¶Nancy Grace Roman gets its telescope. NASA’s next space telescope mission has received its primary mirror and telescope assembly for integration with the rest of the spacecraft (interactive schematic). The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST) is being integrated at NASA Goddard, in the facility’s largest clean room, ahead of launch in spring 2027 on a Falcon Heavy. The mission’s telescope assembly underwent testing, including optical, vibration, and off-gassing tests, prior to last month’s delivery to Goddard. It also endured a long-duration thermal vacuum test, simulating the telescope’s on-mission conditions for a full month. The assembly, containing a 2.4-meter primary mirror—the same size as Hubble’s—will be used to conduct a wide field survey using its 18-section, 300-megapixel main sensor. RST will capture 100x the field of view as Hubble and, due to improved sensors, will maintain similar resolution across its entire field of view. One of its scientific missions is to perform a microlensing survey of the Milky Way, which should yield ~2,600 exoplanets, many of which may be free-floating rogue planets. Meanwhile, its visible and near-infrared spectrum survey capabilities are hoped to illuminate dark energy, the curvature of spacetime, and the consistency of general relativity. RST will also pack an experimental chronograph designed to suppress a host star’s light 100-1,000x more than previous ones, allowing for direct imaging of Jupiter-sized exoplanets. This will be the first “active” coronagraph on a space telescope and will feature deformable mirrors that use 2,000 tiny pistons to adjust curvature, reducing starlight that seeps out around the edge of the primary coronagraph (here’s a good video of the coronagraph’s starlight suppression in action). |
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 | RST’s 2.4 m primary mirror being inspected for optical perfection. Credit: NASA |
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¶Papers- Could we build huge space telescopes using ultrathin reflective membranes that are dynamically shaped using a digital projector (DLP) and laser? The DLP, behind the membrane, would project laser light onto the membrane’s surface, changing its shape via local thermal expansion (paper) and actively adapting to any deformations. The researchers tried this in a lab and were able to demonstrate active control of a membrane’s shape to ~15nm RMS precision.
- One could run a bunch of large-scale universe simulations with varying cosmological parameters, train a deep learning AI model to predict these parameters given the simulation results, then show the model actual galaxy distribution data from our own Universe and see what parameters it picks (paper). Results: highly accurate estimates for our own Universe’s cosmological parameters from fewer samples than traditional methods.
- J1721+8842 is the first known double gravitational lens system where two galaxies are aligned such that they form a gravitational compound lens. It was discovered recently by JWST and ground-based observatories (paper). Measurements of distant objects magnified by this system (by 14-19x) may help refine calculations of the Hubble constant.
- Mars InSight’s Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (aka its “mole” or self-hammering nail) failed to work as expected, only penetrating ~40 cm into the Martian crust when it was designed to burrow itself down to 5 m. Research from data that was produced suggests that a "duricrust" of solidified sand glued by crystallized salts reduced friction, stopping the mole’s progress. Temperature fluctuations on Mars may allow “the formation of thin films of liquid, salty brines, for ten hours or more during a Martian day in winter and spring, when there is sufficient moisture in the atmosphere. Solidification of this brine is therefore the most likely explanation for the observed approximately 20-cm-thick duricrust layer of solidified, cohesive sand.”
