Tag: science

Astronomers discover nearby Earth-sized exoplanet only slightly hotter than Earth

10:49 am

Using the TESS space telescope as well as a number of ground-based telescopes astronomers have discovered an Earth-sized exoplanet only 40 light years away that has a surface temperature estimated to be about 107 degrees Fahrenheit, assuming it has no atmosphere.

The host star, called Gliese 12, is a cool red dwarf located almost 40 light-years away in the constellation Pisces. The star is only about 27% of the Sun’s size, with about 60% of the Sun’s surface temperature. The newly discovered world, named Gliese 12 b, orbits every 12.8 days and is Earth’s size or slightly smaller — comparable to Venus. Assuming it has no atmosphere, the planet has a surface temperature estimated at around 107 degrees Fahrenheit (42 degrees Celsius).

At the moment however scientists do not yet know if the exoplanet has an atmosphere or not. Follow-up observations using the Webb Space Telescope are planned to find this out. Based on the data presently available, the exoplanet could either be like Venus, too hot to sustain life, or like Earth, cooler with water and an atmosphere and thus very habitable.

Gliese 12 b could therefore become one of the primary targets for the first interstellar missions once humanity begins such exploration.

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Euclid releases new images and first science results

10:37 am

Euclid image
Click for original image.

The Euclid science team today released five early science images in connection of the publication of ten papers.

The picture to the right is one of those images, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here. From the caption:

In this image Euclid showcases NGC 6744, an archetype of the kind of galaxy currently forming most of the stars in the local Universe. Euclid’s large field-of-view covers the entire galaxy, capturing not only spiral structure on larger scales but also exquisite detail on small spatial scales. This includes feather-like lanes of dust emerging as ‘spurs’ from the spiral arms, shown here with incredible clarity.

Scientists are using this dataset to understand how dust and gas are linked to star formation; map how different star populations are distributed throughout galaxies and where stars are currently forming; and unravel the physics behind the structure of spiral galaxies, something that is still not fully understood after decades of study.

Euclid is a wide-field space telescope that has instruments that observe in both visible and near-infrared wavelengths. Its primary mirror at 1.2 meters is half the width of Hubble’s. More details about these early images and links to the new science results can be found here.

Unlike Hubble, it appears Euclid will not be used as a general observatory, at least initially. Its primary goal is to do a survey of one third of the sky, focusing on extragalactic sources outside the Milky Way. Once this is complete however it is possible the space telescope will be made available for other observations.

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Psyche gets clean bill-of-health after completing six-month checkout since launch

10:13 am

Psyche's flight path to the asteroid Psyche
Psyche’s flight path to the asteroid Psyche.
Click for original image.

The probe Psyche has successfully completed its six-month checkout since its launch in October 2023 and is now using its ion engines to steadily increase its speed as it heads to a 2029 rendezvous with the metal asteroid Psyche.

The orbiter is now more than 190 million miles (300 million kilometers) away and moving at a clip of 23 miles per second (37 kilometers per second), relative to Earth. That’s about 84,000 mph (135,000 kph). Over time, with no atmospheric drag to slow it down, Psyche will accelerate to speeds of up to 124,000 mph (200,000 kph).

The spacecraft will arrive at the metal-rich asteroid Psyche in 2029 and will make observations from orbit for about two years. The data it collects will help scientists better understand the formation of rocky planets with metallic cores, including Earth. Scientists have evidence that the asteroid, which is about 173 miles (280 kilometers) across at its widest point, may be the partial core of a planetesimal, the building block of an early planet.

The graphic to the right shows the path Psyche will take to get to the asteroid.

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Two of Voyager-1’s four instruments resume science operations

9:15 am

Engineers have resumed getting science data from two of Voyager-1’s four instruments for the first time since in November 2023, when corrupted computer memory caused the spacecraft to send only incoherent data.

The plasma wave subsystem and magnetometer instrument are now returning usable science data. As part of the effort to restore Voyager 1 to normal operations, the mission is continuing work on the cosmic ray subsystem and low energy charged particle instrument. (Six additional instruments aboard Voyager 1 are either no longer working or were turned off after the probe’s flyby of Saturn.)

Engineers hope to begin getting good data the other two instruments in the next few weeks.

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Glacial tributaries draining south on Mars

2:10 pm

Glacial tributaries draining south on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 27, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as a “valley network”, what appears to be several tributaries flowing downhill from the northeast to come together into a larger single flow to the southwest. The elevation drop from the high to the low points in this picture is about 600 feet.

