Kazuho Monster – Dance like Octopus
An evening pause: From the youtube page: “I wanna be the best dancer in the world.”
Hat tip Tom Wilson.
Category: Behind The Black
Flat tadpole depression in ancient Martian crater
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reducedl, and enhanced to post here, was taken on February 24, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Dubbed a “terrain sample” by the camera team, it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so as to maintain that camera’s proper temperature. When they have to do this, they try to pick interesting targets, though there is no guarantee the result will be very interesting.
In this case the camera team already knew this location would have intriguing geology, based on an earlier terrain sample taken a year ago only eight miles to the south. The landscape here is a flat plateaus surrounding flat depressions, some of which appear connected by drainage channels. Today’s picture shows one flat depression with a short tail-like channel flowing into it.
Note the pockmarked surface. The many holes could be impact craters, but they also could be holes caused when the near-surface ice at this location sublimated into gas and bubbled upward to escape. Now all we see is dry bedrock, the flat ground riddled with holes.
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Movies of two supernovae remnants produced from two decades of Chandra X-ray images
Using more than two decades of data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have created two movies of the supernovae remnants the Crab nebula and Cassiopeia A.
I have embedded those movies below. From the press release:
Over 22 years, Chandra has taken many observations of the Crab Nebula. With this long runtime, astronomers see clear changes in both the ring and the jets in the new movie. Previous Chandra movies showed images taken from much shorter time periods — a 5-month period between 2000 and 2001 and over 7 months between 2010 and 2011 for another. The longer timeframe highlights mesmerizing fluctuations, including whip-like variations in the X-ray jet that are only seen in this much longer movie. A new set of Chandra observations will be conducted later this year to follow changes in the jet since the last Chandra data was obtained in early 2022.
…Cassiopeia A (Cas A for short) is the remains of a supernova that is estimated to have exploded about 340 years ago in Earth’s sky. While other Chandra movies of Cas A have previously been released, including one with data extending from 2000 to 2013, this new movie is substantially longer featuring data from 2000 through to 2019.
Several new missions to the asteroid Apophis proposed by commercial and governments
A cartoon showing Apophis’s path in 2029
At a conference this week several new missions to the asteroid Apophis during its close Earth fly-by in 2029 were proposed by both private companies and government entities.
- Blue Origin is considering sending its Blue Ring orbital tug, launched in 2027 on a Falcon 9.
- JPL proposes sending two cubesats on the orbital tug mission previously announced by the startup ExLabs.
- NASA continues to study sending the two Janus spacecraft, since its original asteroid mission was lost when the Psyche asteroid mission was delayed.
- The European Space Agency has two different missions under study.
With all of these missions, the big obstacle is funding. Most are either only partly funded, or not at all.
At the moment the only mission actually on its way to Apophis is OSIRIS-APEX, which having completed its sample return mission to Bennu was then sent to Apophis.
More partners join China’s International Lunar Research Station
China today announced the addition of three more international partners in its project to build a permanent base on the Moon, dubbed the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).
The new partners of the ILRS include Nicaragua, the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization and the Arab Union for Astronomy and Space Sciences. China will collaborate with these three parties on various issues concerning the ILRS, including its demonstration, engineering implementation, operation and application, according to the CNSA.
China’s project now has ten partner nations (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela) and eleven academic or governmental bureaucracies.
If all goes as planned, China hopes to have the basic station established by 2030, which it will periodcially and intermittently send astronauts.
SLIM survives its third lunar night
Though it was primarily designed to prove its landing system and was never expected to resume operations after enduring the long 14-day-long lunar night, Japan’s SLIM lunar lander has successfully survived its third lunar night, resuming contact with Earth yesterday.
JAXA said on the social media platform X that SLIM’s key functions are still working despite repeated harsh cycles of temperature changes. The agency said it plans to closely monitor the lander’s deterioration.
While the newly downloaded data and photos have some scientific value, the important data is the spacecraft’s engineering status. Finding out what continues to work and what fails after each lunar night will inform engineers on what to do best to build future lunar landers and rovers.
SpaceX and Rocket Lab complete launches
Both SpaceX and Rocket Lab successfully completed launches today. First SpaceX launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its ninth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
Shortly thereafter, Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket lifted off from one of its launchpads in New Zealand, placing two technology demonstration satellites in orbit, one testing a solar sail from NASA and the other from South Korea testing a cubesat doing optical observations of Earth. Though the first stage had the markings of a stage designed for resuse, there was no indication in the company’s live stream of any attempt to recover it.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
42 SpaceX
16 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 49 to 28, while SpaceX by itself still leads the rest of the world, including other American companies, 42 to 35.
Jonathan Scott – Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries
An evening pause: Performed on the organ of Rochdale Town Hall, Rochdale, UK.
Hat tip Judd Clark. To all: I could use suggestions from others. Right now Judd is doing the lion’s share of work, suggesting a lot of great evening pauses. I want more variety, however, including suggestions from many others. If you have suggested something before you know the routine. If you haven’t and want to, post a comment here, but DON’T post the link in your comment. I will contact you for it.
