Universe Today
Cassini Sees Clumps in Saturn's Rings
Still more than 100 days before it enters Saturn's orbit, NASA's Cassini spacecraft is delivering great data back to Earth. This week's images released from the spacecraft show clumps embedded within its narrow, outermost F ring. Two images were taken roughly two hours apart when the spacecraft was 62.9 million kilometres away. Clumps like this were seen when the Voyager spacecraft flew past Saturn, but scientists haven't had the chance to watch them for a long time - now they'll have years to keep an eye on them.
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Spirit Sees the Earth
NASA's Spirit rover took the first ever image of the Earth from the surface of another planet (other than the Moon). The photo was taken one hour before sunrise on Spirit's 63rd day on the surface of Mars. The image was built up from a series of images that Spirit took of the sky, as well as a panoramic image directly of Earth. The contrast was doubled to make the Earth easier to see; although, it's still a little hard to make out.
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Santa Ana Winds Stimulate Marine Environment
The Santa Ana winds, which blow across Southern California, are known to cause dry, fire-hazard conditions inland. But new data gathered by NASA's Quiksat satellite and its SeaWinds instrument shows that these same winds can help stimulate the marine environment. The strong winds blow from the land out to the ocean and cause cold water to rise up from the bottom of the ocean, bringing nutrients to the surface. Quiksat was able to measure the winds, a drop in ocean temperature, and a rise in chlorophyll offshore.
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Spirit at the Edge of Bonneville Crater
After being on the road for several weeks, NASA's Spirit rover has finally reached the edge of the crater "Bonneville". The rover made a total journey of 335 metres to reach the crater, but it did stop to analyze a few rocks along the way. This crater doesn't have exposed rocks on its edge, like the one that Opportunity landed in, but there are some interesting rock features on the far side that scientists would like to analyze. During night, Spirit took images of the sky, including the constellation Orion.
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Lawmakers Express Concerns Over Bush Initiative
Even through NASA has begun moving to implement US President Bush's new space initiative; the plan hasn't gotten full support from Washington lawmakers yet. Two members of the House Science Committee, Sherwood Boehlert and Bart Gordon, expressed their concerns about the plan during a hearing on Wednesday, with all the unanswered questions about budget, affordability, and its impact on other science and astronautics programs.
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NASA's Future Plans for Mars Exploration
With all this attention on Spirit and Opportunity, it's easy to forget that robotic exploration of Mars is just getting started. NASA has plans for several more missions in the works, taking advantage of the launch windows that happen every two years. Next up: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is due to launch in 2005. It will take images of the Martian surface at a resolution small enough to see a beach ball. 2007 will see the launch of Phoenix, which will put a lander on the surface to search for organic molecules and water in the Martian soil. And then the Mars Science Laboratory is due to launch in 2009, which will be a rover the size of a minivan, designed to crawl the surface for up to two years.
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Rosetta's Asteroid Targets Decided
The European Space Agency announced its decision today for the two asteroids that Rosetta will fly past on its way to meet up with Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The first target is Steins, which is fairly small; only a few kilometres across - Rosetta will pass it by 1,700 km on Sept. 5, 2008. The second asteroid is Lutetia; a 100 km asteroid which Rosetta will pass within 3,000 km on July 10, 2010. Rosetta will then reach Comet 67P/CG in 2014.
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Prints Available For Hubble Deep Field
Early Oceans Might Have Had Little Oxygen
The Earth's early oceans looked much different than today's, according to researchers from the University of Rochester; they were probably devoid of oxygen for a billion years longer than previously thought. Most geologists believe that the oceans had no oxygen for the first two billion years, and have been oxygen-rich for the last 500 million, but the time in between was a mystery. The team studied rocks that were on the floor of an ancient ocean, one billion years ago, and found that it was still oxygen poor at that time.
