Happy 9th anniversary to the Opportunity rover on Mars!
Talk about getting your money’s worth: The rover was planned as a 90 day mission.
The check is in the mail: NASA has now agreed to contribute equipment and researchers to a European dark energy mission.
And why should Europe have any expectation that NASA will follow through? Europe’s ExoMars project was screwed badly when NASA pulled out last year. Nor was that the first time the U.S. government reneged on a deal with Europe.
Considering the fragile nature of the U.S. federal budget, I wouldn’t depend on anything from NASA or any U.S. government agency for the foreseeable future. And this includes the various private space companies such as SpaceX and Orbital Sciences that are using NASA subsidies to build their spaceships. Get those things built, and quickly! The government money could disappear very soon.
A balloon sent above Antarctica to study cosmic rays has set a new record for the longest flight.
Archeologists have now found the earliest evidence of chocolate in Utah, suggesting that trade with the tropics was going on as early as 800 AD.
Since there still are some uncertainties about the evidence, there are still doubts about the trade.
Crash! Boom! A new infrared image of Betelgeuse suggests the star and its winds will smash into the interstellar medium in only a few thousand years.
If the bar [of gas] is a completely separate object, then taking into account the motion of Betelgeuse and its arcs and the separation between them and the bar, the [star’s] outermost arc will collide with the bar in just 5000 years, with the red supergiant star itself hitting the bar roughly 12 500 years later.
Even as the Kepler mission struggles to survive, the science team has released its entire database of exoplanet candidates to the public.
The judge who sentenced seven earthquake scientists/officials in Italy to prison has released a detailed explanation for his verdict.
The judge’s perspective is worth reading. It is not as foolish as some wish to make it appear. For one thing, he makes it very clear that
the trial was not against science but against seven individuals who failed to carry out their duty as laid down by the law. The scientists were not convicted for failing to predict an earthquake, something [Judge Marco] Billi says was impossible to do, but for their complete failure to properly analyse, and to explain, the threat posed by the swarm.
At the same time, I still think it very bad for the law and government to interfere in this kind of situation. For example, I think the actions of the climategate scientists were as improper (though they did not lead to anyone’s direct death). Yet, the last thing I want is for the government to prosecute them. Rather, I want the scientific community to condemn them instead, so that their careers as scientists suffer. Imprisonment is an over-reaction, and instead serves merely squelch open debate and honest scientific work, something I expect to happen now in Italy.
Data from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter now suggests that a lake in a Martian crater had filled from groundwater coming up from below.
This is an important discovery, as it demonstrates that an underground water table had existed on Mars, at least at this location. With such a water table, it is possible for all kinds of interesting biological things to have taken place, underground.
Uh-oh: Kepler has been shut down for ten days to save the mission.
The spacecraft was launched with four so-called reaction wheels that spin to help keep the telescope pointing at its target fields of stars. One of these, reaction wheel No 2, failed in July 2012, leaving three to do the maneuvers, including a quarterly roll to a new orientation. Now reaction wheel No 4 has shown early indications that it might fail, prompting its NASA controllers to attempt some long-distance maintenance. They hope that by resting the wheels, their lubricant will spread to ease increased friction.
If this wheel fails permanently, the Kepler mission would be over, as it would be impossible to orient the spacecraft with enough precision with only two wheels.
I reported on the discovery of Comet ISON back in September, noting then the possibilities that this could become one of the brightest comets in years, while giving its show in primetime for the northern hemisphere. As this article also notes, this show could also be a dud, as has happened before. Stay tuned.
New images of a dry river bed on Mars.
Reull Vallis, the river-like structure in these images, is believed to have formed when running water flowed in the distant martian past, cutting a steep-sided channel through the Promethei Terra Highlands before running on towards the floor of the vast Hellas basin. This sinuous structure, which stretches for almost [1000 miles] across the Martian landscape, is flanked by numerous tributaries, one of which can be clearly seen cutting in to the main valley towards the upper (north) side.
This will be cool: Scientists are going to use Hubble to take six more deep field images.
The Hubble Space Telescope’s iconic “Deep Field” photo wowed the world in 1996 by revealing a huge collection of galaxies hiding inside a patch of the sky that looked like nothing more than blank space. Now NASA plans to image six more “empty” bits of sky for a whole new set of deep fields that could revolutionize astronomy once again. …
Since the original photo’s release, Hubble looked even longer at the same spot to create the “Ultra Deep Field” in 2004 and then the “eXtreme Deep Field” in 2012. But the new effort, called Hubble Frontier Fields, will be the first to try a similar technique on some new areas of the heavens. These photos won’t go quite as deep as the Ultra Deep Field, but will represent some of the deepest images of the universe ever taken.
Though I repeatedly challenged them at press conferences, too many astronomers claimed in 1996 that the first Hubble Deep Field was representative of the heavens, something that seemed unlikely considering how little of the heavens this one image saw. These new deep fields will help confirm — or disprove — that claim.
Volunteers are needed to analyze images from Mars. From the website:
We need your help to find and mark ‘fans’ and ‘blotches’ on the Martian surface. Scientists believe that these features indicate wind direction and speed. By tracking ‘fans’ and ‘blotches’ over the course of several Martian years to see how they form, evolve, disappear and reform, we can help planetary scientists better understand Mars’ climate. We also hope to find out if these features form in the same spot each year and also learn how they change.
For the first time a giant squid has been filmed in its natural habitat.
