Year: 2015

New close-up image of Ceres’s double bright spots

9:32 am

close-up of Ceres's bright spots

Cool image time! The Dawn science team has released a some new close-up images of Ceres, including a much higher resolution image of the dwarf planet’s double bright spot, which now resolves itself into a cluster of two larger spots with a half dozen smaller spots scattered nearby.

The region with the brightest spots is in a crater about 55 miles (90 kilometers) across. The spots consist of many individual bright points of differing sizes, with a central cluster. So far, scientists have found no obvious explanation for their observed locations or brightness levels.

“The bright spots in this configuration make Ceres unique from anything we’ve seen before in the solar system. The science team is working to understand their source. Reflection from ice is the leading candidate in my mind, but the team continues to consider alternate possibilities, such as salt. With closer views from the new orbit and multiple view angles, we soon will be better able to determine the nature of this enigmatic phenomenon,” said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To my eye, these bright areas resemble a wide flat caldera of a volcano. Instead of being at the top of a peak, the caldera is like a lava pool, almost like a large lake. In this case, the large spots are lakes of frozen ice that periodically melt and flow. The smaller spots are likely smaller vents where water can bubble up from below during active periods. When not active, the water will be frozen. Since ice is white and Ceres is very dark, the pools and vents appear extremely bright in these images.

I am speculating however. We will have to wait for much better images to know for sure.

3 comments

The collapse of Russian scientific innovation

9:13 am

Link here. This report documents much of what I have been seeing in the Russian space industry: an aging workforce, a lack of innovation, and concentration of power to Moscow and the central government, and an exodus of the best minds to other countries.

It appears that all of the solutions that have been imposed by Putin’s government are exactly the worst things you could do and will only make the problems grow with time.

1 comment

Russia announces revised launch schedule for ISS

10:11 pm

As promised, the Russians today revealed their revised schedule of launches for ISS for the next few months.

The next manned launch will be on July 3, and though it will use a Soyuz rocket, it will not use the upgraded rocket version that had a conflict with its Progress freighter during the April launch. They have still not described what that conflict was, or how they plan to fix it on future launches.

Meanwhile, a Soyuz capsule docked to ISS suddenly fired its thrusters unexpectedly during testing of the station’s radio system. The burn changed the station’s orientation, which required other thrusters to compensate.

0 comments

Finding caves on Mars

5:40 pm

A new study of pits on Mars has isolated one particular type of pit that has all the features of an Earth-like cave entrance, with a large number located in the regions around the giant volcanoes where evidence of past glacier activity has been found. From the abstract:

These Atypical Pit Craters (APCs) generally have sharp and distinct rims, vertical or overhanging walls that extend down to their floors, surface diameters of ~50–350 m, and high depth to diameter (d/D) ratios that are usually greater than 0.3 (which is an upper range value for impacts and bowl-shaped pit craters) and can exceed values of 1.8. Observations by the Mars Odyssey Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) show that APC floor temperatures are warmer at night and fluctuate with much lower diurnal amplitudes than nearby surfaces or adjacent bowl-shaped pit craters.

In other words, these pits are deeper with steeper and overhanging walls that suggest underlying passages. They also maintain warmer temperatures at night with their day/night temperatures changing far less than the surface, similar to caves on Earth where the cave temperature remains the same year-round.

The study’s most important finding, from my perspective, was the location of these pit craters.
» Read more

3 comments

Did some dinosaur soft tissues survive fossilization?

2:36 pm

The uncertainty of science: New research strongly suggests that within dinosaur fossils are found many preserved soft tissues from when the creature was still living.

As early as the 1970s, researchers captured images of what looked like cellular structures inside dinosaur fossils. But did the structures contain actual tissue? Proteins commonly decay hundreds to thousands of years after an organism dies, but in rare cases they have been known to survive up to 3 million years. In a series of studies beginning a decade ago, a team led by North Carolina State University paleontologist Mary Schweitzer reported that they had extracted what appeared to be collagen, the most abundant protein in bone, from a 68-million-year-old T. rex fossil. They sequenced fragments of the protein and concluded that it closely matched that of birds, dinosaurs’ living descendants (see here and here). But other teams haven’t been able to replicate the work, and others suggested that the collagen could be contamination.

