Tag: science

Ice-filled crater on Mars?

12:13 pm

Crater in southern mid-latitudes
Click for full image.

Time for another of the many cool images from Mars that suggest the presence of buried glacial ice. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, shows an unnamed crater in the cratered southern highlands of Mars at about 44 degrees south latitude. Taken on October 2, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the crater sits at the very southernmost point of the Tharsis Bulge where the Red Planet’s four more distinctive giant volcanoes are located.

The crater is also in the middle of the 30 to 60 degree mid-latitude bands where scientists have detected many features that suggest glaciers, including a large number of craters that appear to have ice filling their interior.

Does the material in this crater’s floor suggest eroding and sublimating ice to you? It does to me. The second image below zooms in at full resolution at the north-south trench and the strange patterned terrain to its east.
» Read more

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Hubble captures 20-year fading of planetary nebula

9:10 am

The fading of the Stingray Nebula
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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have now tracked the spectacular fading of the Stingray Nebula, which when it was discovered in the mid-1990s was labeled the youngest such object ever found.

Astronomers have caught a rare look at a rapidly fading shroud of gas around an aging star. Archival data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveal that the nebula Hen 3-1357, nicknamed the Stingray nebula, has faded precipitously over just the past two decades. Witnessing such a swift rate of change in a planetary nebula is exceeding rare, say researchers.

Images captured by Hubble in 2016, when compared to Hubble images taken in 1996, show a nebula that has drastically dimmed in brightness and changed shape. Bright blue fluorescent tendrils and filaments of gas toward the center of the nebula have all but disappeared, and the wavy edges that earned this nebula its aquatic-themed name are virtually gone. The young nebula no longer pops against the black velvet background of the vast universe.

Astronomers have found that the central star had been heating precipitiously in the late 20th century, from 40K to 108K degrees Fahrenheit. Since then it has begun to cool. They think that flash of heat, caused by what they think was short period of helium fusion, caused the planetary nebula to brighten, and now fade.

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Trump administration asks Senate to remove SLS requirement for Europa Clipper

8:55 am

The Trump administration has requested the Senate to change the language in its NASA spending bill to remove its requirement that Europa Clipper be launched on SLS.

NASA wants the option to launch the Europa probe using commercial rockets, such as SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. It also says that there are technical reasons that make using SLS problematic, and worse, the agency simply does not have enough SLS rockets to fly its planned (but unfunded) manned Artemis missions and also launch Europa Clipper.

The House has already removed that requirement in its version of the bill. The Senate has not, probably because the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), is a big fan of SLS (much of it built in his state), and has acted for years to pump money into that project.

If the requirement is not removed, Europa Clipper’s launch will likely be delayed by several years, and cost $1.5 billion more.

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First sunspot image from Inouye Solar Telescope

8:42 am

Sunspot image taken by Inouye Solar Telescope
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The science team for the new Inouye Solar Telescope, now in the final phase of construction, has released the telescope’s first high resolution sunspot image.

The image is to the right, reduced to post here, and was taken almost a year ago, on January 28, 2020.

“The sunspot image achieves a spatial resolution about 2.5 times higher than ever previously achieved, showing magnetic structures as small as 20 kilometers on the surface of the sun,” said [Dr. Thomas Rimmele, the associate director at NSF’s National Solar Observatory (NSO)].

The image reveals striking details of the sunspot’s structure as seen at the Sun’s surface. The streaky appearance of hot and cool gas spidering out from the darker center is the result of sculpting by a convergence of intense magnetic fields and hot gasses boiling up from below.

…This sunspot image, measuring about 10,000 miles across, is just a tiny part of the Sun. However, the sunspot is large enough that Earth could comfortably fit inside.

The start of official telescope operations is set to begin in ’21, and had been delayed because of the Wuhan flu panic. Construction had begun in ’13.

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Aram Chaos: Illustrating the puzzle of Mars

11:20 am

Aram Chaos
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The geological history of Mars is incredibly complex, and we really don’t know much about it. What we do know right now is based on a limited number of tiny fragments of a much larger story, with those fragments allowing scientists to only make educated guesses on how they fit together.