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Terraforming Mars One Piece at a Time
One long term goal to help the expansion of humans into space would be to terraform the planet Mars to make it more Earthlike. This would be planetary engineering on the largest scale, taking hundreds of years and requiring an immense amount of resources. Researcher Omar Pensado Diaz believes the best way to terraform Mars would be to do it piece-by-piece, creating Earthlike regions instead of trying to do the whole planet at once.
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Huge Submillimeter Instrument in the Works
Caltech and Cornell have begun a $2 million study to build a 25-metre telescope in the Atacama desert of northern Chile. The telescope will observe the sky in the submillimeter spectrum, which will allow it to see objects which don't emit much visible or infrared light. This would be a significant improvement over the 10.4-metre instrument that Caltech already operates, giving up to 12 times the light gathering power. If construction of the instrument goes ahead, it should be completed by 2012.
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Bad Astronomy Debunks Mars Face
NASA Learns More About Bone Loss in Space
New NASA-funded research has revealed how bone loss from long-duration spaceflight can increase the risk of injury to astronauts. A research team used three-dimensional X-ray scans to study the bones in 14 US and Russian crewmembers of the International Space Station. They found that the astronauts lost up to 2.7% of their bone mass every month, and additional exercise would be necessary to decrease the loss. This research will also help study the loss of bone density in the elderly.
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What's that Bunny on Mars?
When Opportunity sent back the first images from the surface of Mars, there was a strange object that puzzled amateurs and scientists alike - it looked like a bunny. After some analysis, scientists agreed that the object was probably about 4-5 cm long. Later images showed that the object had moved with the wind, ending up underneath the rover. This has led observers to believe that it's a piece of the rover's airbag that tore off and has been drifting around the crater, pushed by the wind.
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Opportunity Sees Phobos and Deimos
NASA's Mars rovers stopped looking down for a bit to watch the Sun. Specifically, they were looking to see Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, make transits across the face of the Sun. Opportunity watched the smaller moon Deimos (14 km) pass in front of the Sun on March 4, and then larger Phobos (27 km long) make a transit on March 7 - in both cases, the transits lasted less than a minute. These images will help scientists better calculate the orbits and shape of the Martian moons.
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Now Spirit Finds Evidence of Past Water
Last week, NASA announced with much fanfare that Opportunity had found evidence that the region of Mars was once drenched with water. But it turns out, NASA's other rover, Spirit, has found quietly evidence as well, but using completely different clues. The rover found cracks inside a rock dubbed "Humphrey", which look like they are minerals crystallized out of water. The amount of water that could create this is far less than the amount that acted on Opportunity's landing site, demonstrating that Mars probably had a diverse climate in the past.
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Spitzer Looks at a Stellar Nursary
The newly-launched Spitzer Space Telescope revealed the Henize 206 nebula, located 163,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The nebula was created when a supermassive star exploded as a supernova millions of years ago. The star had shed layers of material over a long period, and with the force of the explosion, the material collected together to create new stars - the nebula has hundreds and possibly even thousands of young stars, which range in age from two to ten million years old.
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Saturn's X-Ray Mystery
New images of Saturn taken by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory show that X-ray emissions, which are reflected radiation from the Sun, come mainly from its equator. This is unusual, because existing theories predict that they should come from the planet's poles, as has been observed with Jupiter. Another unusual discovery is that the planet's rings aren't visible at all in the X-ray spectrum.
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Silicate Found in a Meteorite
A group of scientists from Washington University in St. Louis found nine specks of silicate stardust inside a primitive meteorite, after examining more than 159,000 particles. This is an important discovery, because it tells researchers that the early solar system formed from gas and dust, and not in a hot solar nebula - until now, these silicate particles had only been found in interplanetary dust. The team used a special mass spectrometer to analyze the composition of individual grains in the meteorite, searching for particles which had to be formed in stars.
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Tom Hanks to Make New IMAX Film
Tom Hanks' production company, Playtone, is set to create a new IMAX film based on the Apollo missions. The film will be called "Magnificent Desolation", and is supported by NASA and sponsored by Lockheed Martin. It will take audiences to the Ocean of Storms, the Fra Mauro Highlands, the Sea of Tranquility and the Taurus Littrow Valley. The previous space-based IMAX film, "Space Station", grossed over $70 million at the box office and it still playing in theatres.
