NASA has announced that the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered its first new exoplanet LHS 475 b.

LHS 475 b

• The exoplanet LHS 475 b is roughly the same size as Earth.
• Located just 41 light-years away, the planet orbits very close to a red dwarf star and completes a full orbit in just two days.

What are Exoplanets?

• Exoplanets are planets that orbit other stars and are beyond our solar system.
• According to NASA, to date, more than 5,000 exoplanets have been discovered.
• Scientists believe that there are more planets than stars as each star has at least one planet orbiting it.
• Exoplanets come in a host of different sizes. They can be gas giants bigger than Jupiter or as small and rocky as Earth.
• They are also known to have different kinds of temperatures — boiling hot to freezing cold.

Significance of exoplanets study

• Studying exoplanets not only broadens our understanding of other solar systems but also helps us piece together information about our own planetary system and origin.
• However, the most compelling reason to learn about them is to find extraterrestrial life.
• Researchers emphasize on determining if exoplanets are solid or gaseous or even has water vapour in the atmosphere.
• This helps scientists determine if a discovered world is habitable or not.
• Another important element of the study is finding out the distance between an exoplanet and its host star.

Do you know?

If an exoplanet is too close to the star, it might be too hot to sustain liquid water. If it’s too far, it might only have frozen water. When such a planet is at a distance that enables it to have liquid water, it is said to be in the “Goldilocks zone”.

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2023 is set to be another busy year. Here are five of the most exciting missions to watch out for.

(1) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer

• In April, the European Space Agency (ESA) is set to launch the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice), in what will be Europe’s first dedicated robotic mission to Jupiter.
• Juice is due to reach the planet in July 2031 after performing an incredible flight path through the Solar System.
• The mission will enter into orbit around Jupiter and perform numerous flybys of its large icy moons: Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
• After four years of moon flybys, Juice will then enter into orbit around Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System — becoming the first spacecraft ever to reach orbit around the moon of another planet.
• The icy moons of Jupiter are interesting as they are all believed to host oceans of liquid water beneath their frozen surfaces.
• Europa, in particular, is regarded as one of the most likely abodes in the Solar System for extra-terrestrial life.

(2) SpaceX Starship

• Starship will be the largest spacecraft capable of carrying humans from Earth to destinations in space (the International Space Station is larger, but it was assembled in space).
• It will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever to fly, capable of lifting 100 tonnes of cargo to low Earth orbit.
• Starship is the collective name for a two-component system consisting of the Starship spacecraft (which carries the crew and cargo) and the Super Heavy rocket.
• The rocket component will lift Starship to some 65km altitude before separating and returning to Earth in a controlled landing.
• The upper Starship component will then use its own engines to push itself the rest of the way to orbit.

(3) dearMoon Project

• The long-awaited dearMoon project, which will take members of the public on a six-day trip around the Moon and back, is due for launch on Starship and was originally planned for 2023.
• It will be the first true deep space tourism launch.
• This mission will mark a big change in the way we think about space, as previously only astronauts picked using incredibly stringent criteria have been able to go into deep space.
• The success or failure of the dearMoon mission could affect whether deep space tourism becomes the next big thing, or it is relegated back to being a pipe-dream.

(4) OSIRIS-REx returning Earth

• The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security — Regolith Explorer, mercifully more commonly known as OSIRIS-REx, is a NASA mission to near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
• A key goal of this robotic mission was to acquire samples of Bennu and return them to Earth for analysis.
• OSIRIS-REx is now fast returning to Earth with up to a kilogram of precious asteroid samples stored aboard.
• If all goes well, the capsule will detach from the spacecraft, enter the Earth’s atmosphere and parachute to a soft landing in the deserts of Utah.
• Asteroid sample return has only been achieved once before, by the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa 2 mission in 2020.
• Bennu is an approximately diamond-shaped world just half a kilometre in size, but has many interesting characteristics.
• Some of the minerals detected within it have been altered by water, implying that Bennu’s ancient parent body possessed liquid water.
• It also has an abundance of precious metals, including gold and platinum.
• It is however classed as a potentially hazardous object with a (very) small possibility of Earth impact in the next century.

(5) India’s private space launch

• Skyroot Aerospace, which successfully launched its Vikram-S rocket in November 2022, is soon to become the first private Indian company to launch a satellite.
• The rocket itself reached 90km in altitude, a distance that would need to be improved upon to get a constellation of satellites into orbit.
• Skyroot’s first satellite launch is planned for 2023, with a goal of undercutting the cost of private space launch rivals by producing its 3D-printed rockets in a matter of days.
• If successful, this could also provide a route for cheaper launches of scientific missions, enabling a faster rate of research.

Conclusion

• With many bold advances and launches due in 2023, we are entering a new phase akin to the “Golden era” of space launches in the 1960s and ’70s.

Bengalurians are all set to witness the annual Geminids meteor shower.

What are meteor showers?

• Meteors are usually fragments of comets.
• As they enter the Earth’s atmosphere at high speed, they burn up, creating a spectacular “shower”.
• Meteors come from leftover comet particles and bits from asteroids.
• When these objects come around the Sun, they leave a dusty trail behind them.
• Every year Earth passes through these debris trails, which allows the bits to collide with our atmosphere where they disintegrate to create fiery and colorful streaks in the sky.

What makes the Geminids unique?

• Geminids is one of the brightest and most reliable annual meteor showers.
• They are unique because unlike most meteor showers, they originate not from a comet, but from an asteroid, the 3200 Phaethon.
• The 3200 Phaethon was discovered on October 11, 1983.
• It is named after the Greek mythology character Phaethon, son of the Sun God Helios.
• It takes 1.4 years to complete one round of the Sun.
• As the 3200 Phaethon moves close to the Sun while orbiting it, the rocks on its surface heat up and break off.
• When the Earth passes through the trail of this debris, the Geminids are caused.

Why are they called Geminids?

• That comes from the constellation Gemini, from whose location in the sky the meteor shower appears to originate.
• The constellation for which a meteor shower is named only serves to aid viewers in determining which shower they are viewing on a given night.
• The constellation is not the source of the meteors.

Back2Basics:

A team of astronomers have spotted a massive near-Earth asteroid called 2022 AP7 believed to be the largest planet killer-sized asteroid to be spotted in nearly a decade.

2022 AP7 Asteroid

• An asteroid is a relatively small chunk of rocky minerals that orbits the Sun, often described as a minor planet.
• 2022 AP7 is among the three asteroids hiding in the glare of the Sun.
• It is 1.5-kilometre-wide and has an orbit that may someday put it on a collision course with our planet.
• At present, researchers have little information about the asteroid, including further details on its possible trajectory and its composition.
• It was found using the Dark Energy Camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

What about the other two?

• The two — 2021 LJ4 and 2021 PH27 — have orbits that are safely constrained inside the limits of Earth’s orbit.
• At less than a kilometer in diameter, 2021 LJ4 is the smallest in size.
• The asteroid, 2021 PH27, is the closest known asteroid to the Sun.
• Due to this, its surface gets hot enough to melt lead.

Is there an immediate threat to Earth?

• At present, the asteroid only crosses the Earth’s orbit while it is on the opposite side of the Sun i.e., when the Sun comes between the Earth and the asteroid.
• This will continue for several centuries as it takes the asteroid about five years to orbit the sun.
• If impacted, Earth’s atmosphere would be inundated with dust and pollutants for years, preventing sunlight from entering.

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Recently, NASA tweeted an image of the sun seemingly ‘smiling’. NASA explained that the patches are called coronal holes, which can be seen in ultraviolet light but are typically invisible to our eyes.

What are Coronal Holes?

• Coronal holes are regions on the sun’s surface from where fast solar wind gushes out into space.
• Because they contain little solar material, they have lower temperatures and thus appear much darker than their surroundings.
• Here, the magnetic field is open to interplanetary space, sending solar material out in a high-speed stream of solar wind.
• They can last between a few weeks to months.
• The holes are not a unique phenomenon, appearing throughout the sun’s approximately 11-year solar cycle.
• They can last much longer during solar minimum – a period of time when activity on the Sun is substantially diminished.

How are they formed?

• It is unclear what causes coronal holes.
• They correlate to areas on the sun where magnetic fields soar up and away, without looping back down to the surface as they do elsewhere.

What do they tell us?

• These ‘coronal holes’ are important to understanding the space environment around the earth through which our technology and astronauts travel.
• In 2016 coronal holes covering “six-eight per cent of the total solar surface” were spotted.
• Scientists study these fast solar wind streams because they sometimes interact with earth’s magnetic field, creating what’s called a geomagnetic storm.
• These storms can expose satellites to radiation and interfere with communications signals.

Back2Basics: Geomagnetic Storms

• Geomagnetic storms relate to earth’s magnetosphere – the space around a planet that is influenced by its magnetic field.
• When a high-speed solar stream arrives at the earth, in certain circumstances it can allow energetic solar wind particles to hit the atmosphere over the poles.
• Such geomagnetic storms cause a major disturbance of the magnetosphere as there is a very efficient exchange of energy from the solar wind into the space environment surrounding earth.
• In cases of a strong solar wind reaching the earth, the resulting geomagnetic storm can cause changes in the ionosphere, part of the earth’s upper atmosphere.
• Radio and GPS signals travel through this layer of the atmosphere, and so communications can get disrupted.

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In the first-of-its kind NASA’s DART Mission is about to hit a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away.

What is DART Mission?

• The main aim of the mission is to test the newly developed technology that would allow a spacecraft to crash into an asteroid and change its course.
• It is a suicide mission and the spacecraft will be completely destroyed.
• The target of the spacecraft is a small moonlet called Dimorphos (Greek for “two forms”).
• It is about 160-metre in diameter and the spacecraft is expected to collide when it is 11 million kilometres away from Earth.
• Dimorphos orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos (Greek for “twin”) which has a diameter of 780 metres.

Why Dimorphos?

