A little while ago, SpaceX’s Dragon 2 spacecraft docked with the International Space Station’s Harmony module completing the first part of its CRS-27 mission. Astronaut Woody Hoburg monitored the operation, but the cargo spacecraft, which blasted off when it was Tuesday in the USA, completed the maneuvers automatically without any problem. Actually, it arrived about 20 minutes earlier than scheduled.
A few hours ago, the SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft blasted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in its CRS-27 (Cargo Resupply Service 27) mission, also referred to as SPX-27. After almost exactly 12 minutes it separated successfully from the rocket’s last stage and went en route. This is the 27th mission for the Dragon/Dragon 2 spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station with various cargoes and then return to Earth, again with various cargoes.
An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the identification of a group of primordial galaxies that could be among the ones that contributed to the reionization of the universe, making it go from dark to bright. A team of researchers coordinated by the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics used observations conducted with the James Webb space telescope within the GLASS-JWST program to study 29 very distant and therefore ancient galaxies. The examination of those galaxies’ physical characteristics led the researchers to conclude that 80% of them contributed significantly to reionization.
A few hours ago, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft concluded its Crew-5, or SpaceX Crew-5, mission for NASA by landing without problems. On board were astronauts Nicole Mann, Josh Cassada, and Koichi Wakata and cosmonaut Anna Kikina, who had reached the International Space Station on October 6, 2022, and were part of Expedition 68. The four of them finished the fifth regular crewed mission of SpaceX in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Tampa, Florida. The Crew Dragon departed the Station about nineteen hours earlier.
An article published in the journal “Nano Letters” reports the demonstration of the possibilities of a telescope equipped with a metalens. A team of researchers produced an 80-millimeter metalens, a structure that has antenna-like surface patterns that focus light to magnify distant objects. Compared to classic lenses, they have the great advantage of being extremely thin.
So far, metalenses have been limited to very small sizes due to manufacturing issues but this study developed a technique to produce 80mm metalenses usable in telescopes. It’s a deep ultraviolet (DUV) photolithography technique of the type used to produce microprocessors adapted to produce metalenses.