What formed the valleys? This location is at 35 degrees south latitude, so we are almost certainly looking at what appear to be shallow glaciers within those valleys, protected by a thin veneer of dust and debris. It also appears that the stippled surrounding plains might also contain a lot of near-surface ice, also protected by a thin layer of dust and debris. The stippling indicates some sublimation and erosion.
» Read more

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Solar storms are simply no longer a threat

3:39 pm

The sunspot cycle as of May 2024
The sunspot cycle as of May 2024. Click
for full details.

Today’s Chicken Little Report: When NOAA predicted on May 9, 2024 that a powerful solar flare had erupted from the Sun and was aiming a major solar storm directly at the Earth, the scientists at the federal government’s Space Weather Prediction Center could not help underlining the disaster potential, and were ably aided by the mainstream press. This CNN report was typical:

“Geomagnetic storms can impact infrastructure in near-Earth orbit and on Earth’s surface, potentially disrupting communications, the electric power grid, navigation, radio and satellite operations,” according to the Space Weather Prediction Center. “(The center) has notified the operators of these systems so they can take protective action.”

The center has notified operators in these areas to take action to mitigate the potential for any impacts, which include the possibility of increased and more frequent voltage control problems. Other aspects operators will monitor include a chance of anomalies or impacts to satellite operations and frequent or longer periods of GPS degradation.

And as always, the news report has to end with this warning of doom:
» Read more

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Court rules COVID jab mandate unconstitutional

11:55 am

One more COVID story to start the week: Earlier this month the 10th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled unequivocally that the mandates requiring the jab and limiting who could be exempted that were imposed by the University of Colorado were unconstitutional.

The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in 2021 required COVID-19 vaccination of all students and employees. It initially offered religious exemptions to anyone who checked a box, but it later stated that administrators would “only recognize religious exemptions based on religious beliefs whose teachings are opposed to all immunizations.”

Officials, for instance, said Christian Scientists would qualify for an exemption but Buddhists would not. They also said exemptions would be granted only to people who never received any vaccinations.

Medical exemptions, on the other hand, were available if a doctor said the prospective recipient’s health or life would be endangered.

College officials would also reject exemptions solely on their own opinion on whether the applicant’s religion was really against vaccinations or not.

The court’s ruling now allows the lawsuit of seventeen students and employees to go forward.

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Former head of NIH admits 6-foot social distancing rule had no scientific basis at all

11:12 am

It was all a lie: In the transcript of a closed-door interview of former NIH director Francis Collins that was released on May 16, 2024, Collins admitted under questioning that there was absolutely no science research or justification behind 6-foot social distancing rule that the government imposed during the Wuhan panic.

“We asked Dr. Fauci where the six feet came from and he said it kind of just appeared, is the quote,” the majority counsel on the committee told Dr. Collins, per the transcript. “Do you recall science or evidence that supported the six-feet distance?”

“I do not,” Collins replied.

Counsel then asked, “Is that I do not recall or I do not see any evidence supporting six feet?”

To which Collins replied “I did not see evidence, but I’m not sure I would have been shown evidence at that point.”

“Since then, it has been an awfully large topic. Have you seen any evidence since then supporting six feet?” Counsel replied.

“No,” said Collins.

None of this is a surprise to those who were paying attention. Back in August 2020 I reported how there was no scientific evidence backing up the six-foot social distancing rule, and that in fact it appears it came from a high school research project that was not based on actual data but on a computer simulation comparable to SIM City.

Even now, the CDC continues to recommend the 6-foot spacing rule, though those rules are based on nothing more than the opinion of some petty dictator in the bureaucracy.

During the entire COVID panic I complained repeatedly about the lack of scientific evidence. Every time the CDC or the government would change its rules, I’d ask, “What new research has appeared to justify this change?” Of course, there never was any new research. These petty goons simply made it up as they went along.

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A really really big landslide on Mars

1:22 pm

A really really big landslide on Mars
Click for original image.

Sometimes the cool geological features I find in the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) image archive are so large they are difficult to present on this webpage. Today is an example. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 13, 2024 by the high resolution camera on MRO. It shows the distinct run-out of debris from a landslide that flowed downhill to the north as a single unit of material. Along the way it carved its track in the ground, almost like a ramp.

