Testimony at a House hearing yesterday, including the refusal of an OMB representative to appear, lend weight to the rumors that OMB plans to end NASA’s planetary program.
Scientists have found evidence for the existence of great shallow lakes below the surface of Europa.
Is shooting down Phobos-Grunt an option?
Curing cancer using DNA and drugs.
Images taken 1363 days apart.
In two different papers published in two different journals in the past month, scientists have concluded that — despite the thinness of the planet’s atmosphere — the dunes and sands of Mars are being continually shaped and changed by its winds. In both papers the data from which this conclusion was drawn came from high resolution images taken by the HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
What is especially interesting about this conclusion is that the climate models that had been developed for the Martian atmosphere, combined with wind measurements gathered by the various Martian landers, had all suggested that the kind of strong winds necessary to move sand were rare. To quote the abstract of the paper published on Monday in the journal Geology, Bridges, et al,
Prior to Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data, images of Mars showed no direct evidence for dune and ripple motion. This was consistent with climate models and lander measurements indicating that winds of sufficient intensity to mobilize sand were rare in the low-density atmosphere.
Similarly, the second paper, Silvestro, et al, published on October 22 in Geophysical Research Letters, stated that
results from wind tunnel simulations and atmospheric models show that such strong wind events should be rare in the current Martian atmospheric setting.
Yet, both studies found significant evidence that such winds do occur on Mars, and are moving sand in many different places.
» Read more
The Senate/House final deal for the White House Science Office has slashed its budget by one third.
Frustrated that White House officials [i.e. John Holdren] have ignored congressional language curtailing scientific collaborations with China, legislators have decided to get their attention through a 32% cut in the tiny budget of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
See this story for more background.
No surprise here: NASA has extended the Messenger mission at Mercury for one more year.
A bronze artifact, resembling the remains of a buckle and a thousand years older than the house being excavated, has been found by archeologists in Alaska.
One Asia archaeologist suggested the piece may have been part of a harness or horse ornament. The researchers are looking for an East Asia expert to confer with on the bronze piece. Mason said it’s not likely the bronze piece was washed ashore after being dropped by a Russian explorer or a whaler. “That’s totally unlikely, in fact nearly impossible, considering where it is,” he said.
The mystery of the Moon’s ionosphere.
The head of the Russian space agency said yesterday that there is still a chance to save Phobos-Grunt.
“The probe is going to be in orbit until January, but in the first days of December the window will close” to re-programme it, he told Russian news agencies at Russia’s Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
He also said that the probe will not pose a threat, and will burn up in the atmosphere if it should fall to Earth.
Scientists have released a new 28 frame movie of asteroid 2005 YU55, created as the asteroid zipped past the Earth this past week.
It now looks like the stranded and toxic Russian Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt, is likely aimed at Earth.
We are looking at an uncontrolled toxic reentry scenario. Phobos-Grunt . . . is fully-laden with unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide; that’s ten tons of fuel and oxidizer. The probe itself weighs-in at only three tons. . . . Phobos-Grunt’s batteries are draining and its orbit is degrading. It looks as if the probe will reenter later this month/early December. NORAD is putting a Nov. 26 reentry date on Phobos-Grunt.
A supernova may have kicked off the birth of our sun.
I have a article awaiting publication at Sky & Telescope on this same subject, though my piece also asks the question: What was the star cluster like in which the sun formed? And can we find that star cluster today?
New data says scientists must look underground for life on Mars.
The uncertainty of science: Are cows magnetic?
Astronomers find the fastest spinning normal star.
Astronomers find clouds of primordial gas from the early universe.
And in related news, a new computer simulation suggests that the very first stars were not the giant monsters scientists had predicted.
A new analysis of data suggests that the asteroid Lutetia is a leftover fragment from the same original material that formed the Earth, Venus and Mercury.
According to GPS data gathered over the past two decades, it appears that the New Madrid fault in Missouri might be shutting down.
The Dutch scientists who faked the data on dozens of papers has given up his doctoral degree.
Lightning! With pictures and video.
Russia has two weeks to save Phobos-Grunt.
As it does every month, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center today released its monthly update showing the ongoing changes of the Sun’s solar cycle sunspot activity. I have posted the graph below the fold.
For the fourth month in a row the Sun’s sunspot activity has leaped upward. In fact, for the first time since I have been tracking sunspot activity, beginning in 2008, the Sun’s sunspot activity exceeds the predicted activity by a significant amount. Since the end of the previous maximum, the Sun had consistently failed to meet the expectations of solar scientists by producing far fewer sunspots than expected.
In the past few months, however, the Sun has recovered, its activity firing upward, including some of the most active and largest sunspots in years.
» Read more
Phobos-Grunt appears to be in trouble in Earth orbit.
In a posting to an online forum for the Phobos-Grunt mission, Anton Ledkov of the Russian Space Research Institute reported that there was “no telemetry” from the spacecraft.
Another report suggests that a variety of engine thrusters did not fire as planned.
To leap or not to leap: Scientists are considering abandoning the solar year as their method for synchronizing their atomic clocks.
At issue is whether to abolish the ‘leap second’ — the extra second added every year or so to keep [Coordinated Universal Time] (UTC) in step with Earth’s slightly unpredictable orbit. UTC — the reference against which international time zones are set — is calculated by averaging signals from around 400 atomic clocks, with leap seconds added to stop UTC drifting away from solar time at a rate of about one minute every 90 years.
Mars Express takes a close look at one of Mars’ giant volcanoes, Tharsis Tholus.
At least two large sections have collapsed around its eastern and western flanks during its four-billion-year history and these catastrophes are now visible as scarps up to several kilometers high. The main feature of Tharsis Tholus is, however, the caldera in its center. It has an almost circular outline, about 32 x 34 km, and is ringed by faults that have allowed the caldera floor to subside by as much as 2.7 km.
NASA’s Deep Space Network has captured a radar image of asteroid 2005 YU55, set to buzz past the Earth tomorrow.
