As bittersweet as the moment is, NASA had been trying to kill the program for years due to its cost, but Congress kept putting it back in the budget. Congress shut down its funding in the most recent NASA appropriation. Yesterday, the SOFIA observatory: an airborne infrared telescope mounted in a converted Boeing 747 aircraft, flew its last mission. Webb will be making additional observations with its other instruments. In both sets of images, we can see the streamers of dust and other ejecta radiating away from the asteroids, along with a three-fold brightness increase. That said, we have data back and the views are impressive. We knew from pre-mission briefing information that Hubble and Webb would be targeted to look at the results of the DART impact with asteroid Dimorphous, despite not being ideally designed for such close-in observations. NASA: Webb, Hubble Capture Detailed Views of DART Impact It would be interesting to see upmass normalized for specific energy, but I don't know if anyone does the calculations.Įdited by Fighteer on Sep 29th 2022 at 10:18:33 AM It takes a lot more energy to launch a geostationary satellite than a LEO satellite. China's CASC came in second with 38,822 kg, and everyone else is basically an also-ran: Roscosmos, ULA, and Arianespace together add up to CASC's number.Įdited to add: Upmass alone is not a perfect indication of launch capability, since you have to account for the target orbit. SpaceX once again dominated in upmass with 158,666 kg, accounting for 75% of the world's total. I'm thankful for small favors.īryceTech released its Bryce Briefing on global launch activity for Q2 2022. Īs awful as things are in Florida, I'm currently looking at NASA Spaceflight's Space Coast Live feed and things seem reasonably intact around Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center. For those interested in watching live, Everyday Astronaut will be covering the launch. Unfortunately, that means I won't stay up to watch it, so I'll report on the status after the fact. One might note that this is a substantial delay, but it has three customer payloads coming up: Crew-5 on October 5, Galaxy 33 & 34 on October 6, and Hotbird 13F on October 13.Īs I previously stated, that means Firefly is up next, making its second attempt to launch its Alpha rocket from Vandenberg tomorrow at 7:01 UTC (12:01 AM PDT). I didn't see a tweet about it, but SpaceX has now moved Starlink Group 4-36 to October 20. The piles of rubble on Dimorphous are probably ejecta from Didymus in fact, it may have been formed from the remnants of a collision, much like Earth's moon.Įdited by Fighteer on Sep 27th 2022 at 2:17:37 PM Since Dimorphous is tidally locked with Didymus, it tends to stretch out towards and away from its parent body, and it would have a similar but smaller effect on Didymus. Something that was observed by several people is the relative oblateness of both asteroids. Scientists will be poring over these images for months to study what they reveal about the nature of the impact, the composition of the asteroids, and the gravitational and solar forces involved. Some of it has impacted Didymus, increasing its brightness as well. In subsequent images we see the ejecta forming long streams resembling a jellyfish. That light, of course, is reflected dust blown out from the impact. In the sequence of images, we can see the moonlet in relative darkness before it suddenly erupts with light, becoming brighter than the parent body. The page is in Italian but the pictures speak without words. The ESA has released the first images from LICIACube, DART's satellite spacecraft, which had a close vantage point of its collision with Dimorphous. 'It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!' That won't be affected by Ian, of course.Įdited by Fighteer on Sep 27th 2022 at 12:28:15 PM Of course, Ian could still mess everything up depending on how hard it hits the Space Coast.Īlso on Friday, Firefly is set to launch its Alpha rocket for the second time. They are lifting off a mere hour apart, which is remarkable: I can't recall the last time the Eastern Range supported such rapid back-to-back launches. There is nothing else scheduled until Friday, when we expect ULA to launch a pair of SES communication satellites on an Atlas V and SpaceX to launch another batch of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9. This morning, NASA Spaceflight captured the rollback of Artemis I to the Vehicle Assembly Building in preparation for Hurricane Ian. These are all believed to have military functions. Later, it also launched a Long March 6 with three Shiyan satellites. Yesterday, while we were all watching DART, China successfully launched a Long March 2D with three Yaogan 36 satellites.

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