NASA-funded Simulations Show How Massive Collisions Delivered Metal to Early Earth

NASA logo.

Dec. 5, 2017

Planetary collisions are at the core of our solar system’s formation. Scientists have long believed that after the Moon’s formation, the early Earth experienced a long period of bombardment that diminished about 3.8 billion years ago.

Image above: Artist concept shows the collision of a large moon-sized planetary body penetrating all the way down to the Earth's core, with some particles ricocheting back into space. Image Credits: Southwest Research Institute/Simone Marchi.

During this period, called “late accretion,” collisions with moon-sized planetary bodies, known as planetesimals, embedded extensive amounts of metal and rock-forming minerals into the Earth's mantle and crust. It is estimated that approximately 0.5 percent of Earth’s present mass was delivered during this stage of planetary evolution.

With the support from a NASA Exobiology grant and NASA’s Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, or SSERVI, researchers at the Southwest Research Institute, or SwRI, and University of Maryland have created high-resolution impact simulations that show significant portions of a large planetesimal’s core could penetrate all the way down to merge with Earth’s core—or ricochet back into space and escape the planet entirely.

Animation above: The simulations show significant portions of a large moon-sized planetary body penetrating all the way down to the Earth's core, and ricocheting back into space. On the right, particles are color coded with temperature, indicated in Kelvin. Animation Credits: Southwest Research Institute/Simone Marchi.

For a recently published paper in Nature Geoscience about the topic, Simone Marchi and his colleagues found evidence of more massive accretion onto the Earth than previously thought after the Moon’s formation. The mantle abundances of certain trace elements such as platinum, iridium and gold, which tend to bond chemically with metallic iron, are much higher than what would be expected to result from core formation. This discrepancy can most easily be explained by late accretion after core formation was complete. The team determined the total amount of material delivered to Earth may have been 2-5 times greater than previously thought, and the impacts altered Earth in a profound way while depositing familiar elements like gold.

“These results have far-reaching implications for Moon-forming theories and beyond,” said Marchi. “Interestingly, our findings elucidate the role of large collisions in delivering precious metals like gold and platinum found here on Earth.”

Researchers at SwRI and the University of Maryland are part of 13 teams within SSERVI, based and managed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. SSERVI is funded by the Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Related links:

Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, or SSERVI: http://sservi.nasa.gov/

Science Mission Directorate: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system

Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/index.html

Planets: https://www.nasa.gov/subject/6960/planets

Ames Research Center: https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/home/index.html

Animation (mentioned), Image (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Kimberly Williams/Ames Research Center/Kimberly Minafra.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Station Ramps Up for December Cargo and Crew Swaps

ISS - Expedition 53 Mission patch.

Dec. 4, 2017


A pair of commercial resupply missions are coming and going this week at the International Space Station. Meanwhile, a new crew has arrived at its launch site to prepare for a Dec. 17 liftoff to the orbital laboratory. All missions to and from the station this month will be televised live on NASA TV.

NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba are brushing up on their robotics skills today ahead of this week’s release of the Orbital ATK Cygnus resupply ship. Ground controllers will remotely command the Canadarm2 on Tuesday to detach Cygnus from the Unity module. While still attached to the Canadarm2, Cygnus will be used for a series of communications tests to assist NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Then on Wednesday, the two astronauts will be in the cupola commanding the Canadarm2 to release Cygnus into Earth orbit at 8:10 a.m. EST.

Image above: The next crew to visit the International Space Station was in Moscow last week posing in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral for traditional ceremonies. From left are Anton Shkaplerov from Roscosmos, Scott Tingle from NASA and Norishige Kanai from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Image Credit Roscosmos.

Just two days later on Friday, the SpaceX Dragon will launch at 1:20 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center where it will begin a two-day trip to the space station. Flight Engineer Paolo Nespoli is cleaning up a pair of modules today to make way for the nearly 4,800 pounds of crew supplies and research gear Dragon is delivering to the station. Dragon is due to arrive Sunday at 6 a.m. when it will be captured by Vande Hei and Acaba once again operating the Canadarm2.

