Space News: NASA Opens Gateway Spaceport for Space Travel

Selection of the most interesting space news for the week: Meteorological satellite helped to unravel why Betelgeuse dimmed. The TESS telescope has discovered a super-earth inside the orbit of hot Jupiter, and we tell you what quasars are and what they are.

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TESS discovered a super-earth inside the orbit of hot Jupiter

Using data collected by the TESS telescope, astronomers have discovered a super-earth whose orbit lies inside the orbit of hot Jupiter. This discovery contradicts the migration model explaining the origin of such bodies. We are talking about the hot Jupiter WASP-132b. It orbits an orange dwarf located 400 light-years from Earth. The orbit of the gas giant passes at a distance of 10 million km from the parent star, the temperature of the atmosphere is estimated at 500 °C.

Black holes found guilty of the death of ghost galaxies

Star formation in the Milky Way galaxy cannot be called active, but 3-4 new stars are born in it every year. But in elliptical galaxies, stars are not born at all, and those that exist are already quite old. Probably at some point, most of the star formation suddenly stopped, leaving the galaxy to slowly fade away over the eons. Such galaxies are also called “ghostly”, since they are actually inanimate.

Satellite for observing the weather helped solve the riddle of Betelgeuse

The dawn of Betelgeuse in 2019 dimmed due to a gas-dust cloud that closed it from us. Three scientists from the University of Tokyo were recently able to solve the mystery of the dimming of the Betelgeuse star in 2019. The Himawari-8 weather monitoring satellite helped them in this. It usually observes the Earth’s surface and clouds in the infrared range. Due to the fact that the satellite operates in the infrared range, it was possible to measure the temperature of the star’s surface. It turned out that during this period it decreased by 150 degrees. In addition, it became clear that the reason for the decrease in brightness was a gas-dust cloud that closed it from us.

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Next stop? Moon ????

Photon Lunar has been integrated onto Electron’s upper stage adapter at Launch Complex 1! This small but mighty spacecraft will set CAPSTONE on ballistic lunar transfer for @NASA and @AdvancedSpace. pic.twitter.com/q6H5N1cpda

— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) May 31, 2022

Next stop — Moon

Rocket Lab has published a timelapse demonstrating the installation of the Photon platform on the upper stage of the Electron rocket. It will be used for the company’s first interplanetary mission. Within its framework, Rocket Lab will send a CAPSTONE spacecraft to the Moon.

Powerful than James Webb: TOP 4 telescopes to build by 2030

Now the scientific community is waiting for the start of operation of the James Webb Telescope, which will show us the Universe with unprecedented quality, with the hope of looking further into the past than ever before. At the same time, new telescopes are being built all over the world, preparing the ground for a new era in astronomy, which would show how the Universe was born and developed.

The Thirty Meter Telescope is named after its widest main mirror, the size of which will be 30 meters across. Images from the Thirty Meter Telescope will be more than 12 times clearer than images from Hubble.

Extremely Large Telescope. The main mirror of the telescope will be even larger than the mirror of a Thirty Meter Telescope – its diameter will be 39 meters. It is to become the world’s largest visible and infrared light telescope, and will also be able to focus 100 million times more light than the human eye.

Giant Magellan Telescope is a 12–floor high optical-infrared telescope that will use seven main mirrors (each with a diameter of more than 8 meters) to focus light from deep space.

LSST will be equipped with the largest digital camera ever created, with an enormous resolution of 3.2 billion pixels. The amount of information it will collect every night will be 15 terabytes.

Artificial intelligence helps to recognize astronomical objects

Astronomers have developed a system for recognizing space objects based on machine learning. It will analyze the data collected by the spacecraft and determine the location of the object in the Universe. The system called SHEEP is based on machine learning technology, which has already been used to search for extraterrestrial civilizations. It will work with photometric data and spectra of objects collected in such large catalogs as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. In the future, this technology is proposed to be applied to data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the Euclid Space Telescope (ESA) and the James Webb Space Telescope.

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NASA Opens Gateway Spaceport for Space Travel

NASA is preparing to open a new attraction. If the Kennedy Space Center complex serves as a theme park for a space film set, then its newest Gateway, The Deep Space Launch Complex, is the space agency’s own view of the future. The new complex will open to visitors on June 15 and invites the public to see what space ports will look like in the future for traveling both into orbit and through the Solar System.

Diversity of quasars (article)

The history of quasars dates back to 1959, when astronomers began searching for fits in visible light for powerful radio sources that were part of the then-new Third Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources. To identify such objects the scientists used the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey — a collection of photographic plates obtained from the 1.22-meter Schmidt Telescope. As early as 1960 and 1962, two objects were identified: 3C 48 fitting a faint 16-magnitude star and 3C 286 fitting a 17-magnitude star, but scientists were unable to explain their optical spectra. Matters were complicated by the fact that the radio telescopes of the time determined the position of celestial objects rather roughly, so an original method was proposed for clarification: observation when some radio sources are covered with the Moon.

Scientists conducted exercises to track a dangerous asteroid

The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) and the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) of NASA conducted exercises to identify potentially dangerous asteroids for humanity. More than 100 scientists from different countries took part in them. The event showed that the observatories can respond promptly to the danger. The well-known asteroid Apophis was chosen as a “training target”.

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