To boldly go where no man has gone before!

[rSin]

doesnt make sense to me

[rSin]

Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, has revealed plans to launch its Luna-25 moon lander mission in midsummer of this year. The project, which would mark the resumption of Moscow’s lunar project after a decades-long hiatus, has seen multiple delays over the past few years.

Speaking to Russia’s TASS media outlet on Thursday, the Roscosmos press office said, “Taking into consideration the astronomical ‘window,’ the launch of ‘Luna-25’ spacecraft is planned for 13.07.2023.”

Back in September 2022, the space agency’s chief, Yuri Borisov announced the postponement of the launch to 2023, citing discrepancies found in the spacecraft’s avionics.

Luna-25 would become the first Russian lunar probe since 1976. Developed in the late 2000s, the mission has, however, been put off numerous times since.


https://www.rt.com/russia/571964-roscos ... r-mission/

[Intrinsic]

new crew from the United States, Russia and the United Arab Emirates arrived on Friday at the International Space Station. The crew includes the first person from the Arab world who will spend an extended time in orbit.

The space station will be home to 11 people for the next week

[rSin]

the orbit planned for the artimis is nothing like apollo's

[rSin]

Scientists have come up with a simple explanation for the strange movements of our solar system's first known visitor from another star. NPR reports:
Now, though, in the journal Nature, two researchers say the answer might be the release of hydrogen from trapped reserves inside water-rich ice. That was the notion of Jennifer Bergner, an astrochemist with the University of California, Berkeley, who recalls that she initially didn't spend much time thinking about 'Oumuamua when it was first discovered. "It's not that closely related to my field. So I was like, this is a really intriguing object, but sort of moved on with my life," she says. Then she happened to attend a seminar that featured Cornell University's Darryl Seligman, who described the object's weirdness and what might account for it. One possibility he'd considered was that it was composed entirely of hydrogen ice. Others have suggested it might instead be composed of nitrogen ice.

Bergner wondered if it could just be a water-rich comet that got exposed to a lot of cosmic radiation. That radiation would release the hydrogen from the water. Then, if that hydrogen got trapped inside the ice, it could be released when the object approached the sun and began to warm up. Astronomers who observed 'Oumuamua weren't looking for that kind of hydrogen outgassing and, even if they had been, the amounts involved could have been undetectable from Earth. She teamed up with Seligman to start investigating what happens when water ice gets hit with radiation. They also did calculations to see if the object was large enough to store enough trapped hydrogen to account for the observed acceleration. And they looked to see how the structure of water ice would react to getting warmed, to see if small shifts could allow trapped gas to escape.

It turns out, this actually could account for the observed acceleration, says Bergner, who notes that the kind of "amorphous" water ice found in space has a kind of "fluffy" structure that contains empty pockets where gas can collect. As this water ice warms up, its structure begins to rearrange, she says, and "you lose your pockets for hiding hydrogen. You can form channels or cracks within the water ice as parts of it are sort of compacting." As the pockets collapse and these cracks form, the trapped hydrogen would leak out into space, giving the object a push, she says.


https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/0 ... study-says

[Intrinsic]

An asteroid big enough to wipe out a city will zip harmlessly between Earth and the moon’s orbit this weekend, missing both celestial bodies.
Saturday’s close encounter will offer astronomers the chance to study a space rock from just over 100,000 miles (168,000 kilometers) away. That’s less than half the distance from here to the moon, making it visible through binoculars and small telescopes.
While asteroid flybys are common, NASA said it’s rare for one so big to come so close — about once a decade. Scientists estimate its size somewhere between 130 feet and 300 feet (40 meters and 90 meters).

https://apnews.com/article/asteroid-ear ... 16ad02c712

[Intrinsic]

Moon soil used to grow plants for first time in breakthrough test

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61434295
Researchers used small samples of dust collected during the 1969-1972 Apollo missions to grow a type of cress.
"Every plant - whether in a lunar sample or in a control - looked the same up until about day six."
After that, differences emerged. The plants grown in moon soil started to show stress, developed more slowly and ended up stunted.

[Intrinsic]

China sends its youngest-ever crew to space as it seeks to put astronauts on moon before 2030

A Long March rocket carrying a crew of Chinese astronauts in a Shenzhou-17 spaceship lifts off at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

Beijing is pursuing plans to place astronauts on the moon before the end of the decade amid a rivalry with the U.S. for reaching new milestones in outer space.

[rSin]

so whats the plan for the ISS?

are we going to deorbit it 10 years from now and dump it in the sea?

youd think we could at least leave the parts of it that have much longer lifespans than the crew modules in orbit to be repurposed
like all those solar arrays...

[Munchy]

interesting question, nasa says yes, as it would not be safe to take apart, but they're gonna send a tow truck

https://www.nasa.gov/faqs-the-internati ... tion-plan/