Space debris forces astronauts on space station to take shelter in return ships
Space debris forces astronauts on space station to take shelter in return ships | Russian anti-satellite test a 'dangerous and irresponsible' act that threatens astronauts, US says | China is building a new ship for sea launches to space
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Seven astronauts on the International Space Station were forced to take shelter in their transport spacecraft early Monday (Nov. 15) when the station passed uncomfortably closed to orbital debris, according to reports. The space junk passes began in the pre-dawn hours of Monday and the International Space Station has continued to make close passes to the debris every 90 minutes or so, according to experts monitoring the situation.
Russia conducted an anti-satellite test (ASAT) early on Monday (Nov. 15), generating hundreds of thousands of pieces of space debris and threatening the safety of astronauts on the International Space Station, the U.S. government has confirmed.
China is building a specially designed ship for launching rockets into space from the seas in an effort to boost its capacity to launch satellites and recover rocket stages. The 533 feet (162.5 meters) long, 131 feet (40 meters) wide "New-type rocket launching vessel" is being constructed for use with the new China Oriental Spaceport at Haiyang, Shandong province on the Eastern coast. The new ship is expected to enter service in 2022.
Last week, the International Space Station (ISS) was forced to maneuver out of the way of a potential collision with space junk. With a crew of astronauts and cosmonauts on board, this required an urgent change of orbit on Nov. 11. Over the station's 23-year orbital lifetime, there have been about 30 close encounters with orbital debris requiring evasive action. Three of these near-misses occurred in 2020.
(Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The universe's black holes are bigger than astrophysicists expected them to be. Now, a new study suggests why: Every single black hole may be growing as the universe expands. The new hypothesis, called "cosmological coupling," argues that as the universe expands outward after the Big Bang, all objects with mass grow with it too. And black holes, as some of the most massive objects to exist, grow the most.
Huge amounts of uncounted emissions of highly warming greenhouse gas methane are being released by "super-emitters" all over the world, satellite observations reveal. Scientists have only recently worked out how to detect methane emissions from space, but what they have seen since has taken them by surprise. The greenhouse gas, which is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, is leaking from gas pipelines, oil wells, fossil fuel processing plants and landfills all over the world. It is frequently released through negligence and improper operations; the emissions, in many cases, are not accounted for in mandatory greenhouse gas inventories.
When SpaceX's newest Starship prototype fired up its six engines last week, you can bet the cameras were on. A new SpaceX photo captures the moment of ignition for the new Starship SN20 rocket, the first of SpaceX's shiny, silver Starshipprototypes designed to launch into orbit. In the photo, the Starship's six Raptor engines belch fire and exhaust on a test stand while another rocket, a prototype for SpaceX's Super Heavy booster, stands idle nearby.
SpaceX just launched its second rocket this week, this time carrying a stack of Starlink satellites into orbit in a foggy flight, before sticking a booster landing at sea. The previously-flown Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Space Launch Complex 40 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 7:19 a.m. EST (1219 GMT) on Saturday (Nov. 13), marking the company's 25th launch of the year. It also marked this particular booster's ninth flight.
Someday, tucked away gathering dust in a nondescript warehouse, there will perhaps be a spacecraft waiting to be called to the launch pad, even as its builders pray it never flies. It wouldn't be a typical spacecraft, kitted out with as many high-tech instruments as engineers can cram aboard, and it wouldn't be designed to tease apart a single scientific mystery. Instead, it would be assigned a far more somber task: to deflect an asteroid on course to hit Earth.
The next eclipse of the moon will greet early risers before dawn on Friday morning (Nov. 19) across North America. It will be the second lunar eclipse of 2021 and, in some ways, will be similar to the last one on May 26. Most North Americans will again need to get up early and look low in the west toward daybreak. And again, the farther west you are the better, as the moon will appear much higher from the western part of the continent as opposed to locations farther to the east. It will also be the longest lunar eclipse in 580 years, lasting about 3 hours, 28 minutes and 23 seconds, and also the longest this century.
On the night of Monday, Nov. 8, a photographer in Zurich, Switzerland, who goes by the Twitter handle @Eavix1Eavix aimed his camera at the sky and snapped several pictures of what he aptly described as a "doughnut UFO." Composed of several bright-blue concentric rings, the flying object looked as much like a spacecraft as a breakfast treat.
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