On July 27, technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida installed a memory card containing 1,350,144 names as part of a commemorative plaque on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The names were submitted by people globally, including astronauts from Artemis II and Artemis III. The memory card will travel with the Roman observatory to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, or L2, about one million miles from Earth, where the Sun’s and Earth’s gravity balance out.

Roman is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and one of the architects of the agency’s modern science program. Roman championed space-based observatories that could study the universe from above Earth’s hazy atmosphere while making their data broadly available to the scientific community.

NASA and SpaceX are targeting launch for no earlier than 7:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, Aug. 30 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.

To learn more about the Roman mission, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/roman

Image credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya

Last month, NASA announced that it was launching an unprecedented and risky mission to rescue its aging Swift observatory.

The telescope, which has spent over two decades in orbit studying the most powerful explosions in the universe, has seen its orbit decay over time. With the help of a specialized space tug developed by contractor Katalyst Space Technologies, the space agency was hoping to give Swift a much-needed push to a more stable orbit, prolonging its life.

But as it turns out, it’s not the observatory that ended up needing help. After launching its robotic spacecraft, dubbed LINK, on July 3, Katalyst Space watched in horror as it started tumbling out of control following a series of unfortunate events.

According to a new update, NASA admitted that the “spacecraft experienced issues with attitude control, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.”

“Preliminary investigation shows that two of LINK’s three reaction wheels currently are not operable, and there is some loss of functionality in its cold gas thruster system,” the agency noted. Reaction wheels are motor-driven flywheels used by spacecraft for attitude control.

At least there’s a silver lining. LINK’s other subsystems are still functional, allowing the ground team to communicate with the spacecraft.

And not all is lost just yet. The Katalyst team is hoping to stop LINK from spinning before reevaluating how to go forward with the rescue mission, if at all.

But considering that a rapidly spinning spacecraft is the very last thing the Swift observatory needs in its vicinity, it’s clearly not the result the agency was hoping for.

And time is rapidly running out. Without a boost, the telescope is destined to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere in the upcoming months.

While it has long outlived its originally intended lifetime at almost 22 years old, it’s currently the only orbital telescope that can detect gamma ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe.

Fortunately, the space agency didn’t have to dig too deep into its own pockets. Its Katalyst contract was $30 million, which in the grand scheme of things is a drop in the bucket when considering the untold billions NASA is spending to return astronauts to the Moon.

Even before LINK launched and started spinning out of control, agency officials were content with NASA’s willingness to give it a shot.

“From a programmatics standpoint, I consider this a success already, just from the fact that we’re even going to try this,” NASA astrophysics director Shawn Domagal-Goldman told Ars Technica last month.

More on the mission: NASA Prepping to Launch Extremely Risky Rescue Mission

The post NASA Rescue Mission Spirals Into Crisis appeared first on Futurism.

For more than two millennia, astronomers have puzzled over a stellar mystery recorded by some of history’s greatest skywatchers. Hipparchus, Ptolemy, and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi—all separated by more than 1,000 years—each described Theta Eridani as one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Yet today, the previously celebrated star barely ranks among the more noticeable stars visible to the naked eye.

A new astronomical study published on arXiv suggests that those ancient observers may have unknowingly recorded an extraordinarily rare stellar event. The star system remained dramatically brighter than normal for roughly a millennium before fading back to its present appearance sometime between the 10th and 16th centuries.

If confirmed, the finding would be among the longest-lived stellar transients ever proposed, fusing modern astrophysics with historical astronomy to reconstruct an event spanning centuries rather than days or months.

The study combines historical star catalogs with state-of-the-art observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), high-definition spectroscopy, and NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).

Together, those observations allowed the researchers to reconstruct the architecture and evolutionary state of the Theta Eridani system and to propose a physical mechanism that could explain its mysterious ancient brilliance.

“The remarkable combination of orbital and stellar parameters hints that the historical brightening of Theta Eridani was due to a millenary transient phase,” researchers write. “This strengthens the case that the apparent brightening was real and not due to an error by three different ancient observers, as has been commonly claimed in the past.”

Today, Theta Eridani, also known by its traditional name Acamar, shines at approximately magnitude 2.9, making it a respectable but hardly spectacular star marking the end of the constellation Eridanus. Yet ancient records tell a very different story.

Hipparchus described it as an exceptionally bright star around 129 BC. Roughly 250 years later, Ptolemy ranked it among only fifteen first-magnitude stars in the Almagest, effectively placing it among the thirteen brightest stars visible in the night sky.

