secured the film rights for “Endurance.” 

PBS and Time did a follow-up documentary on Scott Kelly called “Beyond A Year in Space”, which examined Kelly’s return to Earth and medical testing — as well as the paths of two newer astronauts, Jessica Meir and Victor Glover. 

“Two men with identical genomes, identical careers,” Jeff Kluger, science editor for Time, said in an exclusive clip from the documentary provided to Space.com. “You send one man to space for one year … you track the other man living an earthly life for that same one year, subtract the differences — that’s what space did.”

Kelly frequently comments on spaceflight in the media and is also involved in several charitable endeavors. In late 2017 and early 2018, his Twitter feed included links to an organization helping those hurt by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, as well as research by medical relief organization the Syrian American Medical Society. Kelly will also go to the Arctic in April 2018 with the International Space School Educational Trust, which has astronauts and other space advocates encouraging learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Additional resources

A commercial space company seeking to shine among the satellite launch industry has secretly sent its own “star” into orbit.

Rocket Lab on Wednesday (Jan. 24) revealed to the world that “The Humanity Star” is circling Earth and is expected to become the brightest object in the night sky. Covered in 65 highly-reflective panels, the satellite is rapidly spinning, reflecting the sun’s light back onto the planet, much in the same way that a disco ball casts light onto a dance floor.

From the ground, the geodesic sphere-shaped satellite will appear as a bright, glinting star quickly traversing the night sky. [NASA Put a Big Disco Ball in Space 40 Years Ago, and It’s Still There]

“No matter where you are in the world or what’s happening in your life, everyone will be able to see the Humanity Star in the night sky,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab founder and CEO, in a statement. “Our hope is that all those looking up at it will look past it to the vast expanse of the universe and think a little differently about their lives, actions and what is important for humanity.”

“Humanity Star is a way of looking beyond our immediate situation, whatever that may be, and understanding we are all in this together as one species, responsible collectively for innovating and solving the challenges facing us all,” he said.

Secretly launched on board “Still Testing,” the second test flight of Rocket Lab’s Electron carbon-composite booster, The Humanity Star satellite lifted off on Sunday (Jan. 21) at 2:43 p.m. local time (0143 GMT; 8:43 p.m. EST Jan. 19) from the U.S.-based company’s Launch Complex-1 on the MÄhia Peninsula in New Zealand.

The 55-foot-tall (17-meter) Electron rocket also lofted three commercial nanosatellites: a Dove Pioneer Earth-imaging satellite for Rocket Lab’s launch customer, Planet, and two weather and ship tracking Lemur-2 satellites for Spire. The latter two satellites were subsequently sent into a circular orbit by Rocket Lab’s kick stage, also revealed this week.

“Still Testing,” the second flight of Rocket Lab’s Electron carbon-composite launch vehicle, lifted off from Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand with “The Humanity Star” on Jan. 20, 2018.

Credit: Rocket Lab

The Humanity Star was deployed into orbit 8 minutes and 31 seconds after leaving the Earth. Now circling the planet every 90 minutes, the satellite was designed to serve as a “bright symbol about our fragile place in the universe.”

“We need to make big decisions in the context of humanity as a whole, not in the context of individuals, organizations or even nations,” stated Beck, whose idea it was to launch The Humanity Star satellite. “We must come together as a species to solve the really big issues like climate change and resource shortages.”

Though unique in its symbolic purpose, The Humanity Star is not the first “disco ball” launched into Earth orbit.

The Starshine project comprised three spherical satellites fitted by the United States Naval Research Laboratory with small mirrors polished by students from around the world. The Starshine-1 and -2 satellites were launched on NASA space shuttle missions STS-96 in June 1999 and STS-108 in December 2001, respectively. The 19-inch diameter (48 cm) spheres were each covered in more than 850 mirrors.

Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck stands with his creation, “The Humanity Star,” now shining from Earth orbit.

Credit: Rocket Lab

Starshine-3, which was almost twice the size of the earlier satellites and fitted with 1500 polished mirrors, was lofted into orbit on an Athena I uncrewed rocket from the Kodiak Launch Complex in Alaska in September 2001. It reflected light back at the Earth for two years, completing more than 7,400 revolutions.

Japan also launched a mirror-covered satellite, “Ajisai,” in August 1986, on board the maiden launch of its H-I rocket. The 85-inch (215 cm) experimental geodetic satellite is still in orbit and can be seen with binoculars.

The Humanity Star is expected to be visible for about nine months before its orbit begins to decay and it is destroyed re-entering the atmosphere. Rocket Lab has established a website to track the satellite in real time.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2018 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

Supermassive black holes may provide the key to understanding some of the most energetic particles in the universe. 

A new model suggests that ultra-high-energy cosmic rays accelerated by the jets of enormous black holes may give birth to high-energy neutrinos and high-energy gamma-rays. The model is the first of its kind based on detailed numerical computations and matches up with observations of each particle.

