It was a great week for space science and technology, and Alabama is in the middle of many of the news.
To begin, NASA closed a chapter in space history on Friday at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The space agency placed the last piece of the first Space Launch System (SLS) rocket built in Marshall on a barge at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. To mark the milestone, Governor Kay Ivey declared Alabama Artemis Day July 17.
The part is called the Launch Vehicle Stage Adapter, and Teledyne Brown Engineering of Huntsville built it to connect the rocket’s central stage and one of its propulsion stages. The propulsion stage was built by Boeing and the United Launch Alliance in Decatur. Everything is destined to go up to the first SLS when it launches in November 2021.
The adapter “was the final piece of hardware for the Artemis I rocket built exclusively at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center,” said Marshall Director Jody Singer. Artemis 1 is the name of the first of three SLS flights in NASA’s plan to return the next male and first female to the surface of the Moon by 2024. The plan is named Artemis after Apollo’s sister.
The adapter is a good example of how conversations about space, getting there and doing anything there often turn into conversations about both engineering and science. Good engineering is needed to build something that can withstand the icy vacuum of space and continue to function.
The adapter was “welded together like two separate cones that are then stacked on top of each other,” said hardware manager Keith Higginbotham. “Marshall’s experience with an innovative process called friction stir stir welding and the center’s large robotic welding tools made it possible to build some parts of the rocket in Marshall while Boeing (near New Orleans) built the center stage at the same time” .
Stir friction welding heats two pieces of metal to such a hot point that they melt and are then “stirred” together rather than conventionally welded.
Elsewhere this week, a probe already in space made headlines when it passed close to the Sun. The spacecraft is called the “Solar Orbiter,” and is a partnership of NASA and the European Space Agency. Dr. Gary Zank of the University of Alabama at Huntsville is a co-lead scientist for one of his instruments.
This week’s news came from another instrument, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager. He photographed solar features that no one had ever seen before. The leading scientist David Berghmans of Belgium called those features “bonfires” dotting the Sun, “little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller.”
Berghmans said they “are literally everywhere” in new high-resolution images of the Solar Orbiter. Scientists are not sure what “bonfires” are, let alone how they correspond to “solar flares observed by other spacecraft.” They may help warm the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, but no one knows.
Another instrument on board the Solar Orbiter, the solar and heliospheric imager, revealed what scientists called “zodiacal light,” sunlight that reflects off space dust. The pattern of these images was “so clean” that scientists believe they will be able to see “solar wind structures” when the probe approaches the Sun.
Finally, this week, scientists released a new light image of the early Universe taken by a telescope in Chile. The news here was that data from this “oldest light” indicates that the Universe is about 13.8 billion years old, which is what previous models had shown.
Mark Halpern, a professor on the team studying images from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile, told the science website phys.org that the importance of the new information is that “our model of the universe is holding up well.” And that’s important because the data is getting better and better as the instruments get better; in fact 100,000 times better, according to Halpern. A model that can withstand that kind of improvement gains some real credibility.
