4. Sunday, Feb.20, 2022; 12-1:30 pm PST (2-3:30 pm CST, 3-4:30 pm EST): We welcome back Dr. Abraham (Avi) Loeb to discuss his new Galileo Project with us.
Some recent shows:
** Sunday, Feb.13.2022 – Joe Carroll discussed “his ideas on LEO space debris solutions. Be sure to follow along with his PPT slides uploaded to our blog for this program“.
** Friday, Feb.11.2022 – Brett Hoffstadt and Steve Tanaka talked about “their new children’s bedtime story book, Goodnight Moon Base [Amazon commission link, including] the illustrations, inspiring young children to dream big and do big things, to learn about the Moon and much more”.
** Tuesday, Feb.8.2022 – Douglas Messier discussed “the FAA and related issues to Starship being able to test and launch from Boca Chica. Other topics and timely news were also discussed“.
Here is the latest episode in NASA’s Space to Ground weekly report on activities related to the International Space Station:
** STEMonstrations: Centripetal Force – NASA Johnson
NASA Astronaut Shane Kimbrough discusses centripetal force and its connection to keeping the International Space Station safely orbiting Earth. Watch JAXA astronaut Aki Hoshide demonstrate centripetal force in the weightless-simulated environment aboard the space station and find out what happens to a revolving object when the centripetal force is lost. Be sure to check out https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstrations for more videos like this, along with their corresponding classroom connection lesson plans.
The International Space Station (ISS) is a one-of-a-kind research platform that is capable of groundbreaking innovations that are not possible on Earth. Just as importantly, the orbiting laboratory also provides a novel venue to inspire and engage the next generation of researchers and explorers. This year’s virtual Destination Station event took place Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2022, and featured NASA astronaut Victor Glover on what it is like to live and work in space. Additionally, representatives from NASA and the ISS National Lab offered overviews of the capabilities on station as well as current research opportunities to become part of the space station research community!
** Expedition 66 Astronaut Mark Vande Hei Answers Virginia Student Questions – Feb. 10, 2022 – NASA Video
Aboard the International Space Station, NASA Expedition 66 Flight Engineer Mark Vande Hei of NASA answered pre-recorded questions about life and work on the orbital laboratory during an in-flight event Feb. 10 with students attending Virginia Western Community College in Roanoke, Virginia. Vande Hei is in the midst of a record setting mission for a single spaceflight by a U.S. astronaut living and working aboard the microgravity laboratory to advance scientific knowledge and demonstrate new technologies for future human and robotic exploration missions as part of NASA’s Moon and Mars exploration approach, including lunar missions through NASA’s Artemis program.
** Media Briefing: Space Station Science Highlights on Northrop Grumman’s 17th Resupply Mission – NASA Video
Scientist, engineer, test subject and tradesperson – astronauts in orbit wear many different hats. In this 360° timelapse, ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer works to repair a faulty valve behind EXPRESS-Rack 3. Water On-Off Valve 8 (WOOV-8), along with WOOV-6 and WOOV-7, determines whether the cooling water of Europe’s Columbus module flows through, or bypasses, the heat exchange system that transfers waste heat to downstream cooling circuits outside the International Space Station. The valve has been a problem child for ground teams and astronauts for the past few years and was first replaced during a complicated operation in 2013. It was last replaced by ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet in October 2021, but continued issues led Matthias to try out a reserve valve to see if an unplanned conversion was possible.
The operation was successfully completed on the real WOOV-8 in December 2021, and all involved breathed a sigh of relief. Performing maintenance and repair tasks in weightlessness is especially difficult as astronauts have the added challenge of trying to hold themselves in position while turning a screw or securing a hatch. Watch Matthias carefully fold down the rack, set-up lighting and complete the task as you explore his workspace in 360°.
Matthias was launched to the International Space Station for his Cosmic Kiss mission on 11 November 2021. He will spend approximately six months living and working in orbit, supporting over 35 European and many more international experiments on board. Follow Matthias: https://bit.ly/ESACosmicKiss
** China to Complete Space Station with Six More Missions in 2022: Blue Book – CCTV Video News Agency
China plans to make a record six launches in 2022 to finish building its space station, according to a blue paper released by China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the main contractor of China’s space program, on Wednesday.
** Mechanical Arm on China’s Space Station Completes Another Grab Operation – CCTV Video News Agency
The mechanical arm attached to China’s Tiangong space station firmly grabbed a docking port in one operation, as shown in a video clip released by China Manned Space Agency on Tuesday.