- Many elements required by technologies and our bodies (esp. iodine) are formed during neutron star mergers through r-process nucleosynthesis. (This nucleosynthesis periodic table on Wikipedia is fantastic.) Until recently, we’d never watched r-process nucleosynthesis happen. Then, in 2017, kilonova AT2017gfo, a neutron star merger, was observed by telescopes all over the planet. Spectral data from this event, analyzed in a recent paper, shows the formation of elements, including tellurium, lanthanum, cesium, and yttrium, in real time. This event “produced about 16,000 Earth masses of heavy elements, including 10 Earth masses of the elements gold and platinum.” 💰
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| ¶News in brief. A Falcon Heavy will launch NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan, requiring the launch vehicle to become nuclear-certified for the first time ● Voyager 1 has resumed regular operations of its X-band transmitter after it switched unexpectedly to its weaker, long-idle S-band transmitter a month ago ● The FAA plans to grant SpaceX permission to increase the number of Boca Chica Starship launches from 5 to 25 per year, per a new draft of their environmental assessment ● Rocket Lab launched twice in one day, from Wallops, Virginia and New Zealand ● Meanwhile, SpaceX flew the same booster (B1080) twice in two weeks, a new record turnaround time for a booster ● Russia’s Progress cargo spacecraft docked with the ISS and weirdly had an ‘unexpected odor’ upon hatch opening, likely from off-gassing, that after precautionary air sampling, raised no further concerns from NASA ● Just hours after Progress undocked from the station, the ISS had to fire its thrusters for five minutes to avoid debris ● Munich-based Hula Earth raised a €1.6M pre-seed to develop their EO-based biodiversity monitoring platform ● California startup Inversion raised a $44M Series A to build its Arc autonomous reentry vehicle ● Lunar Outpost selected Starship (lunar version) to deliver its Lunar Dawn rover to the Moon (it is currently one of three year-long projects in NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract) ● ESA awarded €230M to Arainegroup to develop a second Themis reusable booster demonstrator and refine its Prometheus rocket engine design ● The FCC granted SpaceX a first conditional approval for direct-to-smartphone services via Starlink for T-Mobile users in cellular dead zones ● Chinese launch startup Landspace put two satellites in orbit with its enhanced Zhuque-2 rocket ● China launched a pair of satellites for their planned 28-satellite SuperView Neo remote sensing constellation ● Without giving any more details about the heat shield issues on Artemis I, NASA started stacking the SLS rocket for the Artemis II mission, a four month process that, in theory, could still allow the projected September 2025 launch date (Artemis I, however, started stacking two years before it flew) ● Russia launched a radar imaging satellite ● Blue Origin launched its ninth crewed New Shepard mission, carrying a six-person crew including science influencer Emily Calandrelli who became the 100th woman to fly to space. |
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 | Science influencer and space enthusiast Emily Calandrelli aboard Blue Origin’s NS-28 mission where she became the 100th woman to fly to space. |
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¶Etc.- The Matthew Isakowitz Foundation Programs recently announced their new Matthew Isakowitz Commercial Space Scholars Program (MCSS) in partnership with the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF). The annual MCSS program will engage a small cohort of exceptional students, awarding each with a $1000 scholarship and matching them with a policy-focused summer internship in the Washington, DC area at a CSF member company. This new MCSS program seeks to invest in students with career goals in commercial space policy and is accepting applications from December 2 - 20. Eligible students must be at least a junior in college or pursuing an advanced degree, with excellent academic standing, and have demonstrated experience pursuing growth in commercial space.
- The Peculiar Phenomenon of Megacryometeors.
- USC students shattered the altitude record for amateur (non-governmental, non-commercial) launch after their Aftershock II rocket reached a peak altitude of 143 km (paper).
- CSA is calling all Canadians to vote on the name of Canada’s first lunar rover, with Athabasca, Courage, Glacier, or Pol-R as the choices. We’re surprised ICANHasRover or CanadaMcCanadaface isn’t on the list.
- Lunar Engineering 101 from the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium is intended to serve as a “resource for engineers by presenting the main characteristics of lunar surface environments — including reduced gravity, radiation, dust, regolith, moonquakes, and others — along with their respective challenges and hardware design considerations to ensure system function and reliability.”
- How oil and gas companies disguise their methane emissions.
- Researchers at Google used crowdsourced GPS signal and timing data from ~40 million dual-frequency cell phones to map dispersive free electron conditions in the ionosphere (paper), potentially allowing for improved GPS accuracy, especially in regions with few monitoring stations. “Our Android phone-based ionospheric maps cover twice as much of the ionosphere as do monitoring stations. We were thus able to significantly improve resolution in ionosphere maps from regions with few monitoring stations — in particular, Eastern Europe, South and Southeast Asia, much of Africa, and other parts of South America.” The animations in the article are pretty cool.
- The ToughSF blog covers sci-fi topics to an excessive depth, such as particle beams (…and optically-coupled variants, …and hypervelocity macron accelerators), inter-orbital kinetic energy exchanges, nuclear-reactor lasers, how to live on Uranus, and, of course, lots of tethers.
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