Space Stuff

It looks like NASA will finally have an astronaut live in space for a full year​

NASA has had a series of "almost" a year missions.​

NASA's Frank Rubio is on track to become the first American astronaut to spend a full year in space.

NASA's Frank Rubio is on track to become the first American astronaut to spend a full year in space.

Amid much fanfare, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly returned from space nearly seven years ago, landing on a barren, frozen steppe of Kazakhstan inside a hardy little Soyuz spacecraft.
NASA made much of this flight, billing it as the agency's first year-long mission. PBS was among the broadcast television stations that did extended features on Kelly's mission, its multi-episode series was titled "A year in space." But the dirty little secret is that, due to the inevitable shuffling of schedules in spaceflight, Kelly and a Russia colleague, Mikhail Kornienko, spent 340 days in space rather than a full year of 365.25 days.
 

Dwarf planet hosts a ring that’s unexpectedly far from the planet​

At that distance, the ring should condense into a moon. Why hasn't it?​

Image of a collection of dwarf planets.

Prior to this, Quaoar (lower left) looked like a very average Kuiper belt object.

Many bodies in the Solar System have rings—gas giants, dwarf planets, even an asteroid. These examples have allowed us to get a good picture of their physics, leading to models for how rings form and what keeps the material there from falling into the planet or condensing into a moon.
But a discovery described in a paper released today suggests we've gotten something (or maybe more than one something) seriously wrong. A dwarf planet called 50000 Quaoar that orbits beyond Neptune appears to have a ring that shouldn't be there, at 7.4 times more distant than the planet's radius. There are a couple of ideas about why the ring might survive in this location, but nothing definitive at this point.
 

NASA’s DART impactor shows how planetary defense can work​

Most of the orbital change came from the momentum carried away by debris.​

A composite of images showing the evolution of the debris plume from an asteroid impact.

When the NASA DART mission slammed into a small asteroid, we knew with great precision how much the spacecraft weighed and how fast it traveled. If you combine that with our estimates of the motion and mass of its target asteroid, Dimorphos, then you could easily do the math and estimate how much momentum would be lost by the asteroid and what that would mean for its orbit. That bit of math would suggest that Dimorphos' orbit should end up roughly seven minutes shorter.

Instead, the orbit was shortened by a half hour—over four times that number.

Today's issue of Nature contains five articles that collectively reconstruct the impact and its aftermath to explain how DART's collision had an outsized effect. And, in the process, the articles indicate that impactors like DART could be a viable means of protecting the planet from small asteroids.
 
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