The new study, led by materials scientist Sergio Bertazzo and paleontologist Susannah Maidment, both of Imperial College London, has a different strategy for hunting down ancient proteins. Bertazzo, an expert on how living bones incorporate minerals, uses a tool called a focused ion beam to slice through samples, leaving pristine surfaces that are ideal for high-resolution imaging studies. He teamed up with Maidment to apply the technique to eight chunks of dinosaur toe, rib, hip, leg, and claw.

What they found shocked them. Imaging the fresh-cut surfaces with scanning and transmission electron microscopes, “we didn’t see bone crystallites” as expected, Maidment says. “What we saw instead was soft tissue. It was completely unexpected. My initial response was these results are not real.” [emphasis mine]

It must be noted that the new research depends on many uncertainties that still need to be replicated or confirmed.

0 comments

$28 billion spent on poor biomedical research?

2:32 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new study suggests that $28 billion is spent on biomedical research that no one can reproduce.

I have no doubt that a vast amount of medical research is so poorly done that no one else will ever be able to replicate the results. However, the article notes that the way the researchers came up with the $28 billion figure is quite questionable, reviewing only about two dozen studies and then extrapolating their numbers across the entire research field. This is highly uncertain and should be taken with a grain of salt.

1 comment

Obamacare sets record for unpopularity with public

12:22 pm

Finding out what’s in it: A new poll has found that Obamacare, five years after it was passed, is more unpopular now then ever before.

Which is why the Republicans should do nothing to fix it should the Supreme Court rule against Obamacare subsidies in states with no health exchanges, and instead stick with full repeal followed by specific fixes to the previous laws.

I am even more convinced that full repeal is the right political approach after reading this leftwing reporter’s take on the situation. He thinks the above plan is stupid, knows the Democrats and Obama will never agree to it, but also knows that the public does not blame Obamacare in any way on the Republicans. As he notes,

And one of the reasons why Democrats should not assume that a ruling for the plaintiffs in King will totally backfire on Republicans is the cynical, but powerful, source of leverage that Thune is tapping into here: Democrats passed health care reform, and thus Democrats will get blamed for anything bad that happens to the health care system.

The above poll confirms this. The Republicans had better recognize this if they want to take full political advantage of it.

6 comments

Rare large meteorite stolen from Australian museum

11:18 am

In a heist reminiscent of a Hollywood movie, two thieves in hooded jumpers and white masks stole a 25 pound meteorite the size of a soccer ball on Monday.

The only value of such a meteorite is among collectors, but to sell such a large and unique meteorite without being noticed would be impossible. It is theorized that the thieves might chop it up and sell the pieces to collectors instead.

1 comment

Russia completes Soyuz launchpad at Vostochny

10:43 am

The competition heats up: Russia has completed assembly of the Soyuz-2 launch system at Vostochny a month ahead of schedule.

I must say that this story confuses me. Just this past weekend it was reported in the Russian press that they were abandoning efforts to build a Soyuz launchpad for manned flights at Vostochny and would instead focus on Angara. Why then are they finishing this Soyuz-2 launchpad now, and ahead of schedule?

One theory: The new launchpad might be for a new upgraded Soyuz rocket to be used for unmanned missions and thus different than the manned launchpad.

Or it might be that even though the government canceled it, workers continued to work on it and finished it, unaware of the cancellation. It is not unusual in big government projects for the right hand to not know what the left hand is doing.

UPDATE: My first theory was correct. Anatoly Zak of russianspaceweb.com has confirmed to me in an email that they only cancelled manned Soyuz flights at Vostochny. This launchpad will be used for an upgraded Soyuz rocket for unmanned flights.

0 comments
1 … 75 76 77 78 79 … 148