NASA is sending Snoopy, the iconic and adorable character from Peanuts, to the Moon aboard its first Artemis mission early next year. Snoopy became the world’s first beagle to land on the lunar surface in the Peanuts comic strips by the late Charles M. Schulz in 1969. More than 60 years later, it is again going extraterrestrial — only this time it will be for real. A stuffed Snoopy will serve as a zero gravity indicator on the Orion spacecraft as it flies around the Moon. The Artemis I is an uncrewed mission to test NASA’s deep space exploration systems.

Aboard the mission, Snoopy will be dressed in NASA’s Orion Crew Survival System suit. The miniature version of the orange suit has been made from the same materials that will be worn by astronauts on future Artemis missions. NASA shared an image of the dressed Snoopy on Twitter, saying Astronaut Snoopy “is no stranger to space”.

#AstronautSnoopy is no stranger to space. The Peanuts character skimmed the lunar surface as the name of the Apollo 10 lunar module & even caught a ride on the space shuttle.

Now Snoopy is going to the Moon as a zero gravity indicator aboard #Artemis I: https://t.co/wUHfUgYWYm pic.twitter.com/t8DFQq6gHi

— NASA (@NASA) November 12, 2021

Snoopy has a 50-year association with NASA. It has been a mascot for spaceflight safety since the Apollo era. During the Apollo 10 mission in 1969, the lunar module was nicknamed “Snoopy” because its job was to “snoop around” the Moon’s surface to find a landing site for the Apollo 11 mission. Around the same time, Schulz also created comic strips that depicted Snoopy on the Moon. They helped get the public excited for space missions.

“I will never forget watching the Apollo 10 mission with my dad, who was so incredibly proud to have his characters participate in making space exploration history,” Craig Schulz, son of the cartoonist and producer of The Peanuts Movie told Space.com. “I know he would be ecstatic to see Snoopy and NASA join together again to push the boundaries of human experience.”

Zero gravity indicators provide a visual indicator when a spacecraft has reached the weightlessness of micro-gravity, according to NASA.

Under the Artemis programme, NASA is working to land the first woman and the first person of colour on the Moon. The Artemis missions are the stepping stone for future missions to Mars. The first Artemis mission will pave the way for establishing a long-term presence on the Moon.

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The European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia’s Roscosmos plan to launch their joint Mars rover mission in 2022. It was earlier planned to take off in 2020, but got delayed for several reasons. The main cause behind the delay is that the journey from Earth to Mars is only attempted when the planets are favourably aligned. As the agencies are again gearing up for the launch of the ExoMars “Rosalind Franklin” vehicle, the ESA has shared an Instagram post explaining the incredible features of the cameras aboard it and how they intend to explore the Red Planet.

“These eyes are ready for Mars,” ESA said, sharing a video and some images captured by the cameras. It said the cameras are capable of clicking pictures in panorama and close-up techniques. They can also take 3D maps and a wheel selfie. Currently, the rover is testing the wide range of its photo settings ESA added that engineers have packed as much science as they could into the camera system.

Here’s a look at the cameras and their features in five quick points:

1. The Panoramic Camera suite, known as PanCam, is the scientific eyes of the rover. While humans and smartphones can only see colours in visible light, PanCam can ‘see’ in 19 colours in the visible and near-infrared wavelengths.
2. There are two wide-angle cameras (WACs), which are set 50cm apart. The pair captures what is in front of the rover from 2m above the ground. Each WAC has a filter wheel to look at the colours of the rocks and the Martian sky. This will allow the rover to stare at the Sun, measure the amount of dust in the atmosphere and water vapour content during sunsets on Mars.
3. Then there’s a High-Resolution Camera (HRC). It has a resolution of eight times the wide-angle cameras. This helps in closely examining rock texture and grain size in colour.
4. Below it is the Infrared Spectrometer (ISEM). It analyses the geochemistry of the rocks. “HRC and ISEM are a well-matched couple. They are co-aligned so that scientists can see in the HRC images where ISEM took its measurements,” explains ESA.
5. Another camera will be used to take Martian shots and it will be tested in the coming days. The Close-Up Imager, CLUPI, will provide detailed views of the soil that is churned out by the drilling action.

