Table of contents for No. 118 in All About Space

WELCOME This month marks 52 years since humankind landed on the surface of the Moon for the very first time. A little over five decades later and we’ve not sent humans back since Apollo – but that’s not to say the likes of NASA and the ESA, alongside a selection of private space companies, aren’t once again shooting for our natural satellite. So where are we in our plans to return to the lunar surface, stepping into the boot prints of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin? Turn to our cover feature for the plans, spacecraft and logistics that’ll see us go back, this time with intention to stay. Elsewhere in the issue, we return to the extinction of the dinosaurs: was it really an asteroid that wiped them out, or…

SCIENTISTS PONDER HOW TO GET SAMPLES FROM SATURN’S WEIRD MOON TITAN Words by Tereza Pultarova © NASA A sample-return mission to Saturn’s moon Titan could discover unexpected forms of life and bring back chemical compounds that cannot be found on Earth. A team of engineers from the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, has recently received a $125,000 (£88,000) NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant to look into the feasibility of bringing a sample of material from this intriguing world to Earth. “We expect landing on Titan to be relatively easy,” said Steven Oleson, head of the Compass Lab at Glenn. “Titan has a thick atmosphere of nitrogen – 1.5 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth – which can slow the lander’s velocity with an aeroshell and a parachute…

Future tech Sample return from Titan SAMPLE RETURN FROM TITAN A new NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts study is looking at the surprising advantages of a mission to Saturn’s moon ©Adrian Mann 1 SATURN Titan is the largest moon of Saturn, and the iconic Ringed Planet will loom large – clouds permitting – in Titan’s sky. 2 METHANE LAKES Titan’s unique advantage is that methane exists on Titan as water does on Earth, so there are huge reserves of liquid methane handy for filling tanks. 3 WATER ICE While methane takes the place of water on Titan, water ice takes the place of rock. The crust is formed of ice, which can be melted and split to produce oxygen. 4 DENSE ATMOSPHERE Titan’s atmosphere is made up of nitrogen, giving…

HOW TO FIND A ROGUE PLANET GRAVITATIONAL MICROLENSING Microlensing is the distortion and magnification of a star’s light when another object passes in front of it and bends the path of light passing near it through gravity. It’s been successfully used to find exoplanets orbiting other stars, but can also be used to detect interstellar planets, allowing astronomers to estimate how common they are. Microlensing events by interstellar planets tend to be one-offs, so it’s hard to learn much about the planets themselves. DIRECT IMAGING The direct detection of interstellar planets relies on long-exposure surveys of large areas of the sky looking for brown dwarfs and other faint objects. Infrared surveys are particularly useful, since many of these objects emit more radiation as heat than they do as light. Surveys…

Black holes COULD LIFE EXIST AROUND BLACK HOLES? They warp time and space, but could they also nurture life? Reported by Nigel Watson TAP HERE TO PLAY © Nicholas Forder From the coldest to the hottest regions, life on Earth has filled every conceivable ecological niche. It’s very likely life has evolved elsewhere, though despite our best efforts we haven’t seen any signs of it yet. What is truly amazing is that scientists have speculated that life could exist on planets in the neighbourhood of black holes. Black holes are the most extreme and awe-inspiring objects in the universe. At the centre of virtually every galaxy, including our own Milky Way, resides a menacing black hole that greedily consumes everything that falls into it – from vast dust clouds and…

Dinosaur killer WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS? THE OBJECT THAT CAUSED EARTH’S LAST MASS EXTINCTION MAY NOT HAVE BEEN AN ASTEROID Reported by Robert Lea “LONG-PERIOD COMETS MAY ALSO POSE LONG-TERM HAZARDS TO HUMANS AND EARTH’S BIOSPHERE”MANASVI LINGAM Researchers are fairly certain that the object known as the Chicxulub impactor ended the dinosaurs’ reign over Earth 66 million years ago when it crashed into the planet. The huge impact released energy equivalent to the detonation of 21 to 921 billion nuclear bombs, so it wasn’t just the dinosaurs that bore the brunt of the devastation. The impact sparked what geologists call the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction, an event that saw the elimination of around 80 per cent of the planet’s animal species. Evidence of this violent impact is found in Earth’s geological…

