As its fuel supplies begin to run out, engineers have used a new trick to raise Messenger’s orbit around Mercury in order to extend its research life.
The spacecraft’s orbit will still decay, and is expected to impact the surface sometime in the early spring of 2016.
A National Research Council report has outlined a range of budget cuts in the field of ocean science, including significant cuts to infrastructure expenses, in order to focus the available funds more wisely.
Faced with rising costs of going to sea, the ocean-sciences division of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) should immediately slash what it spends on marine hardware, says a new report. It suggests making the biggest cut to the flagship US$386-million Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), which after years of construction is just months away from being finished.
The report, released on 23 January by the US National Research Council, is likely to guide US oceanography for years to come. It is the first formal attempt to address what many researchers have grumbled about for years — that basic ocean science at the NSF is losing out to the rising costs of infrastructure.
This report and the response of the ocean science community illustrates a pattern going on throughout the sciences. For years, their budgets had been rising so fast that they really didn’t know what to do with the money. (I know they would disagree with me.) This resulted in some laziness in how they spent it, including a great deal of feather-bedding and pork.
Now that budgets have frozen and are no longer growing, and in many cases shrinking back to more affordable levels, they need to figure out what is essential and what is not. This report is part of that effort.
I am seeing this same process happening in other fields as well. Santa, in the form of unlimited federal spending, has gone home, and is unexpected to return for quite some time.
Link here. These images are from Rosetta’s high resolution camera OSIRIS, the results from which have been kept very closely secret by the Rosetta science team. Today however they published a bunch of papers in the journal Science, so we are finally beginning to see some of their amazing images.
Take a look. Each one illustrates how alien a place Comet 67/C-G is.
More info on these papers can be found here and here.
Even more here, from the Rosetta team.
Climate change: Data from Rosetta has shown that the coma surrounding Comet 67P/C-G’s nucleus varies far more than had been expected by Earth-based observations.
“From a telescope, images of a comet’s atmosphere suggest that the coma is uniform and does not vary over short periods of hours or days. That’s what we were expecting as we approached the comet,” said Dr. Stephen Fuselier, a director in the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division and the lead U.S. co-investigator for the Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis Double Focusing Mass Spectrometer (ROSINA DFMS) instrument. “It was certainly a surprise when we saw time variations from 200 km away. More surprising was that the composition of the coma was also varying by very large amounts. We’re taught that comets are made mostly of water ice. For this comet, the coma sometimes contains much more carbon dioxide than water vapor.”
The variations might be seasonal, or even reflect a variation from day to night.
Expect more news stories about Comet 67P/C-G from Rosetta. The journal Science is today publishing a special section on results from Rosetta.
Getting closer! Scientists for the space probe Dawn have released new images of Ceres, the solar system’s largest asteroid.
Some of the images have been combined to produce a very short movie showing the asteroid’s rotation. The images also show that unlike Vesta, Dawn’s previous target, Ceres appears very spherical, like a planet.
The science team running Rosetta has released an image (cropped by me on the right) from the probe’s high resolution camera showing the fine structure of Comet 67P/C-G’s plumes.
I call them plumes rather than jets, which is the word the scientists use as well as everyone else, because it appears to me that they really aren’t jets, tightly confined flows of material coming from a nozzle-like opening. Instead, the image makes me think of very fast-rising plumes of smoke rising from an extinguished fire.
This image was taken in November, and is one of only a very tiny handful of images released from the high resolution camera. Rosetta’s science team has been very possessive of images from this camera, holding them back for their own research papers to follow in the future. Even here, the image is not very detailed. I wonder what cool stuff this camera has snapped close in that they have not yet shown us.
After a decade the British Mars lander Beagle 2 has been located on Mars by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
It is believed from the images that the lander is only partially deployed, which would explain why the lander never sent any signal after landing.
In preparing for its July 14 fly-by of Pluto, New Horizons will take its first images of the planet on January 25.
Snapped by New Horizons’ telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, known as LORRI, those pictures will give mission scientists a continually improving look at the dynamics of those moons. And they’ll play a critical role in navigating the spacecraft as it covers the remaining 135 million miles (220 million kilometers) to Pluto. “We’ve completed the longest journey any craft has flown from Earth to reach its primary target, and we are ready to begin exploring!” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Over the next few months, LORRI will take hundreds of pictures of Pluto against star fields to refine the team’s estimates of New Horizons’ distance to Pluto. Though the Pluto system will resemble little more than bright dots in the camera’s view until May, mission navigators will use those data to design course-correction maneuvers that aim the spacecraft toward its flyby target point this summer. The first such maneuver could occur as early as March.
