Tag: science

Astronomers detect radio signal from an exoplanet’s magnetic field

5:10 pm

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers using a Netherlands telescope have detected a radio signal coming from an exoplanet 51 light years away that likely comes from the planet’s magnetic field.

The new research actually began at Jupiter; the researchers had previously studied that planet’s radio emissions and then tweaked those measurements to reflect the effect they expected closeness to the host star and distance from Earth would have had on their observations of an exoplanet.

Then, the scientists consulted observations made in 2016 and 2017 by the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) in the Netherlands. In addition to the potential signal from Tau Boötes b, the researchers also report that they may have picked up a signal from the star Upsilon Andromedae or its planet, but that detection was even fainter than the one from Tau Boötes b.

Obviously, there are many uncertainties with this data. However, if scientists can begin to measure and characterize the magnetic field of exoplanets it will give them an important new data point for studying them.

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A splat on Mars

2:23 pm

A splat on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on October 31, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labelled simply as a “Terrain Sample”, it was not taken as part of any specific science research but because the MRO science team need to regularly take pictures to maintain the camera’s temperature. When such engineering images are required they try to pick spots of some interest, but sometimes the resulting picture is somewhat bland.

If you look at the full image, you will see that blandness generally describes it. However, in the upper left corner was a most intriguing-looking crater, which I have focused on above. From all appearances, when this impact happened the ground was quite soft, almost like mud, and thus the ejecta splattered away not as individual rocks and debris but as a flow.

The map below gives a little context, but really doesn’t explain this crater fully.
» Read more

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Chang’e-5 sample return capsule successfully recovered in China

6:18 pm

The new colonial movement: The sample return capsule for China’s Chang’e-5 mission, the first to bring lunar samples back to Earth since 1976, has been successfully recovered in the inner Mongolia region of China today.

Chinese officials confirmed the roughly 660-pound (300-kilogram) capsule landed at 12:59 p.m. EST (1759 GMT) Wednesday, or 1:59 a.m. Thursday in Beijing.

Recovery crews dispatched to the remote landing zone converged on the capsule in helicopters and off-road vehicles, traveling across the snow-covered plains of Inner Mongolia in the middle of the night. Ground teams reached the Chang’e 5 return module within minutes to begin operations to secure the capsule, and planted a Chinese flag in the frozen soil next the spacecraft.

Crews plan to transport the module to Beijing, where scientists will open the sample carrier and begin analyzing the moon rocks.

For China this success is a major milestone for its government-run space program. They have demonstrated superb technical capabilities that will serve them on many more future missions. They have also signaled to the world and the U.S. that they mean business in space, and that their published plans to build colonies on the Moon are serious. They have also made it clear that they will enforce control over any territory they occupy, notwithstanding the rules of the Outer Space Treaty. Any American government that makes light of these facts and refuses to aggressively compete with China is going to quickly discover it shut out of the most valuable locations on the Moon.

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Cones on Mars!

9:35 am

Today’s cool image is actually a bunch, all found recently in the monthly image download from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

All the photos I post below show pimple-like cones, all of which appear to be a type of small volcano. The cones are found in a wide range of locations, from the northern lowland plains to the cratered highlands to the mid-latitude transition zone between the two. They are also found at the bottom of deep canyons, in the floors of craters, and amidst mountains.

Let us begin.
» Read more

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Dark storm on Neptune changes direction unexpectedly

8:35 am

Dark storm on Neptune
Click for full image.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have found that a dark storm discovered on Neptune in 2018 has been drifting across the gas giant in unexpected ways.

The storm, which is wider than the Atlantic Ocean, was born in the planet’s northern hemisphere and discovered by Hubble in 2018. Observations a year later showed that it began drifting southward toward the equator, where such storms are expected to vanish from sight. To the surprise of observers, Hubble spotted the vortex change direction by August 2020, doubling back to the north. Though Hubble has tracked similar dark spots over the past 30 years, this unpredictable atmospheric behavior is something new to see.

