Tag: science

Juno experienced data download issue during most recent Jupiter close flyby

9:07 am

Right after Juno made its 47th close fly-by of Jupiter on December 14, 2022, the download of the obtained data was suddenly disrupted, forcing engineers to put Juno into safe mode.

The issue – an inability to directly access the spacecraft memory storing the science data collected during the flyby – was most likely caused by a radiation spike as Juno flew through a radiation-intensive portion of Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and its mission partners successfully rebooted the computer and, on Dec. 17, put the spacecraft into safe mode, a precautionary status in which only essential systems operate.

As of Dec. 22, steps to recover the flyby data yielded positive results, and the team is now downlinking the science data. There is no indication that the science data through the time of closest approach to Jupiter, or from the spacecraft’s flyby of Jupiter’s moon Io, was adversely affected. The remainder of the science data collected during the flyby is expected to be sent down to Earth over the next week, and the health of the data will be verified at that time. The spacecraft is expected to exit safe mode in about a week’s time. Juno’s next flyby of Jupiter will be on Jan. 22, 2023.

That such disruptions have actually not occurred very often on Juno is somewhat remarkable, considering the hostile nature of the environment around Jupiter.

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Perseverance experiment generates new record of breathable oxygen on Mars

8:59 am

MOXIE, an experiment on the rover Perseverance to see if breathable oxygen could be generated from the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, has set a new production record.

The atmosphere around Jezero Crater, the present location of Perseverance, reached peak density for the year mid (Earth) summer. This presented the perfect opportunity for the MOXIE science team to step on the accelerator and test how fast we could safely produce oxygen. This test occurred on Sol 534 (Aug. 22, 2022) and produced a peak of 10.44 grams per hour of oxygen. This represented a new record for Martian oxygen production! The team was thrilled to surpass our design goal of 6 grams per hour by over 4.4 grams. The peak rate was held for 1 minute of the 70 minutes oxygen was produced during the run.

MOXIE’s next opportunity to operate came recently. Despite the decreasing density of the Mars atmosphere, on Sol 630 (Nov. 28, 2022) MOXIE managed to break the record again and produce nearly 10.56 grams per hour at peak. Oxygen production was sustained for a 9.79 grams per hour for nearly 40 minutes.

These numbers may seem small, but MOXIE production runs are limited by available rover power. In addition, MOXIE technology was miniaturized to accommodate the limited space available on the rover. A MOXIE for a human Mars mission would produce oxygen nearly 200 times faster and work continuously for well over a year.

Ten grams per hour is about half what one person needs to breathe, and is a little less than a large tree produces. Moreover, MOXIE had earlier conducted seven other runs, producing about six grams of oxygen per hour during each.

Based on these tests, MOXIE has unequivocally proven that future human explorers will not need to bring much oxygen with them, and will in fact have essentially an unlimited supply, on hand from the red planet itself. More important, MOXIE has also proven that the technology to obtain this oxygen already exists.

All we need to do is plant enough MOXIE trees on Mars.

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Bursting lava bubbles on Mars

10:58 am

Burst lava bubbles on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 4, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

I really have no idea what caused these distorted cones. My intuition (a dangerous thing to rely on when it comes to science) suggests these are volcanic in nature. Imagine hot lava with gas bubbling up from below. Periodically a gas bubble will burst on the surface releasing the gas. Depending on temperature, that bursting bubble could harden in place.

The overview map below provides some support for my intuition, but it also suggests this first hypothesis could be completely wrong, something that does not surprise me in the least.
» Read more

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Perseverance deposits first core sample for pickup later

8:57 am

Perseverance's location December 21, 2022
Click for interactive map.

The Mars Perseverance rover has now deposited its first core sample on the floor of Jezero Crater for pickup later by a future Mars helicopter for eventual return to Earth.

A titanium tube containing a rock sample is resting on the Red Planet’s surface after being placed there on Dec. 21 by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. Over the next two months, the rover will deposit a total of 10 tubes at the location, called “Three Forks,” building humanity’s first sample depot on another planet. The depot marks a historic early step in the Mars Sample Return campaign.

The blue dot on the map to the right shows this location. The green dot shows Ingenuity’s present position. The red dotted line the rover’s future travel route.

