View of Monday’s presentation. Photo: NASA
NASA yesterday launched a rocket from the Northern Territory of Australia, marking the agency’s first launch from below in more than 25 years, as well as its first launch from a commercial spaceport outside the United States. .
The launch took place yesterday at the Arnhem Space Center on the Gove Peninsula in the Northern Territory of Australia. The launch was an agreement between NASA and Equatorial Launch Australia (the company that owns the space center), becoming NASA’s first commercial launch from the continent, and also the first commercial space launch in the history of Australia. The Arnhem Space Center is also the only commercial multi-user equatorial launch site in the world, according to ELA, and this launch is the first of three that NASA has planned to study how interstellar radiation could affect the habitability of spacecraft. distant exoplanets. .
Yesterday’s launch involved a Black Brandt IX suborbital rocket, which launched at 10:29 am ET and reached an altitude of more than 200 miles (321 kilometers). The payload of the rocket was the X-ray quantum calorimeter, an instrument that will collect interstellar X-rays from mysterious sources in the depths of our galaxy to understand the evolution of stars and galaxies. NASA notes that these studies should be conducted from the southern hemisphere, as only a portion of the X-ray emissions of interest can be seen from the northern hemisphere. The remaining two missions will study the radiation of the Alpha Centauri system.
“The sun’s ultraviolet radiation played an important role in how Mars lost its atmosphere and how Venus became a dry, arid landscape,” Brian Fleming said in a NASA press release. Fleming is an astronomer at the University of Colorado Boulder and principal investigator of the Continuous Dual Channel Ultraviolet Experiment, or DEUCE, which will fly in the second of three NASA missions from Arnhem. “Understanding ultraviolet radiation is extremely important to understanding what makes a planet habitable.”
The two remaining missions, scheduled for July 4 and 12, will carry instruments from the University of Colorado Boulder. The July 4 launch will bring the suborbital imaging spectrograph for the irradiation of the transition region of the host stars of the nearby exoplanet, or SISTINE for short. This mission will collect data to study how ultraviolet radiation from stars can affect the atmospheres of nearby planets. The July 12 launch will take DEUCE on a mission to collect measurements from a specific region of the ultraviolet spectrum that NASA says has been little studied; These measurements can then be used to create more accurate star models and explain how their radiation can affect exoplanetary atmospheres.
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Monday’s launch reveals the extent to which NASA now depends on private companies and how international partnerships fit into that equation. The continuous commercialization of space, as we are seeing more and more, is a truly global phenomenon.
Learn more: A spacecraft from Mars has been running Windows 98-era software for 19 years, but no more.