Tag: science

Falcon Heavy successfully launches Psyche asteroid mission

8:25 am

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket this morning successfully launched the Psyche mission to the metal asteroid Psyche, lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The two side boosters successfully landed at their landing zones at the cape, each completing their fourth flight.

Psyche will now spend the next six years traveling to the asteroid Psyche, first flying by Mars in 2026 to gain some speed to get there. It will then go into orbit around the asteroid for almost two years.

The leaders in 2023 launch race:

72 SpaceX
45 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successfully launches 84 to 45, and the entire world combined 84 to 73. SpaceX by itself only trails the entire world combined (excluding American companies) 72 to 73.

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Martian pseudo-frost terrain

12:20 pm

Martian pseudo-frost terrain
Click for original image.

Cool image time! It is always dangerous to come to any quick conclusions about what you see from pictures from another planet. The photograph to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 19, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what at first glance looks like a surface similar to frosting seen on window panes on Earth in the winter, where water condensation freezes to form crystalline patterns.

Your first glance would be wrong. This terrain is about 120 miles north of the Martian equator, placing inside the dry equatorial regions where no near-surface ice is known to exist. If this geological feature is formed by the same condensation processes that create ice frost, then it must involve the deposition of some other type of material.

The explanation would also have to account for the change in the terrain, from finely patterned on the right to more crystalline on the left.
» Read more

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Launch of Psyche asteroid mission delayed by weather

8:36 am

NASA and SpaceX today scrubbed the launch of the Psyche asteroid mission because of poor weather, rescheduling the Falcon Heavy launch to tomorrow, October 13, 2023 at 10:19 am (Eastern).

“For our first backup window, Friday morning, 50% chance for go conditions, with our concerns still being associated with storms in the area, where we have anvil clouds, some thick clouds, which are layered clouds, as well as cumulus clouds we get associated with storms,” Moses explained during the briefing.

“Looking at Saturday morning, a third backup window, there is still about the same probability, about 50% chance of go, and fairly similar conditions here, where there may be some storms around, but we expect most of any storms to be after our morning launch window,” she added.

The launch window for the mission closes on October 25, after which a major mission rescheduling will be required to get the probe to the asteroid Psyche, likely causing a year delay.

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Massive landslide in Martian canyon

1:12 pm

Massive landslide in Martian canyon
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, enhanced, and annotated to post here, was taken on September 5, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The image shows a gigantic landslide collapse on the southern interior wall of a long meandering canyon on Mars dubbed Bahram Vallis. The collapse was what scientists call a mass wasting event, in which the entire section of cliff wall breaks off and moves downward as a large unit. In this case the falling section, a half mile wide and long, got squeezed near the bottom, piling up rather than flowing out into the canyon floor.

At this particular location the canyon is 2.4 miles wide, with cliff walls about 1,700 feet high. Imagine when this piece broke off: In one instance a giant section of mountain about a half mile long fell about a thousand feet. Even in Mars’ thin atmosphere the sound must have been thunderous.
» Read more

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Software patch saves Europe’s Euclid space telescope

10:03 am

Engineeers have successfully saved Europe’s new recently launched Euclid space telescope by installing a software patch that fixed the telescope’s inability to orient itself properly for long periods.

Shortly after launching on 1 July, the European space observatory Euclid started performing tiny, unexpected pirouettes. The problem revealed itself during initial tests of the telescope’s automated pointing system. If left unfixed, it could have severely affected Euclid’s science mission and led to gaps in its map of the Universe.

Now the European Space Agency (ESA) says that it has resolved the issue by updating some of the telescope’s software. The problem occurred when the on board pointing system mistook cosmic noise for faint stars in dark patches of sky, and directed the spacecraft to reorient itself in the middle of a shot.

The new software essentially reduces the amount of light that enters the pointing system, so that the noise is no longer detected. This means that observations however will have to be longer to obtain the same data, extending the mission.