The full picture however suggested something much more spectacular. In that full image this landslide is merely a small side avalanche to a landslide many times larger. And that high resolution picture only shows what appears to be a small section of that giant slide. Obviously, this required a look at the global mosaic produced by MRO’s context camera to find out how far that avalanche actually extended.
» Read more

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NASA signs new agreement with ESA to partner on Franklin Mars rover

9:41 am

NASA yesterday signed a new agreement with the European Space Agency (ESA) that confirmed its previous commitment to help land ESA’s Franklin rover on Mars.

With this memorandum of understanding, the NASA Launch Services Program will procure a U.S. commercial launch provider for the Rosalind Franklin rover. The agency will also provide heater units and elements of the propulsion system needed to land on Mars.

Previously NASA had committed $30 million to pay for that launch provider, as yet undetermined. It now wants $49 million for the Franklin mission, with the extra money likely to pay for the new additional equipment outlined in this agreement.

Whether NASA gets this money from Congress however remains unknown. It has not yet been appropriated.

This overall European project has been fraught with problems. It was first designed as a partnership with NASA. Then Obama pulled NASA out in 2012, and ESA switched to a partnership with Russia, which was to provide the rocket and lander. Then in 2022 Russia invaded the Ukraine and Europe broke off all its partnerships with Russia.

Since then ESA has signed a deal with the company Thales Alenia to build the lander.

As these political foibles were going on, the rover also had parachute issues that forced ESA to cancel its original launch date in 2022, using the Russian rocket.

It is likely Congress will approve this additional funding, though it seems to me that Europe should be able to afford paying for its own launch, especially if it is buying that service from the much cheaper U.S. market.

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Another “rightwing COVID conspiracy theory” proves to be true

12:59 pm

Today's modern witch hunt
Burning witches: The debate technique used by
those in charge during the Wuhan panic

Since the very beginning of the COVID panic in 2020 many perfectly reasonable people, both inside and outside the medical community, suggested that COVID was artifically created and that the evidence strongly suggested its source was from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Worse, the evidence suggested that this work was partly funded by the United States itself — approved by federal bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci — that funnelled government contracts to China to do dangerous infectious disease research which that hostile nation could then use against us.

Unfortunately, those individuals found themselves routinely mocked as pushing a “rightwing COVID conspiracy theory,” with many finding their careers destroyed by blacklisting. During those dark times it was forbidden to ask any questions that went against the leftist government narrative that pushed the myths that COVID was a deadly perfectly natural disease, that lockdowns, masks, and social distancing were the only ways to stop it, and that in the end only the COVID jab could cure it.

We now know without question that those accepted wisdoms, enforced by brutal intolerance, were all wrong, and that the blackballed individuals who advocated otherwise were 100% correct.

Or to put it more bluntly, the only difference between a “rightwing conspiracy theory” and the truth is a few months.

This week we got another proof of this apt saying.
» Read more

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Earth-sized exoplanet discovered orbiting dwarf star 55 light years away

10:49 am

Using a number of ground-based telescopes worldwide, astronomers have discovered an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting what the scientists label an “ultra-cool” dwarf star only about 55 light years away.

You can read the paper here.

Though Earth-sized, this exoplanet is not habitable. It orbits the star every 17 hours and is believed to be tidally locked, with one side always facing the star. More important, though this red dwarf star has likely existed for many tens of billions of years and will continue for many tens of billions of years into the future, the star is too dim and lacking in the kind of resources needed for life. It also drenches the planet with bursts of radiation, which is also believed to have stripped the planet of an atmosphere.

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Potentially serious problem on BepiColombo Mercury mission

10:14 am

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), engineers have discovered what could be a potentially serious problem on BepiColombo mission that is presently on its way to Mercury.

The solar arrays and electric propulsion system on the Mercury Transfer Module are used to generate thrust during the spacecraft’s complex journey from Earth to Mercury.

However, on 26 April, as BepiColombo was scheduled to begin its next manoeuvre, the Transfer Module failed to deliver enough electrical power to the spacecraft’s thrusters.

A combined team from ESA and the mission’s industrial partners set to work the moment the issue was identified. By 7 May, they had restored BepiColombo’s thrust to approximately 90% of its previous level. However, the Transfer Module’s available power is still lower than it should be, and so full thrust cannot yet be restored.