The uncertainty of science: Ocean scientists have published a review of the literature, criticizing the ocean science field and the journals and journalists who report on it for overstating the environmental damage to the oceans.
The state of the world’s seas is often painted as verging on catastrophe. But although some challenges are very real, others have been vastly overstated, researchers claim in a review paper. The team writes that scientists, journals and the media have fallen into a mode of groupthink that can damage the credibility of the ocean sciences. The controversial study exposes fault lines in the marine-science community.
Carlos Duarte, a marine biologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and his colleagues say that gloomy media reports about ocean issues such as invasive species and coral die-offs are not always based on actual observations. It is not just journalists who are to blame, they maintain: the marine research community “may not have remained sufficiently sceptical” on the topic. [emphasis mine]
Gee, what a concept! These guys actually want scientists to base their claims of environmental disaster on actual observations. Who wodda thunk it?
…watch a video of its descent.
The video is posted below the fold. This anniversary also celebrates the tenth anniversary of Cassini orbiting Saturn.
» Read more
Archeologists made the astonishing discovery of a 132 year old Winchester rifle leaning against a tree in Great Basin National Park in Nevada during a survey sweep.
“The 132 year-old rifle, exposed to sun, wind, snow, and rain was found leaning against a tree in the park. The cracked wood stock, weathered to grey, and the brown rusted barrel blended into the colors of the old juniper tree in a remote rocky outcrop, keeping the rifle hidden for many years,” Great Basin National Park said in a statement.
They hope with some historical research they might be able to identify who left the rifle there more than a century ago.
On January 26 asteroid 2004 BL86, about 1/3 of a mile in diameter, will fly past Earth at a distance of about 745,000 miles.
This is the largest known asteroid expected to come this close until 2027.
After an initial focus on studying the genomes of dogs, genetics researchers are now switching to cats.
After the completion of the human, mouse and rat genomes, the US National Institutes of Health organized a commission to decide on their next target; the dog genome was selected for high-quality sequencing, whereas cats were put on hold.
That got some cat geneticists’ backs up. “The truth is there were more powerful people interested in dogs,” says Stephen O’Brien, director of the Theodosius Dobzhansky Center for Genome Bioinformatics in St Petersburg, Russia, who led the initial cat-sequencing efforts.
There is now a project which, for only $7,500, allows scientists to map the genome of any cat for the cause of science. Under this program, they’ve already done 56 cats, including a kitten and her parents.
An evening pause: Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Link here.
The Mars rover Opportunity has climbed to its highest Martian altitude yet, a point on the rim of Endeavour Crater 440 feet above the crater floor below.
This despite the rover’s continuing memory problems.
NASA has produced retro-style travel posters for three alien exoplanets which you can download and print.
The posters are quite cool, which is not surprising, considering that, in the past four decades, the best interplanetary travel that NASA has been able to achieve has been its graphic power-point and pr images. Unfortunately, for NASA actually going there has not been so easy.
Heh: It is currently warmer in Gale Crater on Mars than in many parts of the United States.
Obviously those SUVs on Mars are causing the warming there. Obviously.
The Centers for Disease Control today released graphs detailing the on-going ebola epidemic in West Africa.
What is significant about all the graphs at the link is that there is no sign of a let up or an easing of the epidemic. The numbers are still rising, even if the increase has slowed somewhat.
A close look at features on the Martian surface seen by Curiosity suggests to one scientist the presence of ancient fossils of carpet-like microbiology.
On Earth, carpet-like colonies of microbes trap and rearrange sediments in shallow bodies of water such as lakes and costal areas, forming distinctive features that fossilize over time. These structures, known as microbially-induced sedimentary structures (or MISS), are found in shallow water settings all over the world and in ancient rocks spanning Earth’s history.
Nora Noffke, a geobiologist at Old Dominion University in Virginia, has spent the past 20 years studying these microbial structures. Last year, she reported the discovery of MISS that are 3.48 billion years old in the Western Australia’s Dresser Formation, making them potentially the oldest signs of life on Earth.
In a paper published online last month in the journal Astrobiology (the print version comes out this week), Noffke details the striking morphological similarities between Martian sedimentary structures in the Gillespie Lake outcrop (which is at most 3.7 billion years old) and microbial structures on Earth.
Noffke is very careful in her analysis. She doesn’t claim any proofs, only that her expert eye sees the same things on both planets. Most intriguing.
