Tag: NASA

NASA Confirms Where the Space Junk That Hit a Florida House Came From

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NASA has confirmed that the object that fell into a Florida home last month was part of a battery pack released from the International Space Station.

This extraordinary incident opens a new frontier in space law. NASA, the homeowner, and attorneys are navigating little-used legal codes and intergovernmental agreements to determine who should pay for the damages.

Alejandro Otero, owner of the Naples, Florida, home struck by the debris, told Ars he is fairly certain the object came from the space station, even before NASA’s confirmation. The circumstances strongly suggested that was the case. The cylindrical piece of metal tore through his roof on March 8, a few minutes after the time US Space Command reported the reentry of a space station cargo pallet and nine decommissioned batteries over the Gulf of Mexico on a trajectory heading forward the coast of southwest Florida.

On Monday, NASA confirmed the object’s origin after retrieving it from Otero. The agency said in a statement that the object is made of the metal alloy Inconel, weighs 1.6 pounds, and is 4 inches in height and 1.6 inches in diameter.

“As part of the analysis, NASA completed an assessment of the object’s dimensions and features compared to the released hardware and performed a materials analysis,” the agency said. “Based on the examination, the agency determined the debris to be a stanchion from the NASA flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.”

A Jolt From the sky

Otero was out of the country when his house came under the crosshairs, but his 19-year-old son was home. The impact sounded like fireworks going off, Otero said in an interview Tuesday. A recording from Otero’s Nest camera captured the noise.

The son “was sitting in front of his computer doing homework with his earphones listening to music, and he was jolted out of his chair with a very loud sound,” Otero said.

After surveying the damage when he got home, Otero filed a police report, and first responders helped pull the object out of the subfloor between the first and second stories of his house. It penetrated the roof and ceiling of an unoccupied second-floor bedroom, then hit the floor between the bed and a bathroom and struck a piece of air conditioning ductwork. It hit so hard that it created a bump on the ceiling of the first floor but didn’t penetrate it, according to Otero.

Something the size and mass of this battery support stanchion would have probably struck the house with a terminal velocity of more than 200 mph (320 km per hour). At that speed, the results could have been deadly.

“Luckily, nobody got hurt,” Otero said.

A quick glance at the object indicated to Otero that it probably came from space. “It’s super dense, a very strong alloy, a very interesting metal,” he said. “When I saw that it was half-charred and that it had a cylindrical shape that had taken a concave shape from traveling through the atmosphere, I knew it had to be coming from outer space.

“I knew it was manmade,” Otero continued. “I just didn’t know where it was from until I started googling.”

Otero said he found Ars’ original article on the reentry on March 8, along with posts about the event on X. That’s when he contacted a local news outlet. WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida, was first to report on the damage to Otero’s home. After Otero tried several times to contact NASA officials, an attorney from Kennedy Space Center called him to hear his story. NASA then dispatched someone to pick up the object from Naples.

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April 18, 2024
Space Force Is Planning a Military Exercise in Orbit

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The Victus Haze mission is more complicated than Victus Nox, involving two prime contractors, two spacecraft, and two rocket launches from different spaceports, all timed to occur with short timelines “to keep the demonstration as realistic as possible,” a Space Force spokesperson told Ars.

“This demonstration will ultimately prepare the United States Space Force to provide future forces to combatant commands to conduct rapid operations in response to adversary on-orbit aggression,” Space Systems Command said in a statement.

Faith in Commercial Space

“This is a really significant operational demonstration that is really pushing the envelope on technology and demonstrates a lot of faith in the US industrial base,” Rogers said.

“Fundamentally, this is about characterizing an unknown capability for the first time in low-Earth orbit,” Rogers said in an interview with Ars. “There are a whole host of challenges that come with that, consistent coverage with communications, how do you track a maneuvering object in low-Earth orbit with limited space domain awareness capabilities, what’s the right level of autonomy and human interaction?”

True Anomaly’s first two Jackal satellites launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission last month, but the company announced a few weeks later that the two satellites would be unable to complete their planned rendezvous demonstration. This would have been a precursor to the type of activity True Anomaly and Rocket Lab will demonstrate on Victus Haze.

Rogers said his company is working on two more demonstration missions that will fly before Victus Haze.

The military’s Defense Innovation Unit awarded $32 million to Rocket Lab for its part of the Victus Haze mission. True Anomaly’s contract with SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the Space Force, is valued at $30 million. True Anomaly is contributing $30 million in private capital to help pay for the mission, bringing the total cost of Victus Haze to approximately $92 million. Space Safari, a division of Space Systems Command, oversees the entire project.

