Space Scientists finally got a great photo of the center of the Milky Way and in it was something which was surprising, at least to me. It looks like a huge magnetic cloud. It is said it took over four years to assemble the photo. I knew as many others there was a large black hole in the center but never knew about the magnetism. It is said these magnetic clouds drive the dust into forming stars and planets, and it is said this ultimately forms life. There seems to still be so much we don’t know about the universe, but we are chipping away slowly at the facts and learning a lot as we go along. What we have to watch out for is becoming too sure of ourselves. Just because we discover one process in an area of space which is responsible for some act, doesn’t necessarily mean there are not other processes which might be capable of the same thing. In case you are interested in knowing how much dust exists in this area, it is the equivalent to 60 million suns. NASA’s next step in sending rovers to the moon will be a little different. I emphasize little. They have built 3 small rovers. The rovers are said to be setup to be in sync with each other. The project is known as CADRE, which means Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robot Exploration. Each rover is said to be the size of a carryon suitcase. I imagine with the revolution in small electronics these rovers might be small, but will be mighty in their capabilities. The idea is they will work together without needing commands from earth. If this works out and is successful, it will open a new future for planet exploration. We should be able to do this on other planets, and have an entire fleet of robot explorers. I was thinking about Mars when I heard this. We could flood the planet with these small rovers enabling us to cover a lot more territory without needing way more human controllers. AI might also be suited for a task like this. At this point I don’t know if NASA is using it in any way for this project. The Motley Fool posted an article with the headline “Will Jeff Bezos Buy America’s Most Valuable Space Company?” They proposed the reason he was raising cash could be for the purchase of United Launch Alliance. I could understand why he might be thinking about this. SpaceX has eaten the lunch of Blue Origin. United Launch Alliance is a venture formed by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. I am not interested in the financial aspect of this for investors. I am interested in the competition it might give to SpaceX. So far it seems to me SpaceX is also ahead of United Launch Alliance in reliability, price, and in other areas and when they perfect the Starship will prove it is far better than any and might become the prime vehicle for transporting people to Mars and the Moon. Until we crack quantum communication, where we would be able to make instant contact with a craft anywhere in space, NASA’s laser communication terminal seems to be the next best thing. At the end of last year (2023) NASA had a successful link using a Caser Communications Relay Demonstration on the space station known as LCRD. While it doesn’t travel faster than light, it does pack in more data into the signal so a message takes less time to receive and send. Infrared light is used. Another laser communication project known as ILLLUMA-T was sent up. Both are part not only of a communications system, but also of a navigation one. Iran said it wants to put a crew into space before the end of the decade. So far it has accomplished rather small rocket launches with animals aboard. It is hard enough to detect exoplanets, but detecting if they have moons or not is even harder. We thought we found two exomoons but it turned out we were wrong, but that certainly does not mean we will give up. New methods for detecting objects will come along and there is a chance we can fix the process we already have. We are yet to detect a moon orbiting a planet outside the solar system. There are about 290 moons, and maybe more, in our solar system so we figure there are plenty of them in others. There is a star in the heart of the Milky Way which scientists are sure came from another galaxy and took 10 billion years to get where it is. Rogue stars are stars which are knocked out of orbit and travel through space. Our sun is said to have a total life span of 10 billion years making the rogue star rather old. There is an idea about star formation near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. There is so much chaos around that area it makes scientists wonder how stars were able to form there. One theory states they were formed in a different part of the galaxy and eventually drifted there. One extraterrestrial planet found is extremely unusual. It is orbiting a red dwarf star which was thought not to be able to host large planets. The planet I am talking about is 100 times bigger than its star. The planet was named LHS 3154 b and is said to be 13 times the size of earth. It is considered close being 50 light years distant. The NASA budget is much more modest for the next year and is causing some projects to be cancelled or pushed back in time. The Dragonfly mission is in trouble and has been pushed back a year so far, to 2028. It is a mission to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. One of the features of the trip will be a nuclear-powered drone which will fly over the surface of the moon. I never liked the idea of using nuclear power on an unexplored body. Let’s face it, when the mission is finished the nuclear-powered drone will be left on the surface. I call this pollution. It is bad enough the landing craft will be left. As I have said many times, we are not capable of doing a 100 percent sterilization of a rocket and have been known to miss spots such as the drill bit on a Mars rover. This means the moon might become contaminated with earthly microbes. I would like to end this article by talking about the budget cuts to NASA. They are affecting our future while we are spending billions of dollars on many worthless projects. Other countries are increasing their spending on space and there is no doubt some which are unfriendly are trying to pass us and take space over. These budget cuts are very short sighted. We should also be preparing better contracts where companies are not rewarded when they are late and over budget.
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