A team of scientists has been tracking a bright object in the sky. But it’s not a star. It’s a new type of commercial satellite. Astronomers are trying to understand how its brightness and transmissions will interfere with Earth-based observations of the universe — and what can be done to minimize these effects as more of these satellites are launched.
In a paper published Oct. 2 in Nature, the team reports its first detailed assessment on how the satellite — BlueWalker 3 — could impact astronomy.
An asteroid discovery algorithm — designed to uncover near-Earth asteroids for the
Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming 10-year survey of the night sky — has identified
its first “potentially hazardous” asteroid, a term for space rocks in Earth’s vicinity that
scientists like to keep an eye on.
The roughly 600-foot-long asteroid, designated 2022
SF289, was discovered during a test drive of the algorithm with the ATLAS survey in
Hawaii. Finding 2022 SF289, which poses no risk to Earth for the foreseeable future,
confirms that the next-generation algorithm, known as HelioLinc3D, can identify near-
Earth asteroids with fewer and more dispersed observations than required by today’s
methods.
Read full article here.
If any alien civilisations have spotted the new supernova SN 2023ixf in the Pinwheel galaxy, they may use it to try to make contact.
How UW astronomers, the world’s largest telescope and a revolutionary survey of space will upend what we thought we knew about the universe. Full article is featured on the UW Homepage here.
I’ve been rounding up the top stories in space on an annual basis for 25 years now (starting with the Mars Pathfinder mission in 1997), and 2022 ranks among the biggest years when it comes to opening up new frontiers on the final frontier. The best thing about these frontier-opening stories — especially the James Webb Space Telescope and the Artemis moon program — is that the best is yet to come.
Sometime this coming March, a network of 10 small satellites winged with solar panels is scheduled to launch into Earth’s low orbit. Though likely invisible to the naked eye, the satellites will be part of a future herd of hundreds that, according to the Space Development Agency, or SDA, will bolster the United States’ defense capabilities.
In conversation with James Davenport and 2022 DiRAC Research Prize recipients read more about Vera C. Rubin Observatory and important role of the scientists at the UW’s DiRAC Institute.
King5 talks with Thomas Quinn, UW Astronomy, about James Webb Space Telescope’s new images released on July 12th by NASA.
University of Washington astronomer James Davenport and his colleagues lay out the plan in a research paper submitted to the arXiv pre-print server this month. The idea is also the subject of a talk that Davenport’s giving this week at the Breakthrough Discuss conference in California.