The press release implies that this issue won’t prevent the spacecraft from entering orbit around Mercury as scheduled in December 2025, but one wonders how that could be if it doesn’t have sufficient power to do the proper course correction during its last major flyby of Mercury in September 2024. If it misses its precise route in ’24 it could miss Mercury entirely in ’25.

Engineers are analyzing the situation to see what can be done to get it to Mercury, while also trying to figure out what caused this power problem in the first place in order to fix it.

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Juno looks down at Jupiter

9:50 am

Jupiter as seen by Juno on May 12, 2024
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on May 12, 2024 by the camera on the Jupiter orbiter Juno during its most recent close-fly of the gas giant, its sixty-first since it arrived in 2016. The picture was snapped when Juno was about 34,674 miles away from Jupiter as it flew over the northern hemisphere.

Citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos then took that raw image and enhanced and enlarged it to bring out the storm details. You can see the distinct bands that cut across Jupiter’s equatorial and mid-latitudes. The reddish band is where the Great Red Spot is located, though that spot is not seen in this picture.

As we move north those bands slowly transition into the chaotic storms of the polar regions, which also circle the pole but do not form bands.

For scale I have added a circle that approximates the Earth’s size in comparison to Jupiter. You will notice that some of those polar storms are as big if not bigger than the Earth itself. To think we presently have any real understanding of the processes that create Jupiter’s climate and weather systems is to be arrogant beyond belief.

Fortunately, the scientists who study Jupiter are not that arrogant, though they often can’t admit it and are forced to sound otherwise when ignorant journalists and NASA managers demand more answers from them then are possible. The scientists understand that what makes pictures like this intriguing is not what it tells us but the amount of ignorance it reveals. To get funding for future research however sometimes requires they sound more knowledgeable than they are.

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The aurora as seen looking down from space

9:12 am

The aurora over the U.S. on May 11, 2024
Click for original image.

NOAA on May 13, 2024 released a set of eight images taken by its fleet of JPSS weather satellites, showing the strong Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights that were activated over the May 11th weekend due to several very strong solar flares on the Sun and sent a geomagnetic storm at the Earth.

One of those images, reduced to post here, is to the right. You can see the eastern coast of the United States, outlined by city lights, with a band of aurora cutting across the northern half and reaching south below the Great Lakes. The other seven images are available at the link above.

The geomagnetic storm was the strongest produced by the Sun in more than two decades, since 2003. That storm occurred during solar maximum, as did the May 11th this past weekend. However, the Sun experienced another solar maximum in-between, in 2014, which produced few such storms, and none as strong.

I want to add that despite the screams of panic prior to the arrival of this storm, its arrival produced only minor disturbances in the world’s electrical grid, and in fact was proof positive that the many decades of work that electrical companies have devoted to protecting the grid from such storms has paid off. It is very unlikely any major storm from the Sun can harm that grid in the future, unless of course we get lazy and stop maintaining it.

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Curiosity looks forward and back

11:34 am

Panorama looking north
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map

The images above and below are small sections from 360 degree panorama created on May 13, 2024 from 31 photos taken by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The red dotted line indicates Curiosity’s planned route, while the white dotted line its actual route. The rover’s present position is marked by the blue dot. The yellow lines indicate the area covered by the picture above, while the green lines indicate the area covered by the picture below.

The image above looks north, back down Gediz Vallis and across to the north rim of Gale Crater, about 20-25 miles away. The red dotted line marks the rover’s path to get up to this point. All told, Curiosity has climbed about 2,500 feet in elevation since it left the floor of Gale Crater about nine years ago.

The image below looks south, up Gediz Vallis and towards the peak of Mount Sharp (not visible), about 26 miles away and about 16,000 feet higher up. Curiosity might move forward about 500 feet to the small hill on the left (indicated by the red dot), or it might turn west from this point, as indicated by the red dotted line on the overview map.

Panorama looking south
Click for original image.

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A planet with the density of cotton candy?

10:32 am

The uncertainty of science: According to data obtained from ground-based telescopes of a newly discovered transiting exoplanet, that planet has the density of cotton candy.

This new planet, located 1,200 light-years from Earth, is 50% larger than Jupiter but seven times less massive, giving it an extremely low density comparable to that of cotton candy. “WASP-193b is the second least dense planet discovered to date, after Kepler-51d, which is much smaller,” explains Khalid Barkaoui, a Postdcotral Researcher at ULiège’s EXOTIC Laboratory and first author of the article published in Nature Astronomy. Its extremely low density makes it a real anomaly among the more than five thousand exoplanets discovered to date. This extremely-low-density cannot be reproduced by standard models of irradiated gas giants, even under the unrealistic assumption of a coreless structure.”

