A comet and two asteroids are approaching Earth, and they are already being monitored. Comet Leonard can become visible to the naked eye and provide an incredible spectacle, while asteroids 330 and 800 km in diameter will not get close enough to pose any danger to our planet.
In addition, new images of Mars and “disastrous” situation in SpaceX, at risk of bankruptcy, were high in the news. Check out the summary of these and other most important space news of the week!
Comet Leonard (or C/2021 A1 (Leonard)) is approaching Earth and may be visible to the naked eye. In the meantime, Céu Profundo, a Brazilian astronomy project, recorded a beautiful image. Unfortunately, it won’t be very easy to spot because it will rise in the east, close to where the sun rises over the horizon.
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Comets are unpredictable objects, but there are good expectations for an observation with the naked eye in the second half of December, more precisely right after December 15th. If it survives the approach of the Sun without breaking and its glow turns out to be intense enough, Leonard will appear just above and to the left of the planet Venus, about 1 hour after sunset in the western direction of the sky. Write it down in the diary and fix your camera!
The asteroids called 4660 Nereus, 330 meters in diameter, and the (163899) 2003 SD220, 800 meters in diameter, are approaching and will pass “near” Earth this month. The first will make its closest approach on December 11th, while the second on the 17th. There is no risk of collision in either case.
To give you an idea of how harmless they are, this will be the closest approximation of Nereus we’ll see in decades, and yet it will still be no more than 10 times the average distance between Earth and Moon. The next time it comes close it will be on February 14, 2060, when it will be more than three times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
Although it’s a very small image, it’s always exciting to capture a photo of Saturn with its rings. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has orbited and studied the Moon since 2009, was about 90 km above the lunar surface when it was repositioned to capture the northern side of the “Jewel of the Solar System”.
The team of engineers responsible for the LRO had to carefully manipulate the probe to get out of its normal position facing the Moon and point their cameras at Saturn. The LRO has also done the same to register Jupiter, and has even managed to include some of the gas giant’s moons in the image. Unfortunately, in the case of Saturn it was not possible to capture its moons.
New images show the @Space_Station in all its glory.
In early November, Crew-2 astronaut Thom_Astro photographed the orbiting laboratory during the return trip home aboard the @SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour: https://t.co/vHcH5sttWX pic.twitter.com/IOQBqnhm8e
— NASA (@NASA) November 30, 2021
The first time a crew has performed a full flight around the International Space Station since the space shuttle era, Crew-2 astronauts took some pictures of the orbital lab. Their return to Earth was in early November, but NASA has only just released the images on social media,
The Crew-2 mission had Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur of NASA, Thomas Pesquet of ESA and Aki Hoshide of the Japanese space agency JAXA. But who took the photos was Pesquet, who also made several records during his stay on the ISS.
Well, the statement came from the Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, in an internal employee email. According to the statement, the company could face a “genuine risk of bankruptcy” if it fails to meet the target of flights every two weeks with the Starship vehicle. This is the expected rate for him to be able to meet the release schedule.
Musk had planned to take a break over Thanksgiving weekend, but “the Raptors’ production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago,” he wrote in the email. He stressed that all employees must cooperate to recover the company from what he described as “a disaster”. If new, reliable Raptor engines are not produced, it will not be possible to launch the Starship on time.
Perhaps the solar wind formed water on the surface of dust grains present in asteroids, which then crashed into our planet during the “infancy” of the Solar System. This is a possible explanation for the origin of water on our planet.
The Earth is much richer than the other planets in the Solar System when it comes to water, and it is not easy to find explanations for that. One idea is that the liquid would have come here with C-type asteroids, but previous tests have shown that there needs to be at least some other source that hasn’t been considered. Now, the new solar wind hypothesis was formulated from the analysis of atoms of small fragments of the asteroid Itokawa, an S-type space rock, where a quantity of water was found.
this is not a already seen. Curiosity, which had made a awesome picture last week, has now captured a panoramic photo showing the region of Greenheugh Pediment and Rafael Navarro, rocky structures on Mars. Here, 81 individual images taken on November 20, stacked and post-processed were required.
Now, the rover goes to Maria Gordon Notch, the U-shaped structure that appears on the left side of the photos, where it will probably make more amazing records.
The International Space Station (ISS) may not last until the next decade, so NASA is already planning how to replace it. The idea is to place one or more commercial orbital units in low Earth orbit around 2030. The ISS is planned to deactivate in 2024, but everything indicates that it could last until 2030. Until then, NASA hopes to get everything ready for the successors.
The companies selected to build the future stations are Nanoracks, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman. They received, respectively, $160 million, $130 million and $125.6 million to produce the units that will maintain the continued US presence in low Earth orbit.
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