Many of those guesses will certainly turn out right. Just as many will turn out wrong. At this moment in our exploration of the Red Planet we can only grasp at straws while always keeping an open mind, as later data is surely going to change any conclusions we presently have.

The photo to the right is a good illustration of this struggle. Rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, it was taken on September 27, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what at first glance looks like a stream of white frost or ice descending down a canyon to the south.

That first impression however is entirely wrong. When I asked Chris Okubo of the U.S. Geological Survey, who requested this image from MRO, what it was, he explained,

The white material is not frost. Instead, these are sedimentary rocks comprised primarily of sulfates. The texture to me suggests these are lithified dunes.

Lithified merely means that the dunes have hardened into rock. Sulfates are a salt formed from sulfuric acid, and are on Mars often linked to some complex mineralogy. If you stood there the colors would be white and red, quite beautiful. As Okubo explained,

The sulfates are white to tan in color, but there would also be a lot of red/brown Mars dust on top of it. It would be similar to walking around some of the playas in the desert southwest.

Though these white sulfate deposits have their root in sulfuric acid, Okubo added that they “are in the form of minerals similar to gypsum and so they would be safe to touch.”

What is going on here? As is usually the case, we need to first take a wider view to get some context.
» Read more

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Study: Canada’s nationalized health killed nearly 1,500 Canadians waiting fruitlessly for treatment

11:07 am

Coming to your U.S. health plan soon! A new study has found that almost 1,500 Canadians died in 2018-19 waiting for a life-saving operation, sometimes years, because that nation’s national health system could not serve them.

The survey was also incomplete, covering only about half of Canada’s health system, which means the numbers are almost certainly higher. More significant, the Wuhan panic has made the situation worse.

Since the coronavirus pandemic began, there has been a drastic decline in potentially life-saving treatments being conducted by hospitals. According to figures from the Ontario Ministry of Health, between March 15 to September 29, treatments for breast cancer and prostate cancer have gone down 29% and 25% respectively. On average, the province has reported a total of 21% fewer cancer treatments in total.

Surgeries on children were also heavily impacted by the pandemic after reporting a decline of nearly 60%. In comparison, in 2019, 28,844 surgeries were performed on children, while in 2020 there were only 11,230.

But we need to save one life from COVID! One life! It doesn’t matter if thousands of others die from other illnesses, saving people from COVID comes first!

Hat tip Phill Oltmann.

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New Gaia data release tracks distance and motion of 1.8 billion stars

10:49 am

The European Space Agency (ESA) today released the third round of data from its Gaia satellite, designed to measure precisely the distance and motion of billions of nearby stars.

Gaia EDR3 contains detailed information on more than 1.8 billion sources, detected by the Gaia spacecraft. This represents an increase of more than 100 million sources over the previous data release (Gaia DR2), which was made public in April 2018. Gaia EDR3 also contains colour information for around 1.5 billion sources, an increase of about 200 million sources over Gaia DR2. As well as including more sources, the general accuracy and precision of the measurements has also improved.

This release also included the following discoveries:

  • The Milky Way’s outer regions beyond the Sun contain two populations of stars, one slowly dropping towards the galaxy’s plane, the second flying away quickly.
  • The first precise measure of the solar system’s orbit in the Milky Way
  • A more complete census of all stars within 100 parsecs of the Sun
  • A better map of the interaction between the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Milky Way, which also showed that the cloud does have a spiral structure

This precise data will take decades to digest, as past research has been based on only rough distance and motion estimates. Having precise data will change our approximation of each object’s brightness, which will also change much of what we assume about it.

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First images from Chang’e-5 on the Moon

2:01 pm

Panorama of Chang'e-5 landing site
Click for full image.

The new colonial movement: China’s state-run press has now released several images taken by Chang’e-5 on the lunar surface, including movies showing the landing and the ongoing digging operations.