Such a gas giant is not impossible. For example, Saturn’s density is so low that if you could find an ocean large enough it would float. The scientists theorize that this exoplanet is likly comprised mostly of hydrogen and helium.

Nonetheless, there are phenomenon here that we certainly do not understand.

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XRISM X-ray space telescope functioning despite closed “aperture door”

9:50 am

XRISM, a joint X-ray space telescope built by NASA and Japan’s space agency JAXA, is collecting data despite the failure on one instrument of an aperture door to open.

In January, project scientists said that XRISM was working well except for an aperture door, also called a gate valve, for the Dewar on its imaging instrument, Resolve, which failed to open. The instrument can still operate with the door closed, although the door, made of beryllium, does attenuate some X-rays at lower energies.

At the time, efforts were underway to try and open the gate valve. However, speaking at a May 7 meeting of the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy, Mark Clampin, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said those efforts were on hold for the next year and a half.

Instead, the science team decided to proceed with science operations, since the telescope has two other working instruments, and can get data even from this hindered third.

XRISM is a replacement of a previous JAXA X-ray telescope that launched in 2016 but failed immediately.

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A galaxy’s net of dust

10:02 am

A galaxy's net of dust
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the central part of galaxy NGC 4753, 60 million light years away and known as a lenticular galaxy because of its elongated elliptical shape and ill-defined spiral arms. It is believed we looking at this galaxy edge-on.

You can see a wider image of NGC 4753 here, released in January and taken by the Gemini South telescope in Chile. According to that press release, the brown dust lanes that seem to form a wavy net in the foreground are created by a process called differential precession:

Precession occurs when a rotating object’s axis of rotation changes orientation, like a spinning top that wobbles as it loses momentum. And differential means that the rate of precession varies depending on the radius. In the case of a dusty accretion disk orbiting a galactic nucleus, the rate of precession is faster toward the center and slower near the edges. This varying, wobble-like motion results from the angle at which NGC 4753 and its former dwarf companion collided and is the cause of the strongly twisted dust lanes we see wrapped around the galaxy’s luminous nucleus today.

Once again, the limitation of only observing this object from one angle makes it very difficult to untangle what it really looks like. Therefore, these conclusions carry a great deal of uncertainty.

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ISRO to land its Chandayaan-4 lunar sample return mission near where Chandrayaan-3 landed

9:09 am


Click for interactive map. To see the original
image, go here.

India’s space agency ISRO announced on May 11, 2024 that the landing site for its Chandayaan-4 lunar sample return mission will be in the same area where its Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander touched down, carrying the Pragyan rover.

The map to the right shows that location, at about 69 degrees south latitude. The mission will require two launches, and will have five components, a propulsion module, a transfer module, a lander module, an ascender module and a re-entry module. The two rockets will use India’s LVM-3 and PSLV rockets.

The actual mission concept, including which modules will be launched with which rocket as well as whether they will dock in Earth or lunar orbit, has not yet been released. This most recent tweet however mentioned that the lander will only operate for one lunar day, which means it will land, grab its samples quickly, and send the ascender capsule up, all within an Earth week.

A launch timeline for the mission also remains unclear.

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Significant water found in samples from China’s Chang’e-5 Moon mission

12:33 pm

According to a new paper published in late April, scientists analyzing the samples returned from the Moon by China’s Chang’e-5 Moon mission in 2021 have found more water embedded in the topsoil than expected. From the paper’s conclusions:

[O]ur results indicate that a considerable [solar wind]-derived water is stored within at least the uppermost meter (down to 0.8 meters) of the regolith beneath the lunar surface. This type of water represents a valuable potential resource for future in situ exploration of the Moon, as it not only has higher contents than indigenous water (up to several wt.% vs. <50 ppm) but could also be extracted by heating.

We are still not talking about a lot of water, but this result suggests there is more than earlier reports from Chang’e-5’s samples. This result also could explain the hydrogen signature across much of the Moon’s surface by Chandrayaan-1.

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The spiral dust streams within the Andromeda galaxy

10:15 am

Andromeda in infrared
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture above, cropped and reduced to post here, was released yesterday and uses archival infrared data from the now retired Spitzer Space telescope to highlight the dust found within the Andromeda galaxy, about two million light years away.