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InSight mission ended

3:01 pm

Location of InSight's largest quakes
The white patches mark the locations on Mars of the largest quakes
detected by InSight

NASA today announced that it has officially ended the mission of the InSight lander on Mars.

Mission controllers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California were unable to contact the lander after two consecutive attempts, leading them to conclude the spacecraft’s solar-powered batteries have run out of energy – a state engineers refer to as “dead bus.”

NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts. The agency will continue to listen for a signal from the lander, just in case, but hearing from it at this point is considered unlikely. The last time InSight communicated with Earth was Dec. 15.

Other than the success of InSight’s seismometer, this project was mostly a failure. Its launch was delayed two years, from 2016 to 2018, because of problems with the original French seismometer, forcing JPL to take over. Then its German-made mole digger failed to drill into the Martian surface, causing the failure of the lander’s second instrument, a heat sensor designed to measure the interior temperature of Mars.

Fortunately the seismometer worked, or otherwise it would have been a total loss. That data has told us much about Mars and its interior.

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Webb in safe mode intermittently during the past two weeks

2:49 pm

According to a short update today from the science team, the Webb Space Telescope went into safe mode on December 7, 2022 and was in that state “intermittently” through December 20, 2022 because of a software issue.

The James Webb Space Telescope resumed science operations Dec. 20, after Webb’s instruments intermittently went into safe mode beginning Dec. 7 due to a software fault triggered in the attitude control system, which controls the pointing of the observatory. During a safe mode, the observatory’s nonessential systems are automatically turned off, placing it in a protected state until the problem can be fixed. This event resulted in several pauses to science operations totaling a few days over that time period. Science proceeded otherwise during that time. The Webb team adjusted the commanding system, and science has now fully resumed.

It would be nice to have a more detailed description of that “software fault”, and how it affected the attitude control system. Such things can be very trivial, or they can be disastrous. NASA has a responsibility to tell the public which.

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The Wuhan panic underlines how scientists have abandoned the search for truth

1:50 pm

Modern science
Modern science

For almost three years I have been documenting endlessly the utter failure of almost every policy imposed by politicians and government health officials in response to the COVID epidemic. From masks to social distancing to lockdowns to COVID shot mandates, none of their draconian rules have done anything to stop the spread of the Wuhan flu, which was always impossible anyway.

Even worse than these bad policies however has been the behavior of the scientific community the past three years. This community has increasingly put politics and narrative above the search for truth, a focus that signals a terrible cultural change that is so horrible its consequences can barely be measured.

To understand this tragedy we must first go back to what science and government once believed about epidemics. The traditional infectious disease policies that doctors and governments had successfully used for more than a century, based on real research and an honest appraisal of the facts by scientists, always recognized that it was impossible to “stop the spread” of a respiratory illness. What worked best was to protect the aged and sick, whom such diseases could kill, while allowing the virus to quickly spread through the rest of the healthy population in order to quickly create a herd immunity that would choke off the virus’s early most virulent strains. The disease would then mutate to milder forms — essentially a cold — that the aged and weak could fight off.

The virus of COVID-19 has done exactly this, but along the way it killed many more older and sick people then necessary, because today’s modern petty tyrants — encouraged by many scientists — decided instead to toss that past knowledge out. Herd immunity was delayed by the lockdown policies, and most governments did little to protect the aged and sick, with some governments even acting to introduce the virus to these threatened populations.

To underline the failure of these policies, here are just a small recent sampling of the growing research outlining the failures of masks, social distancing, and lockdowns:
» Read more

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The same region on Ganymede, as seen by Voyager-1 in 1979 and Juno in 2021

11:30 am

Ganymede compared between Voyager-1 and Juno
Click for full image.

When the Jupiter orbiter Juno did a close pass of the moon Ganymede on June 7, 2021, it took four pictures, covering regions mostly photographed for the first time by Voyager-1 in its close fly-by in 1979.

Scientists have now published the data from this new fly-by. Though Juno’s higher resolution pictures revealed many new details when compared with the Voyager-1 images from four decades earlier, the scientists found no changes. The comparison image, figure 2 of their paper, is to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here.

A flicker comparison between the registered JunoCam and Voyager reprojected mosaics revealed no apparent new impact features. Given the high albedo of fresh craters on Ganymede, with high albedo ejecta deposits two or three times the diameter of the craters themselves, we argue that new craters as small as 250 m diameter would be detectable in images at these 1 km per pixel scales. Extrapolating Ganymede cratering rates from Zahnle et al. (2003) below 1 km, the probability of JunoCam observing a new crater over 12.2 million km2 in 42 years is 1 in 1500, consistent with none being observed.

