By Benjamin Vermette

The above is an artist's depiction of the view from "Planet Nine". Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

Is there a 9th planet in our solar system?

Caltech researchers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown have found evidence of a ninth planet in our solar system. 

The planet, dubbed Planet Nine, would have a mass 10 times that of Earth and take 10,000 to 20,000 years to make a single revolution around the Sun, hence its late discovery (which shouldn’t be called a discovery yet). Planet Nine would be orbiting the Sun 20 times further out than does Neptune – the outermost planet –, if it exists, and on a highly-elliptical orbit.

Note that the planet was not observed directly: strange behaviours of some Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) lead to the conclusion that a ninth planet might be required. "Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there," says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science. "For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system's planetary census is incomplete."

Evidence and a mathematical model was enough to get some astronomers – amateurs and professionals – started on a quest for the observation of Planet Nine.

The whole story started in 2014, when a student of Mike Brown found out that orbital features of some KBOs (small celestial objects beyond Pluto) were similar and thus suggested the presence of a small planet to explain this phenomenon.

Brown, an observer, took the problem to Batygin, who is a theorist, and for a year and a half they worked the problem out. Brown observed the sky as well as the KBOs while Batygin worked out what was possible on the physical standpoint using math and physics. “I would bring in some of these observational aspects; he would come back with arguments from theory, and we would push each other. I don't think the discovery would have happened without that back and forth," says Brown.

Shown here is the possible orbit of Planet Nine along with other distant bodies of our solar system with highly-eccentric elliptical orbits. Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) 

Note the irony: Mike Brown, potential discoverer of Planet Nine (if it gets officially discovered), was one of the active astronomers who led to Pluto losing its ‘planet’ status, hence his Twitter handle @plutokiller.

Even if the scientific community isn’t sure the planet exists yet, Brown showed a little confidence on his Twitter profile: “OK, OK, I am now willing to admit: I DO believe that the solar system has nine planets,” he wrote.

Evidence is evidence. Astronomers worldwide are on it: stay tuned for facts.

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New Canadian vision system for the ISS

On January 7 the Government of Canada awarded a $1.7-million contract to Neptec Design Group Ltd. of Ottawa, Ontario, to design and build a new high-technology space vision system for the International Space Station (ISS).

Mounted on Dextre, the vision system will be used to support the inspection and maintenance of the ageing structure of the ISS, as small meteorites and space debris regularly hit the Station. It’s not the first time that Neptec’s vision systems are used in space: it previously designed a laser camera system that, mounted on Canadarm2, was used to inspect the tiles of the retired US Space Shuttle while it was in space.

Using a combination of three sensors – an infrared and a high-definition camera, as well as a 3D laser – the vision system will also assist spacecrafts as they dock with the ISS.

Showing Dextre on the right held by Canadarm2 and holding the vision system (www.asc-csa.gc.ca). 

As the system will launch to the ISS in 2020, its imagery will be available to the public, offering a new view of the station no one ever saw before.

“The Government of Canada is pleased to contribute this new technology that combines these strengths, while giving the world a new vantage point on the International Space Station," said the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development.

This investment enforces Canada’s role as a reliable space-technology innovator and as a driving force of the world’s space activities.

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SpaceX failed to land their rocket on a barge-ship

The promising private company SpaceX, owned by ambitious billionaire Elon Musk, succeeded in landing its rocket on a steady landing platform in Cape Canaveral on December 21st (Refer to my previous post on January 15 for details on this.)

But that was ‘easy’, they wanted a more challenging test: landing their rocket on a drone-like barge-ship, sailing freely on the sea, for example. 

On January 17, after flawlessly launching and deploying the Jason-3 ocean-mapping satellite, the first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket called the ball. Hovering through 3- to 4-meter waves, the football-field-sized landing platform waited patiently for the booster to perform the final ‘touchdown’. 

The booster found the platform, deployed its landing legs and landed for a couple seconds, and then this happened. The linked video, posted on Elon Musk's instagram page, shows footage of Falcon 9's landing attempt.

This was the third time SpaceX tried to land the Falcon on a ship, and it was almost a charm.

As Musk said on his Instagram and Twitter accounts, a defective collet might have been the mishap’s cause. Collets are intended to secure the locking of the landing legs. As the leg was not locked tightly enough, it could not support the aircraft's weight, and down it went. The root cause may be that condensation from heavy fog at launch got in there and then froze when it got colder in the upper atmosphere, perhaps cracking the collet.

