So earlier today, the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced that Donald Trump will face criminal charges that pertain to hush-money payments (amounting to $130,000) he made to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election...among other things.
In all, Trump faces 34 counts related to alleged document fraud as a result of today's indictment.
Not to sound heartless and say that I want the one-term, twice-impeached president to be found guilty of all 34 charges, but I really want this one-term, twice-impeached president to be found guilty of all 34 charges.
NASA’s Dragonfly Team Soars through Major Design Review (News Release)
Before it can fly its revolutionary rotorcraft over the organic dunes of Saturn’s moon Titan, NASA’s Dragonfly mission team needs to navigate a series of independent reviews to demonstrate the flight project is on track.
Led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, the team recently crossed a major milestone on that path, successfully passing all the technical requirements and standards of the weeklong Preliminary Design Review (PDR) that wrapped up on March 3.
“I am very proud of the entire Dragonfly team,” said Bobby Braun, head of APL’s Space Exploration Sector. “APL, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Lockheed Martin and all of our partners really came together to deliver a credible technical baseline. The fidelity and thought that went into each decision was clearly communicated and forms a solid foundation upon which the team can build.”
The PDR – a requirement for all NASA missions – covers topics such as spacecraft design, mission requirements, science plans, schedule, cost and risk. Held at APL, which manages the mission and will build and operate the Dragonfly lander, the PDR included more than 60 presentations to a panel of external experts tasked with evaluating and assessing mission progress for NASA.
“I’m excited to see all of the Dragonfly mission's design components coming together,” said Lori Glaze, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This mission team's hard work has resulted in the technical design for a spacecraft that can conduct compelling science to increase our understanding of Titan.”
NASA will consider the board’s findings in a confirmation review later this year, examining Dragonfly’s cost, schedule and the recommended baseline plan forward.
“The team did a fantastic job,” said Dragonfly Principal Investigator Zibi Turtle, also of APL. “Everyone worked so hard to make sure the review board had a clear idea not just of the great progress we've made to close out the design but of our technical challenges, and how we plan to overcome them. We’re incredibly excited to have completed this step, and are ready to continue our work on the next phase of Dragonfly development -- including testing in the large Titan-environment chamber here at APL over the next year.”
Dragonfly centers on a game-changing approach to planetary exploration, employing a rotorcraft-lander to travel between and sample diverse sites on this mysterious world. Dragonfly will characterize the habitability of Titan's environment, investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry in an environment where carbon-rich material and liquid water may have mixed for an extended period, and even search for chemical indications of whether water-based or hydrocarbon-based life once existed on Titan.
Dragonfly is being designed and built under the direction of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which manages the Dragonfly mission for NASA. The team includes key partners at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado; NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California; NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia; Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania; Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California; Honeybee Robotics in Pasadena, California; NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; the French space agency (CNES) in Paris; the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne, Germany; and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Tokyo.
Dragonfly is the fourth mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
NASA Instrument Bound for Titan Could Reveal Chemistry Leading to Life (News Release - March 17)
A new NASA mission to Saturn’s giant moon, Titan, is due to launch in 2027. When it arrives in the mid-2030s, it will begin a journey of discovery that could bring about a new understanding of the development of life in the universe.
This mission, called Dragonfly, will carry an instrument called the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS), designed to help scientists hone in on the chemistry at work on Titan. It may also shed light on the kinds of chemical steps that occurred on Earth that ultimately led to the formation of life, called prebiotic chemistry.
Titan's abundant complex carbon-rich chemistry, interior ocean and past presence of liquid water on the surface make it an ideal destination to study prebiotic chemical processes and the potential habitability of an extraterrestrial environment.
DraMS will allow scientists back on Earth to remotely study the chemical makeup of the Titanian surface. “We want to know if the type of chemistry that could be important for early pre-biochemical systems on Earth is taking place on Titan,” explains Dr. Melissa Trainer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
Trainer is a planetary scientist and astrobiologist who specializes in Titan and is one of the Dragonfly mission’s deputy principal investigators. She is also lead on the DraMS instrument, which will scan through measurements of samples from Titan’s surface material for evidence of prebiotic chemistry.
To accomplish this, the Dragonfly robotic rotorcraft will capitalize on Titan’s low gravity and dense atmosphere to fly between different points of interest on Titan’s surface, spread as far as several miles apart. This allows Dragonfly to relocate its entire suite of instruments to a new site when the previous one has been fully explored, and provides access to samples in environments with a variety of geologic histories.