In hopes of drawing the animals in, [Edith] Widder [of the Ocean Research and Conservation Association] used a different sort of light. Although very little sunlight penetrates to the deep sea, many deep dwellers produce a bioluminescent light. Past research by Widder suggests that the bioluminescence can act as a sort of burglar alarm, among other functions. The idea is that the bioluminescence produced by some prey when they are attacked may serve to attract larger predators — such a giant squid — that will then eat the attacker.
Widder and her colleagues therefore fitted Medusa with an electronic device that mimicked the bioluminescence that jellyfish produce when attacked to serve as a lure. It worked: Medusa first encountered a squid during its second deployment, igniting jubilation on the ship. “I just was blown away,” says Widder,” I couldn’t have been happier.”
An American ice-drilling team has reached Lake Whillans in Antarctica after a 600 mile journey.
Their plan is to drill down 2,600 feet to the lake. With the Russians and British, this makes three teams this year trying to drill into the buried lakes of Antarctica.
Researchers have found that the best way to protect the Gothic cathedrals of Europe from air pollution might be to coat them with olive oil.
The Russians have successfully recovered their first sample from Lake Vostok, buried almost 2.5 miles below the Antarctic icecap.
The largest known spiral galaxy. With images.
Measuring tip-to-tip across its two outsized spiral arms, NGC 6872 spans more than 522,000 light-years, making it more than five times the size of our Milky Way galaxy.
For context, the Milky Way and its two Magellanic Clouds could easily fit inside this galaxy, with lots of room to spare.
An Interior Department official has been accused of trying to disband a fish research division specifically because its research is politically incorrect.
The research division, the Fisheries Resources Branch, had repeatedly found good evidence that the salmon of the Klamath River in the northwest were not suffering significantly from the presence of the dams on that river, contradicting the accepted wisdom that the dams had to be removed in order for these species to survive. The Interior official, Jason Phillips, along with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), did not like these results, and decided that scientific work that “proved others wrong” was unacceptable and had to be squelched. From the actual complaint [pdf]:
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The reason why NASA’s planetary probes still use black and white photography.
The sky is not failing: New radar data of Apophis now indicates that its chances of the asteroid hitting the Earth in 2036 is zero.
This data doesn’t eliminate the chance of a collision, only postpones it much farther into the future.
More Apophis news: New data from the Herschel Space Telescope suggests that the asteroid is bigger and less reflective than previous believed.
Instead of 900 feet across, they now estimate it has a diameter of about 1070 feet. And knowing that the asteroid has a lower albedo means that astronomers will be better able to gauge the effect of solar radiation on Apophis’s orbit.
Pigs fly! A new National Research Council report honestly admits the possibility that the Sun might be an important factor in climate change.
The article, from NASA, itself is a remarkably fair assessment of the field’s state of knowledge (which in truth is quite spotty since we really do not yet understand what is going on with the climate). This, as far as I can remember, is the first time in years, since the early 1990s before the global warming advocates took over the climate field and shut down debate, that an official article from a government organization like NASA has been so open about these issues and not toed the politically correct line that “fossil fuels and carbon dioxide are causing global warming and don’t you dare say anything different!”
Tracking the orbit of the exoplanet in Fomalhaut’s debris disk.
Want to learn something of the geology of the Grand Canyon? The Geological Society of America has just published a special volume of papers, with the introductory and afterword [pdf] chapters available online.
Those two chapters provide a very good layman’s summary of the geological state-of-the-art of the Grand Canyon. Very worthwhile reading if you plan to hike down in the near future.
Scientists now think it is possible for there to be floating methane ice on the lakes of Titan.
Up to this point, Cassini scientists assumed that Titan lakes would not have floating ice, because solid methane is denser than liquid methane and would sink. But the new model considers the interaction between the lakes and the atmosphere, resulting in different mixtures of compositions, pockets of nitrogen gas, and changes in temperature. The result, scientists found, is that winter ice will float in Titan’s methane-and-ethane-rich lakes and seas if the temperature is below the freezing point of methane — minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit (90.4 kelvins). The scientists realized all the varieties of ice they considered would float if they were composed of at least 5 percent “air,” which is an average composition for young sea ice on Earth. (“Air” on Titan has significantly more nitrogen than Earth air and almost no oxygen.)
Worlds without end: The Kepler science team today revealed an additional 461 candidate exoplanets, with four being less than twice Earth’s size and in the habitable zone.
Since the last Kepler catalog was released in February 2012, the number of candidates discovered in the Kepler data has increased by 20 percent and now totals 2,740 potential planets orbiting 2,036 stars. The most dramatic increases are seen in the number of Earth-size and super Earth-size candidates discovered, which grew by 43 and 21 percent respectively. The new data increases the number of stars discovered to have more than one planet candidate from 365 to 467. Today, 43 percent of Kepler’s planet candidates are observed to have neighbor planets.
Of these candidates, 105 have so far been confirmed to be exoplanets by other methods.
Note that these Kepler planets are in addition to the fifteen new exoplanets noted in my previous post.
Fifteen more exoplanets have been found, orbiting their stars in the habitable zone.
NOAA today released its newest monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle and, as I do every month, I have posted the latest graph, with annotation, below the fold.
The sunspot numbers for December were not only startlingly low, they actually plunged to levels not seen since May 2011, at a time when the Sun is supposed to be approaching sunspot maximum and the number of sunspots is supposed to be increasing.
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How to make an indestructible snow fort.