This is a hypothesis, but one thing is for sure: “Definitely harder to land on a ship. Similar to [land on] an aircraft carrier [versus on the ground]: much smaller target area [on the ship], [which is] also translating & rotating,” Musk tweeted.

It’s still a success to me. Launching a rocket at high speeds and making it deploy a satellite takes some innovation, especially when it’s a private company. But making the rocket flip-over in space and come back to Earth from more than 100 km of altitude, making it slow down and find the barge using its fins to control itself and deploy its landing legs is indeed a success to me.

“It’s a freakin’ technological triumph that they can get anywhere near a landing,” wrote Phil Plait, blogger for Slate.

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The Dream Chaser has won the ISS resupply contract award!

On January 14, after delaying the announcement multiple times, NASA finally awarded the second round contract of resupplying the International Space Station (ISS) to three commercial cargo companies. The first round contract was awarded to SpaceX and Orbital ATK in 2008.

The Dream Chaser, previously designed to be a human-carrying spacecraft, was adapted to be unmanned for the possible future cargo missions to the ISS, in case it won the second round contract. And it did!

This amazingly designed spaceship, owned by Sierra Nevada Corporation, will join SpaceX and Orbital ATK, the two other recipients, in 2019, date when the contract will begin service.

Designed by a 50-year-old soviet space shuttle mockup, the Dream Chaser will deliver up to 5500 kg of cargo to the ISS per trip. It will launch on top of a rocket, dock with the station, and when it’s ready it will detach from the orbiting lab and perform a runway landing, just like the American Space Shuttle did.

Image of the cargo version of the Dream Chaser docked to the ISS. (SNC)

Since the Dream Chaser has never flown into orbit, Sierra Nevada said they would drop the spacecraft from a helicopter for it to perform a landing demonstration in the coming months.

Originally, the contract was intended to only have two recipients, but having three is more advantageous. “One of the considerations from an operational standpoint with ISS is it’s really important to have more than one supply chain, and multiple offerers means that at any given time, the sequence of flights could be one Sierra Nevada, SpaceX, Orbital ATK, so if you lose one, you have the ability for another one being right after it from a dissimilar redundancy, or a different supplier, so that’s a big help to us,” said Kirk Shireman, NASA’s International Space Station program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The contract provides a minimum of six flights per selectee, from 2019 to 2024, but “it is likely we will buy more than 18 flights, so we have three winners, and if we need more than 18 flights, then we’ll talk about what happens on those flights,” said Shireman.

The exact value of each recipient’s contract is not precisely known, but Orbital ATK said in a press conference that its six original flights are valued at $1.2 to $1.5 billion USD.

Fake photos and a problematic parachute: This month in space

By Benjamin Vermette

Space pictures aren’t always real

A lot of well-established and popular accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr recently posted this picture, claiming to be taken from Mars, and asserting that the three vertically-aligned lights in the sky were Earth, Venus and Jupiter. If you conducted a search for ‘mars skyline’ you’ll immediately see the image.

The problem with this photo is that it isn’t real.

Phil Plait is an American astronomer and he loves debunking ‘bad’ astronomy. He analyzed this image and maintains that the landscape color is too saturated. Compare the landscape of the photo to real ones taken by the Curiosity rover, and the difference is immediately clear.

Also the sky is the wrong color; Mars’ sky is a blue/grey.

The picture contains too many clouds and they also look like they’ve been digitally designed by software.

If that isn’t enough to prove the image wrong, well, let’s look deeper!

If you look very carefully, at the bottom left of the picture, you can see the letters ‘NE’, which stands for ‘northeast’. This acronym is what you see when you use software programs like SkySafari or Starry Night to display the sky. It points out the cardinal directions.

This means the picture is an image generated by a computer as a representation of a real scene.

However, if you want to see a real picture of Earth taken from Mars, the Spirit rover took one in 2004 (and, unsurprisingly, the real thing is much less visually dramatic).

A real photo depicting how Earth appears from Mars. (NASA photo). 

RS-25 engine test

The fledgling NASA Space Launch System (SLS) is a new-generation rocket that will carry astronauts to asteroids and eventually to Mars in the 2030s.

Four RS-25 engines and two solid rocket boosters will carry SLS in the vacuum of interplanetary space, where no human has yet ventured.

The RS-25 engines are simply former space shuttle main engines operating at higher power levels to provide the additional thrust needed to power the SLS. “While we are using proven space shuttle hardware with these engines, SLS will have different performance requirements,” said Steve Wofford, manager of the SLS Liquid Engines Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

On June 11 at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, a third static RS-25 fire test was performed, the previous ones being in January and at the end of May. For 500 seconds, the engine successfully burned and therefore completed a step towards the SLS first test launch, scheduled for 2017.

