This Month In Science

MS-10 Failure Nearly Costs Crew Their Lives:

The crew of the Soyuz MS-10 rocket were safely recovered after the failure the Soyuz booster a few minutes after liftoff.  MS-10 was intended to transport two crewmembers, Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and NASA astronaut Nick Hague, of the Expedition 57 crew to the ISS.

Shortly after the failure was identified, the spacecraft carrying the crew performed an emergency separation, returning to Earth during which the crew experienced, during which the crew felt 6-7 Gs, followed by a successful landing

The MS-10 flight abort was the first Russian manned booster accident at high altitude in 43 years, since Soyuz 18a similarly failed to make orbit in April 1975.

 MASCOT: Live Fast, Die Young:

After landing on the 3,000 foot wide Ryugu asteroid on 2 October, the German-French lander MASCOT hopped and bounced along the surface of the asteroid for 17 hours before the probe’s non-rechargeable lithium-ion battery bought the farm.

The 22-lb. MASCOT carried a camera, a spectrometer, a magnetometer and a radiometer, which it used to collect and transmit data to the Hayabusa2 probe. Hopefully this data will be released soon.

‘Vulcan’ Discovered!

In 1991, Gene Roddenberry, using information provided by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, declared back that if Vulcan really existed, it would likely orbit the real-life star 40 Eridani A. As 40 Eridani A is a few billion years old, the hypothesis was that a planet orbiting that star would have had enough time to develop a civilization as advanced as the Vulcans. 40 Eridani A is an orange dwarf about 16 light years away from Earth.

Last month, the Dharma Planet Survey, which is a widespread effort to catalog planets in star systems near to our own, has found a planet orbiting 40 Eridani A — right where Vulcan would be. The planet, officially dubbed HD 26965b, is about twice the size of Earth and has a year that lasts only 42 days.

The Dharma Planet Survey's findings are due to be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in October.

Better World Land Map App:

Last month, NASA launched a new Citizen Science Project aimed at creating a more detailed satellite-based global map of land cover by sharing photos of the world from our perspective.

The GLOBE Observer app, introduced in 2016, lets you contribute meaningful data to NASA. Last month, a new ‘Land Cover: Adopt a Pixel’ module that enables users to photograph the landscape with their smartphones, identify the kinds of land cover they see, and then match their observations to satellite data. ‘Adopt a Pixel’ is designed to fill in details of the landscape that are too small for global land-mapping satellites to see.

To learn more, visit the GLOBE Observer web site, https://observer.globe.gov/.

On Course for Ultima Thule:

The New Horizons spacecraft completed an engine burn on 3 October that put it on course for a Kuiper Belt object called 2014 MU69 (nicknamed ‘Ultima Thule’)which is about 4.1 billion miles away from Earth. New Horizons should arrive at Ultima Thule on New Years Day 2019. Updated information will be provided at the USF’s Twitter Feed: @USFSector001 as events unfold.

Bon Voyage, Voyager 2:

According to a NASA statement released on 5 October, Voyager 2 should be leaving the Sol System any day now. Since August, the Voyager Project team has been noticing ‘a small uptick’ in how cosmic rays have been impacting Voyager 2. The telemetry received matches that which was recorded by Voyager 1 when that probe passed through the Heliopause – the bubble around our solar systemformed by solar wind – in 2012.

When Voyager 2 breaks through the Heliopause, it will become the second man-made object to leave the Sol System.