Spitzer’s infrared view was similar to Webb’s but at a far lower resolution. In the picture above the red indicates cool dust.

By separating these wavelengths and looking at the dust alone, astronomers can see the galaxy’s “skeleton” — places where gas has coalesced and cooled, sometimes forming dust, creating conditions for stars to form. This view of Andromeda revealed a few surprises. For instance, although it is a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, Andromeda is dominated by a large dust ring rather than distinct arms circling its center. The images also revealed a secondary hole in one portion of the ring where a dwarf galaxy passed through.

The data also suggested that the dust is flowing at a very steady rate into Andromeda’s central black hole. According to computer simulations, this steady rate would explain why the supermassive black holes at the center of both Andromeda and the Milky Way are relative inactive. If the dust fell in clumps rather than a steady flow, both black holes would exhibit bursts of high activity, similar to active galactic centers.

A side note for anyone wishing to star-gaze: Andromeda is actually the largest visible galaxy in the night sky, about six times with width of the full Moon. If you can get to a very dark-sky location, get your eyes very dark-adapted, and you know where to look, you can actually see it with the naked eye. I did this once at a star party, helped by a bunch of amateur astronomers. The galaxy is very faint, and it helps to use binoculars to help locate it, but once identified its size in the sky truly is breath-taking.

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The edge of a vast frozen lava sea on Mars

1:36 pm

The edge of a vast frozen lava sea on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 10, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label boringly “Lava Interactions with Landscape.”

What is the lava, and what is the landscape? Here’s is my initial guess, based simply on looking at this image alone. The mound in the middle is the landscape, the rounded top of a very ancient mountain or hill. The flat plain that surrounds it is flood lava, that in the far past poured in and mostly buried the mountain.

Everything here signals a very old terrain. To get this mountain worn so smooth from the thin Martian atmosphere has to have taken more than a billion years. And that flood lava has to also be as old, because of the number of craters on its surface. I don’t know the impact rate, but I know it takes time to accumulate this number of impacts.

The sense of age is further underlined by the moat that surrounds the hill. When that lava poured in, it would have flooded right up to the mountain slope. Over time the weakest section of lava, most prone to erosion, would be that contact point. To wear it away as we now see it must have taken many eons.

All these speculations are a very unreliable guesses. To get a better understanding of this terrain it is essential we look at more than this picture alone.
» Read more

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Taffy terrain in Mars’ death valley

2:11 pm

Taffy terrain in Mars' death valley
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and enhanced to post here, was taken on December 17, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label “banded terrain and possible breached crater.”

Banded terrain is another name for a geological feature dubbed “taffy terrain” and only found on Mars, and furthermore only found there in Hellas Basin, the deepest giant impact basin on the red planet. This taffy terrain is considered very young, no than 3 billion years old, and formed from the flow of some form of viscous material, though what that material is remains unsolved.

This image however may help solve that mystery. The breached crater is just off frame to the upper right. The two-fingered flow coming down from the picture’s top is the flow coming out of the crater’s gap.
» Read more

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Webb data suggests a super-Earth might have an atmosphere

10:20 am

Using infrared data from the Webb Space Telescope, scientists now think the hot super-Earth exoplanet dubbed 55 Cancri e and 41 light years away might have an atmosphere made up not only of vaporized molten rock but other gases as well, such as carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide.

The exoplanet orbits much too close to its star, only 1.4 million miles away, for any life as we know it to exist. Its surface is thought to be molten, heated by that star.

The team thinks that the gases blanketing 55 Cancri e would be bubbling out from the interior, rather than being present ever since the planet formed. “The primary atmosphere would be long gone because of the high temperature and intense radiation from the star,” said Bello-Arufe. “This would be a secondary atmosphere that is continuously replenished by the magma ocean. Magma is not just crystals and liquid rock; there’s a lot of dissolved gas in it, too.”

As always, these results remain unconfirmed and are very uncertain.

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Chang’e-6 enters lunar orbit

9:42 am

Chang'e-6 landing zone

China’s Chang’e-6 sample return spacecraft successfully entered lunar orbit today, in preparation for its mission to land and bring back material from the the far side of the Moon. The landing zone is indicated by the red box on the map to the right, on the southern rim of Apollo Crater in the southern hemisphere. That crater is inside South Aitkin Basin, one the Moon’s largest impact basins.