In other words, at these resolutions finding no new impacts is not a surprise.

Of the new features detected, the Juno images could see more details in the bright rays emanating from the crater Tros (in the lower center of both images), and thus found “…terrain boundaries previously mapped as ‘undivided’ or as ‘approximate’, several large craters, and 12 paterae newly identified in this region.”

Paterae resemble craters but are thought to be a some form of volcanic caldera. Their geological origin however is not yet completely understood.

The paper’s conclusion is actually the most exciting:

The insight gained from this handful of images makes it likely in our opinion that new observations from the upcoming JUICE and Europa Clipper missions will revolutionize our understanding of Ganymede.

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Kepler’s first discovered exoplanet is spiraling into its aging star

9:33 am

Measurements of the orbit of first exoplanet discovered by the Kepler space telescope have determined that its orbit is very slowly shrinking, and that it will eventually spiral into its aging sun.

In the case of Kepler-1658b, according to the new study, its orbital period is decreasing at the miniscule rate of about 131 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) per year, with a shorter orbit indicating the planet has moved closer to its star.

Detecting this decline required multiple years of careful observation. The watch started with Kepler and then was picked up by the Palomar Observatory’s Hale Telescope in Southern California and finally the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Telescope, or TESS, which launched in 2018. All three instruments captured transits, the term for when an exoplanet crosses the face of its star and causes a very slight dimming of the star’s brightness. Over the past 13 years, the interval between Kepler-1658b’s transits has slightly but steadily decreased.

The scientists think tidal forces are causing the orbit to shrink. The star itself is old and beginning to expand as it evolves towards its own stellar death.

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A congregation of Martian dust devils

12:13 pm

A congregation of Martian dust devils
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 9, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a spot on Mars where, as indicated by the many many tracks, dust devils routinely develop and travel across the surface.

Though this whole region appears to favor dust devils, within it are places that are even more favored. For example, the number of tracks on the northern and eastern slopes of that small hill at center left practically cover the surface, while the hill’s western and southern slopes are almost untouched.

Both the overview map and the global Mars map below provide the full context.
» Read more

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Perseverance’s planned route up onto the Jezero Crater delta

9:55 am

Perseverance's future route onto the delta
Click for original image.

Even as the Perseverance science team prepares to cache the ten first core samples on the surface of Mars for later pickup by a future Mars helicopter for return to Earth, they have also released the planned route they intend to follow as they drive the rover up onto the delta that flowed into Jezero Crater in the distant past.

The black line on the map to the right shows that route, with the black dots indicating points in which further core samples will likely be taken. The red dot indicates Perseverance’s present position, with the white line indicating its past travels. The green dot marks Ingenuity’s present position.

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Astronomers identify what they think are the Milky Way’s first stars

9:17 am

The concentration of ancient stars in the Milky Way's core region
The concentration of ancient stars in the Milky Way’s core region.
Click for originial image.

The uncertainty of science: Using data produced by the European space telescope Gaia, combined with computer analysis, astronomers think they have identified the Milky Way’s first stars, all located within 30,000 light years of the galaxy’s core region.

The researchers began by locating a sample of two million bright red giant stars with the right spectra, using computer neural network machine learning.

With that sample, it proved comparatively easy to identify the ancient heart of the Milky Way galaxy – a population of stars that Rix has dubbed the “poor old heart”, given their low metallicity, inferred old age, and central location. On a sky map, these stars appear to be concentrated around the galactic center. The distances conveniently supplied by Gaia (via the parallax method) allow for a 3D reconstruction that shows those stars confined within a comparatively small region around the center, approximately 30,000 light-years across

The stars in question neatly complement Xiang’s and Rix’s earlier study of the Milky Way’s teenage years: They have just the right metallicity to have brought forth the metal-poorest of those stars that, later on, formed the Milky Way’s thick disk. Since that earlier study provided a chronology for thick-disk formation, this makes the ancient heart of the Milky Way older than about 12.5 billion years.

While the uncertainties of this scientific result are huge, it still helps identify the beginnings of the Milky Way, its initial size, and the kind of stars that existed here at that time.

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