International Space Station Focus on HOW DO ASTRONAUTS CLEAN A SPACE STATION? Astronauts have to keep the space station clean to keep microbes under control Reported by Tereza Pultarova x2 Images © Getty International Space Station astronauts don’t have time to sleep in on Saturday mornings. They’re far too busy sticking to their strict cleaning schedule. Saturday is their big ‘cleaning day’, when surfaces have to be sanitised and dust removed. On 30 April, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who arrived at the orbital outpost aboard Dragon Crew Endeavour on 24 April, shared insights into what a space station cleaning routine looks like. The inhabitants of the International Space Station are kept as safe as possible from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic: strict preflight quarantine and other safety measures…

THE THEORIES What could be causing the X-rays from Uranus? THE SUN Jupiter’s X-rays are synchronised with the Sun’s emissions, and astronomers have discovered that the gas giant’s glow is due to the X-rays from the Sun reflecting back off the planet’s atmosphere. That’s happening on Uranus, too, but it’s not thought to be the sole explanation. © NASA AURORAE Aurorae light up Uranus’ atmosphere, and they’re driven by the same processes as on Earth: by streams of charged particles like electrons which become caught in powerful magnetic fields. Scientists are not sure what causes aurorae on Uranus, but they may be a source of extra X-rays. © NASA URANUS’ RINGS There are charged particles such as electrons and protons all around Uranus, and it may well be that they…

STARGAZER Planets THIS MONTH’S PLANETS Venus takes pride of place as an evening star, dazzling at an impressive magnitude for naked eye, binocular and telescope observers Venus is our Planet of the Month, not just because it’s bright and easy to find in the sky, but because there will be a lot going on around it in the sky too. Venus is often called ‘Earth’s Twin’, but that’s very misleading because the only thing they have in common is their size – they are roughly the same diameter. While Earth is a lush paradise, teeming with life, Venus is a hellish planet with a poisonous atmosphere, crushing surface pressure and lethal surface temperatures. Because Venus orbits the Sun so closely it can never appear very far from it in the…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE © NASA/JPL-Caltech 11 MAY 2021 A Martian rover’s view of ‘Santa Cruz’ NASA’s Perseverance rover snapped this profound photo using its dual-camera Mastcam-Z imager while inside Jezero crater. Here we can see Santa Cruz, a large hill standing proud amid the rugged Martian landscape, located approximately 2.5 kilometres (1.5 miles) away from the rover. Beyond Santa Cruz on the horizon is the faint dusty rim of Jezero crater. This image is presented as a preliminary calibrated version of a natural-colour composite, meaning the colours displayed are similar to how they would look to a person standing on Mars. 26 APRIL 2021 Star-studded necklace The exquisite and aptly named Necklace Nebula, officially PN G054.2-03.4, is located 15,000 light years away in the constellation…

FIREFLY AEROSPACE PICKS SPACEX ROCKET TO LAUNCH BLUE GHOST MOON LANDER IN 2023 Words by Rahul Rao Space launch company Firefly Aerospace announced that when its Blue Ghost lander launches to the Moon in 2023, it will do so on a SpaceX Falcon 9. The Falcon 9 will be able to carry Blue Ghost to the Moon without forcing the lander to expend much of the fuel it might need for the actual touchdown, said Shea Ferring, Firefly’s senior vice president of spacecraft. Firefly has yet to launch anything, though in June the Texas company hopes to begin testing its own rocket for small launches: Firefly Alpha. Nonetheless, the company has been active in designing lunar landers, and it’s paid off. In February NASA awarded Firefly a contract to deliver…

