There were four solar flares on the sun—at the same time!

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This week's space news from Ad Astra

• Voyager 1 is back in contact with Earth

• There's something mysterious at the edge of our solar system

• Lakes of lava on Jupiter’s moon Io

• Is this asteroid a chunk of our moon?

• Four solar flares on the sun—at the same time!

• Launch news: Boeing Starliner and SpaceX

Voyager 1 is back in contact with Earth

I have the news we’ve all been waiting for: Voyager 1 is back in regular — and meaningful contact with Earth.

For the first time since November, the spacecraft is sending engineering data on the health of the spacecraft back to Earth. Here’s a quick recap of what happened to Voyager 1.

On November 14, Voyager 1, which is 15 billion miles away in interstellar space, stopped sending any meaningful data back to Earth. The spacecraft, which launched in 1977, always communicates with Earth in binary—zeroes and ones—but this was gibberish. It made no sense, though engineers at NASA’s JPL could tell that the spacecraft was receiving commands. It just couldn’t respond in any meaningful way.

Well, over the past five months, engineers narrowed the issue down to a faulty chip in the FDS, or Flight Data System. As a result, 3 percent of the FDS was corrupted — and because the FDS is what packages all the science data and the engineering data into a nice little bundle to send to Earth, the data it was storing and sending was unreadable.

In March, engineers sent a poke to Voyager 1 which was supposed to instruct it to try to route around any corrupted sections of its software. It responded with its regular gibberish signal — as well as a second signal that contained an entire readout of the FDS memory. They were able to find the problem; but what was the solution?

They had to find another space in the FDS to put the science and engineering data — remember, we’re talking about a computer from the 1970s. Voyager 1’s entire computer system — not just the FDS, the entire computer system — has 69.63 kilobytes of memory.

The issue was finding another space big enough to hold all of the science and engineering data. They couldn’t do it, so they decided to try and break the code up into chunks. The problem, then, was adjusting the code to make sure each chunk knew where the other chunks were to ensure it still functioned as one complete unit.

And just as a reminder — it takes 22.5 hours for Voyager to receive a signal from Earth, and another 22.5 hours for us to receive the results — so we’re talking troubleshooting with a 45-hour round trip travel time.

On April 18, the team sent Voyager 1 updated instructions on where to store its code. On April 20, they received the first meaningful communication from Voyager 1 in five months.

This is a huge step, but it’s not the end of this saga. They still need to program the rest of the FDS code to ensure they get all the data from Voyager 1. Right now it’s just engineering data on the health of the spacecraft, but there’s still good science data waiting for engineers on the spacecraft.

NASA found something mysterious near the edge of our solar system

The Kuiper Belt (where Pluto is located) stretches through the furthest reaches of our solar system, and we don’t actually know much about it. The New Horizons spacecraft is traveling through this region and discovered something interesting. Here’s the rundown on the discovery: There might be two Kuiper Belts! (This is also a rundown on what the Kuiper Belt is and what the Oort cloud is).

Lakes of lava on Jupiter’s moon Io

This week we got something incredibly cool: Animation of a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io.

The spacecraft Juno recently did two flybys of Jupiter’s moon Io, a volcanic world. The spacecraft got within 930 miles of the moon’s surface, which gave us some of the most detailed close-up images of the moon we’ve ever seen.

They specifically got some really good date on a 200 km long (127 miles) lava lake called Loki Patera, and they processed it into a cool animation that shows off the lava, as well as the islands we think are within the lava lake

In the annotated image above,, you can see Loki Patera. It’s the largest and most active volcano on Io that we know of. We think the black spots are hot sulfur lava, while the white spots are sulfur dioxide frost.

Now there’s a still image above, and you can find an animation here. It’s zooming in on the lava lake created by Loki Patera. We think this lake is made of magma and rimmed with hot lava. Because we got a great reflection off of this lava lake when Juno made its flybys, we think it’s a very smooth lake.

A near-Earth asteroid may actually be a chunk of the moon

We don’t know a lot about near-Earth asteroids generally, also called Earth quasi-satellites, because they’re small and difficult to detect and study, but we think there are around 30,000 of them. 

The asteroid Kamo’oalewa was discovered in 2016, but scientists soon noticed it was different than other near-Earth asteroids. It orbits the sun in synchronization with the Earth, it’s  it spins much faster than a typical asteroid, and it’s remarkably stable — most near-Earth asteroids only have stable orbits for a few decades, but it’s looking like Kamoʻoalewa will be with us for millions of years.

In 2021, scientists published a paper stating that Kamoʻoalewa appeared to be made of a silicate material that differed from the asteroids around it. It’s not just that it was compositionally different, but that it was different than even other asteroids made of silicates. They noted that what it was compositionally similar to? The moon.

Well, now a new study appears to confirm this finding. Published in Nature Astronomy on April 19, this study uses modeling to determine that not only is the asteroid Kamo’oalewa of lunar origin, but it’s from the Giordano Bruno crater on the moon.

In order to determine this, they started with the hypothesis that the asteroid was indeed from the moon, and then worked backwards — what kind of impact would cause an object of this size and shape to be ejected from the moon, and what would cause it to be spinning so fast once it was ejected?

They determined that Kamoʻoalewa’s orbit isn’t stable, which meant it had to be connected to a recent (in cosmological terms) crater — something in the past 10 million years. And they had to match the size of the crater to the asteroid — which turned out to be the Giordano Bruno crater. A press release from the University of Arizona compares Kamoʻoalewa to the size of a Ferris wheel — 150 to 190 feet in diameter (or about 45 to 58 meters). 

The Giordano Bruno crater on the moon is about 22 km in diameter, or 13.5 miles across.

This is the only near-Earth asteroid that we know of that we think might have a lunar origin.

China is planning to launch Tianwen-2, an asteroid sample return mission to Kamo’oalewa, in 2025, so we might have confirmation of these findings within the next few years.

There were four solar flares on the sun at once

In cool news from our star,  The sun sent out four massive solar flares at once. Here’s what happened:

The sun is currently at solar maximum. Our star is on an 11-year cycle, and we’re at the peak of that cycle now. That means a lot of solar weather and solar activity — sunspots, solar prominences, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections. 

Early on April 23, the NOAA sent out an alert that there was an electromagnetic burst, likely in association with a solar flare. Well it turns out there wasn’t just one flare — there were FOUR of them at the same time.

The still image above on the left shows three bright spots, which are three solar flares associated with sunspots. Sunspots (the photo on the right, taken at the same time of the sun with a different instrument) are cooler, darker regions on the sun’s surface that are concentrations of the sun’s magnetic field that have made their way to the surface. You can’t see it in this face-on image, but the spot in the middle is a filament, which is a loop of plasma on the sun. That’s where the fourth flare is.

These are called sympathetic flares, and they’re linked by magnetic loops within the sun’s corona, the outer atmosphere, that we can’t see.

Launch News: Boeing Starliner and SpaceX’s 300th booster landing

In launch news, things appear to be on track for the May 6 launch of Boeing Starliner. This will be the first crewed flight for this spacecraft, taking two astronauts to the International Space Station for a week. Starliner is greatly delayed — it was supposed to be a crew vehicle in regular use for flights to the ISS, along with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon which just had its eighth operational crewed flight, nine if you include the test flight — so that tells you just how delayed this is.

I’ll have a much more in depth newsletter and video digging into Starliner and talking about why it’s so delayed in the next week or so.

And in other cool news, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 this week — and landed a booster for the 300th time. I like space stuff more than most people, I think, but I think no matter how you feel about space, the sight of one of these boosters turning around and coming back for a landing is just incredibly cool.