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The UAE has selected two new Emiratis to be part of its astronaut corps, including the Arab world’s first female astronaut.

The 4,305 applicants were chosen based on age and educational background. A total of 2,099 candidates then passed the IQ, personality and technical assessments.

Only 122 made it to the interview round. Of these, 61 candidates took part in preliminary and advanced medical examinations.

Fourteen passed a final round of interviews and evaluations, which the UAE's first two astronauts and two female Nasa astronauts participated in.

Four candidates passed fitness, communications and teamwork tests, from whom the new astronauts were selected.

Salem Al Marri, head of the astronaut programme at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (Mbrsc), said the space centre's goal was pick the best out of the lot.

"The team at Mbrsc has worked tirelessly after receiving applications to evaluate them according to specific criteria and standards, and then conducted successive evaluations to ensure the selection of the best candidates, until we reached this point to announce the new astronauts," he said.

Credit : The National News

Picture Credit : Google

Blue Origin is a private spaceflight company based in Kent, Washington that is working to send tourists to space on its reusable suborbital rocket called New Shepard. The company was created in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com. 

In 2015, Blue Origin made history by successfully launching and landing a reusable rocket for the first time. The company is currently developing a lunar lander called Blue Moon that will make robotic cargo deliveries to the lunar surface, and it is partnering with SpaceX and Dynetics to develop a human-rated moon lander that will carry astronauts to the lunar surface in 2024 under NASA's Artemis Program.

Initially focused on suborbital spaceflight, the company has designed, built and flown multiple testbeds of its New Shepard vehicle at its facilities in Culberson County, Texas. Developmental test flights of the New Shepard, named after the first American in space Alan Shepard, began in April 2015, and flight testing is ongoing. Blue Origin has moved the date for first passengers back several times, with one recent planned timeframe being 2019 as of September 2018. In the event, it has not yet begun commercial passenger flights, nor announced a firm date for when they would begin. On nearly every one of the test flights since 2015, the uncrewed vehicle has reached a test altitude of more than 100 kilometers and achieved a top speed of more than Mach 3 (3,675 km/h), reaching space above the Karman line, with both the space capsule and its rocket booster successfully soft landing.

Blue Origin moved into the orbital spaceflight technology business in 2014, initially as a rocket engine supplier for others via a contractual agreement to build a new large rocket engine, the BE-4, for major US launch system operator United Launch Alliance (ULA). By 2015, Blue Origin had announced plans to also manufacture and fly its own orbital launch vehicle, known as the New Glenn, from the Florida Space Coast. BE-4 had been expected to complete engine qualification testing by late 2018, but the test program continued into 2019.

Picture Credit : Google

Titan is the largest moon of Saturn, the seventh planet outward from our sun. It’s the only moon in our solar system known to have a thick atmosphere, and it’s the only known body in space, besides Earth, known to have stable bodies of surface liquid. Titan has a kind of hydrological cycle, much like Earth’s, with liquids falling from the sky and flowing across this moon’s surface before evaporating back into clouds. Some of the weather phenomena we’d be familiar with on Titan include dust storms and monsoonal rains. Earth’s atmosphere is 78% nitrogen; Titan’s is 98% nitrogen. Titan’s climate is driven by seasonal change. So you can see that, in some ways, the closest comparison to Titan’s atmosphere is the one we know best: Earth’s.

But there are also many differences between Earth and this distant Saturnian moon, showing how alien and strange it would be to experience the weather on Titan.

Titan is 10 times farther from the sun than Earth and receives 100 times less solar energy. It orbits roughly in the plane of Saturn’s equator, and its tilt relative to the plane of our solar system is about the same as Saturn’s. As on Earth, Saturn’s seasons – and Titan’s – are caused by their tilts, which cause the sun to strike the different hemispheres of these worlds more strongly or more weakly throughout Saturn’s year. Saturn takes 29 years to orbit the sun once; its year is 29 Earth-years long. Thus both Saturn and Titan have seasons lasting more than 7 Earth-years.

And so any given spot on Titan experiences a change in weather at a much slower pace than on Earth.

An equinox on Titan – when both hemispheres of this moon are receiving the sun’s rays about equally – occurs about every 15 years. The last Titan equinox was in 2009. We now know – thanks to the Cassini mission to Saturn, which arrived in 2004 and lasted until 2017 – that powerful wind storms roved across Titan around the time of its 2008 equinox, producing soot that fell like rain and creating dunes on Titan’s surface.

In general, it’s now thought that Titan’s winds flow in a pole-to-pole circulation for some 12 Earth years before taking a few years to transition to the opposite direction as winter changes to summer.

Credit : EarthSky 

Picture Credit : Google

In a key milestone for NASA’s plan to return humans to the moon, the space agency today announced that SpaceX will build the vehicle that will land astronauts on the lunar surface. The current plan, known as Artemis, calls for astronauts to launch on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, fly to lunar orbit on the space agency’s Orion space capsule, and then transfer to SpaceX’s Starship rocket to make the final descent to the surface.

The contract, worth $2.9 billion, will go toward developing a moon-ready version of the Starship rocket. The futuristic-looking vehicle is still in the prototype stage, with testing ongoing at a Texas facility. SpaceX beat out proposals from Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin—which has been working with defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper—and Dynetics, a defense contractor based in Huntsville, Alabama.

Announced in 2017 under the Trump administration and named in 2019, the Artemis program aims to return U.S. astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, including landing the first woman and the first person of color on the moon.

The Biden administration has voiced support for the program, as well. But while Trump’s team pushed for a crewed mission to the moon’s surface in 2024, Congress has not provided the amount of funding for the program that NASA says would be needed for that time table. Due to a smaller budget than requested, and delays during the development of the SLS rocket and other parts of the program, NASA is reevaluating the soonest date that it could launch people on a lunar mission.

The Artemis I mission, which will launch no sooner than late 2021, will be an uncrewed test flight of Orion and SLS. Artemis II will follow, using SLS and Orion to fly a crew around the moon and back but not land, similar to 1968’s Apollo 8 mission. Then Artemis III will use SLS, Orion, and SpaceX’s Starship to complete the journey to the moon’s surface.

To fly the quarter-million miles to the moon, astronauts will travel on NASA’s SLS heavy-lift rocket and Orion deep-space spacecraft. The plan then calls for Orion to dock with a Human Landing System (HLS)—which is what NASA selected SpaceX’s Starship for. This spacecraft will wait in lunar orbit up to a hundred days before the astronauts arrive and then land them on the surface. To return to Earth, the crew will launch off the moon on Starship, transfer back to the waiting Orion spacecraft, and fly home.

Credit : National Geographic 

Picture Credit : Google