The BOAT (10/20/22)

Happy Thursday! Each year around October 21, the Earth passes through the tail left by Halley's Comet. If you're living somewhere with clear skies, look up late tonight and into the wee hours of the morning to catch the peak of the Orionid meteor shower. I hear it's going to be quite a show.

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Lucy in the Sky

If you were standing in the right place at the right time this weekend, you might have caught a blip of a spacecraft shooting across the sky. That blip was Lucy, NASA’s asteroid probe, using Earth’s gravity to slingshot itself toward the asteroid belt sharing Jupiter’s orbit.

This was Lucy’s first Earth flyby. The craft dipped down close to the Earth’s surface, reaching perigee (aka its lowest point) at 351 km above the Earth’s surface. At that altitude, the craft had to watch out for the many thousands of satellites traversing LEO and all the debris that comes with the territory.

The NASA team had to alter Lucy’s trajectory slightly during the flyby. The craft was originally intended to drop ~30km lower. One of Lucy’s solar arrays is partly unlatched, and the team made this decision in order to reduce the impact of atmospheric drag.

Lucy still has a long journey ahead. The gravity assist this weekend altered the craft’s orbit enough to take it beyond Mars’ orbit, but not enough to propel it to the asteroid belt. In about two years, Lucy will perform a second Earth flyby, which will send the probe hurtling off toward its asteroid targets.

And that’s not all for the mighty little probe. After observing five specified targets trailing behind Jupiter, Lucy will return to Earth for a third flyby, then continue its journey to the other side of the asteroid belt to observe targets traveling ahead of Jupiter in its orbit. It’ll be another decade before Lucy completes its journey.

The B.O.A.T.

A huge gamma-ray explosion spotted in the sky near the small constellation Sagitta is breaking astronomers’ records left and right. The kaboom, affectionately nicknamed the BOAT, or “Brightest Of All Time,” was powerful enough to blind some science satellites as the powerful beam passed by.

Gamma ray bursts are incredibly high-energy explosions. Astronomers believe they occur when black holes form, as huge supernovae collapse in on themselves and expel jets of energy. And they’re not that uncommon, either—scientists catch one in action somewhere in the sky around once a day.

The BOAT was different. “Because this burst is so bright and also nearby, we think this is a once-in-a-century opportunity to address some of the most fundamental questions regarding these explosions, from the formation of black holes to tests of dark matter models," Brendan O'Connor, an astronomer at the University of Maryland and George Washington University, said in a press release.

The explosion was first detected the morning of Oct. 9. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space telescope, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and the Wind spacecraft all observed the blast, which emitted huge amounts of radiation across multiple observable wavelengths, nearly simultaneously. After the explosion, observatories across the world swiveled to set their sights on the aftermath of the explosion.

Up next: There’s plenty of information to be gleaned from such a huge gamma burst so close to Earth. In the coming weeks and months, scientists will pore over the data, searching for clues about what made this particular explosion so big, as well as anything they can suss out about the kind of material ejected from an explosion of this size.

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Other News from the Cosmos

• 30,000 near-Earth asteroids have been discovered so far, ESA reports. Of these, 1,425 have a nonzero chance of winding up on a collision course with our planet.

• “Billboards” in LEO made up of light-reflecting cubesats flying in formation, shining inescapable ads across the globe, could be possible for ~$65M, a Russian study found.

• NASA awarded grants supporting 12 biology research projects, each exploring how organisms respond to the space environment.

• AAS, the American Astronomical Society, published an accounting of matter and dark energy in the universe called Pantheon+.

• Tianjin University researchers developed a method for accurately predicting the speed of the solar wind.

The View from Space

In 1995, Hubble took its iconic snapshot of the Pillars of Creation, a massive, stunning structure of gas and dust where new stars are being born (with, if you ask me, one of the greatest names across the universe). This week, JWST set its sights on the same spot in the sky. Its near-infrared imagers cut through some of the dense gas to reveal hundreds of stars and detailed swirling patterns in the pillars.