“We recognize the significant opportunity to leverage the commercial space industry’s innovations to counter China as America’s pacing threat,” said Colonel Bryon McClain, Space Systems Command’s program executive officer for space domain awareness and combat power. “The United States has the most innovative space industry in the world. Victus Haze will demonstrate, under operationally realistic conditions, our ability to respond to irresponsible behavior on orbit.”

“Once the build phase is completed the mission will enter several successive phases to include hot standby, activation, alert, and launch phases,” the Space Force said. “While this is a coordinated demonstration, each vendor will be given unique launch and mission profiles.”

True Anomaly’s Jackal satellite, nearly as large as a refrigerator, will launch on a “rapid rideshare” mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida or Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Space Systems command said. This will most likely be a rideshare launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Launching on a rideshare flight comes with different challenges than launching on a dedicated rocket, as the Victus Nox mission did last year.

True Anomaly says it could get its satellite out of storage and integrate it with a rocket in 12 to 84 hours, depending on the flight cadence of the launch provider. After the launch of True Anomaly’s Jackal, the Space Force will give Rocket Lab a 24-hour call-up to launch its satellite, similar in size to True Anomaly’s spacecraft, on an Electron rocket from New Zealand or from Virginia. Rocket Lab’s launch must be precisely timed to allow its satellite to rendezvous with True Anomaly’s spacecraft in orbit.

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April 13, 2024
The Best Total Solar Eclipse Photos (2024)

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The arrival of the total solar eclipse in the US has brought with it an impressive array of photographs as well. If you weren’t able to find a spot to view the eclipse in person—or if it was stuck behind uncooperative clouds—you can at least get a sense of its grandeur through these photographs taken at different points along its journey.

The path of totality began in Mexico on Monday morning, working its way up through Texas by early afternoon. By 4:40 pm ET, it will have left the US entirely and headed into Canada. If you’re in or near its path, make sure to put on approved sunglasses—or make your own pinhole—to view it for yourself. And if you happen to have pets or live near wildlife, NASA could use a hand figuring out how animals respond to the eclipse.

Otherwise, enjoy these incredible photos of a total solar eclipse in North America. The next one is 20 years away.

Brady, TX

Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Fort Worth, TX

Photograph: Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

San Francisco, CA

Photograph: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu/Getty Images

Milwaukee, WI

Photograph: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Bloomington, IN

Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

Washington, DC

Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Photograph: Bill Ingalls/NASA/Getty Images

New York, NY

Photograph: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Photograph: Timothy A. Clary/Getty Images

Niagara Falls, NY

Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

Stowe, VT

Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images

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April 8, 2024
How Will the Solar Eclipse Affect Animals? NASA Needs Your Help to Find Out

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In other anecdotes, onlookers have reported birds that stop singing, crickets that stopped chirping, or bees that return to their hive, reduce their foraging, or suspend their flight during total darkness. But there are also studies that deny that some of these behaviors occur or can be attributed to the eclipse.

Therefore, NASA scientists plan not only to systematize observations but also to document what people hear and see under the shadow of the moon.

“The Great North American Eclipse”

NASA has created the Eclipse Soundscapes citizen science project to collect the experiences of volunteers. It was inspired by a study conducted nearly 100 years ago by William M. Wheeler and a team of collaborators. At that time, the Boston Natural History Society invited citizens, park rangers, and naturalists to report on the activities of birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, and fish during the summer eclipse of 1932. They collected nearly 500 reports. In their final report they note that some animals exhibited nocturnal behaviors such as returning to their nests and hives or making nighttime vocalizations.

The current NASA study will add observations made during the annular solar eclipse of October 14, 2023 and the total solar eclipse of April 8. The latter will be visible first in Mexico in Mazatlan, then in Nazas, Torreon, Monclova, and Piedras Negras. These localities will be located directly in the umbra of the eclipse and, therefore, their inhabitants will perceive it as total. In nearby regions it will be experienced as a partial eclipse, with less darkness. It will then enter the United States through Texas, passing through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Finally, it will travel across Canada from southern Ontario and continue through Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. Astronomical estimates point to the Mexican port of Mazatlan as the best place to observe the 2024 event, which will experience totality at about 11:07 am local time.

