NASA got a little bit of a scare when it lost contact with the Ingenuity helicopter for six days and ispace discovered why its lander crashed on the moon. Oh, and they say China’s space plane can catch and drop objects in space!
These and other astronomical news can be found in the summary of the main highlights of the week. Check out!
The object moved by Chinese space plane
It appears that China’s mysterious space plane is equipped with a robotic arm capable of “picking up” things in space. Suspicion surfaced when the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a research organization in Washington, detected an object that had disappeared from Earth’s orbit in January.
This is the same object that was released by the plane itself in November 2022, which nobody had much information about. It disappeared in early 2023 and was identified again by monitoring radars in March 2023. This suggests that perhaps the vehicle has a robotic arm or some other type of device capable of capturing small bodies in orbit. China is silent about the characteristics of the aircraft.
The culprit for the crash of the Japanese lander Hakuto-R
The Hakuto-R lander crashed on the Moon because of a crater, or rather its rim. When it tried to land, the module calculated its altitude based on this crater rim and its slow descent process ended prematurely.
In other words, the on-board computer correctly calculated according to the mission plan, but the lander was unlucky enough to fall into the crater while the altitude measurement was based on higher ground. When the computer estimated its altitude to be zero, the Hakuto-R was actually 5 km above the surface where it crashed.
Kepler’s last planets
Scientists and amateur astronomers spent a few days analyzing some data from the latest Kepler observation campaign, which contains data from 500,000 stars. Retired in 2018 due to fuel shortages, the space observatory spent its last 10 days of “life” collecting data from the universe.
In total, they analyzed the light curves of nearly 33,000 of these objects and found three new distant worlds: K2-416 b, a world 2.6 times the size of Earth that orbits its star every 13 days; K2-417 b, three times the size of Earth and an orbit of 6.5 days; and EPIC 246251988 b, which has yet to be observed with other instruments.
The combination of images from Webb, Hubble and more
Can you imagine if we could see cosmic objects in infrared and X-rays, in addition to visible light? Well, thanks to modern telescopes, we can, and the result of all these “colors” is this:
Celestial bodies emit far more than just visible light: there’s also infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and more. While our eyes only see the colors of the rainbow and their combinations, modern telescopes can “see” in other lights. Each telescope is built to look primarily at one of these wavelengths, but now NASA has superimposed images from a few of them — James Webb, Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer — and you can check them all out.
The scare that NASA took from Ingenuity
The Ingenuity helicopter was out of touch with NASA for six days and concerned the team behind the mission. This was the first time during the entire mission that he had remained silent for so long, with no radio signal.
Despite the scare, Ingenuity returned to communicate normally and the operators said that the problem was a combination of factors, such as the topography between Perseverance and the helicopter. Scientists predict that this could happen again soon, including the accumulation of dust on your solar panel.
The ideal wood to build the LignoSat satellite
Scientists at the University of Kyoto, Japan, determined that the ideal wood to build the LignoSat satellite is magnolia, which has shown advantages over other candidates in tests carried out on the International Space Station (ISS).
With great resistance, good malleability, dimensional stability, magnolia was considered the best alternative for the production of “green” satellites, that is, made of a material other than metallic alloys. While parts of satellites and spacecraft currently have to fall into the ocean to avoid a threat to Earth populations, wood must burn completely upon re-entering the atmosphere.
The discovery of water on an ultrahot planet
To the surprise of astronomers, the planet WASP-18b, a gas giant 400 light-years away from Earth, has water in its atmosphere, even with one of its sides having constant temperatures of up to 2,700 ºC.
As WASP-18b does not rotate around its own axis, this world constantly receives starlight at the same point. In addition, the planet is very close to its star, hence the unimaginable temperature of almost 3 thousand degrees Celsius. Under these conditions, the water molecules should have been destroyed, but they didn’t. It remains to be seen why.
