SpaceX capsule with 4 astronauts reaches space station

NOV 17, 2020 SpaceX's newly launched capsule with four astronauts arrived Monday at the International Space Station, their new home until spring. The Dragon capsule pulled up and docked late Monday night, following a 27-hour, completely automated flight from NASA''s Kennedy Space Center. The linkup occurred 262 miles (422 kilometers) above Idaho. "Oh, what a good voice to hear," space station astronaut Kate Rubins called out when the Dragon''s commander, Mike Hopkins, first made radio contact. "We can''t wait to have you on board," she added after the two spacecraft were latched together. This is the second astronaut mission for SpaceX. But it''s the first time Elon Musk''s company delivered a crew for a full half-year station stay. The two-pilot test flight earlier this year lasted two months. The three Americans and one Japanese astronaut will remain at the orbiting lab until their replacements arrive on another Dragon in April. And so it will go, with SpaceX - and eventually Boeing - transporting astronauts to and from the station for NASA. This regular taxi service got underway with Sunday night''s launch. Hopkins and his crew - Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Japan''s Soichi Noguchi - join two Russians and one American who flew to the space station last month from Kazakhstan. Glover is the first African-American to move in...

Read More........→November 17, 2020

Astronaut trainees complete abnormal descent module landing

Four Indian astronauts who were undergoing training in Russia since February 2020 have successfully completed the training on crew actions in case of abnormal descent module landing on different terrains, said Glavkosmos. The company is a subsidiary of Russian space corporation Roscosmos and the Indian astronauts are being trained at Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC). According to Glavkosmos, the prospective Indian astronauts have been trained in abnormal descent module landing - in wooded and marshy areas in winter; on water surface and in the steppe in summer. "In June 2020, all Indian astronauts-elect passed training in short-term weightlessness mode aboard the IL-76MDK special laboratory aircraft, and in July, they were trained to lift aboard a helicopter while evacuating from the descent module landing point," Glavkosmos said. According to Glavkosmos, the upcoming programme for the prospective Indian astronauts who will be part of India's human space mission Gaganyaan includes training in a centrifuge and in a hyperbaric chamber to prepare their organisms for sustaining spaceflight factors, such as G-force, hypoxia and pressure drops. The regular courses comprise medical and physical training, learning Russian (as one of the main international languages of communication in space), and studying the...

Read More........→August 08, 2020

Black Hole in 'Mirachs Ghost' Galaxy Hints at How It Was Born

Credit: Cardiff University Astronomers zoom in on black hole with one of the lowest masses ever observed in nearby "ghost" galaxy. "On the left is shown a color composite Hubble Space Telescope image of the centre of `Mirachs Ghost'. On the right is shown the new ALMA image of this same region, revealing the distribution of the cold, dense gas that swirls around this centre of this object in exquisite detail." A research team led by Cardiff University scientists say they are closer to understanding how a supermassive black hole (SMBH) is born thanks to a new technique that has enabled them to zoom in on one of these enigmatic cosmic objects in unprecedented detail. Scientists are unsure as to whether SMBHs were formed in the extreme conditions shortly after the big bang, in a process dubbed a 'direct collapse', or were grown much later from 'seed' black holes resulting from the death of massive stars. If the former method were true, SMBHs would be born with extremely large masses - hundreds of thousands to millions of times more massive than our Sun - and would have a fixed minimum size. If the latter were true then SMBHs would start out relatively small, around 100 times the mass of our Sun, and start to grow larger over time by feeding on the stars and gas clouds that live around them. Astronomers have...

Read More........→July 17, 2020

Universe is expanding faster than expected

Photo Source: Thinkstock Washington: The universe is expanding 5 to 9 per cent faster than thought, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered. "This surprising finding may be an important clue to understanding those mysterious parts of the universe that make up 95 per cent of everything and don't emit light, such as dark energy, dark matter, and dark radiation," said study leader and Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins University in the US. Researchers made the discovery by refining the universe's current expansion rate to unprecedented accuracy, reducing the uncertainty to only 2.4 per cent. The team made the refinements by developing innovative techniques that improved the precision of distance measurements to faraway galaxies. They looked for galaxies containing both Cepheid stars and Type Ia supernovae. Cepheid stars pulsate at rates that correspond to their true brightness, which can be compared with their apparent brightness as seen from Earth to accurately determine their distance. Type Ia supernovae, another commonly used cosmic yardstick, are exploding stars that flare with the same brightness and are brilliant enough to be seen from relatively longer distances. By measuring about 2,400 Cepheid stars in 19 galaxies and comparing the...

Read More........→July 21, 2016

New dwarf galaxy found orbiting the Milky Way

Original image by Andrew Z. Colvin [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons. Adapted version by Gabriel Torrealba and Will Fox. A never-before-seen galaxy has been spotted orbiting the Milky Way. With a diameter of around 7,000 light years, it becomes the fourth largest known satellite of the Milky Way, surpassed only by the Large Magellanic Cloud, Small Magellanic Cloud and the Sagittarius Dwarf. Known as "Crater 2", it was discovered by the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy. Crater 2 is extremely faint compared to other members of the Local Group. Its diffuseness allowed it to remain hidden, but it was identified in recent data from the VST ATLAS survey. A computer algorithm processed images taken by the Very Large Telescope in Chile, pinpointing regions that might have unusual clustering of stars. This revealed an entire new satellite galaxy, located 380,000 light years away. "This is indeed a very rare discovery. A galaxy like Crater 2 is a sort of invisible object," says Dr. Vasily Belokurov. "We have found many similar objects in the last 10 years, but never such a large beast. It is orders of magnitude less luminous compared to most objects of similar size. It is extremely diffuse. We believe it was born that fluffy. But why, we do not yet know." If the brightness of Crater 2 were increased by 1,000 times,...

Read More........→May 29, 2016