In Today’s Deep Space Extra… InSight lander going into hibernation for the Martian winter. Telescopes team up in unprecedented observations of famous black hole. U.S. Mint to commemorate Sally Ride, America’s first female astronaut.
Space Science
NASA’s InSight Mars lander is going into emergency hibernation. If it can’t save its batteries, it could die
Yahoo News! (4/14): NASA’s Mars InSight lander has occupied Elysium Planitia on Mars since November 2018, struggling at times to conduct the first subsurface investigations of the Red Planet. Now, an absence of surface winds has allowed dust to coat and build up on the solar panels that generate electricity. InSight’s science instruments are being powered off and soon the lander will go into hibernation, shutting off all but essential systems during the Martian winter. The mission team is hopeful InSight can resume all operations in July.
We just got unprecedented new images of supermassive black hole M87*
Sciencealert.com (4/15): Multiple telescopes from all over the world have teamed up to take unprecedented images of supermassive black hole M87*, the same one that was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope and unveiled two years ago. That first release was a historical achievement that took many years of work. Now a team of scientists has added data from more telescopes across multiple wavelengths of light, revealing different characteristics of the black hole and the relativistic plasma jet it is blasting into space. The new images come as NASA celebrates “black hole week”.
Other News
U.S. Mint to honor astronaut Sally Ride on ‘American Women’ quarter
Collectspace.com (4/14): Imagery of the late Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, will grace one in a collection of quarters from the U.S. Mint honoring notable U.S. females, beginning in 2022. A physicist, Ride was selected by NASA to train as an astronaut in 1978. She launched aboard the shuttle Challenger in 1983, the first of two career shuttle missions. Ride went on to become a professor of physics and the president of Space.com. She passed away in 2012, a victim of cancer.
DoD space agency: Cyber-attacks, not missiles, are the most worrisome threat to satellites
SpaceNews.com (4/14): A large population of U.S. satellites in low Earth orbit to be introduced by the DoD for communications and missile detection would face a threat from cyber-attacks more than they would from missile strikes. That assessment was presented Wednesday by Derek Tournear, director of the DoD’s Space Development Agency, before an online Washington Space Business Roundtable forum. Tournear also expressed a concern for the vulnerability of satellite supply chain to intrusions.
Space junk removal is not going smoothly
Scientific American (4/14): After decades of increased activity, low Earth orbit is becoming too close for comfort when it comes to mounting space debris. New mega constellations of small communications satellites like those being deployed or planned by SpaceX and OneWeb are adding to the concern. Even efforts like Astroscale’s ELSA-d mission demonstrating a debris removal technology may not be enough to overcome the threat of collisions between spacecraft and the creation of even more debris to endanger the environment, whose tenants include the International Space Station (ISS).
Blue Origin practices crew operations on suborbital test flight
Spaceflightnow.com (4/14): Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket soared to an altitude of just over 100 kilometers from its launch complex in West Texas on Wednesday. Though uncrewed, the company used the rocket’s 15th test flight to demonstrate crew ingress and egress procedures as it moves closer to what will be flights of about 10 to 12 minutes. Paying passengers will experience gravitational forces three times that on Earth during the ascent, followed by a few minutes of weightlessness and a spacecraft descent under parachute to a soft landing.