The next test was on June 25, also at Stennis Space Center — but this time the engine burned for 625 seconds.

Three additional tests were scheduled to occur sometime in July and August before the initial series is completed.

These tests are critical towards sending men to Mars and perhaps back on the moon, so let’s hope everything goes as planned.

Pluto’s pockmarks

Pluto is a mysterious world.

The NASA New Horizons probe was launched in 2006 and performed its Pluto flyby on July 14, 2015, becoming the first ever human-made object to visit the dwarf-planet.

As New Horizons got closer, a more detailed view of the small world was made available — and it surprised everyone.

(NASA photo). 

The spots you see (picture on the right) originally appeared blurred together due to low resolution (picture on the left), however, as the Pluto-explorer probe got closer and took higher-resolution pictures, it was able to show four distinct spots.

On June 27, when the spots were discovered, some speculated they were impact sites, where meteorites would have impacted. But they look a bit too evenly spaced. And after all, they’re all over the same hemisphere of Pluto.

Some think the spots are geysers or other phenomenon arising from the idea that Pluto might be geologically active. 

However, the pictures are too poor in details to really identify the spots.

Watch out ISS, there’s rocket debris!

The International Space Station. (NASA photo). 

Carried into orbit by a space shuttle in 1998, the International Space Station (ISS) keeps supporting high-end scientific research. This $150-billion laboratory is the product of more than 17 years of nation-collaboration, and this is why it needs to be protected.

On June 8, the ISS conducted a pre-determined debris avoidance manoeuvre, to get out of the way of a used Minotaur rocket part. The debris was tracked the morning before, allowing ISS’ teams a day to gather additional data.

On Monday, tracking data showed that the path of the ISS was not sufficiently changed, so the rocket debris still presented a menace. Therefore, the ISS’ teams decided to use the thrusters of Progress M-26M, a capsule docked at the station, to clear the debris from entering the imaginary safety zone around the ISS, where no debris are ‘allowed’ to enter.

Progress’ engines burned for about 5 minutes, putting the ISS in a slightly higher orbit and increasing its velocity by 0.3 metres per second. 

A good team effort resulted in a successful debris avoidance manoeuvre, avoiding a collision with a part of a used Minotaur rocket, launched from NASA Wallops, Virginia, in November 2013.

Lately, a great number of debris and satellites are dropping from their original orbit and may present a danger to the ISS.

NASA’s new Mars lander test: Parachute failure

The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) program is projected to cost about $290 million (CAD).

LDSD is a 3.4-ton lander designed to allow NASA carrying more massive payloads on the surface of Mars. LDSD will carry heavy rovers and payload at supersonic speed in Mars’ atmosphere, decelerate it and perform a soft landing on the red planet’s surface.

On June 8, NASA tested for the second time its ‘flying saucer’, as they like to call LDSD. High above Hawaii, at 180,000 feet of altitude to be more precise, LDSD fired solid-fuelled Star 48 retro-rockets, designed by Orbital ATK, to slow the lander from Mach 4 to Mach 2.35, which is a safe speed to deploy a giant 100-foot-wide supersonic parachute.

The thing is, the parachute did not deploy as expected. Okay, yes it did, however, one second after deployment, the chute ripped apart in the supersonic airflow. “A preliminary look at our loads data indicate that the parachute developed full, or nearly full, drag up to the point where that damage can be observed,” said Ian Clark, the experiment’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. A camera onboard the lander “shows what looks to be a largely, if not fully, intact parachute at full inflation,” Clark added.

The lander, being retrieved from the Pacific Ocean. (NASA photo).

The splashdown in the Pacific Ocean damaged the 20-foot-wide lander, which has gained a speed higher than expected, due to the ripped chute.

Despite the parachute failure, NASA is confident in finding a solution to its problem. “We very much want to have these failures occur here in our testing on Earth rather than at Mars,” said Mark Adler, program manager for NASA’s LDSD project. “So it’s a success in that we’re able to understand and learn more about the parachutes, so we can get confidence and have highly reliable parachute for when we have a large mission going to Mars, where we can’t do anything about it.”

LDSD’s high-end technology is just an example of how NASA has an ambitious future on Mars.

Does earth need another space race?

By Benjamin Vermette

Mars: Why We Need To Go There

In 1969, humanity set foot on the moon for the first time. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first two of 12 lucky and optimistic Apollo astronauts to walk on the moon.