Euclid’s goal is a follow-up on Europe’s Gaia mission, to map 1.5 billion galaxies in three dimensions. Gaia did it with the stars in the Milky Way. Euclid is looking deeper, requiring far greater precision and accuracy in pointing.

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Gale Crater as seen by Curiosity from the heights of Mount Sharp

12:57 pm

Gale Crater as seen by Curiosity from the heights of Mount Sharp
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Though Curiosity still lies more than 13,000 feet below the peak of Mount Sharp, in its ten years on Mars it has climbed a considerable distance uphill since leaving the floor of 97-mile-wide Gale Crater, about 2,400 feet. The panorama above, taken today by one of Curiosity’s navigation cameras and rotated and cropped to post here, gives us a good sense of the elevation the rover has gained in that time.

The overview map to the right provides some perspective. Curiosity’s present location is indicated by the blue dot, with the yellow lines indicating the direction of this panorama. Though Curiosity climbed up from that valley on the lower left, none of its route is visible in this picture, as the weaved up from the left and the steepness of the ground hides the lower sections.

The mountain chain in the distance, about 20 to 25 miles away, is the north rim of Gale Crater. Beyond it can faintly be seen other mountains, which form the rim of another smaller crater to the north. The peak of Mount Sharp, about 23 miles to the south and in the opposite direction, forms the wide central peak of Gale Crater, unusual in that it fills much of the crater and rises higher than the crater’s rim, factors which were part of the reason this location was chosen as Curiosity’s landing site.

This picture also allows scientists to get a sense of the dust levels in the Martian atmosphere, which change seasonally depending on dust storm activity. Since it is now summer on Mars, when dust activity is low, the air is relatively clear.

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Astronomers detect baffling blue transient far outside any galaxy

11:32 am

Transient in intergalactic space
Click for original image.

Using a variety of telescopes, astronomers have discovered a baffling short-term object that brightens quickly in blue light and then fades.

What makes this discovery even more baffling is that though other such Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients (LFBOT) have been discovered, all have been within galaxies, while this new discovery is in intergalactic space, as shown by the red bars in the picture to right, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here. From the caption:

[An LFBOT] shines intensely in blue light and evolves rapidly, reaching peak brightness and fading again in a matter of days, unlike supernovae which take weeks or months to dim. Only a handful of previous LFBOTs have been discovered since 2018. The surprise is that this latest transient, seen in 2023, lies at a large offset from both the barred spiral galaxy at right and the dwarf galaxy to the upper left. Only Hubble could pinpoint its location. And, the results are leaving astronomers even more confounded because all previous LFBOTs have been found in star-forming regions in the spiral arms of galaxies. It’s not clear what astronomical event would trigger such a blast far outside of a galaxy.

The frequent discovery of such short term transients in the past decade is because there are now many telescopes dedicated to making daily surveys of the entire sky. In the past such quick events were always missed.

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Texas medical college mandates ineffective COVID jab

12:31 pm

Baylor College of Medicine: Where medicine is taught badly
Baylor College of Medicine: Where medicine
is intentionally taught badly

They’re coming for you next: In a demonstration that it almost certainly teaches its students bad medicine, the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston has now reinstated its mandates requiring all students, faculty, and employees to get the utterly ineffective but potentially unhealthy COVID booster shots.

The statement issued by the college stated “Baylor faculty, staff, and students must get the COVID vaccine, or request a medical, religious, or personal exemption by Nov. 30.” In 2022-23 this college had more 1,600 students [pdf], so this mandate effects a lot of young people, who according to numerous recent studies (here, here, here, here, here, and here) are also at greater risk of getting myrocarditus from these boosters, resulting in serious heart damage and even death.

What makes this even worse is that the boosters are generally useless in preventing COVID, with other research suggesting strongly that if anything, the jab increases the chances you will get the virus.

Not that this matters, since anyone who has read any of the recent studies on the mutation of COVID over time will also know that all the recent strains are generally harmless, especially to the young, producing nothing more than a very mild cold. No one need do anything to avoid it. In fact, it might even be better to get one of these mild strains to strengthen your immune system.

That a medical college seems entirely unaware of this research data tells us that it must be teaching its medical students badly. » Read more

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Distorted Martian craters

11:09 am

Overview map

Distorted Martian craters
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 15, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, on the west end of the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I label glacier country because almost every image suggests the presence of ice and glaciers.

Where this crater is located the terrain is shifting from mesas and criss-crossing canyons to the northern lowland plains. Thus, the features that suggest the presence of ice shift from glacial in nature (flowing down hollows and cliffsides or within canyons) to that of a near-surface ice sheet, which acts to distort impact craters and leave large splash aprons around them.

The straight depression cutting into the crater near the center top that is also aligned with craters to the southwest suggests that these craters are either sinkholes into a void created by a fault line, or the impacts all occurred at the same time, as the asteroid broke up while cutting through the Martian atmosphere.

Either could be true. The data is insufficient to determine which.

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Satellite data shows this year’s ozone hole one of the biggest on record

9:53 am

The uncertainty of science: New data from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite has determined that the ozone hole this year over the south pole was one of the biggest on record.

The hole, which is what scientists call an ‘ozone depleting area,’ reached a size of 26 million sq km on 16 September 2023. This is roughly three times the size of Brazil.

The size of the ozone hole fluctuates on a regular basis. From August to October, the ozone hole increases in size – reaching a maximum between mid-September and mid-October. When temperatures high up in the stratosphere start to rise in the southern hemisphere, the ozone depletion slows, the polar vortex weakens and finally breaks down, and by the end of December ozone levels return to normal.

Despite the claims of scientists that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were creating the hole, requiring their ban in refrigerators, air conditioning, and aerosol sprays in 1987, the arrival of the ozone hole each year is actually a normal seasonal occurance caused by the interaction of the Earth’s tilt and the impact of solar radiation on the upper atmosphere. More interaction, and oxygen molecules break-up into ozone. Less interaction, and there is less ozone.

Thus, despite the ban of these products now for almost forty years, the size of the ozone hole continues to fluctuate significantly from year to year, for reasons that are not yet understood entirely. Some scientists attribute this year’s large size to a volcanic eruption in 2022, but this is merely a theory, not yet proved.

It also must be noted that when the ban was imposed in 1987, we only had data of the ozone hole going back a decade or so. Environmentalists posited then that the hole hadn’t existed before CFCs, but they really hadn’t known that. It will likely take a century of research to really get a good idea of the hole’s normal behavior from year to year. We might find that there was no reason to ban CFCs, that the hole is a natural seasonal occurance like snow in winter and heat in summer.

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A nearby active galaxy, viewed head on by Hubble

9:39 am

Active galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and is the third of a seven-day celebration of galaxies by the Hubble science team. Previous images in the series can be found here. From the caption for this particular image:

At the center of NGC 6951 lies a supermassive black hole surrounded by a ring of stars, gas, and dust about 3,700 light-years across. This “circumnuclear ring” is between 1 and 1.5 billion years old and has been forming stars for most of that time. Scientists hypothesize that interstellar gas flows through the dense, starry bar of the galaxy to the circumnuclear ring, which supplies new material for star formation. Up to 40 percent of the mass in the ring comes from relatively new stars that are less than 100 million years old. Spiral lanes of dust, shown in dark orange, connect the center of the galaxy to its outer regions, contributing more material for future star formation.

This galaxy, located about 78 million light years away, has also seen six different supernovae in the past quarter century. Compare that with the Milky Way, which has not seen a supernova now in more than four hundred years.

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China to expand Tiangong space station

9:10 am

Tiangong-2 station after expansion

The new colonial movement: At the 47th International Astronautical Congress in Baku, Chinese officials yesterday revealed that they intend to expand their Tiangong space station, almost doubling it in size.

The graphic to the right illustrates this, with the proposed new modules in magenta at the top.

“We will build a 180 tons, six-module assembly in the future,” Zhang said. Tiangong currently has three modules, each with a mass of around 22 tons.

A multi-functional expansion module with six docking ports will first be launched in the coming years to allow this expansion. This will dock at the forward port of the Tianhe core module. Full size modules can then be added to Tiangong. SpaceNews understands that the timeline for such launches is around four years from now. An expanded Tiangong would be just over a third of the mass of the roughly 450-metric-ton International Space Station (ISS).

The officials also said that they plan to add additional inflatable modules to the existing part of the station, as well as attachment points allowing for external experiments exposed to the environment of space.

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Enigmatic terrain amid camera problems on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

11:47 am

Enigmatic terrain amid MRO camera problems
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image not only shows us some puzzling lava terrain on Mars, it highlights the continuing camera problems on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) that began last month and now appear to be permanent.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 29, 2023 by the high resolution camera on MRO. The black strip through the middle of the picture highlights MRO’s ongoing problem, as described by the science team in its monthly download of new MRO high resolution pictures:

The electronics unit for CCD RED4 started to fail in August 2023 and we have not been acquiring images [data] in this central swath of the images. The processing pipelines will be updated to fill this gap with the IR10 data for some products. The 3-color coverage is now reduced in width.

The picture shows the failure of this electronics unit. The color strip is now only about half as wide as normal, with the other half the black strip with no data. As the problem first appeared in July, and remains unresolved, it probably is permanent. Though MRO’s high resolution camera can still produce images, they will be less useful, their center strip blank.

This failure should not be a surprise. In fact, it is remarkable that so little has gone wrong with MRO considering its age. The spacecraft was launched in 2005, entered Mars orbit in 2006, and has been working non-stop now for about seventeen years. Moreover, it was built in the early 2000s, making it almost a quarter century old at this point. How much longer it can survive is an open question, but a lifespan of twenty years is usually the limit for most spacecraft. The Hubble Space Telescope however gives us hope MRO can last longer, as Hubble has now been in orbit for 33 years, and continues to operate.

Despite this data loss, the picture still shows some intriguing and puzzling geology
» Read more

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Nova-C ready for launch in mid-November

9:15 am

The Moon's south pole, with Nova-C landing site indicated
Click for interactive map.

Capitalism in space: The commercial lunar lander company Intuitive Machines yesterday unveiled its now ready-for-launch Nova-C lander, set for launch on a Falcon 9 rocket during a six-day launch window beginning on November 16, 2023.

Steve Altemus, chief executive of Intuitive Machines, estimated the odds of success at “upwards of 65% to 75%,” higher than the historical average. That’s based, he said, on the experience the company has built up with key technologies on the lander, such as precision landing and its propulsion system.

It is also based on lessons learned from those failed missions. “Each one of those things that we witnessed in terms of anomalies that caused the failures of those missions, we have internalized,” he said. “Therefore, I think our odds are higher.”

If successful, Nova-C will land closer to the Moon’s south pole than any previous lander, as shown on the map to the right, and will function like India’s Pragyan rover for one lunar day, about two weeks. It will also land right next to a crater with a permanently shadowed interior, though it will have no way to travel into it. The company also two more lunar lander contracts with NASA, with the second Nova-C mission scheduled for 2024, and a third not yet scheduled.

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Sunspot update: Activity rises in September but not significantly

11:15 am

Another month has passed, and it is once again time to post my annotated graph of NOAA’s monthly update of its graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. The new graph is posted below, with several additional details to provide some larger context.

Last month we saw a drastic drop in August of sunspot activity, suggesting that the next maximum might possibly have been reached, though many months earlier than predicted. This month’s graph below, which shows an increase in activity in September but still well below the highs seen in June and July, strengthens that conclusion.
» Read more

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SLIM leaves Earth orbit and is on its way to the Moon

8:51 am

SLIM's planned route to the Moon

The Japanese lunar lander SLIM fired its engines on September 30, 2023 to begin its journey to the Moon. The map to the right indicates the planned route after this trans-lunar injection burn, first flying past the Moon to put it on a trajectory that will bring it back to the Moon at the proper speed and direction for its landing several months hence.

The main goal of this mission is engineering, to test the ability of an autonomous unmanned spacecraft to land precisely within a small target zone about 300 feet across. If proven, this ability will make it possible to send unmanned landers to many places that are presently impossible due to their rough topography.

The route that SLIM is taking to the Moon is also unusual, and is probably also an engineering test of its own. Flybys of planets to change a spacecraft’s path is not a new technique, but in the past it has been used to slingshot the probe to another object, not send it back to that planet.

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Layered ice sheets on Mars?

11:15 am

Overview map

Layered ices sheets on Mars?

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 22, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The white spot near the center of the overview map above marks its location, deep inside the 2,000-mile-long region in the northern mid-latitudes I call glacier country, as everything there seems covered with glacial features of some kind. All the features in this picture are smaller than 50 feet high, based on the resolution of the topographical data obtained by Mars Global Surveyor in the 1990s.

What makes this picture interesting are the layers, made most obvious in the terraced mesa in the upper left. Surrounding this mesa for dozens of miles in all directions are similar layered features, all suggesting that the glacial ice sheets that appear to coat this region have either have been sublimating away over time, or when growing grew less with each subsequent growth cycle.

Though both have or are likely happening, the latter most likely explains the terraces, as there is a lot of evidence on the surface of Mars showing that each subsequent growth cycle produced smaller glaciers and ice layers.

From the perspective of future colonists, this picture once again shows that water will readily accessible on Mars, as long as you travel north or south of the equator at least 30 degrees of latitude. This location is at 42 degrees north, and is very typical of this whole region.

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Updated map of Yutu-2’s travels on far side of the Moon

3:01 pm

Map showing Yutu-2 full route on Moon
Click for original image.

The Chinese agency operating the Yutu-2 rover on the far side of the Moon today released an updated map showing the rover’s full route since landing, the first update since January 2023. That map is to the right, reduced to post here. The landing site is in the lower right, with the rover presently in the upper left.

Since January the rover has apparently traveled only about 300 feet, even though it has had about eight lunar days to travel. Note too that the last update was also the first in three months. It appears the Chinese are either having issues with the rover (not surprising as it has been operating on the Moon for almost five years, since January 2019), or they have decided they don’t need to tell anyone what they are doing.

Since the rover was not expected to last more than a few lunar days (several Earth months), the former is more likely.

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Is this the source of the sand for the giant dune sea that surrounds the Martian North Pole?

12:49 pm

Overview map

Circling the north pole of Mars is a gigantic dune field dubbed Olympia Undae, with its densest regions (marked in red on the overview map to the right) estimated to be 700 miles long and covering 120 degrees of longitude.

Where does all the sand come from that created this dune ocean? We now have a rough idea. The arrows on the map to the right indicate the direction of the prevailing winds, as recently determined by scientists studying the orientation of dunes. From this it appears that much of the dust comes from the north polar icecap itself, from its lower layers where dust and ice are cemented together. The prevailing winds, especially in the canyons that cut into the icecap, drive that dust out from the lower layers, where it over eons has piled up in that circular ocean of sand.

The white cross marks the location of today’s cool image, an attempt by scientists to photograph at high resolution one of the sources of this sand, on the edge of the icecap.
» Read more

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Hubble data shows expansion of supernova remnant

9:57 am

Cygnus loop filament

Astronomers have created a four-second long movie using Hubble images collected over twenty years that shows the expansion of one filament in the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, the explosion of which is thought to have occurred 20,000 years ago.

The picture above is one frame of that movie. The filament is estimated to be two light years in length.

By analyzing the shock’s location, astronomers found that the shock hasn’t slowed down at all in the last 20 years, and is speeding into interstellar space at over half a million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in less than half an hour. While this seems incredibly fast, it’s actually on the slow end for the speed of a supernova shock wave.