The Moon RETURNING TO THE MOON The US, China and Russia plan to put boots back on the Moon before the end of the decade with the support of international partners 2021 German aerospace company PTScientists is looking to launch the world’s first-ever private Moon landing. It will use the Autonomous Landing and Navigation Module, which will deploy two rovers. 1 OCTOBER 2021 The Russian space agency Roscosmos is aiming to launch a lunar lander called Luna 25. It will touch down around the Boguslavsky crater, close to the Moon’s south pole. 4 NOVEMBER 2021 The unmanned test flight Artemis 1 is expected to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on a mission lasting 25.5 days, six of which will be in retrograde orbit around the Moon. JANUARY 2022 Japan’s…

WHY DO SOME PASSENGERS GET NAUSEOUS? Your inner ears contain fluid-filled organs responsible for your sense of balance. When these organs are telling your brain that you’re not moving – because the fluid is not reacting to gravity – but your eyes are telling it you are, then a feeling of nausea is the result. Spinning volunteers in centrifuges for a few hours has shown that upon leaving the chair, about half the subjects suffered similar effects to space adaptation syndrome. This means it’s not weightlessness itself, but the adaptation of the body to different gravitational conditions that leads to nausea. TAP HERE TO PLAY…

Space Shuttle TEN YEARS ON REMEMBERING THE SPACE SHUTTLE Exactly a decade ago, NASA’s reusable low-Earth orbital spacecraft’s time came to an end. All About Space relives the best moments Reported by Stuart Atkinson At the dawn of the Space Age, when mobile phones, laptop computers and the internet were still the stuff of science fiction, astronauts flew into space crammed inside cramped metal capsules that flew only once, launched on top of rockets that also flew only once. Today astronauts are flying into space inside capsules again, although the reusable Dragon and Orion spacecraft are a lot more sophisticated and a lot less cramped than those that flew during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. But for three memorable decades between 1981 and 2011, astronauts travelled into space and…

Uranus’ X-rays MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE WHY ARE X-RAYS COMING FROM URANUS? When X-rays were detected from the ice giant for the first time, a team of astronomers began to look into their origin Reported by David Crookes © Getty SCIENTISTS HAVE MADE A BREAKTHROUGH IN A STUDY OF THE ICY GIANT Uranus has long been thought of as an oddball planet. It’s one of two ice giants in the outer Solar System, the other being Neptune, and it’s one of two planets to rotate from east to west, the other being Venus. Most strangely, its spin axis is titled by 98 degrees, which means it rotates on its side. And now scientists have discovered something else that’s just a little weird. Data collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has…

ASK Space Our experts answer your questions ©NASA/ESA ASTROPHYSICS What are gamma-ray bursts? Gamma-ray bursts are the biggest explosions in the universe, caused by the death of a massive star or the merger of two extremely dense objects, such as neutron stars or black holes. The outcome at the centre of these extremely explosive events is most likely a black hole. An enormous amount of energy is released, as much as the Sun produces during its entire lifetime. This vast amount of energy powers the fastest outflows of matter in the universe and a very bright yet short-lived source of light. Gamma-ray bursts are named after the short flashes of gamma rays they produce, which for a few seconds outshine all the other gamma-ray sources in the universe. They also…

The Northern Hemisphere STARGAZER THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE Many nebulae are visible, and the central part of our galaxy is teeming with star clusters to enjoy Fully in the midst of summer, the shorter, warmer nights offer a splendid selection of nebulae, star clusters and bright stars to observe. Red supergiant Arcturus proudly makes its appearance known in the constellation of Boötes, while the unmistakable Summer Triangle is easily observed this month, with the stars Altair, Deneb and Vega – in the constellations of Aquila, Cygnus and Lyra respectively – marking each of its vertices. Summer is an ideal time to see the Milky Way, with Sagittarius and Scorpius marking its centre – here you’ll be able to see a selection of clusters, including the Ptolemy Cluster, also known as Messier…

