Notices by Elizabeth Tasker (elizabethtasker@mastodon.online)

Catch a falling telescope and put it in your pocket... 🎶 The JAXA/NASA Suzaku X-ray space telescope, which completed science operations in 2015, has now re-entered the atmosphere and I think must have burned up. Suzaku is succeeded by XRISM, which carries the spectrometer for exploring diffuse X-ray sources that couldn't be used on Suzaku as the liquid helium leaked!

https://www.isas.jaxa.jp/en/topics/003916.html

When bacteria was found on an asteroid Ryugu grain in a laboratory in London, the media questioned whether a sample returned from space could ever stay free of contamination from Earth.

However, no contamination has been found in the JAXA curation facilities.

But let's take a look at what that takes... (brace yourselves)

My latest on Cosmos 👉
https://cosmos.isas.jaxa.jp/keeping-out-the-earth-protecting-the-asteroid-ryugu-sample-from-contamination/

Tsuda Yuichi, Project Manager for #Hayabusa2 and lead for the Extended Mission, Hayabusa2♯, is hinting at the bucket load of scrubbing the spacecraft went through in unmentionable solvents prior to launch in order to demonstrate that it was not only possible to collect a sample, but it could be held separate from the Earth as a veritable time capsule 🛰️.

So what DOES it take to keep a (planet)butt load of microbes OUT of an asteroid sample returned from space 🛰️?

On the other microbe-filled site, JAXA researchers who are working with the asteroid Ryugu sample returned by the Hayabusa2 mission commented on a few of the billion steps taken to keep Ryugu pristine. I am going to report right here...

The official statement has been released:

Bad things happened to a good asteroid grain, but not on JAXA turf 😐.

(And therefore, the asteroid Ryugu sample--aside from that one grain that died on the mean streets of London--that was returned by the Hayabusa2 mission is still free of contaminants from the Earth environment.)

https://www.isas.jaxa.jp/en/topics/003899.html

It me 🤸♂️! What fame! When you see a Ryugu grain in a public exhibit, it has been sealed up just like the grains for scientific study. These grains are a chip of the first rock formed in the Solar System before all that planet geo-chem-bio tumbling nonsense gets going. Were these chips key ingredients for the start of life? Could be...

Once back in Japan, the asteroid sample was opened in a clean chamber under vacuum or filled with pure nitrogen and which had been scrubbed cleaner than you can ever be and live. When asteroid grains are sent to another research laboratory, they're sealed in nitrogen inside one of the squeak clean chambers.

When that sample capsule hit Earth, the team had 100 hours to scoop that capsule up from the Australian desert and get it sealed away in the curation facilities in JAXA. Beyond that time, there was no guarantee the hermetic seal that was locking out the Earth's atmosphere would hold. They were back in Japan in 57 hours, and the sample capsule was in vacuum for most of that time!

Allow me to fix this @Gizmodo headline:

"Rare asteroid sample contaminated by microorganisms after exposure TO THE AIR"

A team from Imperial College received an asteroid Ryugu grain from JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission. The journal paper states that the sample was absent of Earthy evil when it arrived from JAXA then... they exposed it while sealing in resin 😑

The contamination speed is interesting, but the message here is wrong: proper protocols protect a celestial sample.

https://gizmodo.com/rare-asteroid-sample-contaminated-by-microorganisms-despite-scientists-best-efforts-2000528691

They're not admitting it in English, but the National Museum of Science and Nature in Tokyo is holding an exhibit from December 17 ~ January 13 of grains from ALL THREE OF HUMANITY'S ASTEROID SAMPLE RETURN MISSIONS: Itokawa (#JAXA Hayabusa mission), Ryugu (JAXA Hayabusa2 mission) & Bennu (#NASA OSIRIS-REx mission).

If you're in Japan over the holiday season, do check this out:
https://www.kahaku.go.jp/event/2024/12hayabusaMMX/

JAXA Press Briefing today at 2pm JST on the latest from the X-ray telescope, XRISM, that was launched last September 🔭🛰️!

I expect it will be... entirely in Japanese... but there'll be an English web release on the ISAS website hopefully around the same time ⭐

📺 : https://www.youtube.com/live/qgapFfAdzIg

Experiment in progress…

Can I get this Gulikit KingKong 2 Pro controller to work with my Mac… and the game, “No Man’a Sky”?

There are a lot of words that don’t intrinsically belong together in that sentence. Like “Mac” and “controller”… or “game” 😅

But! Reddit said I should be successful, and that’s completely trustworthy!

(I should add that I don’t believe a word of this and bought the controller cheaply secondhand. I guess I believe about half a word 🤔. Anyway, no harm, no foul.)

This is born from the fact that I love playing NMS in VR but in truth… it’s janky and my poor old pc has a 1060 graphics card.

The game is surprisingly pretty good on the M1 Mac (my main machine) but I don’t really like the mouse and keyboard controls.

This is how we fell down this oddly niche rabbit hole.

The backup is to use the controller with my pc. Totally doable if I move the computer, but why when I could try what no sensible person does and game on my Mac?

@moonmehta The accuracy of the pinpoint landing technique is measured before the final descent, after which the spacecraft searches for dangerous boulders and prioritises safety over accuracy. That value is less than 10m. The final landing (which included boulder avoidance and the loss of one of the two main engines) was 55m away from the landing site.

Goodnight, SLIM 😭 Japan's brave little moon lander has been silent since the end of April, and communication attempts have officially stopped. But, as a landing tech demo, it was only designed to last a few hours and it landed in January sooooo....

SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) should now mean "Small Indestructible Moon Lander".

https://global.jaxa.jp/press/2024/08/20240826-1_e.html

Scenes from the virtual IAU GA #Astronomy2024! @futuremeetings built a 3D virtual space which could be accessed on #VR headset, regular web browser, or smartphone. This was the JAXA room that I created as one of the exhibits! It included posters on the JAXA small body missions (including Hayabusa2, MMX, SLIM), models of the spacecraft and asteroid Ryugu, a Haya2-kun mascot you could ride and a link to a scene on asteroid Ryugu, created by OmniScope.

@Polychrome @guysoft there is an app for the Quest headset for the platform that we’re using: spatial.io. Unfortunately, I think other headsets aren’t supported.

Everyone, we're expecting... a VR experience at the International Astronomical Union GA Exhibition Hall!

If you're in Cape Town for the #IAU2024, you can try a VR headset and step fully into the virtual venue for the conference, chat with online attendees, check out the virtual exhibits and sit on the IAU sign (the VIRTUAL sign. Do not sit on the physical sign!).

Remember, if you're registered for the conference, you can also join the virtual space from anywhere on your laptop or smartphone.

@guysoft Yes if you're registered for the meeting (you don't even need a VR headset: the space is cross-compatible on browser and smartphone)

National Azabu (a foreign food supermarket in Tokyo) has a sale in Jaffa cakes. Admittedly, strawberry Jaffa cakes which is mildly horrifying, but I moved in anyway! So. My afternoon is set.