Tag: science

Swirling layers in the basement of Mars

11:28 am

Swirling layers in the basement of Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 31, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

In labeling this picture the science team focused on the many layers visible in these swirls, all suggesting a series of cyclical events, each laying down a new layer over many eons.

What caused the swirls? Looking at the lower right quadrant it appears that they were glacial, with the flow to the northwest but with each glacial layer smaller and not reaching as far.

This theory falls apart however at the curved depression, which instead suggests the swirl was traveling along a meandering canyon, going from the lower left to the upper right. If so, the curved depression is even more baffling. If ice it could have sublimated away, but its sharp edges suggest this isn’t ice but maybe a lava flow.
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NASA awards 11 small development contracts to a variety of companies

9:01 am

Capitalism in space: NASA today announced that it has awarded small contracts to eleven different companies, ranging from big established companies like ULA and Lockheed Martin to small startups like Varda and Zeno, for developing a range of new technologies, from power production on the Moon to making building materials from lunar soil.

Five of the technologies will help humanity explore the Moon. For astronauts to spend extended periods of time on the lunar surface, they will need habitats, power, transportation, and other infrastructure. Two of the selected projects will use the Moon’s own surface material to create such infrastructure – a practice called in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU. Redwire will develop technologies that would allow use of lunar regolith to build infrastructure like roads, foundations for habitats, and landing pads.

Blue Origin’s technology could also make use of local resources by extracting elements from lunar regolith to produce solar cells and wire that could then be used to power work on the Moon.

Astrobotic’s selected proposal will advance technology to distribute power on the Moon’s surface, planned to be tested on a future lunar mission. The company’s CubeRover would unreel more than half a mile (one kilometer) of high-voltage power line that could be used to transfer power from a production system to a habitat or work area on the Moon.

The contracts range in price from $1.6 to $34.7 million, with Blue Origin getting that largest award.

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Rocket Lab delays its private mission to Venus two years to ’25

8:51 am

In order to focus at this time on its commercial customers, Rocket Lab has decided to reschedule its private mission to Venus, delaying its two years to the next launch window in 2025.

The mission appeared to still be on in May, before Rocket Lab quietly put it on the back-burner last month. Spokesperson Morgan Bailey said it had decided to delay the mission so it could concentrate on its commercial launches. “The decision was a business one and we look forward to delivering the Venus mission in 2025,” she said.

It also appears that the mission could be pushed back further if customer demand requires it.

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No, that is not a sunspot on Mars!

11:33 am

No, that is not a sunspot on Mars!
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on April 20, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). While at first glance this Martian terrain vaguely resembles the granular surface of the Sun, with the largest depression having its own faint resemblance to a sunspot, the resemblance exists only in our feverish imagination.

The depression might have been formed by an impact, though it is also possible it is a caldera, not of lava but of ice processes. The granular surface is likely resulting from the sublimation of ice, creating random holes and ridges as underground material changes from ice to gas and escapes at weak points on the surface.

My guess that we are looking at ice processes is based on the location, not far from where the first manned spacecraft will likely land.
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Spirals within spirals

8:58 am

Spirals within spirals
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of two different research projects that are studying galaxies where supernovae previously occurred. This particular galaxy is estimated to be about 192 million light years away, and is a classic example of a barred spiral.

Despite appearing as an island of tranquillity in this image, UGC 12295 played host to a catastrophically violent explosion — a supernova — that was first detected in 2015. This supernova prompted two different teams of astronomers to propose Hubble observations of UGC 12295 that would sift through the wreckage of this vast stellar explosion.

Supernovae are the explosive deaths of massive stars, and are responsible for forging many of the elements found here on Earth. The first team of astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to examine the detritus left behind by the supernova in order to better understand the evolution of matter in our Universe.

The second team of astronomers also used WFC3 to explore the aftermath of UGC 12295’s supernova, but their investigation focused on returning to the sites of some of the best-studied nearby supernovae. Hubble’s keen vision can reveal lingering traces of these energetic events, shedding light on the nature of the systems that host supernovae.

What struck me about this picture however were the many smaller spiral galaxies scattered nearby and behind UGC 12295, with one face-on spiral highlighted near the top. I can count at least three or four other background spiral galaxies, all reddish in color likely because their light has been shifted to the red due to their distance.

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Strings of Martian cones

10:10 am

Strings of Martian cones

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 25, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists describe these cones as “longitudinally aligned cones,” but this is puzzling since the alignment runs from the northwest to the south east, not north-south along the longitude.

No matter. The alignment is in itself the mystery, especially because the full image shows many more strings of cones in this area, all running from the northwest to the southeast. The strings also are all curved in the same way, sagging to the southwest as if expressing a wave flowing in that direction.

What could create these strings of cones? The overview map below gives us a hint.
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Chandrayaan-3 completes fourth engine burn in Earth orbit

9:04 am

Chandrayaan-3's mission profile

According to India’s space agency ISRO, engineers have successfully completed the fourth of about six engine burns designed to raise Chandrayaan-3’s Earth orbit in preparation for sending it on its path to the Moon.