The iconic image of Buzz Aldrin's visor reflecting Neil Armstrong during their milestone walk as the first humans on the moon. 

Back then, the majority of NASA’s fans and even NASA officials thought we would set foot on Mars before the end of the century. However, we didn’t. Why? What was Apollo really about? Since 1972, no man has ventured further than Low Earth Orbit. Is it a sign of maturity? No. The United States made exploring the moon a priority because of the space race against the Russians during the Cold War. It was not a curious character that pushed NASA to send men to the moon —  it was patriotic pride.

For now, no space race pushes NASA to send a man to Mars, so we’ll have to wait longer. The only people that can carry humanity further than Low Earth Orbit are ambitious explorers, like Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, the first private company to send liquid-fuel rockets into orbit and to resupply the International Space Station (ISS). He is hell-bent on sending a man to the Red Planet, and he is capable of great things: when SpaceX started in the business, it had more than a few sceptics. To be more realistic, everybody thought SpaceX would fail miserably. Today, as it turns out, the company has a contract with NASA to resupply the ISS, and launches their Falcon9 rocket. They are even trying to land the first-stage of the Falcon9 on a ship.  

But why is Elon Musk so obsessed with going to Mars? In a conversation with Phil Plait, an American astronomer, he simply said, “Humans need to be a multi-planet species.” Behind this statement is perhaps the fear of staying on Earth; a single catastrophe could wipe humanity out. But Musk isn’t doing this for himself — we won’t have time to colonize Mars before he dies, unless he finds a way to live longer (then again, he is capable of many things) — he is doing this for his sons, and for the future of the human species. Maybe Musk was inspired by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of modern rocketry, who thought “the Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.”

It may seem like science fiction to you, but for Elon Musk, it isn’t. The problem is not getting to Mars itself — it’s hard, but not impossible — it’s to convince the human that this goal is realistic and achievable.

Many people believe Musk will get to Mars. NASA, however, doesn’t think the same way. It believes nobody will get to Mars without its help, as it plans to visit the planet in the 2030s. “No commercial company without the support of NASA and government is going to get to Mars,” said Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator. 

 NASA’s New Horizons: Phase-2 Started For July Pluto Encounter

Launched in January 2006, New Horizons is now at Pluto’s doorstep. Actually, it’s so close to it that it took the first ever coloured image of Pluto and its giant moon Charon. It will be the first spacecraft ever to reach this mysterious dwarf-planet.

The unmanned space probe will perform Pluto’s closest approach in July 2015, and the scientists who make up New Horizons’ mission group are starting to get excited.

That excitement likely surged at the beginning of April, when the time to start Approach Phase 2 arrived. Phase 2 will last until June 23 — just before the anticipated encounter.

Approach Phase 2 consists of the spacecraft making use of four optical navigation campaigns, with the help of the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), and the Multi-spectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC).  

Each of these systems will provide information about Pluto’s icy environment and help scientists find the best and safest path for New Horizons to take as it comes into contact with Pluto.

“We are going to be starting taking long exposure images of the whole region around Pluto, so that we can see if there are any new moons that might be producing any debris that could be dangerous to the spacecraft, or if we actually see rings of debris themselves orbiting Pluto in regions that might be dangerous to us,” explains John Spencer, a member of the mission’s science team.

A large community of scientists and amateur astronomers have been waiting patiently for almost a decade for New Horizons to provide astounding answers to some of Pluto’s mysteries, as the space probe carries out its final approach (traveling 1.2 million km each day). 

Coloured Images Of Pluto And Ceres

As New Horizons approaches Pluto, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft entered Ceres’ orbit on March 6, 2015, becoming the first space probe to do so.

For a few weeks after having entered orbit, Dawn couldn’t take pictures of Ceres, because it was orbiting the far side (away from the sun) meaning the surface was too dark. It was only in the middle of April that Dawn sent the first coloured image of Ceres, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.  

Further away, 115 million km from Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons did the same and sent back the first colour photo of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, taken on April 9.

An illustration of NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft 

NASA Will Capture An Asteroid Rock

On March 25, 2015, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced in more details its plan for the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM).

The ARM is necessary to test new capabilities and elements needed to take humans beyond Low Earth Orbit, including Mars. “ARM is an important part of the overall mission of taking humans further into space,” said Robert Lightfoot Jr., NASA associate administrator.

When the mission was first proposed in 2013, the plan was to move a small asteroid into a stable orbit around the moon. However, the plan has changed a little bit to attempt a mission that has increased applicability for future missions and has better potential for planetary protection techniques.