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NASA took to Instagram to share an image that showed the remnants of a supernova, a large explosion that takes place at the end of a star’s life cycle. And, it is indeed remarkable. NASA said the event was created by the death (explosion) of a white dwarf star. A white dwarf is usually stable. But in a binary system, where two stars are orbiting each other, a white dwarf gravitational pulls matter from its companion and then explodes. A similar thing happened with this star.

NASA said in the post, “astronomers suspect this white dwarf star was more massive than expected, which also means it would have died earlier in its lifecycle.”

Named DEM L249, this white dwarf was located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, nearly 200,000 light-years away from Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope found it while “searching for surviving companions of white dwarf stars that went supernova in the Magellanic Cloud.”

The cosmic ribbons of gas, depicted in the image in red, have been left behind by the titanic stellar explosion. “A true chart-topper, this supernova remnant was found to have hotter gas and shine brighter in X-rays than the remnant of a typical Type 1a supernova,” the agency said on the Instagram post.

Separately, NASA explained via animation how a white dwarf star steals material away from a nearby stellar companion. When it reaches critical mass, it is no longer able to sustain its own mass and hence the star explodes and dies, creating a Type 1a supernova.

The Hubble telescope, a joint collaboration of NASA and the European Space Agency, was launched in 1990. It has since been one of the most relied on tools for space observation by scientists as the telescope has an unobstructed view of deep space.

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One of the most worrying questions that weigh on the minds of scientists, astronomers as well as the general public is whether the Earth is threatened by a potential asteroid collision? Despite being addressed by the scientific community, this question crops up time and again. Now, a NASA scientist has tried to put all speculation to rest. In a video shared on YouTube, asteroid expert Davide Farnocchia, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said there was no asteroid threat to Earth in terms of impact hazard.

The caption of the video reads, “Is NASA aware of any Earth-threatening asteroids? Luckily, there are no known asteroid threats to Earth for at least 100 years. But that doesn’t mean we’re not looking.” NASA goes on to add that “asteroid expert Davide Farnocchia of our NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory breaks it down”.

“There is no asteroid that we know of that is concerning in terms of impact hazard,” Farnocchia says, Asteroid impacts have happened in the past and can happen in the future too. But Farnocchia said that those were “rare events”.

“An asteroid impact that could cause serious regional damage only happens every few thousand years or even longer. Still, it’s a good idea to protect us against that possibility, and the rule of the game is find the asteroid before they find us,” Farnocchia added.

He further states that this is why NASA has been funding search programmes for more than 20 years to “observe the sky pretty much every single night to find and track asteroids”.

So far, the US space agency has discovered over a million asteroids, including 95 percent of the asteroids that are greater than a kilometre and could come close to the Earth.

Farnocchia added that once NASA scientists discover an asteroid, they project its motion into the future to find out if there’s a possibility of a collision with the Earth. They rank each asteroid on a risk-ranking scale, called Torino scale. “It goes from zero, which is lowest risk, to 10, which is highest risk,” he says.

The good news is that for all the asteroids NASA has discovered so far, the Torina scale is zero. That means “lowest risk for the next 100 years”, he added.

Watch the video here:

According to a NASA ‘Did You Know’ explainer, the “highest risk of impact for a known asteroid is a 1 in 714 chance of impact by an asteroid designated 2009 FD in 2185, meaning that the possibility that it could impact then is less than 0.2 percent”.

Another asteroid NASA is closely monitoring is called Bennu. It has a 1/ 2,700 chance of impacting Earth between 2175 and 2195.

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Space research is one of the major fields of exploration today. Discoveries and speculations backed by technological advancements are opening up new vistas for human life. Amidst these endeavours, a lot of effort is being put to find the best way to produce oxygen on the Moon. Scientists seem to have found a solution to this problem. The Moon’s layer of rocks, called regolith, contains enough oxygen to sustain human life. If a new study is to be believed, the Moon’s surface has enough oxygen to keep 8 billion, or 800 crore people alive for around 1,00,000 years.

However, this oxygen is not yet in a gaseous form and researchers are trying to find ways to sustainably extract it from these rocks for humans.

