Happy Thought for 12 July 2024

Have a Happy Thought:

 

Just over one year ago, I shared with you the beginning of a simulated mission to Mars – the CHAPEA mission. It’s run by NASA, so you know this is an acronym – it stands for Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog.

https://cymittw.blogspot.com/2023/06/happy-thought-for-30-june-2023.html 

 

Mission patch for Chapea-1 https://www.nasa.gov/chapea/mission1 with the mission motto Ad Martus A Domo and the participants' names Selariu, Haston, Jones and Brockwell.

 

Largely, this mission was to understand the physical and psychological tolls on potential astronauts on a mission to Mars, and also to explore some of the technology that could keep those astronauts alive, fed, and happy. Well, after 378 days, their mission is complete and the four crew members have ‘returned to Earth’. The scientists, participants, and many other supporters learned a lot from this mission, and there are even two more follow-up missions planned. The next ‘launch’ is in 2025, so keep an eye out…

 

In other amazing space news, a human-made spacecraft has just broken the speed record. The sun-orbiting Parker Solar Probe, operated by NASA, did a close fly-by of the sun and in doing so picked up a huge speed boost. It got up to speeds of 176.5 km/sec. (Yes. That is kilometres per second). For reference, if you were able to travel that quickly in Earth’s atmosphere, it would get you from Auckland to Atlanta, Georgia in about 1 minute 15 seconds.

 

In case you’re wondering how fast the now-second-fastest-human-made-craft has gone, here’s a table:

Thanks to https://fosstodon.org/@AkaSci/112734664700124688 for the table!

 

I said the Parker Solar Probe is getting “close” to the sun… close is relative… at its closest approach, the probe will be about 6.2 million km from the Sun. But this is pretty darn close – Mercury ranges from as close as 47 million kilometres to as far as 70 million kilometres from the Sun – so the Parker Solar Probe is well inside the orbit of Mercury.

 

What is it doing there? Well, it’s basically sipping the Sun’s corona. No, not the beer, the corona is the sun’s upper atmosphere and is actually much hotter than the core. That mystery (why is the outside so much hotter than the inside) is one of many things the probe is sent to study… and one main benefit of understanding the sun better is to help get better at predicting aurora.

 

Oh, and to get better at predicting space weather in general so that we can protect our satellites and electrical infrastructure. You know, just the basis of modern civilisation.

 

For example, in the recent major space weather event a few weeks ago (remember those amazing aurora), New Zealand even pre-emptively shut down parts of our grid to prevent damage.

 

And what about “satellites” you may ask? Like, the massive amounts of satellites that comprise Starlink and similar ‘constellations’? Well, they are very vulnerable to ‘space weather’, and had to do quite a lot of emergency manoeuvring during that space weather event.

 

This is of special concern to, well, anyone who cares about satellite technology (looking at you, anyone that likes having GPS). Starlink satellites as far back as 2021 were involved in around 1,600 near-collisions in near-Earth orbit (i.e. coming closer than 1km to another satellite), and considering just how many new Starlinks have been launched since then, and how many more they’re planning on, if these satellites’ navigation or collision-avoidance systems get ‘knocked out’ due to some space weather… it could get bad.

 

I won’t leave you with no hope though – you can check out www.kesslerrebellion.com to learn about the work being done a group of concerned astrophysicists, astronomers, etc trying to raise awareness, and hopefully public policy, about this!