This week in space from Fraser Cain | | The big story, this week, or course, was the passing of the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking at the age of 76. I can't think of anyone in our modern time who did more to inspire the public about black holes, the Big Bang, and concepts in cosmology and astrophysics.
He also showed us that even suffering from a terrible illness that made him a prisoner in his own body, his mind could soar. He pushed out our knowledge of the cosmos, he made it accessible to the public, and he stayed engaged and involved throughout his tenure.
I attached a photograph of him in a Zero G flight. That's how I want to remember him.
Thanks for everything Dr. Hawking.
Have you got an extra 70 minutes to spare? You might want to spend them watching this fascinating interview with Elon Musk at South-by-Southwest on March 11, 2018. This informal chat was hosted by Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote Interstellar and is the co-creator of Westworld.
It's a wide-ranging conversation about the history of all of Musk's companies, the state of SpaceX and the construction of the Big Falcon Rocket. If you don't have time to watch the whole thing, I can give you a few thoughts.
It sounds like the BFR is proceeding quickly rapidly. If all goes well, we should see the first tests of the top half of this rocket system, the Big Falcon Spaceship, some time in 2019. And Musk thinks it'll get to orbit by 2020. There will be flights to the Moon and Mars shortly after that.
The first people who'll go to Mars will need to be very brave and accept the fact that death is likely. Later on, once things have been smoothed out, though, Musk thinks Mars will be a pretty great place to live.
His work with artificial intelligence has shown him that this technology is much further along than anyone anticipated, and it's probably the single-most existential threat that humanity faces. This is one of the reasons why he thinks sending humans to Mars is such an important idea.
Anyway, it's a fascinating interview, great to hear his thought process in forum that's informal. I learned a lot.
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today
As always, if you have comments or questions, or suggestions on how I can improve this newsletter, please don't hesitate to reply this email or send me an email at frasercain@gmail.com. | |  | | Elon Musk's surprising Q&A at SXSW 2018. | | 
At some point in the next month or so, the Chinese Tiangong-1 space station is going to come crashing back to Earth... somewhere. Until then, you can still go outside, point your telescope up and watch it fly overhead. There's still a tremendous amount of uncertainty about where and when it's going to land.
The Office of Planetary Defense has been thinking long and hard about how we could prevent the impact of a killer asteroid, should one ever be discovered. They've come up with an idea called HAMMER, sending a nuke at the spacerock to kick it into a safer trajectory.
Ready to feel more inspired at the state of human spaceflight? Then watch this short video produced by SpaceX that showcases the flight of the Falcon Heavy. I'm not crying, I was just cutting onions.
In this week's QA, I compared apples to apples and look at the launch capability of the Falcon Heavy versus the Space Shuttle. The answer may surprise you. We also look at extracting energy from a black hole, and if launching satellites from the Earth's poles will avoid a Kessler Syndrome.
Oops, an Indian rocket that launched on January 12th was carrying a bunch of payloads including 4 satellites from a US startup called Swarm Technologies. Unfortunately, they hadn't gotten FCC approval to launch the satellites, which is required from any US companies that intend to transmit signals to US customers.
One of the biggest problems of spaceflight is the total lack of gravity. Here are some proposals that could generate artificial gravity through rotating spacecraft.
Astronomers have been studying Jupiter's gorgeous atmospheric bands, and assumed they were a surface atmospheric feature. But new research indicates that these bands might actually go pretty deep, thousands of kilometers below the surface, churning up material from deeper within the planet.
Most astronomers think that dark matter is a particle that doesn't interact with regular matter. But could dark matter just be some property of space that we don't understand? Ethan Siegel from Starts With A Bang explains.
Another mission that's going to be returning to Earth is the humanity star, a multi-sided star ball. Some people think it's a fun way to get people look at the night sky, others think it's an evil light pollution menace. Either way, it's not going to be visible in the sky for long. Dave Dickinson shows you how and where to see it pass overhead.
The Crab Nebula was one of NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory's first targets, and an object that the spacecraft has returned to over and over again throughout almost 2 decades of observations. This latest image is a composite made up of photos from Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer.
With the discovery of geysers on Europa and Enceladus, these worlds are looking more and more exciting to search for life. Of course, how can you search for that life if it could be hiding beneath kilometers of ice? New research indicates that it could actually be right below the surface.
I know this looks like some kind of pepperoni pizza, but it's actually the south pole of Jupiter, which has a huge polar cyclone surrounded by 5 smaller storms. And there's a similar structure at the north pole with 8 storms. This was just one of the many amazing photographs and discoveries announced about Jupiter this week.
I know this looks like the Eye of Sauron, but it's actually an amazing photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the newly forming solar system around the young star HR 4796A. The structure is known as an exo-ring, and it actually extends about 240 billion kilometers across.
If you're putting all your hopes and dreams into the James Webb Space Telescope, you might want to go right past this article, and remain in a state of blissful ignorance. So, uh, bad news, it looks like James Webb is going to shoot past the cost cap set by Congress in 2011 at $8 billion. If it does go over budget, what happens then? Whatever the case, it's now enjoying its final round of tests before it's shipped off to Kourou, French Guiana.
The speed of light is really slow when it comes to communicating with aliens. In a new study, researchers calculated that even if we do receive a signal from aliens, they probably died out a long time ago.
Other Interesting Space Stuff
Amazing Astrophotography
I know we did star trails last week, but I just couldn't help choosing another one. This time it's from Matt Beckmann (@mattbeckmannimages). I really like the process that Matt used for this image, making the stars look like diamonds swirling around in the sky.
We feature a different astrophotographer every day on our Instagram page. Want to do a takeover? Use the hashtag #universetoday and I'll check out your photos. | | | |
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