According to a report on meteorite information on the website of Washington University in St. Louis, the Moon’s regolith is made up of about 41-45 percent oxygen. Another report published in Space.com states that to extract usable oxygen from the Moon, scientists will have to undertake a process called electrolysis. On Earth, electrolysis is used to extract metals from their mineral ore and oxygen is a by-product. But on the Moon, oxygen will be the main product and the metal would be a potentially useful by-product.

The Moon’s atmosphere is very thin and contains only traces of oxygen. It is mostly composed of hydrogen, neon and argon. However, like the rocks on Earth, the regolith on the Moon contains oxygen mixed in mineral form. There, minerals such as silica, aluminium, and iron and magnesium oxides exist in different forms in hard rock, dust, gravel, and stones covering the surface.

A report published in The Conversation states that if the oxygen in the Moon’s deeper hard rock material is ignored, and just the regolith is considered, some estimates could be arrived at. Assuming that the average depth of the regolith is about 10 metres, and that all the oxygen can be extracted from that, the report states that the “top 10 metres of the Moon’s surface would provide enough oxygen to support all eight billion people on Earth for somewhere around 100,000 years”.

This year, Belgium-based start-up Space Applications Services announced its work on three experimental reactors that can improve oxygen output via electrolysis. These reactors may be sent to the moon by 2025 as part of the European Space Agency’s in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) mission.

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Four astronauts, three from NASA and one from the European Space Agency, arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday and docked their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule with the orbiting laboratory to begin a six-month science mission.

The rendezvous came about 21 hours after the team and its capsule were launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Wednesday night, following a string of weather delays that postponed the liftoff for a week and a half.

The docking took place about 6:30 p.m. EST (5am IST on Friday) while the Crew Dragon vehicle, dubbed Endurance, and the space station were flying about 260 miles (420 km) above the eastern Caribbean Sea, according to NASA.

The Endurance crew consists of three American NASA astronauts — flight commander Raja Chari, 44, mission pilot Tom Marshburn, 61, and mission specialist Kayla Barron, 34 — as well as German astronaut Matthias Maurer, 51, a mission specialist from the European Space Agency.

On arrival, the crew took inventory, conducted standard leak checks and pressurized the space between the spacecraft in preparation for opening the hatch to the space station about two hours later.

A live NASA video feed from the station showed the new arrivals floating headfirst through a padded passageway from their capsule into the orbiting outpost.

They were welcomed aboard with hugs from the three current space station occupants – Russian cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Oleg Novitskiy and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, who shared a Soyuz flight with his Roscosmos crewmates to the complex.

Astronaut wings

Endeavor’s second-in-command, Marshburn — a medical doctor and former NASA flight surgeon — has logged two previous spaceflights to the space station and four spacewalks.

Maurer, a materials science engineer, was making his debut spaceflight, as were Chari, a US Air Force combat jet and test pilot, and Barron, a US Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer. Shortly after coming aboard, Marshburn pinned astronaut wings to the collars of his three rookie colleagues amid handshakes and smiles.

Both Chari and Barron also are among the first group of 18 astronauts selected for NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions, aimed at returning humans to the moon later this decade, over a half century after the Apollo lunar program ended.

“I think we all loved the ride up here,” Chari said during brief remarks in a welcoming ceremony webcast from the station. “It was way smoother than we could have imagined.”

The SpaceX Dragon also delivered more than 4,000 pounds (1,800 kg) of hardware and research equipment, NASA said.

The crew arriving on Thursday was officially designated “Crew 3” – the third full-fledged “operational” crew that NASA and SpaceX have flown together to the space station after a two-astronaut test run in May 2020.

“Crew 2” returned safely to Earth from the space station on Monday with a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida that capped a record 199 days in orbit.

SpaceX, the rocket company formed in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, has logged a total of 15 human spaceflights in 17 months, including its astro-tourism launch in September of the first all-civilian crew sent to Earth orbit without professional astronauts.

The space station, spanning the size of an American football field end to end, has been continuously occupied since November 2000, operated by an international partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries.

An international crew of at least seven people typically lives and works aboard the platform while traveling 5 miles (8 km) per second, orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes.