STARGAZER Astroshots ASTROSHOTS OF THE MONTH Get featured in All About Space by sending your astrophotography images to space@spaceanswers.com Chris Grimmer Location: Norwich, UK Telescope: Celestron C9.25 Schmidt-Cassegrain and William Optics GT-81 refractor “My route into astrophotography started a couple of years back when one night in my local pub, I discovered that the pub landlord’s son owned a telescope. In the early hours of the morning, we headed outside to the car park to observe the night sky. I soon paid a visit to my local astronomical society, and the following day bought my first scope. I have always been interested in photography, so it wasn’t long before I had modified a cheap webcam and got my first picture of Jupiter. “It was then that the astronomy bug really hit.…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE CITY-SIZE NEUTRON STARS MAY ACTUALLY BE BIGGER THAN WE THOUGHT Words by Tereza Pultarova © NASA Scientists have found neutron stars – the densest known objects in the universe aside from black holes – have a radius of between 13.25 and 14.25 kilometres (8.2 and 8.9 miles). Previously it was believed these stars, leftovers of huge supernova explosions, have a slightly smaller radius of up to 12 kilometres (7.5 miles). Within this relatively small radius – whichever one you look at – an amount of matter that equals 1.4 times the mass of the Sun is squeezed. The Sun, in comparison, has a radius of 695,508 kilometres (432,169 miles). These estimates were made not by measuring neutron stars directly, but by looking…

LAUNCH PAD YOUR FIRST CONTACT WITH THE UNIVERSE EUROPE UNVEILS PLANS TO BRING ‘GPS’ AND SKYPE TO THE MOON WITH SATELLITES Words by Tereza Pultarova © ESA The ESA has kicked off development of a satellite constellation that will orbit the Moon and provide navigation and telecommunication services to lunar explorers. If all goes according to plan, the new system could be in place in the late 2020s. The ESA believes that Earth’s celestial companion is set to become a busy destination, with commercial companies and nations from across the world all wanting a slice of the ‘eighth continent’. The new constellation, called Moonlight, will make it easier and cheaper for a fledgling lunar economy to blossom. For now contracts have been awarded to two European industrial consortia to study…

The Moon ARTEMIS: MANNED MISSION TO THE MOON © Adrian Mann 1 WE HAVE LIFTOFF NASA will use a super-heavy-lift launch vehicle called the Space Launch System to send a reusable space capsule called Orion to the Moon. 2 SEPARATION It takes 90 seconds for the rocket to reach the period of greatest atmospheric force. The rocket boosters, fairings and launch abort systems are jettisoned. The core stage engine shuts down and separates away. 3 ORBITING EARTH The spacecraft must orbit Earth before it leaves the planet and heads for the lunar surface. As it does, the solar arrays and Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage are deployed. 4 DEPLOYING CUBESATS A total of 13 small satellites called CubeSats will be deployed as part of the flight. They will carry out missions…

Rogue planets WORLDS WITHOUT SUNS Astronomers are still on the hunt for rogue planets, but what can they tell us about the layout of our cosmos? Reported by Colin Stuart © Tobias Roetsch When we think about planets, a star usually comes as part of the package. After all, where would Earth be without the Sun? Imagine Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine without its twin suns, or Superman without Rao, the red supergiant around which Krypton spun. Yet you’d be wrong to imagine that planets are never starless. Astronomers have already found swarms of rogue planets – worlds wandering the open chasm of space alone. As far as we know, planets always start off with stars. They are the leftover fragments from star formation, the offcuts that you’d throw…