A sparrow experiencing a partial solar eclipse in Jize Country, Hebei Province, China, June 21, 2020.Future Publishing/Getty Images

How You Can Help

In the United States, 30 million people live in the area where the eclipse will be perceived as total. If you add in the Mexican and Canadian public, the potential for collecting experiences is immense. That’s what NASA wants to take advantage of.

The project foresees several levels of volunteering: apprentice, observer, data collector, data analyst, and facilitator.

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April 6, 2024
International Space Station Trash May Have Hit This Florida House

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A few weeks ago, something from the heavens came crashing through the roof of Alejandro Otero’s home, and NASA is on the case.

In all likelihood, this nearly 2-pound object came from the International Space Station. Otero said it tore through the roof and both floors of his two-story house in Naples, Florida.

Otero wasn’t home at the time, but his son was there. A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That’s an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time—2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC)—that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.

This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry.

Otero’s likely encounter with space debris was first reported by WINK News, the CBS affiliate for southwest Florida. Since then, NASA has recovered the debris from the homeowner, according to Josh Finch, an agency spokesperson.

Engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center will analyze the object “as soon as possible to determine its origin,” Finch told Ars. “More information will be available once the analysis is complete.”

Ars reported on this reentry when it happened on March 8, noting that most of the material from the batteries and the cargo carrier would have likely burned up as they plunged through the atmosphere. Temperatures would have reached several thousand degrees, vaporizing most of the material before it could reach the ground.

The entire pallet, including the nine disused batteries from the space station’s power system, had a mass of more than 2.6 metric tons (5,800 pounds), according to NASA. Size-wise, it was about twice as tall as a standard kitchen refrigerator. It’s important to note that objects of this mass, or larger, regularly fall to Earth on guided trajectories, but they’re usually failed satellites or spent rocket stages left in orbit after completing their missions.

In a post on X, Otero said he is waiting for communication from “the responsible agencies” to resolve the cost of damages to his home.

If the object is owned by NASA, Otero or his insurance company could make a claim against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, according to Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi.

“It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States,” she told Ars. “If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused.”

This could be an issue in this case. The batteries were owned by NASA, but they were attached to a pallet structure launched by Japan’s space agency.

How This Happened

At the time of the March 8 reentry, a NASA spokesperson at the Johnson Space Center in Houston said the space agency “conducted a thorough debris analysis assessment on the pallet and has determined it will harmlessly reenter the Earth’s atmosphere.” This was, by far, the most massive object ever tossed overboard from the International Space Station. “We do not expect any portion to have survived reentry,” NASA said.

Research from other space experts, however, did not match NASA’s statement. The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, says a “general rule of thumb” is that 20 to 40 percent of the mass of a large object will reach the ground. The exact percentage depends on the design of the object, but these nickel-hydrogen batteries were made of metals with relatively high density.

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April 3, 2024
NASA’s Artemis astronauts will try to grow plants on the moon

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An artist’s concept of an Artemis astronaut deploying an instrument on the lunar surface

NASA

NASA has selected the first science experiments that astronauts will bring to the moon as part of the Artemis III mission. This mission, currently planned for 2026, will mark the first time humans have walked on the lunar surface since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

The first of the three scientific instruments is called Lunar Effects on Agricultural Flora (LEAF). In this experiment, astronauts will grow plants on the surface of the moon, observing their ability to photosynthesise and grow, and how they respond to the stress of lower gravity and space radiation.

This won’t be the first time plants have been grown in space – astronauts have been growing vegetables aboard the International Space Station for a decade, and China’s Chang’e 4 mission sprouted seeds on the moon in 2019. Those seeds didn’t last long, though, so if all goes well, LEAF will give us our first glimpse of the full growth cycle of plants on the moon.

The second experiment is the Lunar Environment Monitoring Station (LEMS), a small seismometer designed to measure moonquakes near the lunar south pole. Characterising how the ground moves during those quakes will help researchers understand the underground structure of the area.

The final instrument, called the Lunar Dielectric Analyzer (LDA), will measure how electrically conductive the soil is. Ice bound to dust particles drastically increases the ability of the soil to conduct electricity, so the LDA will help the hunt for deposits of frost and measure changes in the soil as the sun rises and sets over the lunar surface.

“These three deployed instruments were chosen to begin scientific investigations that will address key Moon to Mars science objectives,” said NASA’s Pam Melroy in a statement. The ultimate goal of the Artemis programme is to lay the groundwork for a long-term human presence on the moon, which will, in turn, teach us how to prepare for crewed missions to Mars.