If all goes to plan, the ARM un-crewed spacecraft will launch in 2020 on a two-year journey to land on a pre-targeted asteroid. Once on the surface of the asteroid, it will capture a boulder up to 4 meters in diameter using its robotic arms.

It would then be placed in the asteroid’s orbit with the captive boulder in tow, during a period that may last up to a year. This technique will help NASA understand and develop techniques for moving an asteroid off a course towards the Earth, if the necessity should ever arise.

By 2025, the ARM spacecraft will, with the asteroid rock in its bag, place itself and the rock in an orbit around the moon. Next, a crew of two astronauts will fly in an Orion spacecraft on an approximately 25-day mission to rendezvous with the un-crewed ARM spacecraft and to collect samples of the boulder. “The option to retrieve a boulder from an asteroid will have a direct impact on planning for future human missions to deep space and begin a new era of spaceflight,” said Lightfoot Jr.

 Russia & US To Build New Space Station After ISS

After the end of the International Space Station’s current operation, which is scheduled to culminate in 2024, NASA and the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) are planning to build a new space station.

“We have agreed that Roscosmos and NASA will be working together on the program of a future space station,” Roscosmos chief Igor Komarov said during a news conference. However, many rumours circulate in the space-o-sphere suggesting this may not be entirely true. 

The discussions were held in Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on March 27, during the launch of the One-Year ISS Mission.

Not only would the Russians and Americans build a new station, but they would also co-operate on a joint Mars project. This is extremely ironic, as they fought in a space race during the Cold War less than 40 years ago.

“Our area of cooperation will be Mars,” said Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator. “We are discussing how best to use the resources, the finance, we are setting time frames and distributing efforts in order to avoid duplication.”

Again, this is not confirmed. However, how fun would it be to see two opposing nations co-operate in a sector they’ve always fought over? 

HUBBLE, SPACEX FALCON, MESSENGER and MORE...

By Benjamin Vermette

CANADA’S CONTRIBUTION TO SPACE TELESCOPES

April 24, 1990 saw Space Shuttle Discovery launch from Kennedy Space Center with the school-bus-sized Hubble Space Telescope in its payload. More than five years after the last of five shuttle servicing missions, the NASA community (and the whole scientific community around the world) celebrated Hubble’s 25th anniversary on April 24, 2015.

One hundred and fifty-six thousand gigabytes of scientific data transmitted to Earth later, Hubble’s officials are starting to think about its future, and it’s not a straightforward question.

NASA: Hubble alongside Discovery

Hubble’s lifespan “is the biggest question we keep getting from people, because everybody is used to something on Hubble breaking every five years,” explained Jason Kalirai, a researcher at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Even though it’s getting old, Kalirai said NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center engineers are doing a wonderful job managing the telescope’s systems. For now, they estimate that Hubble will keep orbiting in Low Earth Orbit, exploring the mysteries of the universe until, at least, its 30th anniversary.

When Hubble eventually does break down, does NASA actually have a plan to replace it? Of course! The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was first scheduled to launch in 2011, but its launch was put off until October 2018. Unfortunately, the project isn’t just delayed, it’s also vastly over budget.

The JWST is a much bigger and more powerful space telescope than Hubble; it’s as big as a tennis court with a 6.5-meter-diameter primary mirror, compared to the 2.4 meter diameter mirror on the Hubble. Overall, the increased the JWST’s collecting area up to seven times more than Hubble.

When finally launched, the JWST will be placed 1.5 million km from the surface of the Earth, “The JWST … isn’t going to look back towards Earth, it’s going to look out into space and take these brilliant pictures and send them back,” explained Industry Minister James Moore. “So we’ll have a view into space that no other human-beings have ever seen before, and that’s incredibly exciting.”

NASA: Outside the enormous mouth of NASA's giant thermal vacuum chamber, called Chamber A, at Johnson Space Center in Houston, engineers and technicians prepare the chamber for testing the James Webb Space Telescope.

Canada is part of the three major contributors to get the JWST into orbit: NASA and the European Space Agency make up the other two. “What if I told you we were going to build a new space telescope? What if I told you Canada was helping to build that telescope?” asked Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

The Canadian Space Agency is providing JWST a Fine Guidance Sensor (FGS) as well as the Near-InfraRed Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), one of the Webb’s four science instruments. Both were designed, built and tested by the Canadian Space Agency.

