Category The Universe, Exploring the Universe, Solar System, The Moon, Space, Space Travel

NASA, the U.S. space agency, partnered with SpaceX, a private space company, to send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) in a commercially built and operated spacecraft. As part of this partnership, the first crewed test flight, Demo-2, was launched successfully on May 30, 2020, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft carried NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket.

The Demo-2 mission has many firsts to its credit. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, responsible for mission, is the first privately designed and built spacecraft to carry astronauts to space. The company has hitherto been delivering only cargo to the space station. The launch also marked the first time since the final flight space shuttle Atlantis in 2011 that NASA had sent from the U.S. soil. Ever since the retirement of Atlantis, human spaceflights to and from the ISS have been carried out using Russia’s Soyuz rocket.

With the success of Demo-2 NASA and SpaceX plant to launch the company’s first full mission with astronauts in October. Known as Crew-1, the mission will see three U.S. astronauts and one Japanese astronaut launch in a SpceX Crew Dragon capsule to the ISS.

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The nearest exoplanet discovered so far orbits the star Proxima Centauri, located 4.2 light-years from our planet.

Proxima Centauri is only 4.2 light-years away. This is still tens of thousands of years by rocket travel, but only a hop, skip and a jump away in cosmic terms. If there were a star closer than Proxima, we would have found it by now. Without any closer stars, astronomers don’t expect to find any closer planets.

There is always the chance of a rogue planet existing closer than Proxima. Rogue planets are those that escaped their star systems and now travel the galaxy solo. But while astronomers think rogue planets are reasonably common, it’s unlikely one would lurk quite that close.

The research team studied Proxima b using the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations, or ESPRESSO for short.  ESPRESSO is a Swiss spectrograph that is currently mounted on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Chile. Spectrographs observe objects and split the light coming from those objects into the wavelengths that make it up so that researchers can study the object in closer detail. 

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The Kepler space telescope is a retired space telescope launched by NASA to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars. Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft was launched on March 7, 2009, into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit. 

Kepler discovered 2,682 exoplanets during its tenure and there are more than 2,900 candidate planets awaiting confirmation — history suggests most of those are the real deal. The mission continued well beyond its scheduled end date, although problems with pointing in 2013 forced mission managers to create a K2 mission in which Kepler swings its view to different spots of the sky.

In the early years of exoplanet hunting, astronomers were best able to find huge gas giants — Jupiter’s size and larger — that were lurking close to their parent star. The addition of Kepler (as well as more sophisticated planet-hunting from the ground) means that more “super-Earths” have been found, or planets that are just slightly larger than Earth but have a rocky surface. Kepler’s finds also allow astronomers to begin grouping exoplanets into types, which helps with understanding their origins.

Kepler’s major achievement was discovering the sheer variety of planetary systems that are out there. Planet systems can exist in compact arrangements within the confines of the equivalent of Mercury’s orbit. They can even orbit around two stars, much like Tatooine in the Star Wars universe. And in an exciting find for those seeking life beyond Earth, the telescope revealed that small, rocky planets similar to Earth are more common than larger gas giants such as Jupiter.

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On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin (1930- ) became the first humans ever to land on the moon. About six-and-a-half hours later, Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. The Apollo 11 mission occurred eight years after President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) announced a national goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Apollo 17, the final manned moon mission, took place in 1972.

At the time, the United States was still trailing the Soviet Union in space developments, and Cold War-era America welcomed Kennedy’s bold proposal. In 1966, after five years of work by an international team of scientists and engineers, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conducted the first unmanned Apollo mission, testing the structural integrity of the proposed launch vehicle and spacecraft combination. 

Then, on January 27, 1967, tragedy struck at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, when a fire broke out during a manned launch-pad test of the Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rocket. Three astronauts were killed in the fire.

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April 12 was already a huge day in space history twenty years before the launch of the first shuttle mission. On that day in 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, making a 108-minute orbital flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft.

In 1955, Gagarin was accepted to the First Chkalovsky Higher Air Force Pilots School in Orenburg. He initially began training on the Yak-18 already familiar to him and later graduated to training on the MiG-15 in February 1956. Gagarin twice struggled to land the two-seater trainer aircraft, and risked dismissal from pilot training. However, the commander of the regiment decided to give him another chance at landing. Gagarin’s flight instructor gave him a cushion to sit on, which improved his view from the cockpit, and he landed successfully. Having completed his evaluation in a trainer aircraft, Gagarin began flying solo in 1957.

On 5 November 1957, Gagarin was commissioned a lieutenant in the Soviet Air Forces having accumulated 166 hours and 47 minutes of flight time. He graduated from flight school the next day and was posted to the Luostari Air Base close to the Norwegian border in Murmansk Oblast for a two-year assignment with the Northern Fleet. On 7 July 1959, he was rated Military Pilot 3rd Class. After expressing interest in space exploration following the launch of Luna 3 on 6 October 1959, his recommendation to the Soviet space programme was endorsed and forward by Lieutenant Colonel Babushkin. By this point, he had accumulated 265 hours of flight time. Gagarin was promoted to the rank of senior lieutenant on 6 November 1959, three weeks after he was interviewed by a medical commission for qualification to the space programme.

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In astrophysics, spaghettification (sometimes referred to as the noodle effect) is the vertical stretching and horizontal compression of objects into long thin shapes (rather like spaghetti) in a very strong non-homogeneous gravitational field; it is caused by extreme tidal forces. In the most extreme cases, near black holes, the stretching is so powerful that no object can withstand it, no matter how strong its components. Within a small region the horizontal compression balances the vertical stretching so that small objects being spaghettified experience no net change in volume.

The way it works has to do with how gravity behaves over distance. Right now, your feet are closer to the centre of Earth and are therefore more strongly attracted than your head. Under extreme gravity, say, near a black hole, that difference in attraction will actually start working against you.

As your feet begin to get stretched by gravity’s pull, they will become increasingly more attracted as they inch closer to the centre of the black hole. The closer they get, the faster they move. But the top half of your body is farther away and so is not moving toward the centre as fast. The result: spaghettification!

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