A sampling of links to recent space policy, politics, and government (US and international) related space news and resource items that I found of interest:
NASA directed to send astronauts to lunar surface by 2024:
Vice President Mike Pence asked NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to accelerate the agency’s lunar exploration plans during a National Space Council meeting held at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, March 26. In addition to targeting a human landing on the Moon in 2024, the council also discussed creating a new Moon to Mars Mission Directorate.
Listen to Jeff Rowlison discuss the effort to leverage innovations coming out of the commercial satellite communications industry to support the Warfighter. Hear him discuss the Air Force envisioning the Warfighter roaming from MILSATCOM to COMSATCOM seamlessly, taking advantage of commercial options to accomplish Warfighter missions. Influencing the pace of innovation, the pace of contracting and acquisition are leaders such as General Hyten, the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command and General Raymond, the Commander of U.S. Air Force Space Command. Jeff believes that going forward, companies with the capability to adapt their innovative services to fielded technology will be very important, however nothing happens quickly without funding.
The GRAVITY instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has made the first direct observation of an exoplanet using optical interferometry. This method revealed a complex exoplanetary atmosphere with clouds of iron and silicates swirling in a planet-wide storm. The technique presents unique possibilities for characterising many of the exoplanets known today.
This result was announced today in a letter in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics by the GRAVITY Collaboration [1], in which they present observations of the exoplanet HR8799e using optical interferometry. The exoplanet was discovered in 2010 orbiting the young main-sequence star HR8799, which lies around 129 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus.
Today’s result, which reveals new characteristics of HR8799e, required an instrument with very high resolution and sensitivity. GRAVITY can use ESO’s VLT’s four unit telescopes to work together to mimic a single larger telescope using a technique known as interferometry[2]. This creates a super-telescope — the VLTI — that collects and precisely disentangles the light from HR8799e’s atmosphere and the light from its parent star [3].
The HR 8799 system harbors four super-Jupiters orbiting with periods that range from decades to centuries. HR 8799e is the innermost planet in this video. This footage consists of 7 images of HR 8799 taken with the Keck Telescope over 7 years. The video was made by Jason Wang, data was reduced by Christian Marois, and the orbits were fit by Quinn Konopacky. Bruce Macintosh, Travis Barman, and Ben Zuckerman assisted in the observations.
HR8799e is a ‘super-Jupiter’, a world unlike any found in our Solar System, that is both more massive and much younger than any planet orbiting the Sun. At only 30 million years old, this baby exoplanet is young enough to give scientists a window onto the formation of planets and planetary systems. The exoplanet is thoroughly inhospitable — leftover energy from its formation and a powerful greenhouse effect heat HR8799e to a hostile temperature of roughly 1000 °C.
This is the first time that optical interferometry has been used to reveal details of an exoplanet, and the new technique furnished an exquisitely detailed spectrum of unprecedented quality — ten times more detailed than earlier observations. The team’s measurements were able to reveal the composition of HR8799e’s atmosphere — which contained some surprises.
“Our analysis showed that HR8799e has an atmosphere containing far more carbon monoxide than methane — something not expected from equilibrium chemistry,” explains team leader Sylvestre Lacour researcher CNRS at the Observatoire de Paris – PSL and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. “We can best explain this surprising result with high vertical winds within the atmosphere preventing the carbon monoxide from reacting with hydrogen to form methane.”
The team found that the atmosphere also contains clouds of iron and silicate dust. When combined with the excess of carbon monoxide, this suggests that HR8799e’s atmosphere is engaged in an enormous and violent storm.
“Our observations suggest a ball of gas illuminated from the interior, with rays of warm light swirling through stormy patches of dark clouds,” elaborates Lacour. “Convection moves around the clouds of silicate and iron particles, which disaggregate and rain down into the interior. This paints a picture of a dynamic atmosphere of a giant exoplanet at birth, undergoing complex physical and chemical processes.”
[1] GRAVITY was developed by a collaboration consisting of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Germany), LESIA of Paris Observatory–PSL / CNRS / Sorbonne Université / Univ. Paris Diderot and IPAG of Université Grenoble Alpes / CNRS (France), the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (Germany), the University of Cologne (Germany), the CENTRA–Centro de Astrofisica e Gravitação (Portugal) and ESO.
[2] Interferometry is a technique that allows astronomers to create a super-telescope by combining several smaller telescopes. ESO’s VLTI is an interferometric telescope created by combining two or more of the Unit Telescopes (UTs) of the Very Large Telescope or all four of the smaller Auxiliary Telescopes. While each UT has an impressive 8.2-m primary mirror, combining them creates a telescope with 25 times more resolving power than a single UT observing in isolation.
[3] Exoplanets can be observed using many different methods. Some are indirect, such as the radial velocity method used by ESO’s exoplanet-hunting HARPS instrument, which measures the pull a planet’s gravity has on its parent star. Direct methods, like the technique pioneered for this result, involve observing the planet itself instead of its effect on its parent star.
1. Monday, March 25, 2019; 2-3:30 pm PDT (4-5:30 pm CDT, 5-6:30 pm EDT): No show for today. Monday is for special and timely programs only.
2. Tuesday, March 26, 2019;: 7-8:30 pm PDT (9-10:30 pm CDT, 10-11:30 pm EDT): We welcome Ian Fichtenbaum of Bradford Space regarding space industry acquisitions such as Deep Space Industries.
3. Wednesday, March 27, 2019; Hotel Mars. See Upcoming Show Menu and the website newsletter for details. Hotel Mars is pre-recorded by John Batchelor. It is archived on The Space Show site after John posts it on his website.
5. Sunday, March 31, 2019; 12-1:30 pm PDT (3-4:30 pm EDT, 2-3:30 pm CDT): We welcome back Dr. Christopher Morrison regarding space nuclear propulsion news and developments..
A sampling of links to recent space policy, politics, and government (US and international) related space news and resource items that I found of interest: