The NASA fire experiment on Cygnus was successfully ignited on Tuesday.
No video or pictures yet, as far as I can tell. All they say so far is that “Saffire-I has been ignited inside the Orbital ATK Cygnus cargo spacecraft and telemetry indicates a burn of the cotton-fiberglass material blend.”
A newly discovered asteroid has a solar orbit that makes it Earth’s constant companion.
As it orbits the sun, this new asteroid, designated 2016 HO3, appears to circle around Earth as well. It is too distant to be considered a true satellite of our planet, but it is the best and most stable example to date of a near-Earth companion, or “quasi-satellite.”
“Since 2016 HO3 loops around our planet, but never ventures very far away as we both go around the sun, we refer to it as a quasi-satellite of Earth,” said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “One other asteroid — 2003 YN107 — followed a similar orbital pattern for a while over 10 years ago, but it has since departed our vicinity. This new asteroid is much more locked onto us. Our calculations indicate 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth’s companion for centuries to come.”
The asteroid is thought to be between 120 to 300 feet across.
The LIGO gravitational wave detector has detected its second gravitational wave, thought to come from the merger of two black holes.
The new observation came at 3:38.53 Coordinated Universal Time on 26 December 2015—late on Christmas day at LIGO’s detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington. As in the first event, the detectors sensed an oscillating stretching of space-time, the signal, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, of massive objects in violent motion. Computer modeling indicated that its source was two black holes spiraling together about 1.4 billion light-years away. (LIGO researchers had seen a weaker signal on 12 October 2015 that may be a third black hole merger.)
Note the last sentence in the quote above. They might have had a third detection, but are uncertain enough to have not claimed it as one.
Cool image time! The European Southern Observatory has released a direct image of an exoplanet, taken with its ground-based Very Large Telescope.
The star is a mere 1,200 light years away. The exoplanet, the brown dot to the left of the star, is not yet confirmed, even after this image.
The competition heats up: China announced plans today to send its next lunar lander, Chang’e 4, to the Moon’s farside south pole in 2018.
The lander of Chang’e-4 will be equipped with descent and terrain cameras, and the rover will be equipped with a panoramic camera, he said. Like China’s first lunar rover Yutu, or Jade Rabbit, carried by Chang’e-3, the rover of Chang’e-4 will carry subsurface penetrating radar to detect the near surface structure of the moon, and an infrared spectrometer to analyze the chemical composition of lunar samples.
But unlike Chang’e-3, the new lander will be equipped with an important scientific payload especially designed for the far side of the moon: a low-frequency radio spectrometer. “Since the far side of the moon is shielded from electromagnetic interference from the Earth, it’s an ideal place to research the space environment and solar bursts, and the probe can ‘listen’ to the deeper reaches of the cosmos,” Liu said.
The U.S. had been in the lead in the land rush to gain dominance in the possibly water-rich lunar south pole. We apparently have lost this lead with decision of President Obama and Congress to focus elsewhere, either the asteroids or Mars.
After four years of southwest travel to skirt a large dune field at the base of Mount Sharp, Curiosity has finally turned due south to aim directly up the mountain.
“Now that we’ve skirted our way around the dunes and crossed the plateau, we’ve turned south to climb the mountain head-on,” said Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “Since landing, we’ve been aiming for this gap in the terrain and this left turn. It’s a great moment for the mission.”
During Rosetta’s recent close approaches to Comet 67P/C-G scientists were able to confirm the presence of two noble gases, krypton and xenon.
Rosetta had already detected argon, which makes three of the six noble gases.
Cool image time! The picture below, taken by Cassini in April, looks down at Saturn’s vast rings and shows a disruption in Saturn’s outermost F ring, likely caused by an interaction of objects within the ring.
Cool image time! The picture on the right, taken by New Horizons during its July 2015 flyby and cropped and reduced here, shows the reddish hues of the Krun Macula dark region along the shore of Pluto’s vast nitrogen ice plains. The hillsides here rise about a mile and a half above both the plains and the valleys, making them deeper than the Grand Canyon. The hills are “believed to get its dark red color from tholins, complex molecules found across Pluto.”
Data from the many Martian orbiters since 1997 have allowed scientists to roughly outline a seasonal pattern of dust storms on Mars.
Most Martian dust storms are localized, smaller than about 1,200 miles (about 2,000 kilometers) across and dissipating within a few days. Some become regional, affecting up to a third of the planet and persisting up to three weeks. A few encircle Mars, covering the southern hemisphere but not the whole planet. Twice since 1997, global dust storms have fully enshrouded Mars. The behavior of large regional dust storms in Martian years that include global dust storms is currently unclear, and years with a global storm were not included in the new analysis.
They have also found three types of regional dust storms, all of which appear to occur each Martian year.
After four blank days without sunspots, the longest such string since 2010 during the middle of the solar minimum, the Sun got a new sunspot today.
Scientists in Russia, Japan, and the United States have proposed four new names for the elements they helped discover.
The periodic table will soon have four new names added to its lower right-hand corner. Element 113 should be named nihonium (Nh); element 115 moscovium (Mv); element 117 tennessine (Tc) and element 118 oganesson (Og), according to proposals outlined on 8 June by chemistry’s governing body, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).
The laboratories who were credited with the discovery of the elements – in Russia, the United States and Japan – got to propose the names under the constraint that elements can only be named after one of their chemical or physical properties, a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, or a scientist.
The last choice, oganesson, is only the second element named after a living person. It will one of a more than a dozen elements named after individuals, overall.
The post originally said that ogranesson was only the second named after a person. My readers noted that many elements had been named for people, which implied the article was wrong. In truth, I was wrong. The article was more specific and correct, noting that this was only the second element to be named for a living person, as the editor of Nature wrote to explain. I have thus corrected the post, and noted my error here.
Faced with tight budgets, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is considering several options for the future operation of the Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest single radio telescope dish, including its complete removal.
[T]he NSF could mothball the site, shutting it down in such a way that it could restart (sometime in the future). Or it could dismantle the telescope altogether and restore the area to its natural state, as required by law if the agency fully divests itself of the observatory and closes it. Previous studies have said such a process could cost around $100 million—more than a decade’s worth of its current funding for telescope operations. Jim Ulvestad, director of the NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences, says the agency is still investigating, not concluding. “No alternative has been selected at this juncture,” he says. And much consideration will go into the final financial decision, whatever it may be. Some outside the agency see writing on the wall. “NSF is dead serious about offloading Arecibo funding to someone else—anyone else,” says Ellen Howell, a former staff scientist at Arecibo and now a faculty member at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) in Tucson, Arizona.
The article spends a lot of time talking about how wonderful Arecibo is, but never tells us how many astronomers actually demand to use it. Is it oversubscribed, like Hubble, where five times the number of astronomers request time than can be handled, or does it often sit unused because not enough astronomers require its use? NSF and the government do not have unlimited funds, and need to focus their spending where the demand is. If Arecibo is not in demand, then they are wise to consider closing it, or handing it off to someone who wants it.
Engineers have announced that the gravity wave detection technology being tested in orbit by Europe’s LISA Pathfinder works.
To show that the necessary sensitivity is possible, LISA Pathfinder measures the distance between two masses, both of which are inside the spacecraft. “We’ve shrunk the arm of a large gravitational wave antenna to 35 centimeters so we could show it works properly,” Paul McNamara, LISA Pathfinder project scientist, told the press conference.
LISA Pathfinder was launched in December 2015 to a spot 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. When its test masses where first released to float free in February, “the relief was unbelievable,” McNamara says. Science operations began on 1 March and on that first day the team was able to measure distance variations between the masses much smaller than LISA Pathfinder’s mission requirements, Stefano Vitale, the mission’s principle investigator, told reporters. After a month, the variations were even smaller, “very close to [eLISA] requirements,” he says.
They now hope to launch an array of at least three such spacecraft by the mid-2030s.
NOAA today released its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in May. It is annotated and posted below.
The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.
Though sunspot activity increased in May, the increase was not significant. The ramp down from solar maximum continues to track the 2007 low prediction for this maximum.
Meanwhile, the Sun continues its first multi-day string of blank days since 2011, now up to 3 days with all indications suggesting it will continue at least one more day. This early blank string, combined with the relatively fast decline in sunspots in the past two years, suggests that the solar maximum is ending sooner than predicted by the 2009 prediction (the red curve above), and that the next minimum will possibly be longer as well.
Cool image time! The picture on the right, taken on January 26, 2016 by Cassini and reduced and cropped to show here, captures Titan above Saturn’s rings, which are themselves partly obscured by the shadow of Saturn (unseen on the right) that falls across them.
Make sure you go to look at the full image. This is the kind of vista that artists in the 1950s imagined we’d see once we began to explore the solar system.
For the first time since the beginning of solar maximum in 2011, the Sun has been blank of sunspots for two consecutive days.
As there continue to be no signs of any sunspots, this string could continue for several more days, which would then be the longest blank stretch since 2010, when we were in the tail end of the last very prolonged solar minimum.
For the first time since July 17, 2014, and only the second time since 2011 at the beginning of the solar maximum, the Sun was blank today, with no sunspots visible on its surface.
I expect the next monthly update of the solar cycle will arrive early next week, and though I expect it will show a slight increase during the past month, it will also show that the ramp down to solar minimum is continuing unabated.
The scientists running Rosetta are asking the public to help them pour through the more than 20,000 images of Comet 67P/C-G to identify any changes the comet has undergone since the spacecraft’s arrival.
The uncertainty of science: New data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggests the universe’s expansion rate is 5%-9% faster than previously thought.
They say they have refined the expansion rate to a margin of error of only 2.4%, but forgive me if I remain skeptical. When it comes to cosmology, the uncertainties dominate, despite these claims.