What is an NIRISS? The light we can see is composed of what is called visible light. There are, however, many other kinds of light, such as infrared light. For instance, infrared light can offer astronomers different sources of information. Many celestial objects, like brown dwarfs and enormous red giant stars, emit mostly infrared light.

NIRISS will also have unique capabilities to find the earliest and most distant object of the Universe, such as the first galaxies ever formed.

The integration of FGS and NIRISS required CSA to add $2.6 million to its contract with COM DEV International Ltd., where the FGS and NIRISS are built and tested.

The Canadian contribution guarantees Canadian astronomers a slice of the action where the observations of space and time by the Webb telescope are concerned. “It’s going to open up a whole new world of scientific discoveries and new ways of looking at the future … It’s going to be a fantastic time of discovery for all Canadians,” said Industry Minister James Moore.

Federal Budget 2015: ISS Commitment Extended to 2024

On April 21, 2015, Minister of Finance Joe Olivier presented the 2015 Canadian federal budget to the Canadian House of Commons.

The budget assumed Canada’s implication in the International Space Station (ISS) until 2024. After previous commitments by NASA and the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos), both the primary contractors of the station, Canada’s decision to extend its participation in the ISS until 2024 was confirmed.

NASA

As a consequence of this, Canada is responsible for 2.3% of the operating costs of the United States-led segment. That means Canada has the rights to use 2.3% of these module’s resources. For comparison, Japan holds 12.8% of the segments’ rights; European Space Agency (ESA) 8.3%; and NASA pays the remaining 76.6%. The Russians finance their own segments.

Japan and ESA officials said they are thinking of reducing their station’s holding rights. Also, neither has yet confirmed their commitment to the ISS beyond 2020. Does that mean Canada will take greater responsibilities within the space station?

SpaceX CRS-6: Still No Cigars

SpaceX is a private company that helps to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) with basic necessities and science-related equipment.

On April 14, 2015, they launched their 6th unmanned Dragon cargo spacecraft to resupply the ISS, something that needs to be done each 90 days or so. This mission, named SpaceX CRS-6, was postponed multiple times. To be honest, I can’t remember one time when a SpaceX launch wasn’t delayed.

SpaceX likes to try risky and out-of-the-ordinary things. For a second time, they tried to land the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket on a drone barge, a feat that nobody has ever accomplished.

The first attempt was almost successful, but the first stage ran out of hydraulic fluid causing it to explode. The Falcon 9 rocket has two stages: the first one, also the biggest one, is on the bottom and powered by nine SpaceX Merlin engines. The second stage carries the Dragon spacecraft and is powered by one Merlin engine.

The launch was a success, and then the first stage separated from the second stage about three minutes after launch, as expected, and began falling back toward the landing platform.

After the considerable challenge that is landing a rocket, SpaceX wants the first stage to stand up on the barge.

Take a look at what happened after the second attempt.

Close, huh? The 14-story booster steadied for a brief moment on the “autonomous spaceport drone ship,” as SpaceX likes to call it, before toppling over and causing an impressive explosion caused by an issue with an engine throttle valve.

Everything else went perfectly. Astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, onboard the ISS, grappled the Dragon spacecraft with Canadarm2 on April 17. The payload, carrying more than 4,300 pounds of supplies and other material to support multiple scientific experiments, was delivered successfully to the ISS.

SpaceX’s next attempt to land the first stage of another Falcon 9 rocket will be in June.

R.I.P.: NASA’s MESSENGER Spacecraft

Since March 2011 NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft has been cruising in Mercury’s orbit. It became the second mission to reach Mercury, the first planet starting from the Sun, after Mariner 10’s 1975 flyby.

NASA

MESSENGER, acronym for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging, helped a lot in characterizing the chemical composition of Mercury’s surface, studying the nature of Mercury’s magnetic field, determining the size and state of the core, and solved many other unprecedented scientific mysteries about the smallest of the four rocky planets. In four years of orbit, it has sent over a quarter of a million images of Mercury back to Earth.

Launched on August 3, 2004, MESSENGER conducted its final orbital manoeuvre on April 6, 2015. It ran out of fuel quickly as the Sun was close by and constantly changing MESSENGER’s orbit.

This lack of propellant lead to the death of the spacecraft: MESSENGER was expected to crash into the planet’s surface in late April or early May. “The sun is pulling on it. The planet is pulling on it. It’s just physics. It has to crash,” said Thomas Zurbuchen of Michigan’s University.