Three Expedition 53 crew members are due to return to Earth Dec. 14 after 139 days in space. Nespoli, Expedition 53 Commander Randy Bresnik and Soyuz Commander Sergey Ryazanskiy will parachute to a landing in Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz MS-05 spaceship.

Image above: Flying over South Atlantic Ocean, altitude: 414,64 Km / speed: 27'560 Km/h. Image captured (by Roland Berga) with EarthCam from ISS - International Space Station (via ISS HD Live application) on December 1, 2017 at 12:48 UTC.

The homebound trio will be replaced shortly after that when the Expedition 54-55 crew launches Dec. 17 for a two-day ride to its new home in space. Veteran cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov will blast off with two first-time astronauts Scott Tingle of NASA and Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to begin a four-month tour on the orbital laboratory. The crew has arrived at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and is in final launch preparations.

Related links:

Commercial Space: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/commercial/index.html

Expedition 53: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition53/index.html

Orbital ATK Cygnus: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/orbital-atk-cygnus-launches-arrivals-and-departures

SpaceX Dragon: https://www.nasa.gov/spacex

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program: https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/commercial/crew/index.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

NASA Extends Expandable Habitat's Time on the International Space Station

ISS - International Space Station logo.

Dec. 4, 2017

Image above: The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, known as BEAM, attached to the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, known as BEAM, will remain attached to the International Space Station to provide additional performance data on expandable habitat technologies and enable new technology demonstrations. NASA awarded a sole-source contract to Bigelow Aerospace to support extension of the life of the privately-owned module, and its use to stow spare space station hardware.

After NASA and Bigelow successfully completed collaborative analyses on BEAM life extension and stowage feasibility, astronauts began the process to provide additional storage capability aboard the station by removing hardware used for the initial BEAM expansion. They then converted sensors that monitor the BEAM environment from wireless to wired (to prevent interference from future stowage items on transmission of sensor data). Next they installed air ducting, netting, and large empty bags to define the stowage volume for hardware inside BEAM.  NASA and Bigelow later will likely add a power and data interface to BEAM, which will allow additional technology demonstrations to take place for the duration of the partnership agreement.

This new contract, which began in November, will run for a minimum of three years, with two options to extend for one additional year. At the end of the new contract, the agency may consider another extension or could again consider jettisoning BEAM from the station.

The space inside BEAM will hold up to 130 Cargo Transfer Bags of in-orbit stowage. Long-term use of BEAM will enable NASA and Bigelow to gather additional performance data on the module’s structural integrity and thermal stability and resistance to space debris, radiation, and microbial growth, to help NASA advance and learn about expandable space habitat technology in low-Earth orbit for application toward future human exploration missions. Using BEAM for stowage will free up about 1.87 cubic feet (0.53 cubic meters) of space in other station modules for research.

Image above: ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Paolo Nespoli works inside the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, outfitting it for future cargo storage aboard the International Space Station. Image Credit: NASA.

NASA’s use of BEAM as part of a human-rated system allows Bigelow Aerospace to demonstrate its technology for future commercial applications in low-Earth Orbit. Initial studies have shown that soft materials can perform as well as rigid materials for habitation volumes in space and that BEAM has performed as designed in resistance to space debris.

BEAM launched on the eighth SpaceX Commercial Resupply Service mission in 2016. After being attached to the Tranquility Node using the station’s robotic Canadarm2, it was filled with air to expand it for a two-year test period to validate overall performance and capability of expandable habitats. Since the initial expansion, a suite of sensors installed by the crew automatically take measurements and monitor BEAM’s performance to help inform designs for future habitat systems. This extension will deepen NASA’s understanding of expandable space systems by making the BEAM a more operational element of the space station to be actively used in storage and crew operations.

Space station crew members have entered BEAM more than a dozen times since its expansion in May 2016. The crew has conducted radiation shielding experiments, installed passive radiation badges called Radiation Area Monitors, and routinely collect microbial air and surface samples. These badges and samples are returned to Earth for standard microbial and radiation analysis at the Johnson Space Center.