The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is part of a fisheye panorama of the entire landing site. I have cropped it to show only the central part. Except for the distant mountain, the terrain is very flat, which is not surprising as this is the Ocean of Storms mare.

Note however how deep the landing pad is pressed into the ground. This gives a sense of the dust layer that covers the surface.

The link above, as well as this link, show additional images as well as the two movies.

Take off is next, followed by the autonomous rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit with the craft that will bring the sample capsule back to Earth sometime around December 16.

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Sagging cliffs on Mars

11:20 am

Sagging escarpment on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! On Mars things change, but not like on Earth because the atmosphere is not as thick and there is no flowing water. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, gives a good example of that slow change. The image was taken on August 29, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows the high escarpment that in this one place separates the planet’s southern cratered highlands from the transition zone down to northern lowland plains.

In this spot that escarpment, approximately 4,000 feet high, shows signs of avalanches and sagging. In the upper steep section, I point to what looks like a dust avalanche that wiped the slope clear of rough terrain as it rolled downhill. At the bottom of the cliff a large section has separated away. Since this cliff is located at 28 degrees north latitude and is in the midst of the chaos terrain regions I like to dub glacier country, it is very possible that this large section is actually buried glacial ice that in shifting down slope cracked, separating the lower section from the upper.

This particular location is east of an area dubbed Nilosyrtis Mensae (where there is a lot of evidence of glaciers and frozen ice), and about 650 miles north of Jezero Crater, where the rover Perseverance will land on February 18, 2021.

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Change’-5 successfully gets sample from drilling

9:02 am

The new colonial movement: According to the state-run Chinese press, Chang’e-5 has successfully obtained its first lunar sample from a 2-meter deep drilled hole.

After making a successful soft landing at 11:00 p.m. BJT on Tuesday, the lander started rolling out its solar panel wings and unlocking some of the payloads onboard to prepare for sample collection.

The lander first drilled a 2-meter-deep hole, digging out soil, and sealed it up at 4:53 a.m. on Wednesday [today]. Next, it will use its robotic arms to scoop up more samples from the lunar surface for backup.

If all goes right, they will collect a second sample from the surface using a scoop, and then the ascent capsule will take off tomorrow. It will then rendezvous and dock with the orbiter and return capsule.

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A spray of Martian meteorites

12:27 pm

A spray of small secondary impacts
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on October 26, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is what the camera team calls a “terrain sample,” meaning it was not specifically requested by a researcher but was instead chosen by the camera team because they need to regularly take images to maintain the camera’s temperature. When they do this, they try to pick a location that hasn’t been photographed in high resolution previously, and that might have some interesting features. Sometimes the photo is boring. Sometimes they hit pay dirt.

In this case, the photo captured an small impact crater, about 1,300 feet across, surrounded by a spray of secondary impacts. The color portion of the image shows what I suspect are dust devil tracks cutting across a surface that, because of its blue tint, is either rough or has frost or ice within it. At 48 degrees north latitude, the possibility of the latter is high, especially because this location is northwest of the Erebus mountains, where SpaceX has its prime Starship candidate landing zone and where scientists suspect ice is readily available very close to the surface. The overview map below shows this context.
» Read more

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LRO looks at Yutu-2

9:40 am

Yutu-2's travels on the Moon through October 2020
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The new colonial movement: The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team today released an update of the travels of China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover, presently operating on the far side of the Moon.

The photo to the right, reduced and annotated to post here, shows the rover’s present position, having traveled about 1,650 feet to the northwest in the 22 months since landing. The goal, according to Yutu-2’s science team, is to get the rover beyond the present ejecta field of debris thrown from a large impact to the north, and reach a basalt covered region about a mile away. At the pace they are setting, about 100 feet per lunar day, it is going to take them about another three years to get there. Whether the rover will last that long is the question, but I suspect they are hopeful, based on the almost two years of operations so far.

If you go to the link you can also see a short movie showing month-by-month where the rover ended up when it shut down for each long lunar night.

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