This was inevitable, and the scientists who were part of the MESSENGER group understood it even at the dawn of the mission’s planning. They even took advantage of it! During its hard-to-control orbit, the Mercury-exploring spacecraft went as low as 5km from the surface of the planet, sending back incredibly high-resolution pictures.

MESSENGER successfully completed its mission: to unmask the secrets of Mercury. “We’re at the end of a really successful mission, and we can’t do anything anymore to stop it from doing what it naturally wants to do,” continued Thomas Zurbuchen.

On April 30, 2015, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft crashed into Mercury’s surface at 3.91 km/second, after traveling 7.8 billion kilometres over 11 years.

From Sky to Space: Recapping a month of discoveries

by Benjamin Vermette

Alien life in the solar system? A month of discoveries leaves unanswered questions

In the hunt for extraterrestrial life, we’ve turned to our own cosmic backyard.

Last month saw a series of discoveries that offer tantalizing hints of life in our solar system.

On March 6, NASA published a study showing strong evidence that Mars once had a vast ocean comparable to our Arctic Ocean. Up to a fifth of the planet may have been covered in water for millions of years. In other words: enough time for life to evolve.

The discovery was made by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, using an infrared telescope to study water molecules on the planet. Their observations point to the historic presence of an ocean in the Northern Hemisphere that would have been two kilometers deep in places.

Today, however, the planet is a dry and barren rock. Most of the water has long since gone into space, or possibly gone into the ground.

But it isn’t just water that’s been found on Mars.

Last December NASA’s car-sized Curiosity rover detected atmospheric methane on the planet’s surface — a significant discovery, since methane is a gas that’s produced by living organisms on Earth. It’s also thought Saturn’s moon Titan may have oceans of liquid methane, which could support life.

On March 11, astronomers working with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft announced the discovery of a warm ocean on the south pole of Enceladus, another of Saturn’s moons. The water’s warm temperature is principally due to gravitational friction from the pull of Saturn and its other moons, resulting in hydrothermal activity.

Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist at Cornell University who works with Cassini, likened the hydrothermal activity to the environment that gave rise to life on Earth. The discovery pits it as the number-one contender for alien life in our solar system.

A day later, officials manning the Hubble Space Telescope declared the largest moon in our solar system — Ganymede, which orbits Jupiter — may be hiding an ocean 150 km below its crust.

Then, on March 24, it was announced that Curiosity had found another ingredient for life on Mars: nitrogen. Making up 80 per cent of our own atmosphere, nitrogen is a gas that living organisms can’t do without.

Despite these exciting clues, we still can’t make any hard and fast statements about extra-terrestrial life in our solar system. We can, however, add Enceladus, Mars and Ganymede to the list of 20 other places – and counting – where water has been found in our solar system.

Watching a supernova explode – multiple times

Early last month, NASA released a shot of something extraordinary in a galaxy far, far away: a supernova — otherwise known as an exploding star.

What made this shot so special? It’s the first time that the explosion has been captured multiple times at once. That’s right, the four pricks of light that are pointed out in the  image below are actually the same star.

Arrows indicate the four separate locations where the Refsdal supernova is visible simultaneously (Photo: NASA)

But how can we pick one star out of a multi-billion-star galaxy, let alone see it four times? Thanks to the process of nuclear fusion, the same process that allows our sun to produce light and heat, we can. Stars fuse hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, carbon into oxygen, neon, and other heavier elements: this process is known as nuclear fusion. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it explodes. While exploding, it releases enormous amounts of energy and material into space. This is what we call a supernova. A supernova is therefore brighter than an entire galaxy; this is why we can pick one star out of the billions surrounding it in space.  

Why did this one show up four times simultaneously? As Albert Einstein proved, big objects can bend space, the way our sun bends space around itself due to its gigantic gravity and mass.

Imagine a big bowling ball on a big sheet of paper, where the bowling ball is the object of significant mass and the sheet of paper represents space. You can imagine the curve that would take the sheet of paper. This is exactly the shape space takes around stars, black holes and galaxies. When light passes through curved spaces, it bends.

The supernova in the picture is in a spiral galaxy more than 9 billion light-years from Earth. On its 9-billion-year trip to Earth, the light from the star passed through a galaxy cluster, which meant the light bent.

Picture this while looking at the image: some of the star’s light was not headed towards us and if it had continued its route straight ahead, the Hubble Space Telescope wouldn’t have seen the supernova. But while passing through the galaxy cluster, the supernova’s light was bent towards us because of the high gravity of that cluster (due to the mass of stars and gases, as well as dark matter).

This effect — known as gravitational lensing — is very rare. This was one of the first times a supernova has been seen under the effect.  

