[Spacetalk] https://www.nasa.gov/index.html; https://spaceflightnow.com; http://jpl.nasa.gov

Wed Nov 13 06:57:30 CST 2024

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   Good morning,  I’ve been in Asia almost 4 weeks…it has been amazing…every 4 days another city/country so it is crazy…just getting used to an area and off to a new one…I’ve spoken with thousands of kids, I really have no idea how many,  I really don’t keep track but one day was around 1,000…each day was filled, sometimes 3 presentations a day plus evening events…the fascination with NASA is almost beyond comprehension…people in Asia and pretty much around the world hold it to the highest esteem. If you are in any way associated with it you are also elevated. The receptions and interest of the kids is amazing…they look at you with eyes wide and in disbelief…I love playing with them, giving them heart sign and asking them to call me gabe…all ages…they are products of their teachers,  like teachers around the world…one kindergarten class sang a really cool rocket to the moon song and had so may questions, even at 5 years old…the first thing I do is sit on the floor with them…they are so adorable <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sEjfCKojllDDwXtCCigydsCicNSVgL?format=multipart>… 

 I’m now on the second leg of my trip….from Delhi to London was about 9 hours in flight….you have to be there 3 hours ahead of time…I was at the airport a 2 am and did not sleep…arriving In London I was spotted to have a 3 hour connection but by the time we got through customs and had to board the next plane it was more like one…I thought I had 3 hours of wifi so I could finish this…I need internet to load the stories and pictures/links…this leg is 10 hours…wifi is supposed to be available but it keeps rejecting my credit cards…by the time I get home it will be around 8pm, Florida time, 6 in the morning for me with means I will have been up for 48 hours..I’ll have 4 weeks of mail to go through…try to sort out issues with credit cards, clean the yard, and get ready to go to Morocco in December…I hope I confined a way to get this finished before another 3 weeks goes by :-) I have had no exercise for a month and will try to get in as much as I can before I leave…

We have to stay positive and always be thankful… remembering to do our best, enjoy everything we do, believe in ourselves, and let those we care about most know (I always say this, we all need to take it to heart) …hugs and smiles… STAY SAFE, TAKE CARE, Love ya, Gabe

FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO SEE THE ISS...
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Spot The Station
spotthestation.nasa.gov
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Spot The Station
spotthestation.nasa.gov

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 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sEjfCKojllDDwXtCCigydsCicNSVgL?format=multipart>Parker Solar Probe to glimpse Venus' surface 
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(NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

 NASA's Parker Solar Probe <https://www.space.com/40437-parker-solar-probe.html> should have completed its seventh swing past Venus on Nov. 6 — the spacecraft's final maneuver around the amber planet — in a flyby that nudged the probe onto a trajectory that will take it within 3.8 million miles of the sun's surface. That will be the closest that any human-built object has come to our star.
"We are basically almost landing on a star," Nour Raouafi, an astrophysicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe mission, told BBC News <https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67837161> earlier this year. "This will be a monumental achievement for all humanity. This is equivalent to the moon <https://www.space.com/55-earths-moon-formation-composition-and-orbit.html> landing of 1969."

The Parker Solar Probe, which is about the size of a small car, launched in 2018 on a daring mission to "touch" the sun <https://www.space.com/58-the-sun-formation-facts-and-characteristics.html>. Scientists were hoping that it'd decode some of the hottest mysteries about our star <https://www.space.com/41424-parker-solar-probe-sun-science.html>, such as why the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s tenuous atmosphere, gets hundreds of times hotter the farther it stretches from the sun’s surface. Indeed, the probe has already started unraveling <https://www.space.com/sun-parker-solar-probe-solar-heating-mystery> some of these puzzles.