Two versions of the movie are at the link, with the longer providing excellent context.

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Parker completes 17th close fly-by of the Sun, setting new records

9:43 am

The Parker Solar Probe on September 27, 2023 completed its seventeenth close fly-by of the Sun, setting new speed and distance records.

Set up by a gravity-assist flyby of Venus on Aug. 21, the close approach (known as perihelion) occurred at 7:28 p.m. EDT, with Parker Solar Probe moving 394,736 miles per hour (635,266 kilometers per hour) around the Sun – another record. The milestone also marked the midway point in the mission’s 17th solar encounter, which began Sept. 22 and continues through Oct. 3.

It zipped past the Sun at a distance of only 4.51 million miles, also a record.

Whether it survived this fly-by will not be confirmed until October 1, when it is able to safely send its first data back after moving far enough away from the Sun to reopen communications.

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Ispace wins $55 million NASA contract for lunar landing mission

9:17 am

The Japanese company Ispace, which is also establishing operations in the U.S., has won a $55 million NASA contract to send a lunar landing plus communications relay satellites to the Moon in 2026.

Ispace’s Hakuto-R1 lander attempted a landing on the Moon in April, but crashed. The company has a second Hakuto-R mission presently targeting launch next year. The NASA contract would the company’s third, which will be built in its new U.S. facility and be called Apex-1.

In today’s briefing, Ispace representatives announced that the primary customer for its upcoming Mission 3 is NASA, which has selected the company as part of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS). Ispace stated during the briefing that it has signed a $55 million contract with NASA for Mission 3 in order to land near the lunar south pole carrying approximately 210 pounds (95 kg) of scientific payloads.

But that’s not all the mission will do. On its way to the lunar surface, Mission 3 will deliver relay satellites that will remain in orbit around the moon to serve as communication relays.

Though it will not be surprising if these launch dates slip, Ispace is in a strong position to succeed, considering it is presently the only private company to launch a Moon lander, and got very close to putting it down on the lunar surface successfully.

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A gully in Mars’ glacier country

12:40 pm

Overview map

A gully in Mars' glacier country
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and brightened to post here, was taken on July 8, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter (MRO).

The white dot in the southwest corner of 146-mile-wide Lyot Crater on the overview map above marks the location, smack dab in the middle of the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I dub glacier country, since practically every high resolution picture shows some glacial features. This picture is no different. The material in the upper right of the picture appears to be ice that fills the crater and laps up against its interior slope. The gully appears to suggest a drainage down into that ice that partly covered it.

The elevation change from the high to low points is about 4,500 feet. What drained down this slope to carve this gully however remains an unsolved mystery, though most scientists presently favor some form of water or brine flow in the past and no longer active.

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The global wind patterns on Mars, determined by the orientation of dunes

10:54 am

Mars global wind patterns

Wind patterns at the Martina North Pole

Scientists have now roughly determined the global wind patterns on Mars, based on the orientation of one type of crescent-shaped dune called barchan dunes.

The global map above and the north pole map to the right come from figure 2 of the paper. The colored letters indicate the location of additional close-up images. On the polar map Olympia Undae is Mars’ largest dune field. From the abstract:

Crescent-shaped sand dunes are prevalent across the deserts of Mars. Here, we use the physical relationship between the shape of these dunes and the winds that form them to infer the directions of surface winds on Mars on a global scale. We find that dunes typically adhere to the global circulation patterns of Mars’ atmosphere, and that local topographic winds are mostly important in areas with high topographic roughness such as inside deep impact craters. Our global wind map can serve to calibrate numerical climate models, which in turn can help us learn about the recent and modern-day climate of Mars.

The arrows on both maps indicate the direction of the prevailing winds. This data will also help clarify the orientation of many surface features seen by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s high resolution camera. This data also helps explain why the lander InSight never got a burst of wind to clear the dust from its solar panels, while the rovers Spirit and Opportunity did. The rovers were located in regions with clear prevailing winds. InSight was not.