“It really threw me for a loop when I spotted the four images surrounding the galaxy — it was a complete surprise,” said Dr. Patrick Kelly of the University of California, who authored a recent paper discussing the phenomena.

Liftoff!

March 27 saw the liftoff of a year-long mission to the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russians cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka tool off on board a Soyuz spacecraft. They’ll return home March 2016.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden says the mission is critical to advancing plans to one day send a man to Mars. “We’ll gain new, detailed insights on the ways long-duration spaceflight affects the human body,” he said. The mission will place Padalka in the number-one spot for most time spent in space by anyone in history.

Liftoff, part 2

March 11 saw the testing of NASA’s Space Launch System, a launch vehicle that will hopefully put a man back on the moon, and one day on Mars. The rocket is designed to carry two extra boosters powered by solid fuel; last month’s testing used one of these boosters.

The test took place in the desert of Utah, where a stationary firing of the rocket was performed. The test, known as Qualification Motor 1, or QM-1, lasted two minutes and six seconds, with the booster flaming out of schedule a little bit.

Found: the largest and brightest black hole ever

It’s estimated our solar system is 13.5 billion years old and about a billion years after that a monster black hole formed.

But it wasn’t until earlier this year that scientists discovered it. A black hole is a region of space with such a strong gravitational pull that no particle can escape — not even light particles.

This particular black hole has a mass 12 billion times that of our sun, making it the largest and most luminous one ever discovered. It’s known as a supermassive black hole (SMBH). It’s believed SMBHs lurk in the center of almost every large galaxy.

But how can the biggest black hole also be the brightest one?

Although you can’t actually see a black hole, you can see what’s happening around it. As matter is pulled in towards a black hole, the gravitational pull creates energy, which in turn produces x-ray emissions. The bigger it is, the greater the potential that matter being sucked in will leave a colossal visual footprint.

The discovery of the SMBH, known as SDSS J010013.02+280225.8, has left some scientists rethinking the early period of our cosmos. “Forming such a large black hole so quickly is hard to interpret with current theories,” said Fuyan Bian, of the Australian National University. “Current theory is for a limit to how fast a black hole can grow, but this black hole is too large for that theory.”

There’s no indication yet on how the discovery may alter that theory.

Asteroid 2010 TD54's path through the solar system (Photo: NASA

Demystified: Earth’s (other) moon

In case you were wondering, the Earth does not, in fact, have a second moon.

Various news sources, such as the U.K.’s Daily Mail, have recently taken to describing Asteroid 2014 OL339 as Earth’s other “moon”. Let’s take a closer look at Asteroid 2014 OL339. Is it turning around the Earth? Yes. But is it actually orbiting the Earth (the way our moon does)? No.

Asteroid 2014 OL339 is actually orbiting the sun along a highly elliptical (oval-shaped) orbit that sends it past the Earth, Mercury and Venus. By contrast, our moon does orbit Earth; they interact through mutual gravitational attraction.

In other words, there’s a difference between orbiting Earth and simply turning around Earth. So, why the impression that the asteroid is in Earth’s “orbit”? It turns out 2014 OL339 orbits the sun in 364.92 days. Which means that, by coincidence, it orbits the sun in roughly the same time that Earth does.

So no, Earth doesn’t have a second quasi-moon. But you knew that from grade school, right?

A planet with … four suns?

Do you remember the beginning of the original Star Wars movie? Early in the film, a young Luke Skywalker, soon to leave his home planet, is seen wistfully observing a particularly stunning sunset — a sunset, as it happened — with two suns.

Turns out that this detail wasn’t simply the stuff of fantasy. While our solar system only has one parent star (the sun) two-star systems are actually much more common. Triple-star systems are very rare, but not unheard of. And four-star systems? Even more so.

In early March, researchers from the Palomar Observatory in California published their findings on a planet that’s part of a four-star system. It’s only the second planet ever to be found in such a system. Dubbed 30 Ari, it’s located in the constellation Aries. It’s also enormous: about 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

Unfortunately, it’s too hot to be habitable, due to its close proximity to the system’s primary star. It was previously thought that the system only had three stars, but thanks to advances in observational techniques, the fourth was recently confirmed. Recent studies may indicate that planets in quadruple star systems are less rare than previously thought. “About four percent of solar-type stars are in quadruple systems,” says Andrei Tokovinin of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

The first four-star planet, KIC-4862625, was discovered in 2013 by amateur scientists using public data from NASA’s Kepler mission.