It is simple: Conservatives don’t have the votes
The modern Republican Party and its voters
Many conservatives both in Congress and out have recently railed in fury at the compromises that House speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has made with the Democrats in order to pass large multi-billion dollar foreign aid bills to help the Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan protect their sovereignty and borders, while doing nothing to pass any bills to secure the American border at all.
That fury is best represented by Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Georgia), who has filed a motion to vacate the speaker but as yet has not followed through to force a vote. She has repeatedly condemned his willingness to work to pass Democratic Party proposals while doing little to help Republicans get their bills passed.
The problem however for Johnson is the same one faced by the previous Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, as well as the Republican speaker before him, Paul Ryan, and the speaker before him, John Boehner. All struggled to get Republican proposals passed, and all failed. None could garner a majority strong enough, especially because the Democrats stood firm and united in opposition and many Republicans were actually more allied with the Democratic Party agenda. It is this same problem that Greene faces and is why she has not moved to force a vote for a new speaker.
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Infeeder to a Martian paleolake
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on December 21, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as an “inlet to a paleolake.” I have used this context camera lower resolution image taken January 14, 2023 to fill in the blank central strip caused by a failed filter on the high resolution camera.
The elevation difference between the plateau on the lower left and the lake bottom on the upper right is about 700 feet. The inlet channel floor is about 200 feet below the plateau. We know it is ancient because of the number of small craters within it as well as on the lakebed below. It has been a very long time since any water or ice flowed down this channel to drain into the lake to the north.
While a lot of analysis of orbital data has found numerous examples of paleolakes in the dry equatoral regions of Mars (see here, here, here, here, and here , this particular example is so obvious not much analysis is needed, as shown in the overview map below.
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Scientists think methane detections by Curiosity come from the salts in the local soil
According to experiments conducted on Earth, some scientists believe the unexpected puffs of methane detected by Curiosity periodically come from the salts in the local soil.
Led by Alexander Pavlov, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the researchers suggest the gas also can erupt in puffs when seals crack under the pressure of, say, a rover the size of a small SUV driving over it. The team’s hypothesis may help explain why methane is detected only in Gale Crater, Pavlov said, given that’s it’s one of two places on Mars where a robot is roving and drilling the surface. (The other is Jezero Crater, where NASA’s Perseverance rover is working, though that rover doesn’t have a methane-detecting instrument.)
The theory, based on those experiments, is complicated and unconfirmed, but if so it suggests that much of the soil of Mars, its regolith, will be somewhat toxic, requiring some processing to make it possible for plants to grow in it. This is not a new discovery, but confirms past data that suggested that perchlorate — a mild acid — is found everywhere on Mars.
Hubble celebrates 34 years in orbit with a new photo of the Little Dumbbell Nebula
Click for original image.
Cool image time! To celebrate the 34th anniversay of its launch in 1990, astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a new photo of the Little Dumbbell Nebula (also known as M76), located about 3,400 light years away and one of the most well-known planetary nebulae in the sky.
That picture is to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here. From the caption:
M76 is composed of a ring, seen edge-on as the central bar structure, and two lobes on either opening of the ring. Before the star burned out, it ejected the ring of gas and dust. The ring was probably sculpted by the effects of the star that once had a binary companion star. This sloughed off material created a thick disk of dust and gas along the plane of the companion’s orbit. The hypothetical companion star isn’t seen in the Hubble image, and so it could have been later swallowed by the central star. The disk would be forensic evidence for that stellar cannibalism.
The primary star is collapsing to form a white dwarf. It is one of the hottest stellar remnants known at a scorching 250,000 degrees Fahrenheit, 24 times our Sun’s surface temperature. The sizzling white dwarf can be seen as a pinpoint in the center of the nebula. A star visible in projection beneath it is not part of the nebula.
Pinched off by the disk, two lobes of hot gas are escaping from the top and bottom of the “belt,” along the star’s rotation axis that is perpendicular to the disk. They are being propelled by the hurricane-like outflow of material from the dying star, tearing across space at two million miles per hour.
Since launch Hubble has made 1.6 million observations of over 53,000 astronomical objects, and continues to be in high demand by astronomers, with only one request in six able to get time on the telescope. Not surprisingly, almost all of Hubble’s biggest discoveries were unexpected. Its future right now rests with its last three working gyroscopes used to orient it precisely. When one more fails, it will go to one-gyro mode, which will limit the precision of that orientation significantly. At that point the sharpness of the telescope’s imagery will sadly decline.
The only comparable orbital optical telescope now planned is China’s Xuntian optical telescope, scheduled for launch next year. It will fly in formation with the Tiangong-3 space station, allowing astronauts to periodically do maintenance missions to it. As I noted many times previously, American astronomers better start learning Chinese, assuming China even allows them access. Nor will these American astronomers have a right to complain, as it was their decision to not build a Hubble replacement, in their 2000, 2010, and 2020 decadal reports.