“The new model suggests that very high-energy neutrinos and high-energy gamma rays are naturally produced via particle collisions as daughter particles of cosmic rays, and thus can inherit the comparable energy budget of their parent particles,” Kohta Murase, an assistant professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, said in a statement. Intrigued by the similar power in each of the three particles, Murase and his colleague Ke Fang, a postdoctoral associate in astronomy at the University of Maryland, investigated the particles’ origins and found the black-hole connection. [7 Surprising Universe Facts] 

“[The model] demonstrates that the similar energetics of the three cosmic messengers may not be a mere coincidence,” Murase said.

A cosmic particle mystery

The origins of the universe’s most energetic particles have been a long-standing mystery in astroparticle physics. Each particle is different, which may be why scientists have chased each one individually.

First discovered in 1912, cosmic rays blaze across the universe at the speed of light. Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) are extremely energetic subatomic particles with energies beyond what can be produced by the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider. The most powerful of these particles has the energy equivalent to a baseball thrown at 100 mph (160 km/h), according to Australia’s Swinburne University. These extremely energetic subatomic particles are mostly protons, though some cosmic rays are made up heavier atomic nuclei.

Neutrinos are ghostly particles with minimal mass that usually pass through conventional matter, rarely interacting with it. They formed at the beginning of the universe, and continue to be produced by stars and nuclear reactions on Earth. But their high-energy counterparts are more than a million times more energetic. Both types have been detected at the IceCube neutrino observatory in Antarctica.

Gamma-rays top the charts, with the highest known electromagnetic energy. NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and ground-based observatories have identified high-energy gamma-rays boasting more than a billion times more energy than a photon of visible light.

Previously, scientists had connected the particles in different ways. As cosmic rays interact with matter, they should produce gamma-rays; some have suggested that the same collisions should also produce neutrinos, according to the study.

Fang and Murase were intrigued when they noticed what they called “an intriguing coincidence”. Although the energy levels of the three particles were dramatically different, their energy generation rates were comparable.

“Our model shows a way to understand why these three types of cosmic messenger particles have a surprisingly similar amount of power input in the universe,” Murase said.

The results of their work were published online yesterday (Jan. 22) in the journal Nature Physics.

Are monster black holes the key?

The pair turned their attention to the leading suspects in the mystery of the highest-energy particles, active galactic nuclei (AGN). Most galaxies boast supermassive black holes at their centers. As material flows toward these giant black holes, they create a glowing core. Together, the two make up active galactic nuclei, and their bright glow allows astronomers to study them from across the universe. Some AGN also contain jets created by material diverted from the black hole at near light speed.

“In our model, cosmic rays accelerated by powerful jets of active galactic nuclei escape through the radio lobes that are often found at the end of the jets,” Murase said. [The Strangest Black Holes in the Universe]

Next, the scientists computed how the cosmic rays moved and interacted with magnetic fields as they moved inside galaxy clusters and groups. By simulating how ultra-high-energy cosmic rays evolved as they moved through the universe, the new model explained the spectrum and composition observed so far, including previously unexplained phenomena discovered by ground-based telescopes. At the same time, the model explained the origin of the other two energetic particles, with most of the particles being generated by interactions between the high-energy cosmic rays colliding within the magnetized environment. Some are generated by the UHECRs as they travel through space.

“The very high-energy neutrino spectrum above one hundred million mega-electronvolts can be explained by particle collisions between cosmic rays and the gas in galaxy clusters and groups,” Fang said in the same statement.

“Also, the associated gamma-ray emission coming from the galaxy clusters and intergalactic space matches the unexplained part of the diffuse high-energy gamma-ray background that is not associated with one particular type of active galactic nucleus,” Fang said.

By tying all three particles together, the new model could help scientists better understand why they all produce similar energy leves.

“This model paves a way to further attempts to establish a grand-unified model of how all three of these cosmic messengers are physically connected to each other by the same class of astrophysical sources and the common mechanisms of high-energy neutrino and gamma-ray production,” Murase said. 

Mysteries remain

Other mysteries still need to be explained, such as some of the lower-energy neutrinos spotted by IceCube. That’s why further investigations combining theory with data about all three of the most energetic particles are crucial in testing the model, according to Murase.

“The golden era of multimessenger particle astrophysics started very recently,” Murase said. “Now, all information we can learn from all different types of cosmic messengers is important for revealing new knowledge about the physics of extreme-energy cosmic particles and a deeper understanding about our universe.

“However, there also are other possibilities, and several new mysteries need to be explained, including the neutrino data in the ten-million mega-electronvolt range recorded by the IceCube neutrino observatory in Antarctica,” Murase added. “Therefore, further investigations based on multimessenger approaches — combining theory with all three messenger data — are crucial to test our model.”

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