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Space Commercialization Bill Approved
The US House of Representatives today approved bill H.R. 3752, The Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004. This bill gives the FAA authority to license commercial suborbital launches, such as the vehicles being developed by groups competing to win the X-Prize. This should make it easier for companies to test new kinds of reusable suborbital vehicles. The bill will now go to Senate for consideration before it becomes law.
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NASA Finds Smoke Can Choke Clouds
Using data from NASA's Aqua satellite, scientists have found that the smoke from burning vegetation can inhibit the formation of clouds. Until now, scientists thought that smoke particles could serve to cool the planet by shading the surface and reflecting light back into space, but this effect seems less than estimated. In fact, wherever there's smoke, cloud cover is significantly reduced, so light reaches the surface and is absorbed by the Earth, creating a warming effect.
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Peering into the First Moments After the Big Bang
British astronomers have used a radio telescope called the Very Small Array to probe the cosmic background radiation; an afterglow from the Big Bang that gives insights into the rapid expansion of the early Universe. By combining their results with data from the WMAP satellite, they were able to see how the expansion went when the Universe was only 10(-35) seconds old. They found that temperature and density varied much wider than traditional estimates.
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Asteroid Bill Passes
The US House of Representatives approved bill H.R. 912, which awards amateur astronomers who discover potential Earth-crossing asteroids up to $3,000. One award will be given to the astronomer who discovers the brightest object, and another to the astronomer who makes the biggest scientific contribution to Minor Planet Center's mission of cataloguing near-Earth asteroids. It's estimated that there are between 900 and 1,100 objects larger than 1 km - of which, 700 have already been tracked.
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Landsat 5 Reaches 20 Years in Space
NASA's workhorse satellite Landsat 5 recently passed the 20 year mark of operations, beating original estimates that it would only last 2-3 years. Over the course of 100,000 orbits, the satellite has taken over 29 million images of the Earth, tracking human activity and changes in the planet's environment; and it's still working fine. Nothing lasts forever, though; the satellite is expected to run out of fuel by 2009 - a replacement should be launched before then.
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Wallpaper: Hubble's New Image of V838 Monocerotis
Here's a 1024x768 wallpaper of the latest image released from the Hubble Space Telescope. It's of V838 Monocerotis, a nebula located about 20,000 light years away from Earth in the constellation of Monoceros. Hubble first began watching this object when the central red star flared up in 2002, illuminating a cloud of material that was probably ejected in an explosion tens of thousands of years ago. The object is likely to continue changing rapidly over the next few years as light continues to expand inside the shell of material.
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Book Review: Sojourner, An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission
Sojourner is the little robot that enthralled Earth in 1997. For the first time, a mobile construct of humans was being guided by humans on the surface of another planet. Andrew Mishkin is a systems engineer who worked on the Sojourner project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) during the inception, birth, and life of this little rover. He uses his notes, official documentation, unofficial recollections and friendships to present Sojourner, An Insider's View of the Mars Pathfinder Mission - a book that is an historical reference, a guide to systems engineering, and an insight into the bureaucracy of government science departments.
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The Moon and Jupiter - Side By Side
Want an easy way to find Jupiter on Thursday and Friday? Just look for the Moon. On March 4th and 5th, the Moon and Jupiter will be side-by-side in the sky inside the constellation Leo. And right now, Jupiter is only 400 million kilometres away - that's close. If you have a small telescope, point it at Jupiter, and you should be able to see the planet's four larger moons, dusty bands across its surface, and maybe even the Great Red Spot.
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Sulfur Could Support Martian Life
During yesterday's press conference, scientists produced four pieces of evidence to support their claim that liquid water once acted on Mars in the region that Opportunity landed. One of these is the discovery of the presence of sulfates, which are likely formed by the action of water. There are microbes on Earth, which use sulfates as their primary source of energy, so they can be largely independent from the Sun. Perhaps something like this could be alive just under the surface of the Mars.