The public-private partnership between NASA and Bigelow supports NASA’s objective to develop deep space habitation capabilities for human missions beyond Earth orbit while fostering commercial capabilities for non-government applications to stimulate the growth of the space economy.

Related links:

Commercial Space: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/commercial/index.html

Expedition 53: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition53/index.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

CASC - Long March 2D lofts latest Yaogan Weixing satellite named LKW-1

CASC - China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation logo.

Dec. 4, 2017

Long March 2D /Yaogan-31 Launch

CASC have launched (Dec. 3, 2017) the Yaogan Weixing-31 remote sensing satellite – also known as the Land Surveying Satellite -1 (LKW-1) – via a Long March-2D (Chang Zheng-2D) on Sunday. The launch – from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center (JSLC) – took place at 04:11 UTC from the 603 Launch Platform at the LC43 Launch Complex.

China Launches Land Exploration Satellite

As per usual for the Chinese media, this spacecraft is once again classed as a new remote sensing bird that will be used for scientific experiments, land survey, crop yield assessment, and disaster monitoring.

Yaogan Weixing satellite named LKW-1

As was the case in previous launches of the Yaogan Weixing series, analysts believe this class of satellites is used for military purposes.

For more information about China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC): http://english.spacechina.com/n16421/index.html

Images, Video, Text, Credits: CASC/NASA Spaceflight.com/Günter Space Page/Rui C. Barbosa/CCTV+.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Russian Air Space Forces - Successful launches of Soyuz-2.1B Rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome

ROSCOSMOS logo.

12/02/2017

Launch of Soyuz-2.1b from the Plesetsk cosmodrome

December 2, 2017 at 13:43 Moscow time from the State Test Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk Region by the combat calculation of the Space Forces of the Military Space Forces, a successful launch of the Soyuz-2.1b medium-range rocket with the space vehicle in the interests of the Russian Defense Ministry was conducted.

The launch was conducted under the general supervision of the commander of the Space Forces, the deputy commander-in-chief of the Air and Space Forces, Colonel General Alexander Golovko.

Launch of the medium-class launch vehicle Soyuz-2.1b from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome

The launch of the launch vehicle and the launching of the spacecraft into the calculated orbit took place in the regular mode. Three minutes after the launch, the Soyuz-2.1b rocket was tracked by the ground-based automated control system of the Main Test Space Center named after German Titov.

At the calculated time, the spacecraft of the Ministry of Defense of Russia was put into the target orbit and adopted for control of ground forces of the Space Forces of the Military Space Station. A stable telemetry connection is established and maintained with the spacecraft. The onboard systems of the spacecraft function normally. After taking over, the spacecraft was assigned the serial number "Kosmos-2524".

Kosmos-2524 (Lotos electronic intelligence spy satellite)

This is the fourth launch of the Soyuz-2 launch vehicle from the Plesetsk space center in 2017. Flight tests of the Soyuz-2 space rocket complex began at the Plesetsk cosmodrome on November 8, 2004. Over the past thirteen years 32 launches of Soyuz-2 carrier rockets from modernization stages 1a, 1b and 1c have been carried out from the northern launch site.

Roscosmos Press Release: https://www.roscosmos.ru/24411/

Images, Video, Text, Credits: ROSCOSMOS/Günter Space Page/Orbiter.ch Aerospace/Roland Berga.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

The Voyagers in Popular Culture

NASA - Voyager 1 & 2 Mission patch.

December 2, 2017

Image above: Each Voyager spacecraft carries a copy of the Golden Record, which has been featured in several works of science fiction. The record's protective cover, with instructions for playing its contents, is shown at left. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Whether you're traveling across cities, continents or even oceans this holiday season, there is no long-haul flight quite like that of the Voyagers.