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March 27, 2024
Europa Clipper: NASA’s mission to moon of Jupiter isn’t meant to find alien life – but it could

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An artist’s impression of Europa Clipper near the moon it is named after

NASA

An instrument on a NASA spacecraft due to blast off to Europa later this year may be able to directly detect cellular material ejected from the icy moon of Jupiter, raising the prospects for finding life.

Europa has garnered scientific interest because researchers believe it contains a vast, saltwater ocean under its thick icy shell. It is also surrounded by an orbiting blanket of ice grains and dust, believed to be remnants of material thrown up following bombardments by meteorites.

NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, due to launch in October and arrive at its destination in 2030, will fly near the moon, but won’t land on it. It will carry 10 experiments with the aim of studying Europa’s internal structure, including the chemistry of its ocean and its potential habitability for life beyond Earth.

One of these is the SUrface Dust Analyser (SUDA), which is a type of instrument known as a mass spectrometer. It will collect material ejected from the moon to reveal its chemical composition, including potential organic molecules and salts.

SUDA hasn’t been designed to look for signs of existing life on Europa, but now Frank Postberg at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, who works on the instrument, and his colleagues have shown that it could detect fragments of cellular material, potentially providing evidence of current life.

“If life forms on Europa follow the same principle of having a membrane and DNA made from amino acids… then detecting [those chemicals] would be a smoking gun for life there,” he says.

“It’s a fascinating result because these ice grains hit your instrument in space with speeds of 4 to 6 kilometres per second,” says team member Fabian Klenner at the University of Washington. “We showed that, even then, you are still able to identify cell material.”

These extreme speeds will see particles hit SUDA with high kinetic energy, breaking large molecular structures up into smaller constituent parts for analysis. To simulate this kinetic energy, the team blasted water droplets with lasers. Inside the water, they placed samples of Sphingopyxis alaskensis, a bacterium known to survive in extremely cold marine environments, to take the place of potential life on Europa.

When the lasers hit the droplets they disintegrated into a smaller spray that hit the SUDA detector. The researchers found they could distinguish the fragmented cellular material, including fatty acids, which cell membranes are rich in, and amino acids.

“We’ve now simulated having a cell in a single ice grain without any pre-treatment, which may be a plausible case for what we’d see in Europa,” says Klenner. The next step will be to repeat the experiment with many different types of cell cultures, he says.

Murthy Gudipati at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who works on SUDA but wasn’t involved with the research, says that even with the differences between lab conditions and those that Europa Clipper is expected to encounter, the results should reflect what the spacecraft might see during its mission.

However, he says its ability to unambiguously distinguish cellular material from other organic molecules and salts will depend on the specific composition of ice grains ejected from Europa. If SUDA picks up many other complex organic molecules and salts mixed in the ice grain, it may be harder for researchers to detect cellular material for certain, says Gudipati.

Currently, NASA says that “Europa Clipper is not a life detection mission – its main science goal is to determine whether there are places below Europa’s surface that could support life”. When asked by New Scientist if this new research will change the goals of the mission, the agency wasn’t able to provide a response before publication.

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March 22, 2024
Bennu: How our golden age of asteroid exploration could reveal life’s origins

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ON THE morning of 24 September 2023, Dante Lauretta woke up early, his pulse racing. For 20 years, he had been working on a NASA space mission that aimed to scoop up a sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth. Now, it was time for the sample capsule to land. If anything went wrong, it could end up smashed to smithereens on the desert floor, as flat – and as useless to science – as a pancake.

Thankfully, the landing was successful. And since that day, researchers led by Lauretta, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, have been busily examining crumbly, jet-black material from the asteroid Bennu. Their mission, called OSIRIS-REx, is one of several similar efforts in what arguably adds up to a golden age of asteroid science. We now have no less than three pristine samples brought back from asteroids and there are thrilling plans afoot to visit others (see “Encounters with asteroids”, below).

Lauretta has written a book about the OSIRIS-REx mission called The Asteroid Hunter. Here, he tells New Scientist about why asteroid samples are important, what his team has discovered so far and his jaw-dropping hypothesis that Bennu might be a fragment of a lost ocean world, one which may have had warm, watery conditions that could have made it an incubator for the building blocks of life.

Joshua Howgego: You watched from a helicopter as the OSIRIS-REx samples landed. How tense was it?