Currently, live views from the ISS are streaming from an external camera mounted on the ISS module called Node 2. Node 2 is located on the forward part of the ISS. The camera is looking forward at an angle so that the International Docking Adapter 2 (IDA2) is visible. If the Node 2 camera is not available due to operational considerations for a longer period of time, a continuous loop of recorded HDEV imagery will be displayed. The loop will have “Previously Recorded” on the image to distinguish it from the live stream from the Node 2 camera. After HDEV stopped sending any data on July 18, 2019, it was declared, on August 22, 2019, to have reached its end of life. Thank You to all who shared in experiencing and using the HDEV views of Earth from the ISS to make HDEV so much more than a Technology Demonstration Payload!
This artist’s impression shows a close-up view of Proxima d, a planet candidate recently found orbiting the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. The planet is believed to be rocky and to have a mass about a quarter that of Earth. Two other planets known to orbit Proxima Centauri are visible in the image too: Proxima b, a planet with about the same mass as Earth that orbits the star every 11 days and is within the habitable zone, and candidate Proxima c, which is on a longer five-year orbit around the star.
A team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile have found evidence of another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System. This candidate planet is the third detected in the system and the lightest yet discovered orbiting this star. At just a quarter of Earth’s mass, the planet is also one of the lightest exoplanets ever found.
“The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbour seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration,”
explains João Faria, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, Portugal and lead author of the study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Sun, lying just over four light-years away.
The newly discovered planet, named Proxima d, orbits Proxima Centauri at a distance of about four million kilometres, less than a tenth of Mercury’s distance from the Sun. It orbits between the star and the habitable zone — the area around a star where liquid water can exist at the surface of a planet — and takes just five days to complete one orbit around Proxima Centauri.
The star is already known to host two other planets: Proxima b, a planet with a mass comparable to that of Earth that orbits the star every 11 days and is within the habitable zone, and candidate Proxima c, which is on a longer five-year orbit around the star.
This image of the sky around the bright star Alpha Centauri AB also shows the much fainter red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Solar System. The picture was created from pictures forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The blue halo around Alpha Centauri AB is an artifact of the photographic process, the star is really pale yellow in colour like the Sun.
Proxima b was discovered a few years ago using the HARPS instrument on ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope. The discovery was confirmed in 2020 when scientists observed the Proxima system with a new instrument on ESO’s VLT that had greater precision, the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO). It was during these more recent VLT observations that astronomers spotted the first hints of a signal corresponding to an object with a five-day orbit. As the signal was so weak, the team had to conduct follow-up observations with ESPRESSO to confirm that it was due to a planet, and not simply a result of changes in the star itself.
“After obtaining new observations, we were able to confirm this signal as a new planet candidate,” Faria says. “I was excited by the challenge of detecting such a small signal and, by doing so, discovering an exoplanet so close to Earth.”
At just a quarter of the mass of Earth, Proxima d is the lightest exoplanet ever measured using the radial velocity technique, surpassing a planet recently discovered in the L 98-59 planetary system. The technique works by picking up tiny wobbles in the motion of a star created by an orbiting planet’s gravitational pull. The effect of Proxima d’s gravity is so small that it only causes Proxima Centauri to move back and forth at around 40 centimetres per second (1.44 kilometres per hour).
“This achievement is extremely important,” says Pedro Figueira, ESPRESSO instrument scientist at ESO in Chile. “It shows that the radial velocity technique has the potential to unveil a population of light planets, like our own, that are expected to be the most abundant in our galaxy and that can potentially host life as we know it.”
“This result clearly shows what ESPRESSO is capable of and makes me wonder about what it will be able to find in the future,” Faria adds.
ESPRESSO’s search for other worlds will be complemented by ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in the Atacama Desert, which will be crucial to discovering and studying many more planets around nearby stars.
1. Tuesday, Feb.8, 2022; 7 pm PST (9 pm CST, 10 pm EST): Douglas Messier of Parabolic Arc returns with all that is happening in space news to date in 2022.
2. Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022; 1:00 pm PST (3:00 pm CST, 4:00 pm EST): No Hotel Mars this week.
3. Friday, Feb.11, 2022; 9:30-11 am PST (11:30 am-1 pm CST, 12:30-2 pm EST): Brett Hoffstadt with Steve Tanaka are guests regarding their new children’s book [Goodnight Moon Base (Amazon commission link)] and lunar development effort. See book URL and info on the upcoming menu on our home page.
