Scientists discovered billions of orphan stars hidden within a Euclid image

This week's space news:

• Voyager 1 is sending back science data!

• That planetary alignment you’ve been hearing about …

• Boeing Starliner will launch tomorrow!! Really…!!!

• Hidden orphan stars unveiled, thanks to Euclid

• Chang’e-6 lander will descend to the far side of t …

• Starship launch scheduled for June 5

Voyager 1 is sending back science data!

Let’s start with some great news: Voyager 1 is sending science data back to Earth.

I’ve delivered quite a few updates on Voyager 1 over the past few months. The short version of what’s been going on is that in November of 2023, the spacecraft started sending gibberish back to Earth. There was no meaningful communication with the spacecraft, and many of us in the space community that that was it for the probe.

But the team persevered and managed to troubleshoot and fix the spacecraft by figuring out that a chip had gone bad. They gave Voyager 1 new instructions on where to store information, and it worked. That’s a VERY brief summary, if you want to know more, check out my story on the fix.

The Voyager 1 team had engineering data back, but it was a longer process to get science data. But on May 22, NASA announced that the team had received data from two of Voyager’s four remaining functional science instruments. (Six instruments are no longer functional or were turned off after the spacecraft’s Saturn flyby in 1980).

The team is continuing to work on the last two science instruments, so hopefully we will hear more good news soon!

That planetary alignment you’ve been hearing about? Skip it.

If you’ve been active on social media, you may have heard a lot of hype about a planetary alignment coming up on June 3(I actually heard from it from a teacher at my kid’s school, who wanted to know if this was actually a thing). Well, I am here to tell you it’s not a thing. Sort of.

The planets WILL align. Our solar system is actually flat like a pancake, and pretty much all the planets are on the same plane, which is why they appear in our sky along a line called the ecliptic, which is the path the sun traces in our sky. Well on June 3, what people have called a “parade of planets” will line up in the night sky — Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — for just a moment.

HOWEVER. This is not worth waking up at 4 am for. Basically, you will not be able to see much with the unaided eye. First of all, planetary alignments aren’t exactly common but they aren’t rare either. In 2023, there was a five planet alignment.

Second, the sun is going to ruin most of this view. Morning twilight will make Mercury and Jupiter hard to see, and Uranus is only visible to the unaided eye from very dark sky areas. And forget about Neptune unless you have binoculars or a telescope.

Anyone who follows me regularly knows I LOVE astronomical events, but I also love sleep and in this case I’m telling you, get your sleep.

Boeing Starliner will launch tomorrow!! Really…!!!

Boeing Starliner…still hasn’t launched, but it looks like the flight is on track for a June 1 launch. The time would be 12:25 pm ET.

The road to this point, since the initial May 6 launch date, has been a bit bumpy. If you want to know more about the flight itself, I have a newsletter about this crewed test flight and NASA’s Commercial Crew program more generally. But here’s a brief summary of what’s happened since that scrub:

The launch was initially scrubbed two hours before the liftoff time due to a pressure valve on the upper stage of the rocket. Because it was seated off its position, it had completed too many open and close cycles and was beyond its lifetime rating, so it had to be replaced.

That took longer than expected because they left the rocket stacked in the assembly building, but they had to use a crane to basically lift the Starliner spacecraft. Not off the rocket, but just to relieve the pressure the spacecraft was putting on the rocket while they did this work. But, before they could do that, they needed to ensure that Starliner could be safely lifted in this manner while still bolted onto the Atlas V launch vehicle. Figuring all that out was what delayed the launch from May 10 to May 17.

They also discovered a helium leak after they scrubbed the launch on May 6 in the Starliner capsule. Now this is important, because many — including myself — reported that NASA knew about the leak during the countdown and mentioned it during the livestream. According to NASA, this isn’t accurate and I went back and checked the broadcast, and yeah, there was no mention of a helium leak as far as I could tell. But they were monitoring this leak — Starliner uses helium basically to push propellant to its thrusters. The leak itself wasn’t a big deal, but they wanted to understand why it was happening — they traced it back to a faulty seal, but they don’t need to fix it at this point.

But while they were analyzing this leak, they also decided to do an additional review of the propulsion system, just to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. They found a redundancy issue that isn’t related to the helium leak — basically, Starliner has three different ways it can perform a de-orbit burn to come back to Earth using different combinations of its thrusters. That’s part of the redundancy NASA insists on, especially for commercial flights. But they basically found an unlikely scenario where a combination of thruster failures could leave Starliner without a path to re-entry. They wanted to ensure they knew how to work through that scenario in case it should arise — which is unlikely, they cited a .77 percent chance this could occur.

So THAT is what NASA has been working through these last few weeks, along with Boeing, ULA, and Aerojet Rocketdyne, which manufactured the propulsion system. There has been some criticism of NASA for their slow release of information, which I think is fair because it’s been a few weeks since that first launch scrub with really no substantial updates until this press conference.

NASA held a flight readiness review to ensure that Starliner is ready for that June 1 date on May 29, and there is another preflight press conference scheduled for today, so let’s see if this sticks. If the flight gets delayed again, there are backup launch opportunities on June 2nd, 5th, and 6th. The ISS is relatively clear of traffic for the flight, so that shouldn’t be an issue, but once we get past early June, the launch vehicle might need to have some parts swapped out, so we’ll see what happens.

Hidden orphan stars unveiled, thanks to Euclid

You may have seen my video from last week about Euclid’s first science images, which were breathtaking. But those were the observatory’s first SCIENCE images — it turns out, though, there was some really cool science in the previous batch of images from about six months ago.

This is the Perseus Cluster of galaxies, and within this image are 1,000 galaxies in that cluster in the foreground. But you can see over 100,000 galaxies that are further away in the distance. The Perseus Cluster is located about 240 million light years away and is one of the universe’s most massive structures. 

Well, hidden within this image were 1,500 BILLION orphan stars scattered within the Perseus cluster. An orphan star is a star that doesn’t belong to a galaxy and is instead drifting between galaxies. You can discern them in the image by their bluish color and the way they’re clustered together. 

The question here is how so many stars were ripped from their host galaxies because stars form within galaxies. The team thinks they may have formed on the outskirts of their larger host galaxies and may have been ripped from them because of interaction with smaller dwarf galaxies. It’s possible that the Perseus Cluster went through a merger with another group of galaxies and this is the result.

It’s always cool to find the science within these breathtaking images. Studying these orphan stars will help scientists learn more about star formation, as well as dark matter distribution.

Chang’e-6 lander will descend to the far side of the moon

In international news, China is about to land a lunar lander on the far side of the moon.

Chang’e-6 launched on May 3, and it’s been orbiting the moon for about a month waiting for optimal landing conditions. Now, it looks like we have them. The rover is set to make its landing at the South Pole-Aitken basin, where the sun started rising on May 28. The time is 8 pm ET on Sunday, June 1, and the surface mission will be just 48 hours long.

The plan for the lander to collect samples of the lunar surface (both scooping up materials and then also drilling). They will launch off the lunar surface, rendezvous with the orbiter, and head back to Earth to arrive around June 25. These would be the first lunar surface samples from the far side of the moon.

Fingers crossed this goes well!

Starship launch scheduled for June 5

SpaceX’s Starship is currently scheduled for its fourth test launch on June 5, with a launch window opening at 7 am CT. But that launch date is dependent on obtaining a launch license from the FAA, which SpaceX does not currently have.

I’ll have a full video/newsletter early next week running down the specifics of what to expect during the launch, what SpaceX needs to do for this to be considered a success, and the possible larger repercussions on NASA’s moon landing should SpaceX not figure out successful return for both stages on this launch.