The Space Roundup - Nov 28th, 2021
Hello, hello, my dear space lovers!
Are you ready for yet another week of space awesomeness?
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3, 2, 1, zero! Lift-off!
Sunny Sunday
This week marked 30 months that the successful solar sail experiment has been in orbit. This small satellite equipped with a thin solar sail was crowdfunded by the community and is constantly sharing data with NASA and other organizations to further advances in this great technology that can save sats from having to bring fuel with them to keep their trajectories. Very very cool
Talking about solar stuff, the fastest probe ever built, the Parker Solar Probe, just got faster! It’s broken its own speed record and now travels at around 586,000 km/h (364,621 mph) towards the sun…amazing.
Martian updates
NASA InSight lander has been capable of imaging the first hundred meters of Mars, revealing that the lander is likely above two large lava flows, separated by layers of sediment.
Ingenuity, the martian helicopter, flew again two weeks after the previous flight. This time it flew for about 100 seconds to travel 116 meters towards the Wright Brothers Field, where it took off for the first time. This was its 16th flight! Do you remember they didn’t know it was going to fly even once? Well… not even close! 🙂
Planetary defense
SpaceX launched its first successful interplanetary mission this week, and it was NASA’s first planetary defense mission. The DART mission will collide with an asteroid to learn how capable we are to change the trajectory of a threatening asteroid in case they approach our planet. “IT WAS ABOUT TIME!” - declared a dinosaur last Thursday :D
More exoplanets!
A group of scientists has been testing a new algorithm that uses data from the Kepler telescope to identify exoplanets and they have successfully identified more than 350 new exoplanets and 17 new multi-planet systems…just wow!
Amazing science :O
Creating something from nothing? Sounds like witchery to me, but that is what a group of scientists has experimented with while studying black holes. I refuse to try to summarize it for you, I’m too silly to do it!, so if you’re interested you can read more about it here.
Commercial updates
Both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have competed for our attention once again and both made public announcements this week. Jeff Bezo’s company is flying Alan Shepard’s daughter and a tv presenter plus four customers as part of its 19th mission scheduled next December 9th.
Virgin Galactic on the other hand announced that they have granted a random civilian two tickets to space on their next flight to orbit. Keisha, from Antigua and Barbuda, is going to be the first astronaut from the Caribbean Islands. Opening access to space for all…sounds truly amazing to me!
Pic of the week
This breathtaking picture was taken by the SpaceX team. This is a Falcon 9 sending a bunch of Starlink satellites to orbit last November 13th. With all that fog, it’s one of the most amazing pictures I’ve seen in a while. Enjoy! :)
Launches of the week
Wednesday, Dec 1st - Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink 4-3
Thursday, Dec 2nd - Galileo | Soyuz STB/Fregat
Thursday, Dec 2nd - Virgin Orbit LauncherOne | Ignis & others
Sunday, Dec 5th - Atlas V 551 | STP-3
And that’s it for this week!
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Cheers from sunny Spain!
Juan, the Curious Astronaut