Vomit Comet ON BOARD THE VOMIT COMET You’d better have a strong stomach: in space, everyone can hear you spew Reported by Ian Evenden Earth has a problem, at least if you want to train astronauts. It’s called gravity, and while useful for things like attaching your feet to the ground, it’s an inconvenience when you need to acclimatise people to weightlessness. So what do you do? If you’re a national space agency, you set up a special flight that takes advantage of free fall to simulate the weightless experience. In order to simulate a feeling of weightlessness like astronauts experience once free of Earth’s gravity, the aircraft flies a particular flight path. It climbs at an angle of 45 degrees to altitude before nosing over and descending at 30…

HOW ARE BLACK HOLES MADE? Black holes are born out of the deaths of massive stars © Tobias Roetsch 1 NEBULA These are giant clouds of dust and hydrogen and helium gases. Clumps of a nebula subjected to the influence of gravity, radiation and temperature form a hot, independent core. This takes 100,000 years. 2 YELLOW DWARF An average yellow G-type main-sequence star like our Sun will form, and through nuclear fusion will burn up its central core of hydrogen and helium. Their life span is about 10 billion years. 3 RED GIANT As hydrogen fuel is used up in the core of a star, hydrogen burning occurs outside the core, causing the star to expand to hundreds of times its original size. The life of a red giant lasts…

THE CHICXULUB CRATER The collision with the Chicxulub impactor left a scar on Earth The crater is buried beneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. It’s the second-largest impact crater on Earth, discovered in 1978 by Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo as part of an airborne magnetic study. They cross-referenced this with gravimetric data collected in the 1940s, confirming the presence of the crater. Their evidence of the crater was presented in 1981, a year after father and son team Luis and Walter Alvarez, unaware of the crater’s discovery, suggested that a massive body from space had struck Earth 66 million years ago. ©NASA…

Mimas MOON PROFILE MIMAS This small, oddly shaped and icy moon continues to baffle scientists You could be mistaken in thinking this strange satellite is something pulled straight out of the Star Wars universe. Commonly referred to as the ‘Death Star’ moon, Mimas has only been visited a few times, and could be harbouring secrets below its surface. Discovered on 17 September 1789 by William Herschel, and later named by his son John Herschel, Mimas is Saturn’s smallest and innermost major moon. Orbiting just 185,539 kilometres (115,300 miles) above the gas giant, the icy moon zips along at high speeds, completing an orbit in just 22 hours and 36 minutes. Akin to our own Moon, Mimas is tidally locked with its host, meaning it keeps the same face towards Saturn…

HOW NASA’S CHANDRA X-RAY OBSERVATORY GATHERED DATA ABOUT URANUS Astronomers made their breakthrough by analysing three sets of information collected by this amazing spacecraft © Nichoas Forder 1 MAKING A BIG IMPRESSION Chandra is the largest and most sensitive X-ray telescope ever built. It’s named after astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and can detect X-ray sources 100 times fainter than previous telescopes. 2 SENT OUT INTO SPACE The telescope has to be in space because Earth’s atmosphere absorbs X-rays, making ground-based equivalents ineffective. While up there in orbit, it’s able to gather full-colour images of objects which emit X-rays. 3 HIGH-RESOLUTION MIRROR ASSEMBLY The telescope consists of four pairs of nested mirrors. X-rays bounce off the top mirrors in a pair onto the bottom mirrors. The mirrors are accurate to 50 millionths…

STARGAZER WHAT’S IN THE SKY? “AN OBJECT’S MAGNITUDE TELLS YOU HOW BRIGHT IT APPEARS FROM EARTH” RED LIGHT FRIENDLY In order to preserve your night vision, you should read our observing guide under red light JARGON BUSTER Conjunction A conjunction is an alignment of objects at the same celestial longitude. The conjunction of the Moon and the planets is determined with reference to the Sun. A planet is in conjunction with the Sun when it and Earth are aligned on opposite sides of the Sun. Right Ascension (RA) Right Ascension is to the sky what longitude is to the surface of the Earth, corresponding to east and west directions. It is measured in hours, minutes and seconds since, as the Earth rotates on its axis, we see different parts of…