4. Sunday, Feb.13, 2022; 12-1:30 pm PST (2-3:30 pm CST, 3-4:30 pm EST): Joe Carroll is back with his ideas and solutions for solving our space debris issues and problems.
Some recent shows: (There were no live shows in the previous week.)
** Tuesday, Jan.25.2022 – Dennis Wingo discussed “Starship, returning to the Moon, commercial space and space mining economics and challenges, much needed in-space vehicles, Mars, returning to the Moon, U.S.-Russia space relationship and much more“.
their new book, Beyond the Covid Shock: The Great Economic Transition“. We applied much of the economics from the book and the discussion to both the public and commercial space industry. Listeners and callers also asked lots of general economic questions given the state of today’s economy and how the pandemic is impacting it.
** Tuesday, Jan.18.2022 – Robert Zimmerman talked about “[a]nnual launch rates and predictions, China’s Long March 5B, Mars rovers, ancient molecular life on Mars, light carbon atoms, life in the solar system, Carbon-12, UV light, Musk and Starship, Georgia’s preliminary spaceport approval, exploring the lunar poles and more“.
Here is the latest episode in NASA’s Space to Ground weekly report on activities related to the International Space Station:
** STEMonstrations: Vestibular System – NASA Johnson
NASA Astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Shane Kimbrough demonstrate the effects of the weightless-simulated environment on their perception of motion, spatial orientation, and balance aboard the International Space Station. Watch as NASA astronaut Megan McArthur and JAXA astronaut Aki Hoshide discuss the vestibular system and learn how the human body relies on external cues to provide us with important information about our environment. Be sure to check out https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstrations for more videos like this, along with their corresponding Classroom Connection lesson plans.
** Media Briefing: NASA, SpaceX to Provide Update on Crew-4 Space Station Mission – NASA Video
** Expedition 66 Space Station Astronauts Answer Wisconsin Student Questions – Feb. 3, 2022 – NASA Video
Aboard the International Space Station, NASA Expedition 66 Flight Engineers Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron of NASA answered pre-recorded questions about life and work as astronauts on the orbital laboratory during an in-flight event Feb. 3 with students attending the Random Lake School in Random Lake, Wisconsin. Marshburn and Barron are in the midst of long duration missions living and working aboard the microgravity laboratory to advance scientific knowledge and demonstrate new technologies for future human and robotic exploration missions as part of NASA’s Moon and Mars exploration approach, including lunar missions through NASA’s Artemis program.
** China’s space station decorated for lunar new year by crew – VideoFromSpace
China’s Shenzhou-13 crew Zhai Zhigang, Wang Yaping and Ye Guangfu decorated the Tiangon space station to celebrate lunar new year. Credit: Space.com | footage courtesy: China Central Television | produced & edited by Steve Spaleta
Spaceflight participants Yusaku Maezawa and Yozo Hirano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin were welcomed to the International Space Station on 8 December 2021 for a 12 day stay in space. Experience their arrival and farewell in 360° as captured by ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer from within the Russian segment. Also seen in this video are Expedition 66 Commander Anton Shkaplerov, @Roscosmos Mediacosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov and @NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, and Kayla Barron. Matthias was launched to the International Space Station for his six-month ESA mission known as Cosmic Kiss on 11 November 2021. During his time on board, he will support around 35 European and many more international experiments in orbit. Follow Matthias: https://bit.ly/ESACosmicKiss
The Nasa ISS is broadcasting live from the International Space Station as it circles the earth at the edge of space in low earth orbit, 240 miles (405 km) above the planet.
Currently, live views from the ISS are streaming from an external camera mounted on the ISS module called Node 2. Node 2 is located on the forward part of the ISS. The camera is looking forward at an angle so that the International Docking Adapter 2 (IDA2) is visible. If the Node 2 camera is not available due to operational considerations for a longer period of time, a continuous loop of recorded HDEV imagery will be displayed. The loop will have “Previously Recorded” on the image to distinguish it from the live stream from the Node 2 camera. After HDEV stopped sending any data on July 18, 2019, it was declared, on August 22, 2019, to have reached its end of life. Thank You to all who shared in experiencing and using the HDEV views of Earth from the ISS to make HDEV so much more than a Technology Demonstration Payload!