© Thomson Reuters 2021

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NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover said it has seen something “no one has ever seen.” In an update via Twitter, Perseverance said it scratched the Martian surface with a tool attached to its robotic arm while wandering around the Jezero Crater in search of evidence of interest to scientists. When it looked underneath the rock it found something that was surely never seen before. It shared images of the scratched surface and they appeared stunning. These images have raised curiosity about the secrets of the possible existence of life on Mars. Perseverance will collect these samples for further exploration by scientists on Earth.

“Peering inside to look at something no one’s ever seen. I’ve abraded a small patch of this rock to remove the surface layer and get a look underneath,” the post from the official handle of NASA’s Perseverance said, adding it was already zeroing in on its next target for sampling Mars.

Separately, NASA released several images of the Red Planet as seen by Perseverance. These include raw images that the rover captured on Mars.

NASA has been sending machines and tools to explore Mars since 1970, but this is the first time any of those machines have looked under the surface in the Jezero Crater region. It may shed light on whether water existed on Mars or not, and if this planet could become habitable for humans one day.

The samples Perseverance is collecting is also of huge significance for further exploration of the planet. NASA is planning a mission to land humans on Mars to explore it and also collect samples. The Perseverance rover will collect samples from Martian rocks and soil using its drill, stated a NASA release on sample handling. The release also outlines 3 steps in handling the samples — collecting the samples, sample sealing and storing onboard, and depositing the samples on the surface.

Perseverance will collect at least 20 samples during its life on Mars. The rover is accompanied by a small helicopter, named Ingenuity, which recently completed its 15th flight.

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NASA scientists have found evidence for a new transiting circumbinary planet. The term refers to any planet which orbits around two different stars. The evidence was received using an unprecedented technique. Researchers used NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to discover this unique planet. With the use of TESS and its predecessor Kepler space telescope scientists have discovered 14 such planetary bodies till now. Before this discovery, such planets existed only in the speculative and hypothetical realms of science and science-fiction literature.

A paper on the new discovery was published in the Astronomical Journal on November 10, 2021. According to it, the planet was detected from a single sector of TESS data.

Nader Haghighipour, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and an author on that paper, said that finding circumbinary planets was much more complicated than detecting planets orbiting around single stars. He added that at least three transit events were required to determine the orbit of a planet. The Independent quoted him as saying, “This becomes complicated when a planet orbits a double-star system because transits will not happen with the same interval over the same star.”

Studying the required three transits for a circumbinary planet also required more time as the orbits of these planets were a lot longer than those of their binary stars.

However, the TESS technique allowed scientists to speed up the process. According to a report on SETI Institute’s website, the detection of this planet required 27 days, two transits, and three eclipses from a single sector of TESS data.

Haghighipour, who is also the founder of the TESS Circumbinary Planet Working Group, added, “Our group was able to show that despite its short window of observation, it is still possible to use TESS to detect circumbinary planets. The new planet is the proof of the validity, applicability, and success of our invented technique.”

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NASA and private rocket company SpaceX launched four astronauts into orbit late on Wednesday en route to the International Space Station, including a veteran spacewalker and two younger crewmates chosen to join NASA’s future lunar missions.

The SpaceX-built launch vehicle, consisting of a Crew Dragon capsule perched atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, climbed into the night sky from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as its nine Merlin engines roared to life at about 9 p.m. (7:30am IST on Thursday).

Liftoff of the Dragon spacecraft, named Endurance by the crew, was aired live from Cape Canaveral on NASA TV. Intermittent rain and clouds over the Cape earlier in the day had cast doubt on launch prospects, but the weather cleared by flight time, NASA said.

Live video footage webcast by NASA showed the four crew members seated calmly and strapped into the pressurized cabin of their gleaming white SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, wearing their helmeted white and black flight suits several minutes after liftoff.

Within about 10 minutes of liftoff, the rocket’s upper stage had delivered the crew capsule to Earth orbit, according to launch commentators. The rocket’s reusable lower stage separated from the rest of the spacecraft and flew itself back to Earth, touching down safely on a landing platform floating on a vessel in the Atlantic.

The three American astronauts and their European Space Agency crewmate were due to arrive at the space station, orbiting some 250 miles (400 km) above the Earth, on Thursday evening following a flight of about 22 hours.

The flight marks the third “operational” space station crew sent to orbit aboard a Dragon capsule since NASA and SpaceX teamed up to resume space launches from American soil last year, following a nine-year hiatus at the end of the US space shuttle program in 2011.

“Crew 3” includes two members of NASA’s latest graduating class of astronauts — Raja Chari, 44, a US Air Force combat jet and test pilot serving as mission commander, and mission specialist Kayla Barron, 34, a US Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer.

The team’s designated pilot and second-in-command is veteran astronaut Tom Marshburn, 61, a medical doctor and former NASA flight surgeon who has logged two previous spaceflights to the space station and four spacewalks. Rounding out the crew is European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer, 51, of Germany, a materials science engineer.

Chari, Barron and Maurer were making their debut spaceflights with Wednesday’s launch, becoming the 599th, 600th and 601st humans in space.

Both Chari and Barron also are among the first group of 18 astronauts selected for NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions, aimed at returning humans to the moon later this decade, over a half century after the Apollo lunar program ended.

NASA-SpaceX partnership

It is the fourth crewed flight overall in 17 months under NASA’s public-private partnership with SpaceX, the rocket company founded in 2002 by Musk, the billionaire chief executive of electric car maker Tesla Inc

The first was a two-astronaut trial run to the space station in May 2020, followed by the maiden NASA-SpaceX operational “Crew 1” in November of that year.

“Crew 2” was launched to the space station in April of this year, and just returned safely to Earth on Monday night with a splashdown capping a record 199 days in orbit.

The latest mission also follows a flurry of recent high-profile astro-tourism flights, including the SpaceX launch in September of “Inspiration 4,” the first all-civilian crew sent to orbit without a professional astronaut on board.

Earlier this month, 90-year-old actor William Shatner, famed for playing Captain James T. Kirk on the original 1960s “Star Trek” TV series, made headlines riding aboard a rocketship launched by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin to become the oldest person to fly in space.

The “Crew 3” team, on arriving at the space station, will be welcomed aboard the orbiting laboratory by its three current occupants — two cosmonauts from Russia and Belarus and a US astronaut who shared a Soyuz flight to orbit with them earlier this year.

© Thomson Reuters 2021

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NASA on Tuesday delayed putting astronauts back on the moon until 2025 at the earliest, missing the deadline set by the Trump administration.

The space agency had been aiming for 2024 for the first moon landing by astronauts in a half-century.

In announcing the delay, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Congress did not provide enough money to develop a landing system for its Artemis moon program and more money is needed for its Orion capsule. In addition, a legal challenge by Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, stalled work for months on the Starship lunar landing system under development by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Officials said technology for new spacesuits also needs to ramp up, before astronauts can return to the moon.

NASA is still targeting next February for the first test flight of its moon rocket, the Space Launch System, or SLS, with an Orion capsule. No one will be on board. Instead, astronauts will strap in for the second Artemis flight, flying beyond the moon but not landing in 2024, a year later than planned. That would bump the moon landing to at least 2025, according to Nelson.

“The human landing system is a crucial part of our work to get the first woman and the first person of color to the lunar surface, and we are getting geared up to go,” Nelson told reporters. “NASA is committed to help restore America’s standing in the world.”

Nelson made note of China’s ambitious and aggressive space program, and warned it could overtake the U.S. in lunar exploration.

NASA’s last moon landing by astronauts occurred during Apollo 17 in 1972. Altogether, 12 men explored the lunar surface.

During a National Space Council meeting in 2019, Vice President Mike Pence called for landing astronauts on the moon within five years “by any means necessary.” NASA had been shooting for a lunar landing in 2028, and pushing it up by four years was considered at the time exceedingly ambitious, if not improbable.

Congress will need to increase funding, beginning with the 2023 budget, in order for NASA to have private companies competing for the planned 10 or more moon landings by astronauts, Nelson said.

The space agency also is requesting a bigger budget for its Orion capsules, from $6.7 billion (roughly Rs. 49,731 crore) to $9.3 billion (roughly Rs. 69,031 crore), citing delays during the coronavirus pandemic and storm damage to NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, the main manufacturing site for SLS and Orion. Development costs for the rocket through the first Artemis flight next year stand at $11 billion (roughly Rs. 81,650 crore).

Vice President Kamala Harris will convene her first National Space Council meeting, as its chair, on December 1. Nelson said he updated her on the latest schedule and costs during their visit to Maryland’s Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday.

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