At each site, samples less than a gram in size will be drilled out of the surface by the Drill for Acquisition of Complex Organics (DrACO) and brought inside the lander’s main body, to a place called the “attic” that houses the DraMS instrument. There, they will be irradiated by an onboard laser or vaporized in an oven to be measured by DraMS.
A mass spectrometer is an instrument that analyzes the various chemical components of a sample by separating these components down into their base molecules and passing them through sensors for identification.
“DraMS is designed to look at the organic molecules that may be present on Titan, at their composition and distribution in different surface environments,” says Trainer. Organic molecules contain carbon and are used by all known forms of life.
They are of interest in understanding the formation of life because they can be created by living and non-living processes.
Mass spectrometers determine what’s in a sample by ionizing the material (that is, bombarding it with energy so that the atoms therein become positively or negatively charged) and examining the chemical composition of the various compounds. This involves determining the relationship between the weight of the molecule and its charge, which serves as a signature for the compound.
DraMS was developed in part by the same team at Goddard which developed the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard the Curiosity rover. DraMS is designed to survey samples of Titanian surface material in situ, using techniques tested on Mars with the SAM suite.
Trainer emphasized the benefits of this heritage. Dragonfly’s scientists did not want to “reinvent the wheel” when it came to searching for organic compounds on Titan, and instead built on established methods which have been applied on Mars and elsewhere.
“This design has given us an instrument that’s very flexible, that can adapt to the different types of surface samples,” says Trainer.
DraMS and other science instruments on Dragonfly are being designed and built under the direction of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which manages the mission for NASA and is designing and building the rotorcraft-lander. The team includes key partners at Goddard, the French space agency (CNES, Paris, France), which is providing the Gas Chromatograph Module for DraMS that will provide an additional separation after leaving the oven, Lockheed Martin Space, Littleton, Colorado, NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, La CaƱada Flintridge, California, Penn State University, State College, Pennsylvania, Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, California, Honeybee Robotics, Brooklyn, New York, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Cologne, Germany and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Tokyo, Japan.
Dragonfly is the fourth mission in NASA’s New Frontiers program. New Frontiers is managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate Washington.
Vulcan: Tanking Tests Performed on ULA's New Rocket (News Release - March 17)
Completing the next phase of testing in preparation for the inaugural Vulcan rocket flight, the United Launch Alliance (ULA) team accomplished tanking demonstrations at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
The pathfinder tests filled the Vulcan first stage and Centaur V upper stage with cryogenic propellant on separate days to validate performance of the stages, Vulcan Launch Platform (VLP), Space Launch Complex-41 facilities and ground support systems.
The tests, which also verified countdown steps, procedures and timelines, were successfully performed March 10 on the Vulcan booster stage and March 16 on Centaur V.
For both tests, the "Preps and Tanking Team" shift of launch console operators initiated the countdown to power up the rocket, perform testing and complete final configurations for cryogenic propellant loading.
During the planned countdown hold, the launch pad was verified clear of all personnel and the authorization was given to proceed into tanking of the rocket.
The transfer lines at the pad and the flight hardware underwent chill down procedures to thermally condition equipment against the harsh temperature shock of the propellants. Once that was achieved, the cryogenics began flowing into the rocket.
The Vulcan booster uses Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and liquid oxygen; Centaur V is powered by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.
A shift change in the control room saw the "Detanking and Securing Team" take over to drain the propellants back into the pad storage tanks, safe the rocket and power it down.
Engineers will review the tanking test data collected and information gained in test objectives aimed at characterizing performance of hardware and confirming analytical predictions.
With the tanking tests now accomplished, the Vulcan Launch Platform will disengage from the pad systems for transport of the Vulcan rocket to the Vertical Integration Facility (VIF).
The next step in the countdown to the inaugural launch includes conducting a Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) to practice the day-of-launch activities and then performing a Flight Readiness Firing (FRF) to complete the full Terminal Countdown sequence, ignite the engines and demonstrate a hot-fire abort recycle and safing.
The tanking test for the Centaur V is ongoing. You can tell by the flame emanating from the flare stack to the lower right side of this screen: https://t.co/ptiivtPpeJ
Intuitive Machines Successfully Completes Launch Vibration Tests in Preparation for Lunar Mission (Press Release - March 16)
Intuitive Machines, Inc. (Nasdaq: LUNR, LUNRW) (“Intuitive Machines” or the “Company”), a leading space exploration, infrastructure and services company, today announced that its lunar lander, Nova-C has completed all structural testing, paving the way for the Company’s first mission to the Moon later this year.
