スペースX衛星40基失う、原因は太陽フレア　災害備え近くから監視：朝日新聞デジタル

太陽表面の爆発に伴って通信・放送が2週間断続的に途絶える――。総務省が6月、激しい太陽活動がもたらす「最悪シナリオ」を発表した。太陽活動による極端な宇宙天気は、社会経済へ大きな影響を与えかねない。対応に向けた研究や観測が進んでいる。 大規模な停電のほか、携帯電話や防災無線などが断続的に途絶え、110番な…

NASA reportedly had contingency plans for Russia’s ISS exit last year

Yuri Borisov, the newly appointed chief of Roscosmos, recently announced that Russia is pulling out of the International Space Station after 2024. NASA and Russia’s space agency work in tandem to keep the station running, and the latter’s exit would change ISS operations tremendously. According to Reuters, though, NASA has actually been preparing for such a possibility way before Borisov made his announcement — and even before the invasion of Ukraine began — in light of the increasing tensions between Russia and the US.

Reuters‘ sources said NASA and the White House drew up contingency plans for the ISS late last year. Those plans include ways to pull astronauts out of the station if Russia leaves abruptly and ways to keep the ISS running without Russian hardware. While the US module keeps the station balanced and provides the electricity it needs to run using its solar arrays, Roscosmos’ module has the thrusters needed to keep the flying lab in orbit. And that is why NASA’s contingency plans also reportedly include examining ways to dispose of the station years earlier than planned. 

Apparently, NASA was working on creating a formal request for contractors to conjure up ways to deorbit the space station over the past few weeks. That said, the agency roped in private space companies into its contingency planning in hopes of keeping the ISS in orbit even without Russia. The sources said Boeing already formed a team of engineers to figure out how to control the ISS without Russia’s thrusters. SpaceX chief Elon Musk also previously expressed interest in helping out when former Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin slammed Western sanctions against his country, asking who would “save the ISS from uncontrolled deorbiting” if the West blocks cooperation with Russia.

Back in June, Northrop Grumman was successfully able to adjust the station’s orbit for future operations using its Cygnus capsule, which was then docked to the ISS. Reuters‘ sources said SpaceX is also looking into the possibility of using its spacecraft to boost the station’s orbit. 

Borisov said Russia hasn’t set a date for its exit yet, but that it would honor its obligations and will give partners a one-year notice before it leaves. Roscosmos and NASA will most likely continue working closely until Russia pulls out of the program — they even recently agreed to swap seats on Crew Dragon and Soyuz flights to the ISS.

NASA develops ingenious solution to fix its troubled ‘Lucy’ asteroid explorer

Last year, NASA launched the Lucy spacecraft designed to explore the Trojan asteroids trapped near Jupiter’s Lagrange points. However, a problem arose just 12 hours after launch — one of the large solar arrays designed to generate power from an increasingly distant Sun had failed to fully deploy and latch. Now, NASA has announced that a team was able to troubleshoot the problem sufficiently for the mission to continue — thanks to several clever tricks. 

Hours after the problem was first discovered, NASA pulled together an anomaly response team with members from the science mission lead Southwest Research Institute, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the spacecraft’s builder, Northrop Grumman. 

Since there’s no camera aimed at the solar arrays, the team had to figure out another way to find the problem. To that end, they fired the spacecraft’s thrusters to measure any anomalous vibrations, and created a detailed model of the array’s motor assembly to determine the array’s rigidness. They finally figured out that a lanyard designed to pull the array open was probably snagged on its spool. 

The team quickly honed in on two potential solutions. One was simply to use the array as it was, because it was still generating 90 percent of expected power. The other was to attempt to pull the lanyard harder by using the back-up deployment motor as well as the primary motor, hopefully allowing it to wind further and engage the latching mechanism. 

Both motors were never designed to work at the same time, so the team modeled it to test out possible outcomes and potential ripple effects. After months of simulations, they decided to proceed with the two-motor option. They ran both the primary and backup solar deployment motors simultaneously seven times, and succeeded in further opening and tensioning the array. 

Unfortunately, it didn’t close enough to latch, but it’s now “under substantially more tension, making it stable enough for the spacecraft to operate as needed for mission operations,” NASA said. It’s now “ready and able” to complete its next deadline, getting a boost from Earth’s gravity in October 2022. It’s scheduled to arrive at its first asteroid target in 2025. 