• Didymos is a perfect system for the test mission because it is an eclipsing binary which means it has a moonlet that regularly orbits the asteroid.
• It is observable when it passes in front of the main asteroid.
• Earth-based telescopes can study this variation in brightness to understand how long it takes Dimorphos to orbit Didymos.

Collision course

• At the time of impact, Didymos and Dimorphos will be relatively close to Earth – within 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers).
• The spacecraft will accelerate at about 24,140 kilometers per hour when it collides with Dimorphos.
• It aims to crash into Dimorphos to change the asteroid’s motion in space.
• This collision will be recorded by LICIACube, or Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids, a companion cube satellite provided by the Italian Space Agency.
• Three minutes after impact, the CubeSat will fly by Dimorphos to capture images and video.

Why such mission?

• Dimorphos was chosen for this mission because its size is relative to asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth.
• The spacecraft is about 100 times smaller than Dimorphos, so it won’t obliterate the asteroid.
• The fast impact will only change Dimorphos’ speed as it orbits Didymos by 1%, which doesn’t sound like a lot — but it will change the moon’s orbital period.

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NASA’s Artemis 1 mission has sought unexpected delay due to fuel leakages issue.

What is the Artemis I Mission?

• NASA’s Artemis mission is touted as the next generation of lunar exploration, and is named after the twin sister of Apollo from Greek mythology.
• Artemis is also the goddess of the moon.
• Artemis I is the first of NASA’s deep space exploration systems.
• It is an uncrewed space mission where the spacecraft will launch on SLS — the most powerful rocket in the world — and travel 2,80,000 miles from the earth for over four to six weeks during the course of the mission.
• The Orion spacecraft is going to remain in space without docking to a space station, longer than any ship for astronauts has ever done before.
• The SLS rocket has been designed for space missions beyond the low-earth orbit and can carry crew or cargo to the moon and beyond.

Key objectives of the mission

• With the Artemis Mission, NASA aims to land humans on the moon by 2024, and it also plans to land the first woman and first person of colour on the moon.
• With this mission, NASA aims to contribute to scientific discovery and economic benefits and inspire a new generation of explorers.
• NASA will establish an Artemis Base Camp on the surface and a gateway in the lunar orbit to aid exploration by robots and astronauts.
• The gateway is a critical component of NASA’s sustainable lunar operations and will serve as a multi-purpose outpost orbiting the moon.

Other agencies involved

• Other space agencies are also involved in the Artemis programme.
• The Canadian Space Agency has committed to providing advanced robotics for the gateway.
• The European Space Agency will provide the International Habitat and the ESPRIT module, which will deliver additional communications capabilities among other things.
• The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency plans to contribute habitation components and logistics resupply.

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A Chinese booster rocket made an uncontrolled return to earth, leading to US furore against Beijing for not sharing information about the potentially hazardous object’s descent.

Yet another Chinese irresponsibility

• Ending over a week of global anxiety and alarm, the debris from a large Chinese rocket – the Long March 5B — crashed to earth over the Pacific and the Indian oceans.
• It felt into the Sulu Sea near Malaysia.
• The 22-tonne core stage of the rocket hurtled uncontrollably back to earth. There were fears that it might hit a populated area.
• China, however, had dismissed these fears despite widespread criticism for rocket re-entry risks imposed by it on the world.

What is an Uncontrolled Re-entry?

• Generally, the core or first stage of a rocket is made up of heavy pieces that usually don’t reach orbit after liftoff, and fall back safely along a near-precise projected trajectory.
• If they do enter an orbit, then a costly de-orbit manoeuvre is required for a steered, controlled return using engine burn.
• Without a de-orbit manoeuvre, the orbital core stage makes an uncontrolled fall.

Why did it fell back?

• Gigantic remnants from China’s Long March 5B rockets’ core stage are known to make such fiery, out-of-control descents back to earth.
• Most nations’ rockets, separate the launcher from the payload before leaving the atmosphere.
• An extra engine then gives the payload a final boost.
• But China’s 5B series does NOT use a second engine and pushes right into orbit, the report points out.

Why is it difficult to track uncontrolled descents?

• The variables involved make it difficult to precisely track the re-entry time and drop zone of rocket debris in uncontrolled descents.
• The factors that make this prediction extremely challenging include atmospheric drag, variations in solar activity, angle and rotational variation of the object among others.
• A miscalculation of even a minute in re-entry time could result in the final resting place of the debris changing by hundreds of kilometres.
• It’s important to understand that among the 10 tough things that we do in space, debris re-entry is probably one of the toughest ones to predict.

Are there laws regulating space junk?

Yes. The Space Liability Convention of 1972.

• It defines responsibility in case a space object causes harm.
• The treaty says that a launching State shall be absolutely liable to pay compensation for damage caused by its space objects on the surface of the earth or to aircraft, and liable for damage due to its faults in space.
• The Convention also provides for procedures for the settlement of claims for damages.
• However, there is no law against space junk crashing back to earth.
• In April this year, suspected debris from a Chinese rocket was found in two Maharashtra villages.

Cases of settlements

• In 1979, the re-entry of NASA’s 76-ton Skylab had scattered debris over uninhabited parts of Australia, and the space agency was fined $400 for littering by a local government.
• The only settlement using the Liability Convention was between the erstwhile Soviet Union and Canada over the debris of Soviet Cosmos 954 falling in a barren region.
• Canada was paid CAD 3 million in accordance with international law for cleaning up the mess.

Do you know?

The 1979 Skylab was rumoured to be falling in India. We may ask our parents who were apparently kids at that time. The event was widely perceived as a Pralay (doomsday) in rural India back then! People were in all joy with festive food/partying every day fearing so that they would never see the next dawn!!

NASA has unveiled images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful orbital observatory ever launched.

What is the image about?

• NASA released a deep field photo of a distant galaxy cluster, SMACS 0723, revealing the most detailed glimpse of the early universe recorded to date.
• The collection also included fresh images of another galaxy cluster known as Stephan’s Quintet, first discovered in 1877.

James Webb Space Telescope

• JWST is a joint NASA–ESA–CSA space telescope that is planned to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA’s flagship astrophysics mission
• It is the most powerful space telescope ever built.
• It will enable a broad range of investigations across the fields of astronomy and cosmology, including observing some of the most distant events and objects in the universe,
• It would help understand events such as the formation of the first galaxies, and detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets.

Its significance

• Some have called JSWT the “telescope that ate astronomy.”
• It is said to look back in time to the Dark Ages of the universe.

What does the ‘Dark Ages’ of the universe mean?

• Evidence shows that the universe started with an event called the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, which left it in an ultra-hot, ultra-dense state.
• The universe immediately began expanding and cooling after the Big Bang.
• One second after the Big Bang, the universe was a hundred trillion miles across with an average temperature of an incredible 18 billion F (10 billion C).
• Around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was 10 million light-years across and the temperature had cooled to 5,500 F (3,000 C).
• Throughout this time, space was filled with a smooth soup of high-energy particles, radiation, hydrogen and helium.
• There was no structure. As the expanding universe became bigger and colder, the soup thinned out and everything faded to black.

This was the start of what astronomers call the Dark Ages of the universe.

How will JWST study this?

Ans. Looking for the first light

• The Dark Ages ended when gravity formed the first stars and galaxies that eventually began to emit the first light.
• Astronomers aim to study this fascinating and important era of the universe, but detecting first light is incredibly challenging.
• Compared to massive, bright galaxies of today, the first objects were very small and due to the constant expansion of the universe, they’re now tens of billions of light years away from Earth.
• Also, the earliest stars were surrounded by gas left over from their formation and this gas acted like fog that absorbed most of the light.
• It took several hundred million years for radiation to blast away the fog. This early light is very faint by the time it gets to Earth.

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NASA has launched CAPSTONE, a microwave oven-sized CubeSat weighing just 55 pounds (25 kg).

What is CAPSTONE?

• CAPSTONE, short for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, is designed to test a unique, elliptical lunar orbit.
• It aims to help reduce risk for future spacecraft by validating innovative navigation technologies, and by verifying the dynamics of the halo-shaped orbit.

Its launch

• It is heading toward an orbit intended in the future for Gateway, a Moon-orbiting outpost that is part of NASA’s Artemis program.
• The orbit is known as a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO).
• It is significantly elongated, and is located at a precise balance point in the gravities of Earth and the Moon.
• This offers stability for long-term missions like Gateway, NASA said on its website.

Mission details

• CAPSTONE will enter NRHO, where it will fly within 1,600 km of the Moon’s North Pole on its near pass and 70,000 km from the South Pole at its farthest.
• The spacecraft will repeat the cycle every six-and-a-half days and maintain this orbit for at least six months to study dynamics.

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In a paper published in Nature, astronomers have reported a fast radio burst (FRB) whose characteristics are different from almost all other FRBs previously detected.

Such news makes us think about alien and extraterrestrial life at the first. Do not get carried away with such thoughts. Its simply a space based phenomena.

Fast Radio Burst (FRB)

• FRBs are super intense, millisecond-long bursts of radio waves produced by unidentified sources in the distant cosmos.
• They were first discovered in 2007 when scientists combed through archival pulsar data.
• Pulsars refer to spherical, compact objects in the universe, which are about the size of a large city but contain more mass than the sun.
• They often look like flickering stars but are not stars.

Why in news?

• The new study in Nature describes FRB 20190520B, first discovered in 2019.
• What makes it different is that unlike many other FRBs, it emits frequent, repeating bursts of radio waves.
• And between bursts, it constantly emits weaker radio waves.
• FRB 190520B is co-located with a compact, persistent radio source and associated with a dwarf host galaxy of high specific star formation.

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A team of researchers from Stanford University have said that on one of Jupiter’s moons Europa, a prime candidate for life in the solar system might have abundance of water pockets beneath formations called double ridges.

About Europa

• Europa is slightly smaller than Earth’s moon and its diameter is about one-quarter that of the Earth.
• Even though Europa has a very thin oxygen atmosphere, it is considered one of the most promising places in the solar system to find present-day environments that are suitable for life beyond the Earth.
• It is also believed that underneath Europa’s icy surface the amount of water is twice that on Earth.
• NASA notes that scientists believe Europa’s ice shell is 15-25 km thick and is floating on an ocean, which is estimated to be 60-150 km deep.
• Interestingly, while its diameter is less than the Earth’s, Europa probably contains twice the amount of the water in all of the Earth’s oceans.
• NASA is expected to launch its Europa Clipper in 2024.
• The module will orbit Jupiter and conduct multiple close flybys to Europa to gather data on the moon’s atmosphere, surface and its interior.

What is the new finding?

• It is already known that Europa, whose surface is mostly solid water ice, contains water beneath it.
• The researchers are now saying that the double ridges – the formations which are most common on Europa’s surface and are similar to those seen on Earth’s Greenland ice sheet .
• They are formed over shallow pockets of water.

Significance of the recent findings

• The central implication is that the shallow water pockets beneath the double ridge increase the potential habitability of the moon.
• The ice shell, which is potentially miles thick, has been a difficult prospect for scientists to sample.
• But according to the new evidence, the ice shell is believed to be less of a barrier and more of a dynamic system.
• This means that the ice shell does not behave like an inert block of ice, but rather undergoes a variety of geological and hydrological processes.
• This suggests active volcanism and thus a possibility for life.

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A recent hypothesis says that dark matter comprises a large number of compact objects such as primordial black holes.

What are Dark Matters ?

• Astronomical observations suggest that a significant part of the universe is made up of dark matter which interacts with the rest of the universe only through the gravitational pull.
• Many large lab experiments have tried to detect elementary particles that could be candidates for dark matter.
• However, such dark matter particles have not been detected until now.
• Several astronomical observations suggest that all galaxies are embedded in a “halo” of dark matter.
• The “visible” galaxy is like a disc embedded in a dark matter halo that is much larger in size.

What is the recent proposition?

• When the universe was very young, hot and dense – soon after the Big Bang, it must have had quantum fluctuations of its density.
• This, in turn, would have caused some regions to become extremely dense, and therefore, to collapse under their own gravity to form the primordial black holes.
• While we have no conclusive evidence of spotting these objects, some of the binary black hole mergers detected by the LIGO gravitational wave detectors might be primordial black holes.
• The question is open there is good reason to believe that primordial black holes did form in the young universe.

Observing dark matter: Gravitational Lensing

• The paper explores what happens when such objects get in the way of gravitational waves traveling towards the Earth from the distance.
• It invokes a phenomenon called gravitational lensing that is used regularly in astronomy.
• When light travels through space and passes near a massive or compact body – a star, a galaxy or a black hole, for example, the intense gravity of that body may attract the light towards it.
• This causes bending it from its rectilinear (straight line) path.
• This phenomenon is known as gravitational lensing and was first observed by Arthur Eddington in 1919.

How intense are they?

• Massive objects like galaxies can bend light significantly, producing multiple images, this is called strong lensing.
• Lighter objects like stars or black holes bend light less, and this is called micro-lensing.
• A similar lensing can happen to gravitational waves travelling towards the Earth, and this would leave signatures in the detected gravitational waves.
• This can be used to detect the presence, or the existence, of primordial black holes.

Assessing dark matter

• Until now, individual black holes have not marked out these signatures on gravitational waves detected by the LIGO-VIRGO detectors.
• However, if all of the dark matter is made of primordial black holes, they should have produced detectable signatures on the gravitational wave signals.
• The researchers use the non-observation of the lensing signatures to assess what fraction of the dark matter could be made of black holes.

Way ahead

• This provides a new way of constraining the nature of dark matter.
• The study concludes that black holes in the mass range from a hundred to a million solar masses can contribute only up to 50-80% of the dark matter in the universe.
• This is an upper limit and the actual fraction can be much smaller.
• These upper limits will get better and better with more and more observations.

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NASA is set to send its first spacecraft to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids to glean new insights into the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago.

Lucy Mission

• Lucy will fly by eight Jupiter asteroids—seven Trojans and one main-belt asteroid — over the next 12 years.
• It is NASA’s first single spacecraft mission in history to explore so many different asteroids.
• Lucy will run on solar power out to 850 million km away from the Sun.
• This makes it the farthest-flung solar-powered spacecraft ever, according to NASA.

What is Jupiter Trojan Asteroids?

• Simply known as Trojans, they are a large group of asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun.
• Thousands of such asteroids exist in a gravitationally stable space.
• The swarms lead and follow the planet Jupiter along its orbit around the Sun.

What exactly are Trojans?

• Lucy’s Trojan destinations are trapped near Jupiter’s Lagrange (L) points, which are gravitationally stable locations — it is where the gravity from the Sun and from Jupiter cancel each other out.
• This means their orbits are stable and the Trojans are trapped in the space between.
• This also means that asteroids are as far away from Jupiter as they are from the Sun.
• Jupiter’s leading and trailing Lagrangian points (L4 and L5) have been stable over the age of the solar system.
• This means that their orbits have accumulated many, many asteroids.
• It makes sense to call a Trojan a co-orbital object, which moves around one of the two stable Lagrangian points.

When and how were they discovered?

• It took many a scientist to understand Trojans, and subsequently, name them so.
• A German astrophotographer in 1906 made an important discovery: An asteroid with a particularly unusual orbit. As Jupiter moved, this asteroid remained ahead of Jupiter.
• It was observed that the asteroid was nearly 60 degrees in front of Jupiter.

Students with engineering background would better understand who Lagrange was. Rest need not care.

Lagrange’s propositions

• This specific position of a particular behavior was predicted by the Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange over 100 years earlier.
• Lagrange had argued that if a small celestial body is placed at one of two stable points in a planet’s orbit around the Sun (the L4 and L5), the asteroid would remain stationary from the planet’s perspective.
• This is due to the combined gravitational forces of the planet and the Sun.
• Thus, Lagrange’s prediction acquired credibility. More such asteroids were discovered over subsequent months in Jupiter’s Lagrange point L5.

Behind the name: Lucy

• It is the fossil of a hominin that lived 3.2 million years ago.
• She is known to be one of the most famous pre-human fossils in history.
• Nearly 40 percent of the fossilized skeleton of this hominin was discovered in 1974 by a team of paleoanthropologists led by Donald Johanson.
• The name was inspired from the famous Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” which Johanson’s team listened to at camp the night of their discovery.

Back2Basics: Lagrange Points

• Lagrange points are positions in space where objects sent there tend to stay put.
• They are named after Italian-French mathematician Josephy-Louis Lagrange.
• At Lagrange points, the gravitational pull of two large masses precisely equals the centripetal force required for a small object to move with them.
• These points in space can be used by spacecraft to reduce the fuel consumption needed to remain in position.
• There are five special points where a small mass can orbit in a constant pattern with two larger masses.

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An international group of researchers has succeeded in measuring for the first time the characteristics of a flare on a distant magnetar.

What is a Magnetar?

• Magnetars are the most magnetic stars in the universe.
• It is a rare compact type of neutron star teeming with energy and magnetism.
• It is an exotic type of neutron star, its defining feature that it has an ultra-powerful magnetic field.
• The field is about 1,000 times stronger than a normal neutron star and about a trillion times stronger than the Earth’s.
• Magnetars are relatively rare objects, with only about thirty having been spotted within the Milky Way so far.

What is the recent study?

• The studied magnetar is about 13 million light years away, in the direction of the NGC 253, a prominent galaxy in the Sculptor group of galaxies.
• Its flare spewed within a few tenths of a second as much energy as the Sun would shed in 100,000 years.
• It was captured accidentally on April 15, 2020, by the Atmosphere-Space Interactions Monitor instrument (ASIM) of the International Space Station.
• This is the first study to characterize such a flare from so distant a magnetar.

How do magnetars form?

• During the course of their evolution, massive stars – with masses around 10-25 times the mass of the Sun – eventually collapse and shrink to form very compact objects called neutron stars.
• A subset of these neutron stars is the so-called magnetars which possess intense magnetic fields.
• These are highly dense and have breathtakingly high rotation speeds – they have rotational periods that can be just 0.3 to 12.0 seconds.

What characterizes Magnetars?

(1) Violent flares

• The observed giant flare lasted approximately 160 milliseconds and during this time 1039 joules of energy was released.
• The flare spewed as much energy in a tenth of a second that our Sun will radiate in 100,000 years.

(2) Starquakes

• Eruptions in magnetars are believed to be due to instabilities in their magnetosphere, or “starquakes” produced in their crust – a rigid, elastic layer about one kilometer thick.
• This causes waves in the magnetosphere, and interaction between these waves causes dissipation of energy.

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NASA has launched a new mission named Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer or IXPE.

About IXPE

• IXPE observatory is a joint effort of NASA and the Italian Space Agency.
• The mission will study “the most extreme and mysterious objects in the universe – supernova remnants, supermassive black holes, and dozens of other high-energy objects.”
• The mission’s primary length is two years and the observatory will be at 600 kilometers altitude, orbiting around Earth’s equator.
• IXPE is expected to study about 40 celestial objects in its first year in space.

What are the instruments onboard?

• IXPE carries three state-of-the-art space telescopes.
• Each of the three identical telescopes hosts one light-weight X-ray mirror and one detector unit.
• These will help observe polarized X-rays from neutron stars and supermassive black holes.
• By measuring the polarization of these X-rays, we can study where the light came from and understand the geometry and inner workings of the light source.
• This new mission will complement other X-ray telescopes such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton.

Why is it important?

The mission will help scientists answer questions such as:

• How do black holes spin?
• Was the black hole at the center of the Milky Way actively feeding on surrounding material in the past?
• How do pulsars shine so brightly in X-rays?
• What powers the jets of energetic particles that are ejected from the region around the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies?

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NASA has launched its new Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) — the agency’s first-ever laser communications system.

What is LCRD?

• LCRD involves laser communications – also called optical communications which uses infrared light to send information.
• LCRD is launched in a geosynchronous orbit, over 35,000km above Earth.
• LCRD has two optical terminals – one to receive data from a user spacecraft, and the other to transmit data to ground stations.
• The modems will translate the digital data into laser signals. This will then be transmitted via encoded beams of light.

Benefits offered by LCRD

• Currently, most NASA spacecraft use radio frequency communications to send data.
• Optical communications will help increase the bandwidth 10 to 100 times more than radio frequency systems.
• The LCRD will help the agency test optical communication in space.

Laser vs Radio

• Laser communications and radio waves use different wavelengths of light. It uses infrared light and has a shorter wavelength than radio waves.
• This will help the transmission of more data in a short time.
• Using infrared lasers, LCRD will send data to Earth at 1.2 gigabits-per-second (Gbps).
• It would take roughly nine weeks to transmit a completed map of Mars back to Earth with current radio frequency systems. With lasers, we can accelerate that to about nine days, says NASA.

Other advantages

Optical communications systems are smaller in size, weight, and require less power compared with radio instruments.

• A smaller size means more room for science instruments.
• Less weight means a less expensive launch.
• Less power means less drain on the spacecraft’s batteries.

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The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s largest space science telescope ever constructed, is scheduled to be sent into orbit in December.

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

• It is a space telescope being jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).
• It has taken 30 years and $10bn to develop, and is being described as one of the grand scientific endeavors of the 21st Century.

What is the goal of this telescope?

• The telescope will be able to see just about anything in the sky.
• However, it has one overriding objective – to see the light coming from the very first stars to shine in the Universe.
• These pioneer stars are thought to have switched on about 100-200 million years after the Big Bang, or a little over 13.5 billion years ago.
• Webb will be picking out groupings of these stars.
• They are so far away their light – even though it moves at 300,000km per second – will have taken billions of years to travel the cosmos.

JWST mirror

• One of the most important objects it will carry is a large mirror which will help collect light from the objects being observed.
• The primary mirror is made of 18 hexagonal-shaped mirror segments — each 1.32 metre in diameter — stitched together in a honeycomb pattern.
• The primary mirror is a technological marvel.
• The lightweight mirrors, coatings, actuators and mechanisms, electronics, and thermal blankets when fully deployed form a single precise mirror that is truly remarkable.
• Each mirror segment weighs approximately 20 kilograms and is made from beryllium.

Why beryllium?

• NASA explains that beryllium was used as it is both strong and light.
• Beryllium is very strong for its weight and is good at holding its shape across a range of temperatures. Beryllium is a good conductor of electricity and heat and is not magnetic.
• Because it is light and strong, beryllium is often used to build parts for supersonic airplanes and the Space Shuttle.
• It added that special care was taken when working with beryllium because it is unhealthy to breathe in or swallow beryllium dust.

So, it does not have gold?

• After the beryllium mirror segments were polished a thin coating of gold was applied to it. Gold helps improve the mirror’s reflection of infrared light.
• The gold was coated using a technique called vacuum vapour deposition.
• The mirrors are kept inside a vacuum chamber and a small quantity of gold is vapourised and deposited on the mirror.
• The thickness of the gold is just 100 nanometers. So less than 50 grams of gold was used for the entire mirror.
• A thin layer of glass was also deposited on top of the gold layer to protect it from scratches.

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Russia has successfully placed into orbit a military satellite believed to be part of the Kremlin’s early warning anti-missile system. This launch could be delivering a Tundra satellite.

Tundra Satellite

• The Tundra or EKS (Edinaya Kosmicheskaya Sistema) series of satellites is the next generation of Russian early-warning satellites.
• The development of the EKS started in 2000.
• These satellites carry a secure emergency communications payload to be used in case of a nuclear war.
• They are launched on Soyuz-2-1b Fregat boosters into Molniya-orbits, inclined highly elliptical 12 h orbits.

What are Tundra Orbits?

• A Tundra orbit is a highly elliptical geosynchronous orbit with a high inclination (approximately 63.4°), an orbital period of one sidereal day.
• A satellite placed in this orbit spends most of its time over a chosen area of the Earth, a phenomenon known as apogee dwell.
• It makes satellites particularly well suited for communications satellites serving high latitude regions.
• The ground track of a satellite in a Tundra orbit is a closed figure 8 with a smaller loop over either the northern or southern hemisphere.
• This differentiates them from Molniya orbits designed to service high-latitude regions, which have the same inclination but half the period and do not hover over a single region.

Back2Basics: Types of Orbits

[1] Geostationary orbit (GEO)

• Satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO) circle Earth above the equator from west to east following Earth’s rotation – taking 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds – by travelling at exactly the same rate as Earth.
• This makes satellites in GEO appear to be ‘stationary’ over a fixed position.
• In order to perfectly match Earth’s rotation, the speed of GEO satellites should be about 3 km per second at an altitude of 35 786 km.
• This is much farther from Earth’s surface compared to many satellites.
• GEO is used by satellites that need to stay constantly above one particular place over Earth, such as telecommunication satellites.
• Satellites in GEO cover a large range of Earth so as few as three equally-spaced satellites can provide near-global coverage.

[2] Low Earth orbit (LEO)

• A low Earth orbit (LEO) is, as the name suggests, an orbit that is relatively close to Earth’s surface.
• It is normally at an altitude of less than 1000 km but could be as low as 160 km above Earth – which is low compared to other orbits, but still very far above Earth’s surface.
• Unlike satellites in GEO that must always orbit along Earth’s equator, LEO satellites do not always have to follow a particular path around Earth in the same way – their plane can be tilted.
• This means there are more available routes for satellites in LEO, which is one of the reasons why LEO is a very commonly used orbit.
• It is most commonly used for satellite imaging, as being near the surface allows it to take images of higher resolution.
• Satellites in this orbit travel at a speed of around 7.8 km per second; at this speed, a satellite takes approximately 90 minutes to circle Earth.

[3] Medium Earth orbit (MEO)

• Medium Earth orbit comprises a wide range of orbits anywhere between LEO and GEO.
• It is similar to LEO in that it also does not need to take specific paths around Earth, and it is used by a variety of satellites with many different applications.
• It is very commonly used by navigation satellites, like the European Galileo system of Europe.
• It uses a constellation of multiple satellites to provide coverage across large parts of the world all at once.

[4] Polar Orbit

• Satellites in polar orbits usually travel past Earth from north to south rather than from west to east, passing roughly over Earth’s poles.
• Satellites in a polar orbit do not have to pass the North and South Pole precisely; even a deviation within 20 to 30 degrees is still classed as a polar orbit.
• Polar orbits are a type of low Earth orbit, as they are at low altitudes between 200 to 1000 km.

[5] Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO)

• SSO is a particular kind of polar orbit. Satellites in SSO, travelling over the polar regions, are synchronous with the Sun.
• This means they are synchronised to always be in the same ‘fixed’ position relative to the Sun.
• This means that the satellite always visits the same spot at the same local time.
• Often, satellites in SSO are synchronised so that they are in constant dawn or dusk – this is because by constantly riding a sunset or sunrise, they will never have the Sun at an angle where the Earth shadows them.
• A satellite in a Sun-synchronous orbit would usually be at an altitude of between 600 to 800 km. At 800 km, it will be travelling at a speed of approximately 7.5 km per second.

[6] Transfer orbits and geostationary transfer orbit (GTO)

• Transfer orbits are a special kind of orbit used to get from one orbit to another.
• Often, the satellites are instead placed on a transfer orbit: an orbit where, by using relatively little energy from built-in motors, the satellite or spacecraft can move from one orbit to another.
• This allows a satellite to reach, for example, a high-altitude orbit like GEO without actually needing the launch vehicle.
• Reaching GEO in this way is an example of one of the most common transfer orbits, called the geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).

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NASA will launch the agency’s first planetary defense test mission named the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

What is DART Mission?

• The main aim of the mission is to test the newly developed technology that would allow a spacecraft to crash into an asteroid and change its course.
• It is a suicide mission and the spacecraft will be completely destroyed.
• The target of the spacecraft is a small moonlet called Dimorphos (Greek for “two forms”).
• It is about 160-metre in diameter and the spacecraft is expected to collide when it is 11 million kilometres away from Earth.
• Dimorphos orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos (Greek for “twin”) which has a diameter of 780 metres.

Is there any threat from this asteroid?

• The asteroid and the moonlet do not pose any threat to Earth and the mission is to test the new technology to be prepared in case an asteroid head towards Earth in the future.
• The spacecraft will navigate to the moonlet and intentionally collide with it at a speed of about 6.6 kilometres per second or 24,000 kilometres per hour.

Why Dimorphos?

• Didymos is a perfect system for the test mission because it is an eclipsing binary which means it has a moonlet that regularly orbits the asteroid.
• It is observable when it passes in front of the main asteroid.
• Earth-based telescopes can study this variation in brightness to understand how long it takes Dimorphos to orbit Didymos.

How big is the spacecraft?

• NASA states that DART is a low-cost spacecraft, weighing around 610 kg at launch and 550 kg during impact.
• The main structure is a box (1.2 × 1.3 × 1.3 metres). It has two solar arrays and uses hydrazine propellant for manoeuvring the spacecraft.

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Using the Hubble Space telescope and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), astronomers have identified several white dwarfs over the years.

Where is this white dwarf?

• A white dwarf is what stars like the Sun become after they have exhausted their nuclear fuel.
• Near the end of its nuclear burning stage, this type of star expels most of its outer material, creating a planetary nebula.
• Only the hot core of the star remains. This core becomes a very hot white dwarf, with a temperature exceeding 100,000 Kelvin.
• Unless it is accreting matter from a nearby star, the white dwarf cools down over the next billion years or so.

Limits for white dwarf

• White Dwarf is half the size of our Sun and has a surface gravity 100,000 times that of Earth.
• There is a limit on the amount of mass a white dwarf can have.
• Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovered this limit to be 4 times the mass of the Sun. This is appropriately known as the “Chandrasekhar Limit.”

Observing white dwarf

• Many nearby, young white dwarfs have been detected as sources of soft, or lower-energy, X-rays.
• Recently, soft X-ray and extreme ultraviolet observations have become a powerful tool in the study the composition and structure of the thin atmosphere of these stars.

What is TESS?

• The researchers observed this phenomenon using Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
• TESS is a space telescope in NASA’s Explorer program, designed to search for extrasolar planets using the transit method.
• The primary mission objective for TESS is to survey the brightest stars near the Earth for transiting exoplanets over a two-year period.
• The TESS project will use an array of wide-field cameras to perform an all-sky survey. It will scan nearby stars for exoplanets.

How does white dwarf ‘switch on and off’?

• In these types of systems, the donor star orbit around the white dwarf keeps feeding the accretion disk.
• As the accretion disk material slowly sinks closer towards the white dwarf it generally becomes brighter.
• It is known that in some systems the donor stars stop feeding the disk.

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Last week, an international team of researchers has made the first direct detection of dark energy.

About the Project

• The XENON1T experiment is the world’s most sensitive dark matter experiment and was operated deep underground at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy.
• The finding also suggests that experiments like XENON1T, which are designed to detect dark matter, could also be used to detect dark energy.

What is Dark Energy?

• Dark energy is an unknown form of energy that affects the universe on the largest scales.
• The first observational evidence for its existence came from measurements of supernovae, which showed that the universe does not expand at a constant rate; rather, the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
• Prior to these observations, it was thought that all forms of matter and energy in the universe would only cause the expansion to slow down over time.
• Measurements of the cosmic microwave background suggest the universe began in a hot Big Bang, from which general relativity explains its evolution and the subsequent large-scale motion.
• Without introducing a new form of energy, there was no way to explain how an accelerating universe could be measured.

Does it exist?

• Since the 1990s, dark energy has been the most accepted premise to account for the accelerated expansion.
• As of 2021, there are active areas of cosmology research aimed at understanding the fundamental nature of dark energy.

Dark energy Vs Dark matter

• Everything we see – the planets, moons, massive galaxies, you, me, this website – makes up less than 5% of the universe.
• About 27% is dark matter and 68% is dark energy.
• While dark matter attracts and holds galaxies together, dark energy repels and causes the expansion of our universe.

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A new study’s “treasure map” suggests that a planet several times more massive than Earth could be hiding in our solar system, camouflaged by the bright strip of stars that make up the Milky Way.

Do not wonder. This too was a PYQ:

Q.Which planet was downgraded to dwarf planet status?

(a) Pluto

(b) Mars

(c) Earth

(d) Venus

 

Post your answers here!

4

Please leave a feedback on thisx

Planet 9

• Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet in the outer region of the Solar System.
• Its gravitational effects could explain the unlikely clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs), bodies beyond Neptune that orbit the Sun at distances averaging more than 250 times that of the Earth.
• Based on earlier considerations, this hypothetical super-Earth-sized planet would have had a predicted mass of five to ten times that of the Earth, and an elongated orbit 400 to 800 times as far from the Sun as the Earth.

Curiosity for the ninth Planet

• In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union broke several hearts when it announced that it had reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. ‘
• The decision was based on Pluto’s size and the fact that it resides within a zone of other similarly-sized objects.

Is everyone convinced that Planet Nine exists?

• Researchers from across the globe have carried out several studies on Planet Nine and there are several theories about it, including one that stated Planet Nine could in fact be a black hole.
• Another research has argued that the unknown object causing anomalous orbits of the trans-Neptunian objects could be a primordial black hole.
• Yet another study noted that a trans-Neptunian object called 2015 BP519 had an unusual trajectory because it was affected by Planet Nine’s strong gravity.

Back2Basics: Dwarf Planet

• A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit of the Sun – something smaller than any of the eight classical planets, but still a world in its own right.
• As of today, there are officially five dwarf planets in our Solar System.
• The most famous is Pluto, downgraded from the status of a planet in 2006.
• The other four, in order of size, are Eris, Makemake, Haumea and Ceres. The sixth claimant for a dwarf planet is Hygiea, which so far has been taken to be an asteroid.
• These four criteria are – that the body orbits around the Sun, it is not a moon, has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and has enough mass for its gravity to pull it into a roughly spherical shape.

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Studies have found that a powerful solar storm can cause a disruption of the internet, damage submarine cables, and communication satellites.

What is a Solar Storm?

• A solar storm or a Coronal Mass Ejection as astronomers call it is an ejection of highly magnetized particles from the sun.
• These particles can travel several million km per hour and can take about 13 hours to five days to reach Earth.
• Earth’s atmosphere protects us, humans, from these particles.
• But the particles can interact with our Earth’s magnetic field, induce strong electric currents on the surface and affect man-made structures.

History of solar storms

• The first recorded solar storm occurred in 1859 and it reached Earth in about 17 hours.
• It affected the telegraph network and many operators experienced electric shocks.
• A solar storm that occurred in 1921 impacted New York telegraph and railroad systems and another small-scale storm collapsed the power grid in Quebec, Canada in 1989.
• A 2013 report noted that if a solar storm similar to the 1859 one hit the US today, about 20-40 million people could be without power for 1-2 years, and the total economic cost will be $0.6-2.6 trillion.

Why is it a cause of concern?

• The Sun goes through an 11-year cycle – cycles of high and low activity.
• It also has a longer 100-year cycle.
• During the last three decades, when the internet infrastructure was booming, it was a low period.
• And very soon, either in this cycle or the next cycle, we are going towards the peaks of the 100-year cycle.
• So it is highly likely that we might see one powerful solar storm during our lifetime.

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SpaceX has announced its ‘Inspiration4’ mission, the first all-civilian, non-governmental spaceflight, for launch.

What is Inspiration4?

• Inspiraton4 is a part of an effort to raise funds for pediatric treatment and research facility that focuses on children’s catastrophic diseases, particularly leukemia and other cancers.
• The mission involves circling the Earth for three days and then splashing down into the Atlantic Ocean.
• Inspiration4 will orbit the Earth at 575km, higher than the International Space Station (408km) and the Hubble space telescope (547km).
• This will be the farthest distance travelled by a crewed mission since 2009, when astronauts last went to repair the Hubble.
• The Dragon module that the group will be using has also been modified for the mission.
• Usually, the SpaceX module is used for travelling to the ISS, where it has to dock or join the floating laboratory.

UPSC may ask an MCQ asking: Which of the following is/are the space missions related to human flights? It may throw up 4-5 options (which we all get confused at after few months) like Cassini , InSight , Messanger, Voyager etc.

Key feature: Dome window

• Since Inspiration4 is not going to the ISS, the docking port has been removed and has been replaced with a dome window instead.
• This dome window will offer breath-taking views of the Earth for the four travellers.
• The window has been inspired by the Cupola, a module on the ISS used to make observations about our planet.

Why is the mission significant?

• According to a report in the Independent, the journey will present an opportunity for collecting large amounts of health data that will aid in planning future crewed space missions.
• As per the report, they will collect data on ECG (electrocardiograph) activity, movement, sleep, heart rate, and rhythm, blood oxygen saturation, cabin noise and light intensity, which will help in assessing behavioral and cognitive changes over the journey.
• The travelers will undergo balance and prescription tests just before and after their journey to assess their response to the change in gravity.
• The immune system function will also be monitored by collecting blood. Their organ systems will also be monitored by an AI-powered ultrasound device.

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NASA is seeking applications for its new mission called the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA), which is related to Mars.

CHAPEA

• The mission is set to begin in 2022 and will give four successful applicants the chance to live and work in a 1,700 square-foot module that is created by a 3D printer and is called the Mars Dune Alpha.
• The simulated quarters include a kitchen, areas for medical, recreation, fitness, work, crop growth, a technical work area and two bathrooms.
• This habitat will simulate what it feels like to carry out missions on Mars including resource limitations, equipment failure, communication delays and any other environmental stressors.
• The crew will be expected to perform simulated spacewalks, scientific research and use virtual reality and robotic controls and exchange communications.

What is the purpose of this mission?

• The habitat in which the crew members will stay will be as Mars-realistic as possible.
• The results from this analog mission will provide scientific data that will help in validating the systems that will be used for actual missions to Mars and also help in solving problems for spaceflight research.
• CHAPEA is not the only analog mission, there are others including Aquarius/NEEMO, Concordia, Desert RATS, and HESTIA.
• Analog missions are required because not all experiments can be carried out in space because resources and money are limited.

Pirs, a Russian module on the International Space Station (ISS) used as a docking port for spacecraft and as a door for cosmonauts to go out on spacewalks. In its place, Russia’s space agency Roscosmos will be attaching a significantly larger module called Nauka.

What does Russia’s new Nauka module do?

• Nauka, which is 42 feet long and weighs 20 tonnes, was supposed to be launched as early as 2007, as per the ISS’s original plan.
• Nauka — meaning “science” in Russian — is the biggest space laboratory Russia has launched to date, and will primarily serve as a research facility.
• It is also bringing to the ISS another oxygen generator, a spare bed, another toilet, and a robotic cargo crane built by the European Space Agency (ESA).
• The new module was sent into orbit using a Proton rocket — the most powerful in Russia’s space inventory — on July 21 and will take eight days to reach the ISS.

What kind of research goes on at the International Space Station?

• A space station is essentially a large spacecraft that remains in low-earth orbit for extended periods of time.
• It is like a large laboratory in space and allows astronauts to come aboard and stay for weeks or months to carry out experiments in microgravity.
• For over 20 years since its launch, humans have continuously lived and carried out scientific investigations on the $150 billion ISS under microgravity conditions, being able to make breakthroughs in research not possible on Earth.

Back2Basics: International Space Station (ISS)

• The International Space Station, which launched its first piece in 1998, is a large spacecraft that orbits around the Earth and is home to the astronauts.
• The ISS is currently the only active space station in the earth’s orbit.
• The first crew on the space station arrived on November 2, 2000.
• The space station is home to a minimum of six astronauts, with two bathrooms, a gymnasium, and a big bay window.
• It is a joint project between five participating space agencies -NASA (USA), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada).

The UAE’s Hope spacecraft, which is orbiting Mars since February this year, has captured images of glowing atmospheric lights in the Red Planet’s night sky, known as discrete auroras.

What causes an Aurora on Earth?

• Auroras are caused when charged particles ejected from the Sun’s surface — called the solar wind — enter the Earth’s atmosphere.
• These particles are harmful, and our planet is protected by the geomagnetic field, which preserves life by shielding us from the solar wind.
• However, at the north and south poles, some of these solar wind particles are able to continuously stream down, and interact with different gases in the atmosphere to cause a display of light in the night sky.
• This display, known as an aurora, is seen from the Earth’s high latitude regions (called the auroral oval), and is active all year round.

Where are they observed on Earth?

• In the northern part of our globe, the polar lights are called aurora borealis or Northern Lights and are seen from the US (Alaska), Canada, Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Sweden and Finland.
• In the south, they are called aurora australis or southern lights and are visible from high latitudes in Antarctica, Chile, Argentina, New Zealand and Australia.

So, how are Martian auroras different?

• Unlike auroras on Earth, which are seen only near the north and south poles, discrete auroras on Mars are seen all around the planet at night time.
• Unlike Earth, which has a strong magnetic field, the Martian magnetic field has largely died out.
• This is because the molten iron at the interior of the planet– which produces magnetism– has cooled.
• However, the Martian crust, which hardened billions of years ago when the magnetic field still existed, retains some magnetism.
• So, in contrast with Earth, which acts like one single bar magnet, magnetism on Mars is unevenly distributed, with fields strewn across the planet and differing in direction and strength.
• These disjointed fields channel the solar wind to different parts of the Martian atmosphere, creating “discrete” auroras over the entire surface of the planet as charged particles interact with atoms and molecules in the sky– as they do on Earth.

Why is it important to study them?

• Studying Martian auroras is important for scientists, for it can offer clues as to why the Red Planet lost its magnetic field and thick atmosphere– among the essential requirements for sustaining life.

Answer this PYQ in the comment box:

Q.Which region of Mars has a densely packed river deposit indicating this planet had water 3.5 billion years ago?

(a) Aeolis Dorsa

(b) Tharsis

(c) Olympus Mons

(d) Hellas

Back2Basics:

Hope Orbiter

• The Hope Probe, the Arab world’s first mission to Mars, took off from Earth in July last year, and has been orbiting the Red Planet since February.
• The primary objective of the mission is to study Martian weather dynamics.
• By correlating the lower atmosphere and upper atmosphere conditions, the probe will look into how weather changes the escape of hydrogen and oxygen into space.
• By measuring how much hydrogen and oxygen is spilling into space, scientists will be able to look into why Mars lost so much of its early atmosphere and liquid water.
• It is expected to create the first complete portrait of the planet’s atmosphere.
• With the information gathered during the mission, scientists will have a better understanding of the climate dynamics of different layers of Mars’ atmosphere.

Mars

• Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, being larger than only Mercury.
• In English, Mars carries the name of the Roman god of war and is often referred to as the “Red Planet”.
• The latter refers to the effect of the iron oxide prevalent on Mars’s surface, which gives it a reddish appearance distinctive among the astronomical bodies visible to the naked eye.
• Mars is a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere, with surface features reminiscent of the impact craters of the Moon and the valleys, deserts and polar ice caps of Earth.
• The days and seasons are comparable to those of Earth, because the rotational period, as well as the tilt of the rotational axis relative to the ecliptic plane, is similar.
• Mars is the site of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano and highest known mountain on any planet in the Solar System, and of Valles Marineris, one of the largest canyons in the Solar System.

Last week, Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos’s space company called Blue Origin concluded the online auction for the first seat on New Shephard, a rocket system meant to take tourists to space.

What is New Shephard?

• New Shephard has been named after astronaut Alan Shephard – the first American to go to space – and offers flights to space over 100 km above the Earth and accommodation for payloads.
• Essentially, it is a rocket system that has been designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Karman line – the internationally recognized boundary of space.
• The idea is to provide easier and more cost-effective access to space meant for purposes such as academic research, corporate technology development, and entrepreneurial ventures among others.
• Apart from its academic and research-oriented goal, New Shephard will also allow space tourists to experience microgravity by taking them 100 km above the Earth.

Its components

• The rocket system consists of two parts, the cabin or capsule, and the rocket or the booster.
• The cabin can accommodate experiments from small Mini Payloads up to 100 kg.
• As per Blue Origin, the Mini Payloads provide easier space access to students, who are part of educational institutions that are developing their own space programs.
• Further, the cabin is designed for six people and sits atop a 60 feet tall rocket and separates from it before crossing the Karman line, after which both vehicles fall back to the Earth.
• All the six seats in the capsule are meant for passengers, each of whom gets their own window seat. The capsule is fully autonomous and does not require a pilot.

How does it work?

• The system is a fully reusable, vertical takeoff and vertical landing space vehicle that accelerates for about 2.5 minutes before the engine cuts off.
• After separating from the booster, the capsule free falls in space, while the booster performs an autonomously controlled vertical landing back to Earth.
• The capsule, on the other hand, lands back with the help of parachutes.

A boost for space tourism

• Space tourism seeks to give laypeople the ability to go to space for recreational, leisure, or business purposes.
• The idea is to make space more accessible to those individuals who are not astronauts and want to go to space for non-scientific purposes.

Following NASA’s footsteps, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that it has selected EnVision as its next orbiter that will visit Venus sometime in the 2030s.

Last week, NASA selected two missions to the planet Venus, Earth’s nearest neighbour. The missions called DAVINCI+ and VERITAS have been selected based on their potential for scientific value and the feasibility of their development plans.

What is EnVision?

• EnVision is an ESA-led mission with contributions from NASA. It is likely to be launched sometime in the 2030s.
• The earliest launch opportunity for EnVision is 2031, followed by 2032 and 2033.
• Once launched on an Ariane 6 rocket, the spacecraft will take about 15 months to reach Venus and will take 16 more months to achieve orbit circularization.
• The spacecraft will carry a range of instruments to study the planet’s atmosphere and surface, monitor trace gases in the atmosphere and analyses its surface composition.

What are other such missions?

• EnVision will follow another ESA-led mission to Venus called ‘Venus Express’ (2005-2014) that focused on atmospheric research and pointed to volcanic hotspots on the planet’s surface.
• Other than this, Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft has also been studying the planet’s atmosphere since 2015.

Why are scientists interested in studying Venus?

• At the core of the ESA’s mission is the question of how Earth and Venus evolved so differently from each other considering that they are roughly of the same size and composition.
• Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system because of the heat that is trapped by its thick cloud cover.
• Last year, a team of scientists reported that they had found phosphine gas (a chemical produced only through biological processes) in the atmosphere of Venus.
• This triggered excitement in the scientific community that some life forms might be supported by the planet.
• But the existence of life on the planet is nearly impossible given the high temperatures of Venus and its acidic atmosphere.

Back2Basics: Venus Planet

• For those on Earth, Venus is the second-brightest object in the sky after the moon.
• It appears bright because of its thick cloud cover that reflects and scatters light.
• But while Venus, which is the second closest planet to the Sun, is called the Earth’s twin because of their similar sizes, the two planets have significant differences between them.
• For one, the planet’s thick atmosphere traps heat and is the reason that it is the hottest planet in the solar system, despite coming after Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun.
• Surface temperatures on Venus can go up to 471 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to melt lead.
• Further, Venus moves forward on its orbit around the Sun but spins backwards around its axis slowly.
• This means on Venus the Sun rises in the west and sets in the East.
• One day on Venus is equivalent to 243 Earth days because of its backward spinning, opposite to that of the Earth’s and most other planets.
• Venus also does not have a moon and no rings.

Scientists with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Collaboration have assembled the largest collection of fast radio bursts (FRBs) in the telescope’s first FRB catalog.

CHIME Telescope

• CHIME is an interferometric radio telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, Canada.
• It consists of four antennas consisting of 100 x 20-meter cylindrical parabolic reflectors with 1024 dual-polarization radio receivers suspended on support above them.
• The telescope receives radio signals each day from half of the sky as the Earth rotates.
• While most radio astronomy is done by swiveling a large dish to focus light from different parts of the sky, CHIME stares, motionless, at the sky, and focuses incoming signals using a correlator.
• This is a powerful digital signal processor that can work through huge amounts of data, at a rate of about seven terrabytes per second, equivalent to a few percent of the world’s Internet traffic.

What are FRBs?

• FRBs are oddly bright flashes of light, registering in the radio band of the electromagnetic spectrum, which blaze for a few milliseconds before vanishing without a trace.
• These brief and mysterious beacons have been spotted in various and distant parts of the universe, as well as in our own galaxy.
• Their origins are unknown and their appearance is highly unpredictable.
• But the advent of the CHIME project has nearly quadrupled the number of fast radio bursts discovered to date.
• With more observations, astronomers hope soon to pin down the extreme origins of these curiously bright signals.

A NASA-funded rocket’s launch window will open at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, USA. The aim of this mission is to count the number of stars that exist in the Universe.

Answer this PYQ from CSP 2020 in the comment box:

Q.“The experiment will employ a trio of spacecraft flying in formation in the shape of an equilateral triangle that has sides one million kilometers long, with lasers shining between the craft.” The experiment in question refers to

(a) Voyager-2

(b) New horizons

(c) Lisa Pathfinder

(d) Evolved LISA

What is CIBER-2?

• In order to roughly estimate the number of stars in the Universe, scientists have estimated that on average each galaxy consists of about 100 million stars, but this figure is not exact.
• The figure of 100 million could easily be an underestimation, probably by a factor of 10 or more.
• To put this into perspective, an average of 100 million stars in each galaxy (there an estimated 2 trillion of them as per NASA), would give a total figure of one hundred quintillion stars or 1 with 21 zeroes after it.
• NASA notes that if this figure is accurate, it would mean that for every grain of sand on Earth, there are more than ten stars.
• But this calculation assumes that all stars are inside galaxies, which might not be true and this is what the CIBER-2 instrument will try to find out.

How will CIBER-2 count stars?

• NASA notes that the instrument will not actually count individual stars but it will instead detect the extragalactic background light
• It is all of the light that has been emitted throughout the history of the Universe.
• From all of this extragalactic background light, the CIBER-2 will focus on a portion of this called cosmic infrared background, which is emitted by some of the most common stars.
• Essentially, this approach is aiming to look at how bright this light is to give scientists an estimate of how many of these stars are out there.
• The ESA infrared space observatory Herschel also counted the number of galaxies in infrared and measured their luminosity previously.

NASA has selected two missions to the planet Venus, Earth’s nearest neighbor. The missions are called DAVINCI+ and VERITAS.

DAVINCI+ and VERITAS

(1) DAVINCI+

• DAVINCI+ is short for ‘Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging’ and is the first US-led mission to the planet’s atmosphere since 1978.
• It will try to understand Venus’ composition to see how the planet formed and evolved.
• This mission also consists of a decent sphere that will pass through the planet’s thick atmosphere and make observations and take measurements of noble gases and other elements.
• Significantly, this mission will also try to return the first high-resolution photographs of a geological feature that is unique to Venus.
• This feature, which is called “tesserae” may be comparable to Earth’s continents.
• The presence of tesseraes may suggest that Venus has tectonic plates like Earth.

(2) VERITAS

• The second mission called VERITAS is short for ‘Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy’.
• It will map the planet’s surface to determine its geologic history and understand the reasons why it developed so differently from Earth.
• VERITAS will orbit Venus with a radar that will help to create a 3D reconstruction of its topography which might be able to tell scientists if processes such as plate tectonics and volcanism are still active there.
• This mission will also map the emissions from Venus’s surface that may help in determining the type of rocks that exist on Venus–a piece of information that is not exactly known yet.
• It will also determine if active volcanoes are releasing water vapor into the atmosphere.

Why study Venus?

• The results from DAVINCI+ are expected to reshape the understanding of terrestrial planet formation in the solar system and beyond.
• Taken together, both missions are expected to tell scientists more about the planet’s thick cloud cover and the volcanoes on its surface.
• Further, scientists speculate about the existence of life on Venus in its distant past and the possibility that life may exist in the top layers of its clouds where temperatures are less extreme.

Have humans visited Venus?

• Because of the planet’s harsh environment, no humans have visited it and even the spacecraft that have been sent to the planet have not survived for a very long time.
• Venus’ high surface temperatures overheat electronics in spacecraft in a short time, so it seems unlikely that a person could survive for long on the Venusian surface.
• So far, spacecraft from several nations have visited the planet.
• The first such spacecraft was the Soviet Union’s Venera series (the spacecraft, however, could not survive for long because of the planet’s harsh conditions).
• It was followed by NASA’s Magellan Mission that studied Venus from 1990-1994. As of now, Japan’s Akatsuki mission is studying the planet from Orbit.

Back2Basics: Venus

• For those on Earth, Venus is the second-brightest object in the sky after the moon.
• It appears bright because of its thick cloud cover that reflects and scatters light.
• Surface temperatures on Venus can go up to 471 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to melt lead, NASA notes. Surface temperatures on Venus can go up to 471 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to melt lead, NASA notes.

Some unknown facts

• While Venus, which is the second closest planet to the Sun, is called the Earth’s twin because of their similar sizes, the two planets have significant differences between them.
• For one, the planet’s thick atmosphere traps heat and is the reason that it is the hottest planet in the solar system, despite coming after Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun.
• Further, Venus moves forward on its orbit around the Sun but spins backwards around its axis slowly.
• This means on Venus the Sun rises in the west and sets in the East.
• One day on Venus is equivalent to 243 Earth days because of its backward spinning, opposite to that of the Earth’s and most other planets.
• Venus also does not have a moon and no rings.

China landed a spacecraft on Mars carrying its first Mars rover in a big boost to its space ambitions.

UPSC may ask an MCQ asking: Which of the following is/are the space missions related to Mars? It may throw up 4-5 options (which we all get confused at after few months) like Cassini , InSight , Messanger, Voyager etc.

Tianwen-1 Mission

• The mission is named after the ancient Chinese poem ‘Questions to Heaven’, the Tianwen-1.
• It is an all-in-one orbiter; lander and rover will search the Martian surface for water, ice, investigate soil characteristics, and study the atmosphere, among completing other objectives.
• It will be the first to place ground-penetrating radar on the Martian surface, which will be able to study local geology, as well as rock, ice, and dirt distribution.
• The lander descended successfully onto the surface of the red planet carrying a rover named Zhurong, named after a god of fire for a planet known in Chinese as the planet of fire.
• Only the Soviet Union and the United States had previously carried out a successful landing on Mars.

Back2Basics: Various missions on Mars

• The USSR in 1971 became the first country to carry out a Mars landing– its ‘Mars 3’ lander being able to transmit data for 20 seconds from the Martian surface before failing.
• The country made it’s second and Mars landing two years later in 1973.
• The second country to reach Mars’s surface, the US, holds the record for the most number of Mars landings.
• Since 1976, it has achieved 8 successful Mars landings, the latest being the ‘InSight’ in 2019 (launched in 2018).
• India and the European Space Agency have been able to place their spacecraft in Mars’s orbit.
• India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) or ‘Mangalyaan’ was able to do so in September 2014, almost a year after its launch from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh.
• The Chinese mission now is expected to take off around the same time when NASA is launching its own Mars mission– the ambitious ‘Perseverance’ which aims to collect Martian samples and bring them back.

The first Arab interplanetary mission is expected to reach Mars’ orbit on February 9 in what is considered the most critical part of the journey to unravel the secrets of weather on the Red Planet.

Try this question from CSP 2014:

Q.Which of the following pair is/are correctly matched?

Spacecraft	Purpose
1. Cassini-Huygens	Orbiting the Venus and transmitting data to the Earth
2. Messenger	Mapping and investigating the Mercury
3. Voyager 1 and 2	Exploring the outer solar system

Select the correct answer using the code given below.

a) 1 only

b) 2 and 3 only

c) 1 and 3 only

d) 1, 2 and 3

Hope Mission

• The Emirates Mars Mission called “Hope” was announced in 2015 with the aim of creating mankind’s first integrated model of the Red planet’s atmosphere.
• Hope weighs over 1500 kg and will carry scientific instruments mounted on one side of the spacecraft, including the Emirates exploration Imager (EXI), which is a high-resolution camera among others.
• The spacecraft will orbit Mars to study the Martian atmosphere and its interaction with outer space and solar winds.
• Hope will collect data on Martian climate dynamics, which should help scientists understand why Mars’ atmosphere is decaying into space.

Objectives of the mission

• Once it launches, Hope will orbit Mars for around 200 days, after which it will enter the Red planet’s orbit by 2021, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the founding of UAE.
• The mission is being executed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, UAE’s space agency.
• It will help answer key questions about the global Martian atmosphere and the loss of hydrogen and oxygen gases into space over the span of one Martian year.

Stardust 1.O was recently launched from Maine, the US has become the first commercial space launch powered by biofuel.

UPSC may puzzle you with the following type of MCQ asking:

Q.Which of the following is the unique feature of the Stardust 1.0 Spacecraft recenlty seen in news?

(a) It is propelled by Bio-fuels.

(b) It has the largest payload capacity.

(c) It is re-usable launch vehicle.

(d) All of the above

What is Stardust 1.O?

• Stardust 1.O is a launch vehicle suited for student and budget payloads.
• The rocket is manufactured by bluShift, an aerospace company based in Maine that is developing rockets that are powered by bio-derived fuels.
• The rocket is 20 feet tall and has a mass of roughly 250 kg.
• The rocket can carry a maximum payload mass of 8 kg and during its first launch carried three payloads.
• The payloads included a cubesat prototype built by high-school students, a metal alloy designed to lessen vibrations.

Why such missions are important?

• Such efforts are a part of a growing number of commercial space companies that are working to provide easier and cheaper access to space to laypeople.
• It also makes access to space cost-effective for purposes of academic research, corporate technology development and entrepreneurial ventures among others.

Back2Basics: Biofuel

• Biofuels are obtained from biomass, which can be converted directly into liquid fuels that can be used as transportation fuels.
• The two most common kinds of biofuels in use today are ethanol and biodiesel and they both represent the first generation of biofuel technology.
• Ethanol, for instance, is renewable and made from different kinds of plant materials.
• Biodiesel on the other hand is produced by combining alcohol with new and used vegetable oils, animal fats or recycled cooking grease.

Categories of biofuels

Biofuels are generally classified into three categories. They are

1. First-generation biofuels – First-generation biofuels are made from sugar, starch, vegetable oil, or animal fats using conventional technology. Common first-generation biofuels include Bioalcohols, Biodiesel, Vegetable oil, Bioethers, Biogas.
2. Second-generation biofuels – These are produced from non-food crops, such as cellulosic biofuels and waste biomass (stalks of wheat and corn, and wood). Examples include advanced biofuels like biohydrogen, bioethanol.
3. Third-generation biofuels – These are produced from micro-organisms like algae.

Space scientists from the University of Sussex have found a new way to know more about dark matter. They have narrowed down the range of masses within which particles that could make up dark matter may lie in.

What is the news about?

• Around 95 % of the Universe is unknown to human beings.
• It is often referred to as dark which has nothing to do with the colour of any substance but to do with the unknown nature of cosmic entities known as dark matter and dark energy.

Trending in news these days is the Quantum Technology. (as it used to be until last year were- the Internet of Things (IoT) CSP 2019, Artificial Intelligence (AI) etc.)

Must read all this news in a loop:

1. National Mission on QC
2. Quantum Coin
3. Quantum Supremacy
4. Quantum Entanglement

What is Dark Matter?

• Dark matter is composed of particles that do not absorb, reflect, or emit light, so they cannot be detected by observing electromagnetic radiation.
• Dark matter is a form of matter thought to account for approximately 85% of the matter in the universe and about a quarter of its total mass-energy density or about 2.241×10⁻²⁷ kg/m³.

What does the research say?

• Scientists carried out the research using quantum gravity, a field of study that tries to combine two of Einstein’s concepts — quantum physics and general relativity theory of gravity.
• This is the first time anyone has thought of using what we know about quantum gravity to calculate the mass range for dark matter.
• Their research shows that the dark matter particles can neither be super light nor super heavy unless there is a force acting on it that is yet unknown.

Quantum gravity: The concept

• Quantum gravity is a field of theoretical physics that seeks to describe gravity according to the principles of quantum mechanics.
• Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics which describes nature at the smallest scales of energy levels of atoms and subatomic particles.
• Here quantum effects cannot be ignored, such as in the vicinity of black holes or similar compact astrophysical objects where the effects of gravity are strong, such as neutron stars.

Significance of the findings

• This might help in finding out more about this mysterious force. There are currently four known forces in the Universe — gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong.
• Scientists estimate that roughly 68 per cent of the Universe is made up of dark energy which is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe.
• Another 27 per cent is a dark matter whose existence was inferred from the observation that ordinary matter in galaxies, including the Milky Way, is far less than that required by gravity to hold the galaxies together.

Why does the ‘Dark Matter’ matter?

• Dark matter’s gravitational effects are also necessary to explain the motions of clusters of galaxies and the structure of the entire Universe at the largest scale.
• On smaller scales, dark matter is too diffused to impact the motion of the Solar System, Earth or the origin and evolution of humans in any significant way.
• But the nature of that dark matter is still unclear. It is most likely made of particles that do not couple to light because of which humans cannot see them.

The Mars rover ‘Curiosity’ has completed 3,000 Martian days.

Try this PYQ:

Q.Which region of Mars has a densely packed river deposit indicating this planet had water 3.5 billion years ago?

(a) Aeolis Dorsa

(b) Tharsis

(c) Olympus Mons

(d) Hellas

Curiosity Rover

• Curiosity is an SUV-sized Mars rover designed to explore the Gale crater on Mars as part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission
• The main mission of Curiosity was “to search areas of Mars for past or present conditions favourable for life, and conditions capable of preserving a record of life.”
• It has a suite of instruments:

1. A gas chromatograph, a mass spectrometer, a tunable laser spectrometer, X-ray diffraction, fluorescence instrument help study the rocks
2. The Mars Hand Lens Imager (for close-up pictures) and a Mast Camera (to take photos of the surroundings)
3. An instrument named ChemCam to vaporize thin layers of Martian rocks.
4. Radiation Assessment Detector to study the radiation environment at the surface of Mars
5. Rover Environmental Monitoring Station to measure atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, winds, plus ultraviolet radiation levels
6. Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons instrument to measure subsurface hydrogen

Back2Basics: Martian Day/ Sol

• Coincidentally, the duration of a Martian day aka ‘Sol’ is within a few per cent of that of an Earth day, which has led to the use of analogous time units.
• A sol is slightly longer than an Earth day. It is approximately 24 hours, 39 minutes, 35 seconds long.
• A Martian year is approximately 668 sols, equivalent to approximately 687 Earth days.
• Mars has an axial tilt and a rotation period similar to those of Earth.
• Thus, it experiences seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter much like Earth.

A Chinese lunar capsule has returned to Earth with the first fresh samples of rock and debris from the moon in more than 40 years.

Try this PYQ:

Q.What do you understand by the term Aitken basin:

(a) It is a desert in the southern Chile which is known to be the only location on earth where no rainfall takes place

(b) It is an impact crater on the far side of the Moon

(c) It is a Pacific coast basin, which is known to house large amounts of oil and gas

(d) It is a deep hyper saline anoxic basin where no aquatic animals are found

Chang’e-5 Probe

• The Chang’e-5 probe, named after the mythical Chinese moon goddess, aims to shovel up lunar rocks and soil to help scientists learn about the moon’s origins, formation and volcanic activity on its surface.
• The goal of the mission is to land in the Mons Rumker region of the moon, where it will operate for one lunar day, which is two weeks long.
• It will collect 2 kg of surface material from a previously unexplored area known as Oceanus Procellarum — or “Ocean of Storms” — which consist of vast lava plain.
• The original mission, planned for 2017, was delayed due to an engine failure in China’s Long March 5 launch rocket.

A big achievement

• The successful mission was the latest breakthrough for China’s increasingly ambitious space programme that includes a robotic mission to Mars and plans for a permanent orbiting space station.
• This return marked China’s third successful lunar landing but the only one to lift off again from the moon.
• It also marked the first time scientists have obtained fresh samples of lunar rocks since the former Soviet Union’s Luna 24 robot probe in 1976.

Significance of the mission

• Rocks found on the Moon are older than any that have been found on Earth and therefore they are valuable in providing information about the Earth and the Moon’s shared history.
• Lunar samples can help to unravel some important questions in lunar science and astronomy, including the Moon’s age, its formation, the similarities and differences between the Earth and the Moon’s geologic features.
• For instance, the shape, size, arrangement and composition of individual grains and crystals in a rock can tell scientists about its history, while the radioactive clock can tell them the rock’s age.
• Further, tiny cracks in rocks can tell them about the radiation history of the Sun in the last 100,000 years.

Due to an event referred to as “opposition”, which takes place every two years and two months, Mars will shine the brightest.

Try this question from CSP 2017:

Q.Which region of Mars has a densely packed river deposit indicating this planet had water 3.5 billion years ago?

(a) Aeolis Dorsa (b) Tharsis (c) Olympus Mons (d) Hellas

What is the Opposition Event?

• ‘Opposition’ is the event when the sun, Earth and an outer planet (Mars in this case) are lined up, with the Earth in the middle.
• The time of opposition is the point when the outer planet is typically also at its closest distance to the Earth for a given year, and because it is close, the planet appears brighter in the sky.
• An opposition can occur anywhere along Mars’ orbit, but when it happens when the planet is also closest to the sun, it is also particularly close to the Earth.
• It will outshine Jupiter, becoming the third brightest object (moon and Venus are first and second, respectively) in the night sky during the month of October.

When does opposition happen?

• Earth and Mars orbit the sun at different distances (Mars is farther apart from the sun than Earth and therefore takes longer to complete one lap around the sun).
• In fact, the opposition can happen only for planets that are farther away from the sun than the Earth.
• In the case of Mars, roughly every two years, the Earth passes between sun and Mars, this is when the three are arranged in a straight line.
• Further, as the Earth and Mars orbit the sun, there comes a point when they are on the opposite sides of it, and hence very far apart. At its farthest, Mars is about 400 million km from the Earth.
• In case of opposition, however, Mars and Sun are on directly opposite sides of the Earth. In other words, the Earth, sun and Mars all lie in a straight line, with the Earth in the middle.

Logic behind the name

• As per NASA, from an individual’s perspective on the Earth, Mars rises in the east and after staying up all night, it sets in the west just as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
• Because from the perspective on Earth, the sun and Mars appear to be on the opposite sides of the sky, Mars is said to be in “opposition”.
• Essentially, the opposition is a reference to “opposing the sun” in the sky.

The launch of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) first mission to Mars has been delayed by two days due to bad weather conditions which were scheduled to take off from its launch site, Tanegashima Space Center, in Japan.

Try this question from CSP 2014:

Q.Which of the following pair is/are correctly matched?

Spacecraft	Purpose
1. Cassini-Huygens	Orbiting the Venus and transmitting data to the Earth
2. Messenger	Mapping and investigating the Mercury
3. Voyager 1 and 2	Exploring the outer solar system

Select the correct answer using the code given below.

a) 1 only

b) 2 and 3 only

c) 1 and 3 only

d) 1, 2 and 3

Hope Mission

• The Emirates Mars Mission called “Hope” was announced in 2015 with the aim of creating mankind’s first integrated model of the Red planet’s atmosphere.
• Hope weighs over 1500 kg and will carry scientific instruments mounted on one side of the spacecraft, including the Emirates exploration Imager (EXI), which is a high-resolution camera among others.
• The spacecraft will orbit Mars to study the Martian atmosphere and its interaction with outer space and solar winds.
• Hope will collect data on Martian climate dynamics, which should help scientists understand why Mars’ atmosphere is decaying into space.

Objectives of the mission

• Once it launches, Hope will orbit Mars for around 200 days, after which it will enter the Red planet’s orbit by 2021, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the founding of UAE.
• The mission is being executed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre, UAE’s space agency.
• It will help answer key questions about the global Martian atmosphere and the loss of hydrogen and oxygen gases into space over the span of one Martian year.

Back2Basics: Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM)

• The MOM also called Mangalyaan is a space probe orbiting Mars since 24 September 2014. It was launched on 5 November 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
• It aims at studying the Martian surface and mineral composition as well as scans its atmosphere for methane (an indicator of life on Mars).
• It is India’s first interplanetary mission and it made it the fourth space agency to reach Mars, after Roscosmos, NASA, and the European Space Agency.
• It made India the first Asian nation to reach Martian orbit and the first nation in the world to do so on its maiden attempt.
• It was initially meant to last six months, but subsequently, ISRO had said it had enough fuel for it to last “many years.”