The spacecraft will next adjust its orbit to prepare for sending its lander-ascender sections down to the surface. If the landing goes well, it will drill into the surface, place some material into the ascender section, which will then lift-off and dock with the orbiter-return section in orbit. The material will be transferred into the return section, which will separate and bring the material back to Earth, sometime in late June.

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TESS resumes science operations

9:26 am

Engineers have corrected the issue that put the space telescope TESS into safe mode on April 8, 2024 and have resumed science operations.

The operations team determined this latest safe mode was triggered by a failure to properly unload momentum from the spacecraft’s reaction wheels, a routine activity needed to keep the satellite properly oriented when making observations. The propulsion system, which enables this momentum transfer, had not been successfully repressurized following a prior safe mode event April 8. The team has corrected this, allowing the mission to return to normal science operations. The cause of the April 8 safe mode event remains under investigation.

As for that April 8th safe mode, though engineers were able to return the spacecraft to normal operations after about a week, that they still do not know what caused it remains a concern.

TESS takes high resolution survey images of 93% of the sky about once per month. By comparing the data from each scan, scientists have discovered so far more than 300 transiting exoplanets as well as many supernovae and other phenomenon related to variable stars.

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Swirls of layers and dunes at the bottom of Valles Marineris

2:57 pm

Overview map

Swirls of layers and dunes
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 25, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a small spot of the floor of Mars’ giant canyon Valles Marineris, the largest such canyon known in the solar system, as indicated by the white dot on the overview map above.

This location is not actually at the very bottom of the canyon, but on a very large mountainous bench extending out about 20 miles from the canyon’s south rim. It seems there is a lot of dust and sand on this bench, producing many miles of swirling dunes. It also appears there are many terraced layers in the region as well, which also swirl in curves going in many different directions. Though it appears that most of the swirls in this picture are from layers in the bedrock, this conclusion is not certain. For example, are the curves on the top of the mesa dunes or bedrock layers? The answer is hardly clear.

For scale, the canyon at this location is about 80 to 90 miles wide. The northern rim rises five miles from the bottom to the top, while the south rises seven miles. And yet, though five to ten times larger than Earth’s Grand Canyon, this is only a small side spur of Valles Marineris.

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Scientists: Restrict all exploration on Mars to protect our future work!

10:52 am

In a paper just published, planetary scientists Australia have proposed strict guidelines for any future exploration on Mars in order to prevent future colonists from doing anything that might interfere with any future research the scientists might want to do.

The thrust of the paper, they comment, is to ensure that locales of geological significance on Mars do not suffer the same damage as many sites on Earth have faced. Sites on the Red Planet can be practically conserved while still allowing science and exploration to continue, they say.

“Geoconservation allows humanity to protect Earth’s story and geological history,” the researchers observe, “so that present and future generations can experience Earth’s aesthetic beauty, conduct scientific research, connect with various cultures, adequately protect and ensure the functioning of Earth’s biology and ecosystems, and learn about the history of our planet.”

Let me translate: “We academics fear allowing others the freedom to explore. We come first. Let’s create rules that will allow us to do what we want, while forcing others to ask us for permission to do what they want.”

Sadly, this mentality now rules throughout all of western civilization’s intellectual community, and its not much different than the totalitarian top-down attitudes of the Russians and Chinese. Those in charge or better educated simply know better than everyone else, and are hell bent on telling everyone what they can and cannot do.

The first few generations of colonists on Mars, the Moon, and the asteroids are going to find their hands badly tied. Freedom will not exist.

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A supernova factory

9:44 am

A supernova factory

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2023 as part of a survey of galaxies where recent supernovae have occurred. One occurred in 2020 in this galaxy, which is about 240 million light years away and dubbed UGC 9684.

Remarkably, the 2020 supernova in this galaxy isn’t the only one that’s been seen there — four supernova-like events have been spotted in UGC 9684 since 2006, putting it up there with the most active supernova-producing galaxies. It turns out that UGC 9684 is a quite active star-forming galaxy, calculated as producing one solar mass worth of stars every few years! This level of stellar formation makes UGC 9684 a veritable supernova factory, and a galaxy to watch for astronomers hoping to examine these exceptional events.

This image provides scientists a high resolution baseline should another supernova occur. It will not only make it easier to spot a future supernova, it also increases the chances that the progenitor star that went boom could be identified.

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