The series of modal tests, conducted by Intuitive Machines engineers, subjected the Company’s Nova-C lunar lander to low-level vibration to excite the completed lander. Results from these tests correlate the detailed finite element model of Nova-C with the flight structure, ultimately allowing engineers to calculate flight environments of the lander, electronics and customer payloads that will be exposed to strong vibrations during the launch.
The modal tests, in conjunction with previous vibration and static load tests, provide the complete structural certification of the flight lander.
“Completing modal testing and structural certification in advance of our first mission to the Moon is a significant milestone ahead of launching later this year,” said Steve Altemus, Chief Executive Officer of Intuitive Machines. “Returning the United States to the Moon is a historic mission, and completing this test ensures the payloads and spacecraft subsystems can withstand the vibrations of launch.”
Intuitive Machines is a leading participant in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative, having been awarded contracts for three missions to date, more than any other contractor.
NASA’s Webb Telescope Captures Rarely Seen Prelude to Supernova (News Release - March 14)
The rare sight of a Wolf-Rayet star – among the most luminous, most massive and most briefly-detectable stars known – was one of the first observations made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in June 2022. Webb shows the star, WR 124, in unprecedented detail with its powerful infrared instruments.
The star is 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagitta.
Massive stars race through their lifecycles, and only some of them go through a brief Wolf-Rayet phase before going supernova, making Webb’s detailed observations of this rare phase valuable to astronomers. Wolf-Rayet stars are in the process of casting off their outer layers, resulting in their characteristic halos of gas and dust.
The star WR 124 is 30 times the mass of the Sun and has shed 10 Suns’ worth of material – so far. As the ejected gas moves away from the star and cools, cosmic dust forms and glows in the infrared light detectable by Webb.
The origin of cosmic dust that can survive a supernova blast and contribute to the universe’s overall “dust budget” is of great interest to astronomers for multiple reasons. Dust is integral to the workings of the universe: It shelters forming stars, gathers together to help form planets, and serves as a platform for molecules to form and clump together – including the building blocks of life on Earth.
Despite the many essential roles that dust plays, there is still more dust in the universe than astronomers’ current dust-formation theories can explain. The universe is operating with a dust budget surplus.
Webb opens up new possibilities for studying details in cosmic dust, which is best observed in infrared wavelengths of light. Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) balances the brightness of WR 124’s stellar core and the knotty details in the fainter surrounding gas.
The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals the clumpy structure of the gas and dust nebula of the ejected material now surrounding the star. Before Webb, dust-loving astronomers simply did not have enough detailed information to explore questions of dust production in environments like WR 124, and whether the dust grains were large and bountiful enough to survive the supernova and become a significant contribution to the overall dust budget.
Now those questions can be investigated with real data.
Stars like WR 124 also serve as an analog to help astronomers understand a crucial period in the early history of the universe. Similar dying stars first seeded the young universe with heavy elements forged in their cores – elements that are now common in the current era, including on Earth.
Webb’s detailed image of WR 124 preserves forever a brief, turbulent time of transformation, and promises future discoveries that will reveal the long-shrouded mysteries of cosmic dust.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.
Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
NASA Picks Firefly Aerospace for Robotic Delivery to Far Side of Moon (Press Release - March 14)
To carry multiple payloads to the far side of the Moon including a satellite to orbit that area, NASA has selected Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas. The commercial lander will deliver two agency payloads, as well as a communications and data relay satellite for lunar orbit, which is an ESA (European Space Agency) collaboration with NASA.
The contract award, for just under $112 million, is a commercial lunar delivery targeted to launch in 2026 through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, initiative, and part of the agency’s Artemis program.
This delivery targets a landing site on the far side of the Moon for the two payloads, a place that permanently faces away from Earth. Scientists consider this one of the best locations in the solar system for making radio observations shielded from the noise generated by our home planet.
The sensitive observations need to take place during the fourteen earth-day long lunar night.
One of these payloads delivered to the lunar surface aims to take advantage of this radio-quiet zone to make low-frequency astrophysics measurements of the cosmos – focusing on a time known as the “Dark Ages,” a cosmic era that began some 370,000 years after the Big Bang and lasted until the first stars and galaxies formed. Since there is no line of sight and no direct communication with Earth from the far side of the Moon, Firefly is also required to provide communication services.