Equally as puzzling, the storm was not alone. Hubble spotted another, smaller dark spot in January this year that temporarily appeared near its larger cousin. It might possibly have been a piece of the giant vortex that broke off, drifted away, and then disappeared in subsequent observations.

The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows both storms. The smaller dark spot can be seen faintly to the right of the larger storm.

Since Hubble has been observing Neptune in 1993 it has seen four such storms, all of which have faded away after about two Earth years. What causes the storms as well as their motions in Neptune’s atmosphere remains unknown, and any theories posited (such as those noted at the link) are highly unreliable, considering the paucity of data we have about Neptune’s atmosphere and the meteorology of such gas giants.

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Scientists confirm ample Ryugu material in first Hayabuse sample chamber

8:01 am

Japanese scientists have opened the first chamber that stored the Ryugu asteroid samples obtained during its first touch-and-go sample grab, and confirmed that it holds ample material.

They also noted that the chamber itself contained gas from the asteroid as well.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has confirmed that the gas collected from the sample container inside the re-entry capsule of the asteroid explorer, Hayabusa2, is a gas sample originating from asteroid Ryugu.

The result of the mass spectrometry of the collected gas within the sample container performed at the QLF (Quick Look Facility) established at the Woomera Local Headquarters in Australia on December 7, 2020, suggested that the gas differed from the atmospheric composition of the Earth. For additional confirmation, a similar analysis was performed on December 10 – 11 at the Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center on the JAXA Sagamihara Campus. This has led to the conclusion that the gas in the sample container is derived from asteroid Ryugu.

They think that this gas must have outgassed from the samples themselves. I suspect it was released either during the long journey or when the samples were subjected to the high accelerations and impact during its return to Earth. Research is going to have to try to pin this down, however.

They plan to open the two remaining sample chambers containing material sometime next week.

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Ancient and recent volcanoes on Mars

9:41 am

Volcanic vent on eastern flank of Olympus Mons
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on October 25, 2020. It shows what it calls a “possible volcanic vent east of Olympus Mons”.

Is this active? If not, how old is it. Also, the elongated shape of the vent suggests the possibility of a lava tube, or at least some underground complexity to the release of its magma.

In order to get some clarity, I emailed Sarah Sutton of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona, who requested this photograph. Her response:

The image is of a small shield volcano with an elongated vent at the summit. We don’t have complete stereo here yet, so we can’t tell exactly what the height is. This vent might have sourced tube-fed flows, but in this case, we can’t resolve such features in the image data. This and other small shield volcanoes in the vicinity are partially buried by plains-forming lava flows. The lava flows around the base overlap the flows that emanate radially from the summit vent. Therefore we infer that the shield is older than the surrounding lava flows.

The vent, which runs from the southwest to the northeast, sits on top of a sloping wide hill, which is that small shield volcano described by Sutton. The flat plains surrounding this hill are from later eruptions from other and possibly larger volcanoes. The wider overview map below might give us a clue as to the source.
» Read more

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Scientists confirm Hayabusa-2’s return capsule brought back material from Ryugu

8:56 am

Based on their first observations of the return capsule from Hayabusa-1, Japanese scientists yesterday confirmed that it successfully has returned material from the asteroid Ryugu.

JAXA said in a statement that they observed the sandy material at the entrance of the collection chamber, but have yet to look inside to see if more asteroid dust is lurking there. It is only the second time that scientists have returned material from an asteroid.

This find in the entrance portends a gold mine of material in the collection chamber itself.

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Confirmed: Martian glacial features are ice

10:12 am

Lobate glacial flows on Mars
Click for full image.

Scientists using the radar instrument on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have now confirmed that the Martian glacial features that most resemble the glaciers seen on Earth are made of substantial amounts of ice, and were possibly active and growing only a few million years ago.

“Our radar analysis shows that at least one of these features is about 500 meters thick and nearly 100 percent ice, with a debris covering at most ten meters thick,” said Berman, lead author of “Ice-rich landforms of the southern mid-latitudes of Mars: A case study in Nereidum Montes” published online in Icarus at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2020.114170. PSI scientists Frank C. Chuang, Isaac B. Smith and David A. Crown are co-authors on the paper.