Dante Lauretta: I got up at 1.30 that morning because we had…

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March 4, 2024
Odysseus Marks the First US Moon Landing in More Than 50 Years

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For the first time in more than half a century, a US-built spacecraft has made a soft landing on the moon.

There was high drama and plenty of intrigue on Thursday evening as Intuitive Machines attempted to land its Odysseus spacecraft in a small crater not all that far from the south pole of the moon. About 20 minutes after touchdown, NASA declared success, but some questions remained about the health of the lander and its orientation. Why? Because while Odysseus was phoning home, its signal was weak.

But after what the spacecraft and its developer, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, went through earlier on Thursday, it was a miracle that Odysseus made it at all.

Losing Your Way

The landing attempt was delayed by about two hours after mission controllers had to send a hastily cobbled together, last-minute software patch up to the lander while it was still in orbit around the moon. Patching your spacecraft’s software shortly before it makes its most critical move is just about the last thing a vehicle operator wants to do. But Intuitive Machines was desperate.

Earlier on Thursday, the company realized that its navigation lasers and cameras were not operational. These rangefinders are essential for two functions during landing: terrain-relative navigation and hazard-relative navigation. These two modes help the flight computer on Odysseus to determine precisely where it is during descent—by snapping lots of images and comparing them to known moon topography—and to identify hazards below, such as boulders, in order to find a safe landing site.

Without these rangefinders, Odysseus was going to face-plant into the moon. Fortunately, this mission carried a bunch of science payloads. As part of its commercial lunar program, NASA is paying about $118 million for the delivery of six scientific payloads to the lunar surface.

One of these payloads just happened to be the Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment, a 15-kilogram package that contains three small cameras. With this NDL payload, NASA sought to test out technologies that might be used to improve navigation systems in future landing attempts on the moon.

The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment’s three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. So software was hastily written and shipped up to the lander. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?

A New Home

The Odysseus lander started its descent from a circular orbit 57 miles (92 kilometers) above the surface of the moon, an hour and 13 minutes before its planned landing time. The lander began a powered descent, using its main engine powered by liquid oxygen and methane, 11 minutes before touchdown on this timeline. During these final, crucial minutes, Odysseus’ improvised terrain-relative navigation camera scanned the surface for hazards, such as boulders, to ensure a safe landing site.

After the touchdown, the mission controllers knew it might take a minute or two to get a good signal back from the lander, which was relaying signals back to large satellite dishes on Earth. First one, then two, and then five minutes passed with an increasingly uncomfortable silence in the mission control room for Intuitive Machines. Nothing.

Finally, after 10 minutes, mission director Tim Crain called out that the lander was sending a faint signal back to Earth.

“We’re not dead yet,” said Crain, who is a cofounder of the company.

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February 24, 2024
Moon mission: Intuitive Machines is about to launch its Odysseus spacecraft

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The Odysseus spacecraft is scheduled to launch to the moon on 14 February

SpaceX

The US company Intuitive Machines will soon attempt to become the first private firm to land a spacecraft on the moon. Three previous efforts by other companies have failed, highlighting the treacherous path ahead of Intuitive Machines’s Nova-C lander.

The spacecraft, nicknamed Odysseus, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 14 February. It will travel atop a Falcon 9 rocket manufactured by SpaceX. If the mission, called IM-1, goes well, Odysseus should land near the south pole of the moon on 22 February.

The goal of the IM-1 mission, aside from proving that a private company can land on the moon, is to carry six NASA payloads and five commercial payloads to the lunar surface. The NASA instruments include tools to study how the landing itself blows up plumes of moon dust, several devices to help the craft land safely and a device to measure radio waves and how they affect the lunar surface. The commercial payloads include a camera that will be tossed off the lander before it touches down to take photographs of the landing, 125 tiny sculptures by artist Jeff Koons and a chip designed to establish an archive of human knowledge on the moon.

IM-1 is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which awards government contracts to private companies with the goal of accelerating exploration and developing a lunar economy. This is the second CLPS mission – the first, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, suffered a fuel leak shortly after its January launch that prevented it from reaching the moon.

There have been two other attempts by private companies to land on the moon – SpaceIL’s Beresheet craft and ispace’s Hakuto-R – but both crash-landed and were destroyed. If Odysseus succeeds where the others failed, Intuitive Machines’s next step is to send another Nova-C lander, equipped with a drill to harvest underground ice, to the moon’s south pole. That mission is planned for March 2024.

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February 12, 2024