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Webb takes an infared look at Saturn

10:36 am

Webb's five images of Saturn
Webb’s five images of Saturn. Click for original.

Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have obtained five infrared images of Saturn to get a more detailed look at the gas giant’s atmosphere and the molecules within it.

The image to the right is Figure 1 from the paper, showing the location of those five images on Saturn, placed over a much higher resolution Hubble Space Telescope optical image. The graph on the bottom shows the molecules revealed from spectroscopic data obtained by Webb’s infrared view. From the abstract:

We show evidence that a stratospheric circulation pattern detected by Cassini during northern winter has now fully reversed in northern summer, with the low-latitude stratosphere being cool and depleted in aerosols due to summertime upwelling. MIRI [Webb’s mid-infrared instrument] provides access to spectral regions that were not possible with the Cassini spacecraft, particularly in the 5–7 μm region where reflected sunlight and thermal emission blend together. Ammonia and phosphine are enriched at Saturn’s equator, suggesting strong mixing from the deeper troposphere. MIRI’s high sensitivity enables the first identification of previously unseen emission propane bands, along with the first measurements of the distribution of several gaseous species: tropospheric water, and stratospheric ethylene, benzene, methyl, and carbon dioxide.

The paper notes that this work still has uncertainty because when the infrared images were taken engineers were still working out the kinks for using Webb. Nonetheless, the results illustrate the large potential for future planetary discoveries from Webb.

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Another retraction looms of research claiming the discovery of superconductivity at room temperature

10:22 am

A March research paper that claimed the discovery of a compound that allowed superconductivity at room temperature is now facing retraction, making it the third superconductivity paper in which physicist Ranga Dias of University of Rochester was the lead author.

On 1 September, Nature attached an editor’s note to the March paper, warning readers that “the reliability of data presented in this manuscript is currently in question.” A week later, eight of the co-authors on the 11-person paper submitted a letter to Nature requesting the study be retracted, The Wall Street Journal first reported on Tuesday. Science has obtained the letter and additional documents, which raise concerns about the reliability of the data and Dias’s treatment of his co-authors. “We respectfully request and recommend that Nature issue a retraction,” conclude the signatories, who include five recent graduate students of Dias’s.

The article at the link is worth reading, as it details at length the bullying efforts of Dias to intimidate his co-authors by threatening legal action.

Before the co-authors sent their letter to Nature, Dias sent a cease-and-desist letter to six of them—five of his former graduate students and one U of R faculty member. He warned them about the “potential legal consequences of your actions and to consider the ethical implications of making baseless allegations against a colleague and fellow scientist.” Dias has previously sent cease-and-desist letters to other critics of his work.

This is not all. It appears that Dias used his position of authority to prevent an honest appraisal of his work, actions that are in utter violation of ethics and the scientific method.

While it is good that Dias’s chickens are now coming home to roost, his corrupt behavior is unfortunately too common now in the academic world, as indicated by the increase in retractions by 13,750% since 2000.

The good news however is that these retractions are helping to clean out that corruption. Though cleaning house will take time, it does appears to be happening. For example, according to the article, absolutely no students have enrolled in any of Dias’s classes at the University of Rochester.

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Anti-matter falls down, just like matter

9:31 am

The uncertainty of science: In a difficult particle physics experiment that carries large margins for error, scientists have determined that gravity appears to affect anti-matter the same as matter.

Quantitatively, the experiment indicates that antimatter experiences a pull from gravity that’s 75% as strong as that on ordinary matter, give or take 20%—a statistical agreement between the two. Hangst says 99.9% of physicists would have predicted the result. Still, he notes, “You have to do the experiment with an open mind.”

One must understand that, at atomic levels, the influence of gravity is practically nil. Extracting a measurment of its influence outside the other more powerful forces that dominate atomic particles, magnetism, the weak force, and the strong force, is difficult, to put it mildly.