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The Asteroid that Almost Hit
For a few hours on January 13, 2004, some astronomers believed that a 30-metre asteroid could strike the Earth in less than two days. The asteroid, named 2004 AS1, ended up passing 12 million kilometres away, but it demonstrates the difficulty asteroid hunters have searching for objects that could hit our planet. Had it struck, 2004 AS1 could have caused destruction on a city-wide scale. NASA currently has a program to search for asteroids larger than 1 km, and should locate them all by 2008. Other proposals have been suggested to search for smaller - and still dangerous - asteroids that threaten the Earth, but nothing has been approved yet.
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Adaptive Optics Reveal Massive Star Formation
Astronomers at UC Berkeley took advantage of the newly installed adaptive optics system at the Lick Observatory to get clear images of a massive star forming region. The system works by using a laser to create a false star in the sky. A computer tracks the atmospheric turbulence, and warps the telescope's mirror to compensate. The young massive stars that the team observed are usually too blurry when seen from the ground, so they made the perfect target for the adaptive optics system.
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Water Once Drenched Regions of Mars
NASA announced today that liquid water once soaked the environment around Opportunity's landing site, raising the chances that life once existed on the Red Planet. This announcement came from Opportunity's detailed examination of a region of exposed rock on the side of the crater it landed in. By analyzing the rock with every instrument at its disposal, scientists now have conclusive evidence that liquid water once acted on this rock, changing its texture and chemistry. Opportunity's next job will be to determine if the rocky outcrop was actually formed by water, or if it's volcanic in origin. This means that there was probably a long period of time on Mars where the environment would have supported life.
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Black Holes Maintain Their Information
In 1997, cosmologists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, and John Preskill made a bet about what happens to a black hole when material is sucked into it. Do the characteristics of the particles somehow change the black hole so that a record of information is maintained? Or is all the information destroyed? A new solution based on string theory predicts that material sucked into the black hole is preserved as a tangle of strings, which fills its core to its surface. In theory, a black hole could be traced back to its original condition by following the trail of material consumed. Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne need to pay up.
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Both Rovers Working on Rocks
NASA's Spirit rover used its rock abrasion tool to dust off a rock called "Humphrey", and then backed away to see the whole rock with its thermal emission spectrometer - this should tell it what minerals are present in the rock. Once it completes this task, the rover will actually grind a hole to see under the rock's surface. Opportunity is also examining rocks on the other side of Mars, and it's getting ready to exit the crater that it landed in to search for evidence of past water on the plains.
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Simulating Titan's Atmosphere in the Lab
Saturn's moon Titan has long intrigued astrobiologists as a possible environment that was similar to our own Earth's early history. Its atmosphere has the same pressure as Earth, and it could contain chemicals called tholins - a building block for life. The Huygens probe, currently piggybacking a ride on NASA's Cassini spacecraft, will measure the atmosphere when it arrives later this year, but researchers are working to simulate Titan's complex chemistry in a laboratory environment right here on Earth.
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New Insights Into Martian Atmosphere
Astronomers have found hydrogen peroxide in Mars' atmosphere. The team gathered the data when Mars made its closest approach to Earth in the summer of 2003, using the 15-metre James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. Hydrogen peroxide is used as an antiseptic to kill bacteria on Earth, so it could help sterilize the surface of Mars. Many astrobiologists now think that the best chance of finding bacteria on Mars will be underneath the surface, which would be protected from this hydrogen peroxide and ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.
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Mars Express' Image of Hecates Tholus
The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft took this image of the caldera of volcano Hecates Tholus; it's 5300 metres tall, and the northernmost of the Elysium volcano group. The photo was taken during orbit 32, when the spacecraft was 275 km above the volcano.