死んだブタの細胞機能回復に成功、移植用の臓器保存に期待　死の概念揺るがす　米イエール大

米イエール大学の研究チームが、死んだブタの細胞機能を回復させることに成功した/Nhac Nguyen/AFP/Getty Images （ＣＮＮ） 米イエール大学の研究チームは、死んでから１時間たったブタの血液循環などの細胞機能を回復させることに成功したと発表した。この研究は、細胞がこれまで考えられていたほど早くは死なないこと…

Virgin Galactic postpones space tourism flights again

Virgin Galactic has announced that its commercial space tourism service has been delayed yet again, from the end of this year until Q2 2023. During its earnings report, the company said that the delay is “due to the extended completion dates [i.e., delays] within the mothership enhancement program.”

The mothership VMS Eve is a crucial part of its launch system, carrying the VSS Unity spacecraft to 50,000 feet before it launches to the edge of space. The enhancement program launched July 7th with the aim of improving flight frequency, along with “reliability, predictability and durability.” 

At the same time it revealed the updates, Virgin Galactic announced that Boeing’s Aurora Flight Sciences will design and manufacture its next-gen motherships, expected to enter service in 2025. The company is also working on a new spaceship, the VSS Imagine, set to make a debut test flight in Q1 2023. 

Virgin Galactic had already delayed its first paid flights from Q3 to Q4 2022 out of an “abundance of caution” due to a possible flight control system issue. The next flight was supposed to launch three Italian Air Force members to the edge of space, to study the effects of transitioning from regular Earth gravity to microgravity on both humans and the environment. Yesterday, the company reported a $111 million quarterly loss and plans a $300 million stock offering.

Microsoft begins testing family subscriptions for Xbox. Five people can share the same subscription.

Earlier this year there were reports that Microsoft would be launching a family subscription for Xbox Game Pass and those rumors seem to have been […]

The post Microsoft begins testing family subscriptions for Xbox. Five people can share the same subscription. appeared first on Gamingsym.

Something is making the Earth spin faster and our days shorter

Over the last couple of years, time has felt more nebulous than ever. You’d be forgiven for thinking that days are passing by at an increasingly faster clip. According to scientists, that perspective is not wrong. On June 29th, midnight arrived 1.59 milliseconds sooner than expected. It was the shortest day in over half a century, at least since scientists started tracking the pace of the Earth’s rotation with atomic clocks in the 1960s. 

That wasn’t a one-off occurrence either. In 2020, the planet saw what were, at the time, the 28 shortest days in recorded history. And just last week, on July 26th, the day lasted 1.5 milliseconds less than usual. “Since 2016 the Earth started to accelerate,” Leonid Zotov, a researcher at Lomonosov Moscow State University, told CBS News. “This year it rotates quicker than in 2021 and 2020.”

Days have become much longer since the Earth’s formation. As The Guardian notes, around 1.4 billion years ago, a rotation of the Earth took less than 19 hours. Days have gotten longer by, on average, around one 74,000th of a second each year. But the planet’s rotation can fluctuate on a day-to-day basis.

Scientists believe there are a number of factors that may impact the Earth’s rotation, including earthquakes, stronger winds in El Niño years, icecaps melting and refreezing, the moon and the climate. Some have suggested the so-called “Chandler wobble” may have an effect on the rotation too. That phenomenon is a “small, irregular deviation in the Earth’s points of rotation relative to the solid Earth,” as USA Today puts it.

To account for fluctuations in the lengths of days, since 1972, there have been occasional leap seconds — a single-second addition to Coordinated Universal Time. Should the current trend of shorter days continue, there’s a possibility that a negative leap second may be needed to keep clocks aligned with the planet’s rotation. As such, UTC would skip a second.

Leap seconds already cause havoc on ultra-precise systems. Just last week, Meta called for an end to leap seconds, which have caused outages at Reddit and Cloudflare over the last decade. A negative leap second could lead to even more chaos.

“With the Earth’s rotation pattern changing, it’s very likely that we will get a negative leap second at some point in the future,” Meta engineers Oleg Obleukhov and Ahmad Byagowi wrote in a blog post. “The impact of a negative leap second has never been tested on a large scale; it could have a devastating effect on the software relying on timers or schedulers.”