Skip to main content

China Makes History Again: Chang'e-6 Returns with Groundbreaking Moon Samples

In a remarkable achievement, China has successfully collected samples from the far side of the moon, marking a significant milestone in space exploration. The Chang'e-6 mission, launched on May 3, touched down in the Apollo crater within the vast South Pole-Aitken basin on June 1. During its brief but productive stay, the spacecraft gathered approximately 2 kilograms of lunar material using a scoop and drill. The samples, now stored in an ascent vehicle, are expected to return to Earth on June 25, landing in Inner Mongolia. This historic achievement not only demonstrates China's space program prowess but also provides scientists with a unique opportunity to unravel the mysteries of the moon's formation and evolution.   Achievements: - *First-ever samples from the far side*: Chang'e-6 successfully collects lunar material from the moon's less-explored hemisphere. - *Second successful farside landing*: China builds on its 2019 achievement with...
Post a Comment

The Sun as You Never Seen it Before by Solar Orbiter


Solar Orbiter  closest approach to the Sun, known as perihelion, took place on 26 March. The spacecraft was inside the orbit of Mercury, at about one-third the distance from the Sun to the Earth, and its heatshield was reaching around 500°C. But it dissipated that heat with its innovative technology to keep the spacecraft safe and functioning.

Solar Orbiter carries ten science instruments – nine are led by ESA Member States and one by NASA – all working together in close collaboration to provide unprecedented insight into how our local star ‘works’. Some are remote-sensing instruments that look at the Sun, while others are in-situ instruments that monitor the conditions around the spacecraft, enabling scientists to ‘join the dots’ from what they see happening at the Sun, to what Solar Orbiter ‘feels’ at its location in the solar wind millions of kilometres away.

When it comes to perihelion, clearly the closer the spacecraft gets to the Sun, the finer the details the remote sensing instrument can see. And as luck would have it, the spacecraft also soaked up several solar flares and even an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection, providing a taste of real-time space weather forecasting, an endeavour that is becoming increasingly important because of the threat space weather poses to technology and astronauts.


The images are really breathtaking,” says David Berghmans, Royal Observatory of Belgium, and the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) instrument, which takes high-resolution images of the lower layers of the Sun's atmosphere, known as the solar corona. This region is where most of the solar activity that drives space weather takes place.


The task now for the EUI team is to understand what they are seeing. This is no easy task because Solar Orbiter is revealing so much activity on the Sun at the small scale. Having spotted a feature or an event that they can’t immediately recognise, they must then dig through past solar observations by other space missions to see if anything similar has been seen before.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Structure of the Universe

The structure of the universe is a complex and fascinating topic that has intrigued scientists and laypeople alike for centuries.  It is a vast expanse of space that contains everything that we know of, from stars and planets to galaxies and superclusters. Understanding the structure of the universe is essential to understanding our place in it and the fundamental laws of nature that govern it. At the largest scale, the universe appears to be homogeneous and isotropic, meaning that it appears the same in all directions and at all points in space. This is known as the cosmological principle. However, at smaller scales, the structure of the universe is highly varied and complex. The basic building blocks of the universe are subatomic particles, such as protons, neutrons, and electrons. These particles combine to form atoms, which in turn combine to form molecules, and so on. At larger scales, these molecules combine to form stars, planets, and other celestial bodies. The universe is...
Post a Comment
Read more

Who is James Webb NASA?

James Webb, in full James Edwin Webb, (born October 7, 1906, Tally Ho, North Carolina, U.S.—died March 27, 1992, Washington, D.C.), American public servant and administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Apollo program (1961–68). After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1928, Webb became a marine pilot. He began his government career in 1932 as a congressional aide in Washington, D.C., and from 1934 to 1936 he studied law at George Washington University. He worked for Sperry Gyroscope from 1936 to 1944, when he reentered the Marine Corps for the remainder of World War II. During the administration of Pres. Harry Truman (1945–53), Webb was director of the Bureau of the Budget and undersecretary of state. When Truman left office, he went to work for the Kerr-McGee Oil Company in Oklahoma. Webb became the administrator of NASA in 1961, just months before Pres. John F. Kennedy announced the U.S. commi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Jupiter Like Planet Discovered By NASA's Citizen Scientist

The signature for the newly discovered planet was hiding in data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. Using TESS data, scientists look for changes in brightness of nearby stars, which could indicate the presence of orbiting planets. Jacobs is part of a group of citizen scientists who look at plots of TESS data, showing the change in a star’s brightness over time, in search of new planets. While professional astronomers use algorithms to scan tens of thousands of data points from stars automatically, these citizen scientists use a program called LcTools, created by Alan R. Schmitt, to inspect telescope data by eye. That’s why Jacobs’ group, which includes several citizen scientists and two veteran astronomers, calls themselves the Visual Survey Group. Many of them met while working on Planet Hunters, a NASA-funded citizen science project through Zooniverse that focused on data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. On February 1, 2020, Jacobs happened to notice a plot ...
Post a Comment
Read more