Russian cargo spacecraft fails, crashes in southern Siberia

Thursday, December 1, 2016, 5:03 PM - Russia's latest uncrewed launch to the space station crashes back to Earth, the smallest known asteroid also turns out to be one of the brightest, and NASA discovers the source of the Sun's coronal heat. It's what's up in space!

ISS delivery crashes back to Earth

At 9:51 a.m. EST, on December 1, 2016, the Russian Progress MS-04 spacecraft (aka Progress 65) lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, on its way to delivery a load of cargo to the International Space Station.

While the liftoff and orbital boost of the first and second stages for this uncrewed spacecraft went as planned, an anomaly was reported with the third stage of the rocket.

According to a statement released by Roscosmos:

After 382 seconds of flight the receiving Progress MS-04 telemetry data was stopped. Radar stations did not detect the cargo vehicle Progress MS-04 on the calculated orbit.
According to preliminary information, the contingency took place at an altitude of about 190 km over remote and unpopulated mountainous area of the Republic of Tyva. The most of cargo spacecraft fragments burned in the dense atmosphere. The State Commission is conducting analysis of the current contingency. The loss of the cargo ship will not affect the normal operations of the ISS and the life of the station crew.

So, it would seem that a failure of the Soyuz third stage cut off its scheduled 9 minute burn, and failing to reach the speeds necessary to achieve orbit, the rocket and its payload came crashing back to Earth.

Lost is the spacecraft, along with 2450 kg of cargo, which included food, fuel and operational supplies for the space station crew.

Although they have reported finding the crash zone, 

Progress MS-04 was launched atop a Soyuz-U rocket booster. These rockets have been in use since 1973, and were declared obsolete in April 2015. The last launch scheduled for this class of rocket was supposed to be with Roscosmos' next ISS cargo launch, Progress MS-05, in February of 2017.

This was to be the second last delivery of 2016 to the station. The final cargo delivery of the year should be the Japanese Kounotori HTV-6 resupply ship, which is scheduled to launch on December 13.

Russian cargo craft launches with 2.6 tons of cargo for Saturday delivery to station. https://t.co/C7LVQGQ6Xn pic.twitter.com/qVxajz5woj

— Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) December 1, 2016

Tiniest known asteroid is a bright one!

On October 13, 2015, a tiny asteroid, known as 2015 TC25, zipped past Earth at less than one-third the distance to the Moon. While this was a harmless pass that posed no danger to us here on Earth, it did afford astronomers - who had detected this interloper two days beforehand - to take detailed observations of it. Not only did they take optical observations, but they also aimed the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility and the Arecibo Planetary Radar at this small rock, to get a good look at it during its close flyby (watch below).

Now, in a study recently published in The Astronomical Journal, a team led by Vishnu Reddy, of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, has used that data from Arecibo to show how 2015 TC25 is remarkable in three different ways:

1) It is now the smallest known near-Earth asteroid on record, at just around 2 metres across,
2) It is also one of the brightest asteroids, reflecting back 60 per cent of the sunlight that falls on its surface (~0.6 albedo, compared to ~0.05 for typical asteroids), and
3) It is the first asteroid characterized that is just bare rock, without the typical blanket of dark dust that asteroids have (known as "regolith").

According to the study, the reason why 2015 TC25 is so bright is because it's made of silicate minerals. Meteorites found on Earth that are made of these minerals are known as aubrites, so this asteroid would be an example of one of these that is still floating around in space. Also, the brightness is due to its lack of dark regolith, which is likely because of the asteroid's very fast rate of rotation, as it spins at a rate of one revolution every 133 seconds.

"This is the first time we have optical, infrared and radar data on such a small asteroid, which is essentially a meteoroid," Reddy said in a University of Arizona news release. "You can think of it as a meteorite floating in space that hasn't hit the atmosphere and made it to the ground — yet."

That's not to say that 2015 TC25 is destined to hit Earth. With the object's orbit mapped out, the 2015 flyby was the closest it will come until at least 2070, and there is a tiny chance of a close encounter between the years 2070 and 2115. Even then, however, there's still a 99.987 per cent chance that this rock will miss the planet, and if it did happen to plunge into the atmosphere, it's so small that there's very little chance of it causing any significant damage.

IRIS pinpoints "heat bombs" in the Sun's corona

Sources: NASA | Planetary Society | Roscosmos | Russian Space Web | University of Arizona | NASA