The key is that the experiment result showed some influence of gravity, in the expected direction.

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The base of the long and deep south rim of Valles Marineris

1:14 pm

Overview map

The base of southern slope of Valles Marineris
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 14, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), showing the very bottom section of the long and endlessly deep south slopes of Valles Marineris, the largest known canyon in the solar system.

The many layers here are likely evidence of repeated volcanic flood lava events, over several billion years, after which the canyon formed.

On the overview map above the black dot in the southeast section of the area of the canyon dubbed Melas marks this location. The picture’s northeast corner is essentially the floor of Valles Marineris. From this point the elevation gain to the southwest corner of the picture 3.5 miles away is about 3,300 feet.

The rim itself however is far far higher, about fifty miles farther to the southwest and climbing about 22,000 feet more. Along those fifty miles you’d have to also climb over two intervening mountain ranges, one about 4,000 feet high and the second about 6,000 feet high.

Valles Marineris is big, so big it is hard to imagine a canyon this size. It makes many moutain ranges on Earth seem small.

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Nearest supernova in a decade confirms such stars lose mass prior to exploding

10:03 am

Gemini North image of supernova in Pinwheel Galaxy
Arrow points to supernova. Click for original image,
taken by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii.

Astronomers making a detailed analysis of the data from the nearest supernova in a decade, SN 2023ixf and located in the Pinwheel Galaxy only 20 million light years away, has confirmed what other research had suggested, that such stars lose significant mass prior to exploding.

Within hours of going supernova, core-collapse supernovae produce a flash of light that occurs when the shock wave from the explosion reaches the outer edge of the star. SN 2023ixf, however, produced a light curve that didn’t seem to fit this expected behavior. To better understand SN 2023ixf’s shock breakout, a team of scientists led by CfA postdoctoral fellow Daichi Hiramatsu analyzed data from the 1.5m Tillinghast Telescope, 1.2m telescope, and MMT at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, a CfA facility located in Arizona, as well as data from the Global Supernova Project— a key project of the Las Cumbres Observatory, NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, and many others. This multi-wavelength study, which was published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, revealed that, in sharp contradiction to expectations and stellar evolution theory, SN 2023ixf’s shock breakout was delayed by several days.

“The delayed shock breakout is direct evidence for the presence of dense material from recent mass loss,” said Hiramatsu, adding that such extreme mass loss is atypical of Type II supernovae. “Our new observations revealed a significant and unexpected amount of mass loss— close to the mass of the Sun— in the final year prior to explosion.”

The press release overstates the surprise of this discovery. Research in the last two decades of massive stars that are thought to be the progenitors of supernovae has shown that they lose mass in great amounts during eruptions. It was therefore not that surprising that this star experienced its own eruption prior to going supernova.

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Giant Magellan Telescope begins fabricating its seventh mirror

9:23 am

The fabrication of the seventh and last mirror for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) has begun, with its completion and installation expected before the end of the decade.

In the project’s latest development, the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at another founding project partner, the University of Arizona, closed the lid on nearly 20 tons of the purest optical glass inside a one-of-a-kind oven housed beneath the stands of the university’s football stadium. The spinning oven will heat the glass to 1,165 degrees Celsius, so that as it melts, it is forced outward to form the mirror’s curved paraboloid surface. Measuring 8.4-meters in diameter—about two stories tall when standing on edge—the mirror will cool over the next three months before moving into the polishing stage.

Once assembled, all seven mirrors will work in concert as one monolithic 25.4-meter mirror—a diameter equal to the length of a full-grown blue whale—resulting in up to 200 times the sensitivity and four times the image resolution of today’s most advanced space telescopes.

A decade ago it was expected that this telescope in Chile would follow the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), while also working in parallel with it, with TMT covering the northern hemisphere and GMT covering the southern hemisphere. Now GMT is likely to forever work alone, as TMT remains blocked in Hawaii by the government and anti-western, anti-white protesters, and will likely never be built.

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