This year, we celebrated 40 years since the launch of NASA's twin Voyager probes -- the two farthest, fastest spacecraft currently in operation. Each Voyager has contributed an enormous amount of knowledge about the solar system, including the unexpected diversity of its planets and their moons. Among their many distinctions, Voyager 1 is the only spacecraft to enter interstellar space, and Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to fly by all four giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Voyager Images from the Odysseys (NASA Space Photos)

You might have missed the virtual Voyager party, though, since there was a lot of other space news around the time of the Voyager launch anniversaries. The solar eclipse, visible across America, took place on Aug. 21, just one day after Voyager 2 marked 40 years in flight. Sept. 5 was Voyager 1's launch anniversary, but space fans were already gearing up to commemorate the finale of NASA's Cassini mission on Sept. 15.

Don't worry -- it's never too late to appreciate the far-reaching influence the Voyagers have had. In fact, in addition to the news coverage the spacecraft have received, the spacecraft have also earned a place in popular culture.

So, since you might have some downtime as we head into the holidays, here are some Voyager-related movies, TV shows and songs. (Warning: a few spoilers ahead!)

Voyagers in Film and Television

Perhaps the most widely recognized pop culture Voyager homage is in the film "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" from 1979. In the film, a machine called V'Ger -- the fictional Voyager 6 spacecraft, its intelligence greatly enhanced by an alien race -- seeks the home of its creator, Earth, and threatens to wreak havoc on our planet in the process. In real life, John Casani, who was the Voyager project manager at that time at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, offered to loan a Voyager model to "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry. Although the movie version altered the original design, it still used the mission as an inspiration.

The spacecraft had long passed the planets when a 2004 episode of "The West Wing" -- titled "The Warfare of Genghis Khan" -- mentioned a major mission milestone: Voyager 1 crossing the termination shock. The termination shock is a shockwave that marks the point at which the solar wind from the Sun, which travels at supersonic speeds up to that point, abruptly slows down and heats up. It represents the innermost part of the boundary of the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble that includes the Sun, planets and solar wind. Due to the termination shock crossing, the character Josh Lyman (mistakenly) declares this Voyager 1 to be the first man-made object to leave our solar system (mistakenly, because the solar system ends well beyond that landmark). "Funny, I'm going through a little termination shock myself," quips the character Donna Moss.

More recently, Voyager 1 did, in real life, cross into interstellar space in 2012, although technically it has still not left the solar system. In 2013, to talk about that milestone, the mission's project scientist, Ed Stone of Caltech in Pasadena, appeared on Comedy Central's Colbert Report: http://www.cc.com/video-clips/g14s8s/the-colbert-report-ed-stone

The Golden Record

Each Voyager contains a copy of a Golden Record filled with Earth's sights and sounds, including images, music and audio clips of people and animals. This record has been featured in several works of science fiction. In the 1984 film "Starman," a race of aliens discovers the record and sends an emissary to Earth to learn more about our planet.

A 1994 episode of the X-Files titled "Little Green Men" also paid homage to Voyager. The episode opens with FBI agent Fox Mulder describing the Voyager mission and the Golden Record, including images, music and a child's voice saying, "Hello from the children of planet Earth." Mulder says the Voyagers passed the orbit of Neptune and "there were no further messages sent," but in reality, the Voyagers still communicate with Earth every day.

Voyager's Remarkable Journey Continues. Animation Credit: NASA

The mission wasn't exempt from fun on "Saturday Night Live." In episode 64, which aired in 1978, a psychic played by actor Steve Martin says the extraterrestrials had found the record and replied, "Send More Chuck Berry" -- referring to the iconic song "Johnny B. Goode" included on the Golden Record. Learn more about the Golden Record and see a full list of its contents here: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/

And More

Voyager has proved inspirational to contemporary musicians and songwriters as well. The Academy Award-winning composer Dario Marianelli wrote a Voyager violin concerto that had its world premiere in 2014 in Brisbane, Australia, and was subsequently played by the London Symphony Orchestra in 2015. Artist James Stretton also wrote a song in honor of the Voyagers' 40th anniversary.