Starship booster was '1 second away' from tower catch abort
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(SpaceX)

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(SpaceX)

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 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgECigydsCicNrwTt?format=multipart>SpaceX's historic rocket catch earlier this month was even more dramatic than it looked. That catch occurred on Oct. 13, during the fifth test flight of SpaceX's Starship megarocket. Starship's huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, came back to Earth about seven minutes after liftoff, nestling next to its launch tower, which secured the rocket with its "chopstick" arms. But that epic moment almost didn't happen: Super Heavy was just one second away from aborting the launch-tower landing and crashing into a patch of nearby ground, SpaceX engineers told company founder and CEO Elon Musk recently.
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 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgECigydsCicNrwTt?format=multipart>Supermassive black holes prefer to eat from wobbly plates
 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgECigydsCicNrwTt?format=multipart>(Robert Lea (created with Canva))

Black holes exert a tremendous influence on their surroundings, meaning that when they spin, they literally drag the very fabric of space and time around with them. That means nothing can sit still around a rotating black hole, including the "plates" that these cosmic titans feed from.

Those flattened clouds of gas and dust surrounding supermassive black holesare known as accretion disks. Around some supermassive black holes, the churning of these disks is one of the most efficient ways of converting energy in the known universe — changing gravitational and kinetic energy to bright electromagnetic energy, which we know better as just "light." 

Astronomers know that dimmer accretion disks "wobble" like slowing, spinning tops around some black holes. But what hasn't been clear is whether incredibly bright, or "ultraluminous," accretion disks also wobble, or "process," as they spin. That is what researchers from the University of Tsukuba set out to discover.

"The gravitational energy of the accreting matter is released, and then a part of the released energy is converted to thermal, magnetic and radiation energy. As a result, it is thought that strong radiation and jets appear," the authors wrote in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Spinning black holes have wobbly dance partners

 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgECigydsCicNrwTt?format=multipart>supermassive black holes <https://www.space.com/supermassive-black-hole>are known as accretion disks. Around some supermassive black holes, the churning of these disks is one of the most efficient ways of converting energy in the known universe — changing gravitational and kinetic energy to bright electromagnetic energy <https://www.space.com/what-is-the-electromagnetic-spectrum>, which we know better as just "light." 

Astronomers know that dimmer accretion disks "wobble" like slowing, spinning tops around some black holes. But what hasn't been clear is whether incredibly bright, or "ultraluminous," accretion disks also wobble, or "process," as they spin. That is what researchers from the University of Tsukuba set out to discover.

"The gravitational energy of the accreting matter is released, and then a part of the released energy is converted to thermal, magnetic and radiation energy. As a result, it is thought that strong radiation and jets appear," the authors wrote in a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal <https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad6cd9>.

Spinning black holes have wobbly dance partners

An artist's impression of the inner parts of the accretion disk around the black hole V404 Cygni. (Image credit: ICRAR)
 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgECigydsCicNrwTt?format=multipart> <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgECigydsCicNrwTt?format=multipart> <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgECigydsCicNrwTt?format=multipart> <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgECigydsCicNrwTt?format=multipart> Supermassive black holes with masses millions, or sometimes even billions, of times that of the sun are believed to dwell at the hearts of all large galaxies — but not all of these black holes are surrounded by accretion disks. 
 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgFCigydsCicNAAie?format=multipart>Where accretion disks are present, the immense gravity of the central black hole generates a huge amount of friction in the flattened clouds, heating gas and dust and transforming the matter into plasma <https://www.space.com/surprising-plasma-rain-connects-solar-mysteries.html>. This causes accretion disks to glow brightly in regions that scientists call active galactic nuclei  <https://www.space.com/what-are-radio-galaxies>(AGNs). 

Additionally, because black holes are "messy eaters <https://www.space.com/supermassive-black-hole-messy-eaters-recycling-material>," some of the material in accretion disks is channeled toward the poles of blacks hole by powerful magnetic fields, where they are blasted out as high-energy twin jets of plasma. Traveling at speeds approaching that of light <https://www.space.com/15830-light-speed.html>, these jets are accompanied by powerful electromagnetic emissions.

Milky Way swirls over Easter Island in stunning photo

(Josh Dury)

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(Josh Dury)

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 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgFCigydsCicNAAie?format=multipart>Sometimes a photo can captivate so powerfully that you are transported to another place and time. When photographer Josh Dury traveled to Easter Island for last month's annular solar eclipse, he wasn't going to let a single moment go to waste. Although primarily there with a group of expert Astro Trails eclipse chasers for the day-time event, Dury also managed to capture some images overnight, with some of the island's famous statues, known as Moai.
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 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgFCigydsCicNAAie?format=multipart>US now at risk of losing to China in the race to the Moon

(3dScultor/iStock via Getty Images)

 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgFCigydsCicNAAie?format=multipart>US now at risk of losing to China in the race to the Moon
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(3dScultor/iStock via Getty Images)

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 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgFCigydsCicNAAie?format=multipart>Will the next human to walk on the Moon speak English or Mandarin? In all, 12 Americans landed on the lunar surface between 1969 and 1972. Now, both the US and China are preparing to send humans back there this decade. However, the US lunar program is delayed, in part because the spacesuits and lunar-landing vehicle are not ready. Meanwhile, China has pledged to put astronauts on the Moon by 2030 - and it has a habit of sticking to timelines
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 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgFCigydsCicNAAie?format=multipart>Artemis II Orion Spacecraft Undergoes Testing

Teams with NASA and Lockheed Martin prepare to conduct testing on NASA’s Orion spacecraft on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in the altitude chamber inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 
Lockheed Martin/David Wellendorf
Teams lifted NASA’s Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II test flight out of the Final Assembly and System Testing cell and moved it to the altitude chamber to complete further testing on Nov. 6 inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Engineers returned the spacecraft to the altitude chamber, which simulates deep space vacuum conditions, to complete the remaining test requirements and provide additional data to augment data gained during testing earlier this summer.

The Artemis II test flight will be NASA’s first mission with crew under the Artemis campaign, sending NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Reid Wiseman, as well as CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back.

Image credit: Lockheed Martin/David Wellendorf

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Teams with NASA and Lockheed Martin prepare to conduct testing on NASA’s Orion spacecraft on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in the altitude chamber inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 
Lockheed Martin/David Wellendorf
Teams lifted NASA’s Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II test flight out of the Final Assembly and System Testing cell and moved it to the altitude chamber to complete further testing on Nov. 6 inside the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Engineers returned the spacecraft to the altitude chamber, which simulates deep space vacuum conditions, to complete the remaining test requirements and provide additional data to augment data gained during testing earlier this summer.

The Artemis II test flight will be NASA’s first mission with crew under the Artemis campaign, sending NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Reid Wiseman, as well as CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back.

Image credit: Lockheed Martin/David Wellendorf

 <https://r.smartbrief.com/resp/sDaqCKojllDDuEgFCigydsCicNAAie?format=multipart>SpaceX targets Starship Flight 6 launch on November 18
November 8, 2024 <https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/11/> Will Robinson-Smith <https://spaceflightnow.com/author/will-the-robinson-smith/>

A merging of multiple photographs of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster as it made its way down to be caught my the ‘Mechazilla’ launch tower during the Starlink Flight 5 mission on Oct. 13, 2024. Image: SpaceX
Less than a month after launching its Starship rocket and catching its booster, SpaceX is targeting a sixth test flight of its gleaming stainless steel rocket which towers almost 400 feet tall (121 meters).

The company announced on Wednesday a target launch date of Nov. 18, along with lessons learned from Flight 5 and mission objectives for Flight 6.

Unlike every other mission launch, this time around, SpaceX didn’t need to hedge its bets on the timing of the launch based on regulatory approval. When the Federal Aviation Administration cleared the Flight 5 mission, they also approved the company’s plan for Flight 6.

“The FAA determined the changes requested by SpaceX for Flight 6 are within the scope of what has been previously analyzed,” the FAA wrote in an Oct. 12 statement. “Any modifications requested by SpaceX to the approved Flight 6 scope of operations may require further FAA evaluation.”

To a large extent, Flight 6 will be a repetition of Flight 5, featuring another suborbital flight with a splashdown of the Ship upper stage in the Indian Ocean. However, the mission will include a few key differences.

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