Global mapping of Viscous Flow Features (VFFs), a general grouping of ice-rich flow features in the southern hemisphere of Mars shows a dense concentration in Nereidum Montes, along the northern rim of Argyre basin. Located within a northwestern subregion of Nereidum Montes is a large number of well-preserved VFFs and ice-rich mantling deposits, the paper says, potentially the largest concentrations of any non-polar region in the southern hemisphere.

…Processed data from the Shallow Radar (SHARAD) instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft were used to search for basal reflections across VFFs within the region. For one in particular, these observations and analysis indicate that it is composed of nearly pure water ice. Model ages obtained from crater counts and their associated size-frequency distributions (SFDs) on both ice-rich mantling deposits and small lobate VFFs suggest that the deposits stabilized several to tens of millions of years ago in the Late Amazonian Epoch, and that small lobate VFFs likely formed due to the mobilization of mantling deposits.

This data here reinforces the impressions from many other places within the 30-60 degree latitude bands on Mars where many such features are found.

Mars might be a desert, but it is a desert like Antarctica, not the Sahara. Any settlement there must use the Earth’s south pole as its guide for construction and design.

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New data confirms and localizes uplifted lunar dust as seen by Apollo astronauts

1:11 pm

The uncertainty of science: In a paper released today, scientists reveal the detection of electrostatic dust events on the Moon similar to those observed by Apollo astronauts, and find that these events might not be global but instead confined to craters during twilight. From the abstract:

Lunar horizon glows observed by the Apollo missions suggested a dense dust exosphere near the lunar terminator. But later missions failed to see such a high‐density dust exosphere. Why the Apollo missions could observe so large number of dust grains remains a mystery. For the first time, we report five dust enhancement events observed by the Lunar Dust Experiment on board Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer [LADEE] mission, which happen near a twilight crater with dust densities comparable to the Apollo measurements. Moreover, the dust densities are larger on the downstream side of the crater and favor a higher solar wind temperature, consistent with an electrostatic dust lofting from the negatively charged crater floor. We also check the Apollo observations and find similar twilight craters, suggesting that the so‐called dust exosphere is not a global phenomenon but just a local electrified dust fountain near twilight craters.

The dust clouds the astronauts thought they saw near the horizon have been theorized to be dust uplifted by static electricity. However, all later missions had so far failed to detect this phenomenon, until now. That the result also pinpoints the location and ties it to twilight is important for future missions to the Moon. Astronauts can thus minimize any damage by this dust by shutting down operations during lunar twilight periods.

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Strange crater in the basement of Mars

12:25 pm

Strange crater in Hellas Basin
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is intriguing for a number of reasons. Taken on September 11, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows a partially buried crater found in the middle of Hellas Basin, the lowest point on Mars and what I like to call the red planet’s basement.

What makes this crater intriguing is the layered pile of material filling its interior. If I didn’t know any better, I would think some construction crew has used a bulldozer to push debris from the crater’s right half in order to smooth the ground in preparation for building a strip mall, office building, or housing development.

This of course is not what happened. Then what did create those layered piles in the crater’s left half?
» Read more

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China launches two science satellites with its Long March 11 rocket

8:23 am

The new colonial movement: China yesterday completed the eleventh successful launch of its Long March 11 rocket, putting two astronomy satellites in orbit designed to supplement gravitational wave research.

The satellites appear designed to look in other wavelengths at the region of sky from which gravitational waves are detected, and better pinpoint their location and nature.

This Long March 11 launch continues its perfect launch record. It uses solid rocket motors, derived from military missiles, which allow it to be stored easily and then launched quickly.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

33 China
23 SpaceX
13 Russia
5 ULA
5 Rocket Lab
5 Europe (Arianespace)

The U.S. still leads in the national rankings, 36 to 33, over China. And before anyone asks, yesterday’s SpaceX test suborbital flight of Starship does not qualify as a launch in these standings, as I only include successful orbital launches.

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