For a deep dive into the history of the mission, the documentary "The Farthest" premiered on PBS in August, featuring numerous interviews with Voyager scientists and engineers, past and present.

And if you get tired of looking at your own vacation photos, there are lots to explore on the Voyager website. Live long and prosper, Voyagers!
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-voyager-took/

The Voyager spacecraft were built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, which continues to operate both. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

Image (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/JPL/Elizabeth Landau.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

A very special run for the LHCb experiment

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.

Dec. 1, 2017

The LHCb detector in open configuration. (Image: Anna Pantelia/CERN)

For the first time, the LHCb experiment at CERN has collected data simultaneously in collider and in fixed-target modes. With this, the LHCb special run is even more special.

The past two weeks have been devoted to special runs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at the end of the LHC 2017 proton run and before the winter shutdown. One run involved proton collisions at an energy of 5.02 TeV, mainly to set a reference to compare with lead-ion collision data. What was exceptional this year is that a tiny quantity of neon gas was injected into the beam pipe near the LHCb experiment’s interaction point. This allowed physicists to collect proton-neon at the same time as proton-proton collision data.

When (noble) gases are injected into the beam pipe to collide with protons, the LHCb experiment is in “fixed-target” mode, in contrast to the standard “collider” mode. But unlike traditional fixed target experiments, where the beam of accelerated particles is directed at a dense solid or liquid target, here LHC protons are colliding with a handful of neon nuclei injected near the collision point and floating in the beam pipe. These nuclei slightly pollute the almost perfect LHC vacuum, but the conditions they create – where pressure is in the order of 10^-7 millibar – are still considered to be typical of ultra-high vacuum environments.

There are two main reasons to collect proton-gas collision data at the LHC. On one hand, these data help understand nuclear effects (i.e. depending on the type of nuclei involved in the collisions), affecting the production of specific types of particles (J/ψ and D⁰ mesons), whose suppressed production is considered to be the hallmark of the quark-gluon plasma. The quark-gluon plasma is the state in which the matter filling the universe a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang was , when protons and neutrons had not yet formed, composed of quarks not binding together and then free to move on their own.

Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Animation Credit: CERN

On the other hand, proton-neon interactions are important to also study cosmic rays – highly energetic particles, mostly protons, coming from outside the Solar System – when they collide with nuclei in the Earth’s atmosphere. Neon is one of the components of the Earth’s atmosphere and it is very similar in terms of nuclear size to the much more abundant nitrogen and oxygen.

This gas-injection technique was originally designed to measure the brightness of the accelerator's beams, but its potential was quickly recognised by the LHCb physicists and it is now also being used for dedicated physics measurements. In 2015 and 2016, the LHCb experiment already performed special proton-helium, proton-neon and proton-argon runs. In October this year, for eight hours only, the LHC accelerated and collided xenon nuclei, allowing the four large LHC experiments to record xenon-xenon collisions for the first time.

This recent 11-day proton-neon run will allow physicists to collect a dataset that is 100 times larger than all proton-neon collision data collected until now at the LHC, and the first results of the analyses are foreseen for next year.

Find out more on the LHCb website: http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/Welcome.html#End2017

Note:

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research. Its business is fundamental physics, finding out what the Universe is made of and how it works. At CERN, the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments are used to study the basic constituents of matter — the fundamental particles. By studying what happens when these particles collide, physicists learn about the laws of Nature.

The instruments used at CERN are particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before they are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe’s first joint ventures and now has 22 Member States.

Related links:

Large Hadron Collider (LHC): https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider

LHC 2017 proton run: http://home.cern/cern-people/updates/2017/11/lhc-report-record-luminosity-well-done-lhc

LHC accelerated and collided xenon nuclei: https://home.cern/about/updates/2017/10/one-day-only-lhc-collides-xenon-beams

For more information about European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Visit: http://home.cern/

Image (mentioned), Animation (mentioned), Text, Credits: CERN/Stefania Pandolfi.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch