Subject: Space Technology

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.

On May 11, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft will depart asteroid Bennu, and start its two-year-long journey back to Earth.

About OSIRIS-REx

• OSIRIS-REx is NASA’s first mission to visit a near-Earth asteroid, survey its surface and collect a sample from it.
• The mission was launched in 2016, it reached its target in 2018 and since then, the spacecraft has been trying to match the velocity of the asteroid using small rocket thrusters.
• It also utilised this time to survey the surface and identify potential sites to take samples.
• In October 2020, the spacecraft briefly touched asteroid Bennu, from where it collected samples of dust and pebbles. 
• Once the surface was disturbed, the spacecraft’s robotic arm captured some samples.
• The spacecraft’s engineers have also confirmed that shortly after the spacecraft made contact with the surface, it fired its thrusters and “safely backed away from Bennu”.

About Bennu

• Bennu is considered to be an ancient asteroid that has not gone through a lot of composition-altering change through billions of years, which means that below its surface lie chemicals and rocks from the birth of the solar system.
• Around 20-40 percent of Bennu’s interior is empty space and scientists believe that it was formed in the first 10 million years of the solar system’s creation, implying that it is roughly 4.5 billion years old.
• Bennu is a B-type asteroid, implying that it contains significant amounts of carbon and various other minerals.
• Because of its high carbon content, the asteroid reflects about four percent of the light that hits it, which is very low when compared with a planet.
• Bennu is named after an Egyptian deity.
• The asteroid was discovered by a team from the NASA-funded Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research team in 1999.