“NASA continues to look at ways to learn more about our universe,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Going to the lunar far side will help scientists understand some of the fundamental physics processes that occurred during the early evolution of the universe.”
Firefly is responsible for end-to-end delivery services, including payload integration, delivery from Earth to the surface and orbit of the Moon, and NASA payload operations for the first lunar day. This is the second award to Firefly under the CLPS initiative.
This award is the ninth surface delivery task award issued to a CLPS vendor, and the second to the far side.
“We look forward to Firefly providing this CLPS delivery,” said Joel Kearns, the deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “This lunar landing should enable new scientific discoveries from the far side of the Moon during the lunar night. This particular group of payloads should not only generate new science but should be a pathfinder for future investigations exploiting this unique vantage point in our solar system.”
The three payloads slated for delivery are expected to weigh in total about 1,090 pounds (494.5 kilograms). These payloads are:
- Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night): A pathfinder to understand the Moon’s radio environment and to potentially take a first look at a previously unobserved era in our cosmic history. It will use deployable antennas and radio receivers to observe sensitive radio waves from the Dark Ages for the first time.
LuSEE-Night, is a collaboration between the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley, Space Science Laboratory and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. It is managed for NASA by the Planetary Missions Program Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
- Lunar Pathfinder: A communications and data relay satellite that will provide communication services to lunar missions via S-band and UHF links to lunar assets on the surface and in orbit around the Moon and an X-band link to Earth. ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder is designed and developed by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited.
ESA collaborated with NASA for delivery through the CLPS initiative.
- User Terminal (UT): This payload will institute a new standard for S-Band Proximity-1 space communication protocol and establish space heritage. It will be used to commission the Lunar Pathfinder and ensure its readiness to provide communications service to LuSEE-Night.
UT consists of software-defined radio, an antenna, a network switch and a sample data source. It is in development by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Commercial deliveries to the lunar surface with several providers continue to be part of NASA’s exploration efforts. Future CLPS deliveries could include more science experiments and technology demonstrations that further support the agency’s Artemis program.
NASA Begins Building its First Robotic Moon Rover (News Release)
NASA’s first robotic lunar rover is officially coming together and the team building it is over the Moon.
“I’m super excited...it makes me very proud of all the time and effort the team has invested to get this far,” said David Petri, system integration and test lead for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover(VIPER). The team recently began assembling the 1,000-pound rover at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Engineers have affixed the rover’s lower chassis plate and the lower parts of the frame that will support all of VIPER – from the bottom of its wheels to the tip of its headlights. It all now sits atop a set of risers on a specialized lift table in a cleanroom at Johnson.
“We’ve just completed the first few steps integrating rover components that will one day be on the surface of the Moon,” said Petri. “Hardware is coming in from all over the world, including some manufactured at several NASA centers – it’s really ‘go’ time.”
Over the next few months, engineers and technicians will continue the build-up, adding subsystems such as avionics, power, telecommunications, mechanisms, thermal systems and navigation systems onto the rover, including the specialized scientific instruments and drill that will perform the primary objectives of the VIPER mission. Once integration is complete, they will put the completed rover through a series of stressful function, performance and operational tests, followed by vibration, acoustic and thermal-vacuum environmental tests ensuring the rover is mission-ready.
Meanwhile, at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley where the mission is managed, software engineers continue developing and testing the brains of the rover, before it is integrated with the rover hardware. And the VIPER science team continues to simulate the fast-paced science operations in preparation for a target lunar landing date of November 10, 2024.
Scientists chose the date to ensure that VIPER, a solar-powered rover, receives the most sunlight possible as it makes frequent stops to study and explore a portion of the large flat-topped Moon mountain Mons Mouton. Using a target landing date, the rover’s science team can continue planning the best path for the rover to take to maximize science results while outrunning cold and dark shadows.
The successful arrival of the first flight science instruments is just the beginning – with more expected to arrive soon, and many other parts staged in preparation for integration – NASA is on track to deliver VIPER in mid-2024 to Astrobotic of Pittsburgh, ahead of a launch in late-2024. Astrobotic is scheduled to deliver VIPER to the Moon’s South Pole aboard its Griffin lander as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
Once on the Moon, VIPER will explore and study the environment to better understand the origin and distribution of lunar water and other potential resources. Such findings could be used to help determine where and how the Moon’s resources can be harvested to sustain humans on the Moon for the Artemis program and future human space exploration in deep space.
