A new NASA mission is already collecting data and producing striking images of the solar system. Launched in March, the PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission aims to study the sun’s corona and how the sun interacts with the wider environment of the solar system. Made up of four small suitcase-sized satellites, the mission is able to capture a continuous view of the entire inner solar system thanks to a camera placed on each satellite.
Before PUNCH can start doing science though, its instruments need to be brought online. As part of that process, PUNCH’s Wide Field Imager 2 captured an image of the zodiacal light coming from the sun. This faint glow, often seen before sunrise and known as false dawn, is a result of sunlight being scattered by the dust which floats through the solar system.
In the full image below, you can see a rainbow of zodiacal light, with the position of the sun marked by a star. The image uses color to represent features of the light: the hue of the light represents its direction, and the amount of saturation represents the degree of polarization. This data also shows background stars in white, like the Pleiades star cluster above the center of the image and the Hyades star cluster, a V-shaped cluster located toward the upper left.
Other instruments on board PUNCH also collected early data, including one which captured a striking view of the moon. This image was taken by the Narrow Field Imager (NFI), which is a type of instrument called a coronagraph that has a dark disk that is used to block out light from the sun. That allows less bright objects to be seen — in this case, the moon.
The NFI will be used to study the sun’s corona, so the purpose of this image was to check whether the moon would obscure the view — and the good news is that the moon won’t interfere with the science data, as it isn’t too bright compared to the background light being studied.
PUNCH will now continue collecting data, with two more instruments to be commissioned within the next few weeks before full science operations begin in June.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.