More than 800 years afterward, the Persian astronomer al-Sufi independently retained that same first-magnitude classification while revising the brightness estimates of many other stars toward values that closely match modern observations.

The sharp contrast between the historical accounts and Theta Eridani’s modest appearance today has made the star one of astronomy’s most enduring and compelling mysteries.

Researchers examined long-standing alternative explanations, including simple observational mistakes, copyist errors in ancient manuscripts, confusion with the much brighter star Achernar farther south, and even errors caused by atmospheric extinction near the horizon. One by one, they argue the evidence weighs against those explanations.

Theta Eridani would not even have been visible to the Greek and Arab astronomers because of Earth’s changing orientation over time. Likewise, statistical analyses of nearly 1,000 stars contained in the Almagest show that Theta Eridani represents the single largest discrepancy between ancient and modern brightness estimates, rather than part of a wider systematic mistake.

The historical trail eventually changes around the dawn of the Age of Exploration. By the late 1500s and early 1600s, after European navigators began mapping the southern skies, star catalogs consistently described Theta Eridani as only a third-magnitude star—essentially the same brightness observed today.

That suggests the bright phase had already ended.

To investigate whether Theta Eridani itself could plausibly have undergone such a transformation, the team turned to modern astronomical observations.

Rather than a single star, Theta Eridani consists of three stars. The primary component itself is a remarkably tight binary whose two stars orbit one another every 4.1077 days at a separation of just 0.083 astronomical units—roughly one-fifth the distance between Mercury and the Sun.

Using interferometric measurements from the VLTI, together with spectroscopy and precision photometry from TESS, the researchers determined that the two stars each contain just over twice the Sun’s mass and have swollen to approximately 4.3 and 4.0 solar radii.

Those enlarged sizes are significant because both stars have expanded to nearly 80 percent of the volume where gravity from one star begins pulling material toward the other, a region around a star in a binary system known as the Roche lobes. The close gravitational interaction also produces measurable ellipsoidal distortions that TESS detects as subtle, rhythmic brightness variations every orbit.

Researchers’ evolutionary modeling further revealed that the primary star occupies an unusually brief stage within stellar evolution, having only recently exhausted hydrogen in its core and begun transitioning into a subgiant. That evolutionary timing may be critical.

According to the researchers, Theta Eridani may once have possessed a much more elongated orbit. As the primary expanded, it could have begun overflowing its Roche lobe during each close approach, transferring material toward its companion and possibly generating an extended common envelope surrounding both stars.

Unlike the violent stellar explosions astronomers typically classify as transients, this proposed event would have evolved extraordinarily slowly. Instead of lasting weeks or years, the researchers suggest the envelope may have persisted for roughly a thousand years while gradually extracting orbital energy from the binary.

Because the surrounding envelope would have remained optically thick, it could have radiated from an area far larger than either star individually, making the entire system appear nearly ten times brighter than it does today.

Researchers’ calculations suggest that such an envelope could have reached roughly 20 times the Sun’s radius while needing only a tiny amount of encircling material, because that material would be continually replenished and slowly ejected over hundreds of thousands of orbits.

Importantly, researchers stress that this is still a proposed physical explanation rather than a demonstrated one. Modeling the detailed hydrodynamics of eccentric mass transfer and long-lived common envelopes remains beyond the scope of the current work.

Nevertheless, they argue that the unusual combination of orbital geometry, stellar evolution, and historical observations makes the scenario physically plausible.

The study of Theta Eridani also raises wider implications for time-based astronomy.

Modern astronomical surveys are exceptionally good at finding dramatic events that unfold over minutes, days, or years. A stellar brightening lasting centuries, or even a millennium, would be almost impossible to recognize within a human lifetime. Researchers suggest there may be other long-duration stellar transients hidden among ordinary-looking stars whose histories have been forgotten.

If their interpretation proves correct, some of humanity’s earliest astronomers may have unknowingly documented one of the most unusual stellar phenomena ever proposed—not an exploding star, but a binary system trapped in an exceptionally slow evolutionary episode which lit up the night sky for generations before quietly receding into obscurity.

“Although modern photometric surveys have had an observational coverage of a few years to a few decades rather than two millennia like Theta Eridani, they are sensitive to objects up to 14 magnitudes fainter than the naked eye limit,” researchers write. “Therefore, there could be unexplored or unexplained Theta Eridani-like transients that either brightened or faded in current data.”

The team’s new study, The Forgotten Bright Star: Theta Eridani as a Millenary Stellar Transient Observed by Hipparchus, Ptolemy and al-Sufi, is currently available on the arXiv.org preprint server.

Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan.  Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com