Space News June 2020

SpaceX docks at ISS May 31st:  Private initiatives have got their nose out under the tent flap and see stars beckoning. Well, metal asteroids anyway. Capitalism with government subsidies got its first crack at going into outer space on May 30.  The SpaceX module delivered astronauts to the aging space lab from a U.S. base, instead of at $86 million per chair per launch being paid to Russia as per the last nine years.  The space story here is that at least one government, the American one, has got a little out of the way and  there will be good consequences.
       You can watch the launch here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lyq_piGHKuY
And watch the link with the space station here:

Earth's magnetic field continues actively re-shaping.  The north pole moves dozens of kilometers in one year lately, requiring navigation updates all the time. It's actually close to the "real" north pole for the first time in my life   The new story is that an area of low magnetic flux in the South Atlantic is weakening and developing twin cores.  The South Atlantic Anomaly changes have been detected by a cluster of  Swarm satellites.
The Anomaly has been moving westwards about 19 kmph recently.  That's not "per year" but "per hour".The top speculation is that we are approaching one of earth's periodic reversals of magnetic poles.  The Daily Mail was all over this one for graphics.  There's a movie of the changing field at the link.   (The last polar flip was 780,000 years ago.





Every few weeks a meteorite from outside the solar system burns up in our atmosphere.  Here's a recent fireball track from May 19th.  Spaceweather.com posts a daily report from the NASA all-sky-cameras.  The straight blue line is the culprit, projecting where it would have gone if we hadn't been in the way.







Like a bump on a log in a hole in the bottom of the sea,  a speck of dust smaller than a mustard seed on a moon pebble has been analysed and The Creation of the Moon is being revealed in that speck.  A cubic zirconia crystal was found and measured.  It' formed about 4.3 billion years ago and this could only have happened in temperatures above 2300 C.  Those amazing temperatures would only have happened if that region of the moon's surface had turned molten.  The conclusion is that an immense and specific moon-rocking collision happened as part of the moon's story. The speculation is old but having a measurement is new. Today the moon is sedate with one side turned towards us, slowing its orbit by 1.5 milliseconds per century.



Near earth orbit is filling up with junk. The current cost of satellite junk cleanup is about the same as the cost of launching a new satellite.  This is an opportunity for a bureaucracy to tax new launches  (like a pop bottle deposit but a million times pricier)  and it's an opportunity for an entrepreneur to get filthy rich developing a cheaper clean-up business.


Four separate millisecond massive bursts of energy  (FRB = Fast Radio Burst) have been pin-pointed to the periphery of the galaxies they came from, eliminating a central black hole as the source.  From the Astrophysical Journal Letters, "Appears to rule out FRB progenitor models that invoke active galactic nuclei or free-floating cosmic strings."