Vulcan: Inaugural Rocket Moved to Launch Pad for Tanking Tests (News Release)
The first United Launch Alliance (ULA)Vulcan rocket is atop its Cape Canaveral launch pad for the next phase of qualification testing in preparation for the inaugural flight.
Over the next several days, ULA engineers and technicians will put the rocket through pathfinder tests to validate the successful performance of the Vulcan and Centaur stages, Vulcan Launch Platform (VLP), pad facilities and ground support systems.
The tanking tests will verify countdown steps, procedures and timelines and offer the opportunity to certify the launch team through real-world experience operating the hardware.
The VLP transported the rocket from the Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) to Space Launch Complex (SLC)-41 on March 9, riding the rails that connect the two locations. The rocket was stacked on the VLP inside the VIF in late January, and a series of readiness checks since then confirmed that the vehicle was ready to move on to launch pad testing.
Each tanking day is planned to be lengthy and incorporate extensive special test objectives. The expected duration of tests necessitates two shifts of launch console operators, dividing the crew into the "Preps and Tanking Team" and the "Detanking and Securing Team."
After the tanking tests are accomplished, the VLP will disengage from the pad systems for transport of the Vulcan rocket to the VIF for the next step in the countdown to the inaugural launch.
The first flight includes payloads for three distinctly different missions, deploying two Project Kuiper prototype broadband satellites into low Earth orbit for Amazon, sending Astrobotic's Peregrine commercial lunar lander to intercept the Moon and carrying a Celestis memorial payload into deep space.
Just thought I'd share these images that I took at last night's NBA game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Memphis Grizzlies at Crypto.com Arena (a.k.a. The Crypt). The Lakers won this game, 112-103, with LeBron James not playing due to an injury and Anthony Davis (AD) scoring 30 points and grabbing 22 rebounds in Tuesday's victory.
The biggest highlight of last night came during halftime...when the Lakers honored Pau Gasol by unveiling his retired jersey on the rafters at The Crypt, next to those of Kobe Bryant. In attendance at the game to witness this unveiling were former Lakers head coach Phil Jackson, Kobe's wife Vanessa and fellow (retired?) NBA player Marc Gasol—Pau's sibling who won a title with the Toronto Raptors in 2019.
Even if the Lakers lost this game, last night would've still been memorable. It was very emotional and nostalgic to see games that Pau and Kobe played together during their championship years in 2009 and 2010 on the Jumbotron during the ceremony—with Phil Jackson and Pau's other former Lake Show teammates like Derek Fisher, Metta World Peace and Sasha Vujacic posting video testimonials that congratulated Gasol on yesterday's achievement.
This makes me hope that LeBron and AD will win one last title here in Los Angeles before they move on in their careers, or in LeBron's case, retire from the NBA. A championship won't happen this year, but I think there are about two more years of this duo playing together...with the greatness of late 2020 hopefully being repeated before that time is up.
Oh, and all of the fans at the game last night also got a free commemorative Pau Gasol jersey (as shown at the bottom of this entry)! Happy Wednesday.
NASA’s DART Data Validates Kinetic Impact as Planetary Defense Method (News Release - March 1)
Since NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test(DART) successfully impacted its target nearly five months ago, on September 26 — altering the orbit of the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos by 33 minutes — the DART team has been hard at work analyzing the data collected from the world’s first planetary defense test mission.
The DART mission employed an asteroid-deflection technique known as a “kinetic impactor,” which in simplest terms means smashing a thing into another thing — in this case, a spacecraft into an asteroid. From the data, the DART investigation team, led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, found that a kinetic impactor mission like DART can be effective in altering the trajectory of an asteroid, a big step toward the goal of preventing future asteroid strikes on Earth.
These findings were published in four papers in the journal Nature.
“I cheered when DART slammed head-on into the asteroid for the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration, and that was just the start,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “These findings add to our fundamental understanding of asteroids and build a foundation for how humanity can defend Earth from a potentially hazardous asteroid by altering its course."
The first paper reports DART’s successful demonstration of kinetic impactor technology in detail: reconstructing the impact itself, reporting the timeline leading up to impact, specifying in detail the location and nature of the impact site, and recording the size and shape of Dimorphos.