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Record for Furthest Galaxy is Broken Again
Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have shattered the record for finding the most distant galaxy ever seen. By using a gravitational lens to magnify more distant objects, the team has found a galaxy which is 13.2 billion light-years away; the galaxy is being seen when the Universe was only 470 million years old. The young object is 10 times less massive than our own Milky Way, and looks like it was a building block for present day galaxies.
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Closest Youngest Star Found
Astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley have discovered the nearest and youngest star with a visible disk of dust that could be a home for planets. The dim red star, AU Microscopium, is only 33 light-years away. It's half the mass of the Sun, and only 12 million years old (our Sun is 4.6 billion years old). The star was imaged using the University of Hawaii's 2.2-metre telescope atop Mauna Kea, which can block out the central star to reveal dimmer material.
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Opportunity Watches a Sunset on Mars
A new animation built from a series of photos taken by NASA's Opportunity rover shows the Sun dimly setting in a hazy Martian sky. Although it's a pretty picture, the main purpose for this data is to let scientists calculate the amount of dust in the sky - currently it seems to be roughly double what Pathfinder measured in 1997. Opportunity is partway through its analysis of a piece of the exposed rock outcropping; after this it will exit the crater it landed in, and begin exploring the surrounding flatlands.
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Wallpaper: Cassini's Latest View of Saturn
Now only four months away from its encounter with Saturn, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will be delivering weekly postcards as it approaches the ringed planet. Here's a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper image of Saturn, taken by Cassini on February 9, 2004, when the spacecraft was 69.4 million kilometres away - the smallest details visible are 540 kilometres across. Cassini will go into orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004, and spend the next four years studying the planet and its moons.
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Rovers Losing Power as Mars Heads Towards Winter
The Mars rovers are starting to generate less power these days because Mars is starting to slip into Winter. In order to compensate for the reduced amount of light falling on the rovers' solar panels, engineers have begun a new lower-power communications plan. The rovers will only receive information in the morning, and transmit through Mars Odyssey twice a day. The rovers will also take more naps during the day to conserve battery power.
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Winking Star Turns Out to Be a Binary System
Astronomers have spent the last five years trying to explain a strange star called KH 15D, which winks on an off, sometimes with eclipses that last 24 hours. One theory is that there was a blob of protoplanetary material orbiting the star, occasionally blocking our view. By looking into historical images of the object, astronomers think they might have a new scenario that better explains their observations. They think it could be a double star system with a disk of material surrounding it and rotating with a wobble. This would explain the unusual eclipses.
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Opportunity Grinds Away
Having made the drive up to the "El Capitan" region of exposed rock, NASA's Opportunity rover ground away the surface of part of it with its rock abrasion tool (RAT). It then examined the spot with its alpha particle X-ray spectrometer for five hours, and then swapped in its Moessbauer spectrometer, which will analyze for 24 more hours. After Opportunity transfers this data back to Earth, it will move slightly forward, and grind another spot to gather more data about the formation of this rocky outcrop. Scientists back on Earth are getting closer to understand what could have formed this layered bedrock.
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Watch the Rosetta Launch Live
Getting a Greenhouse to Work on Mars
One key to the long-term exploration of Mars will be figuring out how to get plants to grow there in greenhouses - they're natural factories for air and food. Since they evolved on Earth, they have no mechanism for surviving in low pressures, which would be a requirement for off-planet greenhouses; they think they're drying out even when there's plenty of water. One solution might be to biochemically adjust levels of hormones that initiate the drought instinct.
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Your Pictures of Venus and the Moon
Spirit Could Have Found Salty Brine
NASA's Spirit rover has discovered an unusual patch of sand in a hollow on its journey to the crater "Bonneville". An unusual pattern of irregular lines and polygons in the soil could indicate the presence of a salty brine. This could mean there's liquid water right below the surface of Mars, which could harbour life - microbes thrive in similar environments on Earth. The rover dug a trench and examined the spot with its array of instruments, which scientists will study intensely back on Earth.
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