As shown in the graphic to the right, these adjustments are relatively small, but each increases the speed of the spacecraft at its orbit’s closest point to the Earth. That extra velocity thus reduces the amount of fuel needed for that trans-lunar-injection burn.

If all the maneuvers continue to go as planned, the landing attempt will occur around August 23, 2023.

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South Korean researchers turn simulated lunar soil into building blocks

8:51 am

Using simulated lunar soil, South Korean researchers have developed the engineering that turns that soil into building blocks shaped as needed.

The researchers first produce simulated moon soil by grinding black volcanic rock from Cheorwon County bordering the North. They then use a microwave to turn the sand-like simulant into solidified blocks. Lee said the team has developed a technique to make blocks by heating the soil in a mold to more than 1,000 degrees Celsius in two to three hours and cooling them. In space, the process could be powered by nuclear energy.

The article at the link also provides a nice summary of the status of South Korea’s entire space effort.

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Unknown Mars

11:36 am

MRO context camera mosaic
Click for interactive global mosaic.

Cool image time! The picture to the right was created from a global mosaic of all the context camera images taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) since it entered Mars orbit in 2006. It shows an unnamed 17-mile-wide-depression located only about seven miles south of the southern rim of Valles Marineris.

I highlight this particular depression because, despite seventeen years in orbit, MRO’s high resolution camera has at this time still not taken any pictures inside or around it. This is a place on Mars that remains unstudied in detail, in any way, even though its depth is comparable to the Grand Canyon and its features strongly suggest its is a collapse feature, created when the roof over an underground void gave way. If so, it suggests an origin for Valles Marineris that conflicts with present theories.
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Hubble image shows several dozen boulders flung from Dimorphos

9:40 am

Boulders drifting from Dimorphos
Click for original image.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have photographed several dozen boulders that were flung off of the asteroid Dimorphos following the impact by the space probe DART. The picture to the right, reduced and brightened to more clearly show those boulders, was taken on December 19, 2022, four months after DART’s impact.

These are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed inside the Solar System. The ejected boulders range in size from 1 meter to 6.7 meters across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at around a kilometre per hour.

The blue streak is the dust tail that has streamed off of Dimorphos since the impact, pushed away from the sun by the solar wind.

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The possibility of more than one exoplanet sharing the same orbit

9:27 am

PDS 70, as seen by ALMA
The Trojan debris clouds around PDS 70, as seen by ALMA

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have detected evidence that suggests the possibility of more than one exoplanet sharing the same orbit around PDS 70, a star 400 light years away.

This young star is known to host two giant, Jupiter-like planets, PDS 70b and PDS 70c. By analysing archival ALMA observations of this system, the team spotted a cloud of debris at the location in PDS 70b’s orbit where Trojans are expected to exist.

Trojans occupy the so-called Lagrangian zones, two extended regions in a planet’s orbit where the combined gravitational pull of the star and the planet can trap material. Studying these two regions of PDS 70b’s orbit, astronomers detected a faint signal from one of them, indicating that a cloud of debris with a mass up to roughly two times that of our Moon might reside there.

The press release — as well as most news reports — touts the possibility that they have found a second planet in this orbit. They have not, and are likely not going to. As noted above, the data indicates the presence of “a cloud of debris”, which is most likely a clustering of Trojan asteroids, just as the more than 12,000 asteroids we see in the two Trojan points in Jupiter’s orbit.

Nonetheless, this is the first detection of what appears to be a Trojan clustering in the accretion disk of a young star.

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Scientists discover in archival data a slowly pulsing object that has been beating since 1988

8:48 am

The uncertainty of science: Using archival data, scientists have discovered a previously undetected but very strange slowly pulsing object that has been doing so since 1988.

Astronomers have found an ultra-slow, long-lasting source of radio-wave pulses, and they are perplexed as to its true nature. While “regular” radio pulsars have very short periods, from seconds down to just a few milliseconds, this source emits a brief pulse of radio waves about three times per hour. What’s more, it has been doing this for decades. “I do not think we can say yet what this object is,” says Victoria Kaspi (McGill University), a pulsar researcher who was not involved in the new study.

Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin University, Australia) and her colleagues discovered the mysterious source in data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) observatory in Western Australia. They carried out follow-up observations with the MWA and with other radio observatories in Australia and South Africa. Known as GPM J1839-10, the tardy blinker is located at a distance of some 18,500 light-years away in the constellation Scutum. Archival data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Indian Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope reveal that it has been pulsating at least since 1988, with a period of just under 22 minutes (1,318.1957 seconds, to be precise).

In a sense, the object is a pulsar, since on a very basic level it does what all pulsars do, send a radio beat in our direction in a precise pattern. The problem is that according to present theories that say pulsars are actually magnetized neutron stars rotating quickly, this object is rotating too slowly to be one.

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