The authors, led by Terik Daly, Carolyn Ernst and Olivier Barnouin of APL, note DART’s successful autonomous targeting of a small asteroid, with limited prior observations, is a critical first step on the path to developing kinetic impactor technology as a viable operational capability for planetary defense.
Their findings show intercepting an asteroid with a diameter of around half a mile, such as Dimorphos, can be achieved without an advance reconnaissance mission, though advance reconnaissance would give valuable information for planning and predicting the outcome. What is necessary is sufficient warning time — several years at a minimum, but preferably decades.
“Nevertheless,” the authors state in the paper, DART’s success “builds optimism about humanity’s capacity to protect the Earth from an asteroid threat.”
The second paper uses two independent approaches based on Earth-based lightcurve and radar observations. The investigation team, led by Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University, arrived at two consistent measurements of the period change from the kinetic impact: 33 minutes, plus or minus one minute.
This large change indicates the recoil from material excavated from the asteroid and ejected into space by the impact (known as ejecta) contributed significant momentum change to the asteroid, beyond that of the DART spacecraft itself.
The key to kinetic impact is that the push to the asteroid comes not only from colliding spacecraft, but also from this ejecta recoil. The authors conclude: “To serve as a proof-of-concept for the kinetic impactor technique of planetary defense, DART needed to demonstrate that an asteroid could be targeted during a high-speed encounter and that the target’s orbit could be changed. DART has successfully done both.”
In the third paper, the investigation team, led by Andrew Cheng of APL, calculated the momentum change transferred to the asteroid as a result of DART’s kinetic impact by studying the change in the orbital period of Dimorphos. They found the impact caused an instantaneous slowing in Dimorphos’ speed along its orbit of about 2.7 millimeters per second — again indicating the recoil from ejecta played a major role in amplifying the momentum change directly imparted to the asteroid by the spacecraft.
That momentum change was amplified by a factor of 2.2 to 4.9 (depending on the mass of Dimorphos), indicating the momentum change transferred because of ejecta production significantly exceeded the momentum change from the DART spacecraft alone.
This finding “[validates] the effectiveness of kinetic impact for preventing future asteroid strikes on the Earth,” the authors conclude.
DART’s scientific value goes beyond validating kinetic impactor as a means of planetary defense. By smashing into Dimorphos, the mission has broken new ground in the study of asteroids.
DART’s impact made Dimorphos an “active asteroid” — a space rock that orbits like an asteroid but has a tail of material like a comet – which is detailed in the fourth paper led by Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute.
Although scientists had proposed that some active asteroids are the result of impact events, until now no one had ever observed the activation of an asteroid. The DART mission activated Dimorphos under precisely known and carefully observed impact conditions, enabling the detailed study of the formation of an active asteroid for the first time.
“DART, as a controlled, planetary-scale impact experiment, provides a detailed characterization of the target, the ejecta morphology, and the entire ejecta evolution process,” the authors write. “DART will continue to be the model for studies of newly-discovered asteroids that show activity caused by natural impacts.”
DART’s Legacy Begins
“We are so proud of the DART team and the investigation’s latest results,” said Jason Kalirai, Civil Space Mission Area Executive at APL. “With the core analysis activities starting after the impact of Dimorphos, the results demonstrate how successful the kinetic impactor technique can be — paving the way for a bright future for planetary defense.”
Johns Hopkins APL manages the DART mission for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office as a project of the agency’s Planetary Missions Program Office. The LICIACube project is managed by ASI Robotic Exploration Mission Office, with industrial contractor Argotec S.r.I. and a scientific team from the National Institute of Astrophysics, Polytechnic University of Milan, the University of Bologna, the University of Naples Parthenope, and CNR-IFAC.
After more than a 2-year hiatus, The Mandalorian is back! I watched the Season 3 premiere—a.k.a. Chapter 17, "The Apostate"—last night, and needless to say, it was great to see Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his surrogate Jedi son Grogu back on my computer screen.
I won't delve into the plot details for Chapter 17 here, except to say that I do believe that this is the first time I saw a proton torpedo used against a living creature (the screenshot above is from that moment) in the Star Wars universe...at least in a live-action show. Poor gigantic alligator / crocodile / whatever that was.
And the image below indicates that Grogu will obviously be adding more adorable highlights like this to his repertoire. Chapter 18 (on March 8) can't arrive soon enough!
