Tag: science

Jupiter’s north pole cyclones appear as stable as those at the south pole

11:26 am

The northern polar cyclones of Jupiter
Click for original figure.

In reviewing five years of data from Juno, scientists now conclude that the polygon of large storms surrounding Jupiter’s north pole appear as stable as the same poloygon of storms found at the south pole.

Each polygon is made up of a central polar cyclone (PC) surrounded by a number of circum-polar cyclones (CPC). The image to the right, Figure 1 from the paper, compares the north polar storms from 2017 (top) to 2022 (bottom). During the five years of observations the whole polygon “rotated approximately 15° westward,” though it essentially maintained its structure.

After 5 years, the 8 + 1 North PCs structure and the 5 + 1 South one show very small changes; the lifetime of a single cyclone is therefore longer than 25 years and possibly longer than 75 years. Also, single cyclones have their peculiar morphology and this is often retained after 5 years, both in radiance and in morphology. In particular, this is the first time that we can observe the North CPCs system since the discovery in 2017, and we find that the structure is almost unperturbed.

The question that appears to remain unanswered by this data is whether these storms are deep-rooted to the interior of Jupiter or shallow structures. The stability suggests the latter, but this remains unproven.

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Chang’e-5 samples suggest lunar meteorite impacts took place the same time as big Chicxulub impact

10:23 am

In analyzing lunar samples brought back by China’s Chang’e-5 Moon lander, Australian scientists have found evidence of lunar meteorite impacts that apparently took place the same time as big Chicxulub impact in the Yucatan 66 million years ago, thought by many scientists to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Their findings suggest that the frequency of meteorite impacts on the Moon may have been mirrored on Earth, and that major impact events on Earth were not stand-alone events and instead were accompanies by a series of smaller impacts. The study has been published in Science Advances.

“We combined a wide range of microscopic analytical techniques, numerical modelling, and geological surveys to determine how these microscopic glass beads from the Moon were formed and when,” says lead author Professor Alexander Nemchin, from the Space Science and Technology Centre (SSTC) in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University in Perth.

The data suggests two possibilities, neither of which is confirmed. First, the impacts could have occurred because a cluster of large objects hit both Earth and the Moon at the same time. Second, the impacts on the Moon could have been caused by objects thrown up from the Earth when the bigger impact occurred at Chicxulub.

Either way, the data suggests a greater and more complex interaction between events on the Earth and events on the Moon.

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Initial Webb results revised because telescope wasn’t yet fully calibrated

10:02 am

The uncertainty of science: Though it appears that no results will have to be abandoned, the scientists who published some of the very first results from the Webb Space Telescope have been scrambling to adjust and revise their papers because the telescope is only now getting fully calibrated.

“This caused a little bit of panic,” says Nathan Adams, an astronomer at the University of Manchester, UK, who, along with his colleagues, pointed out the problem in a 9 August update to a preprint they had posted in late July3. “For those including myself who had written a paper within the first two weeks, it was a bit of — ‘Oh no, is everything that we’ve done wrong, does it all need to go in the bin?’”

To try to standardize all the measurements, the STScI is working through a detailed plan to point Webb at several types of well-understood star, and observe them with every detector in every mode for every instrument on the telescope4. “It just takes a while,” says Karl Gordon, an astronomer at the STScI who helps lead the effort.

In the meantime, astronomers have been reworking manuscripts that describe distant galaxies on the basis of Webb data. “Everyone’s gone back over and had a second look, and it’s not as bad as we thought,” Adams says. Many of the most exciting distant-galaxy candidates still seem to be at or near the distance originally estimated. But other preliminary studies, such as those that draw conclusions about the early Universe by comparing large numbers of faint galaxies, might not stand the test of time. Other fields of research, such as planetary studies, are not affected as much because they depend less on these preliminary brightness measurements.

Overall, it does not appear the more precise calibrations will change much of signficance, since most of the earliest observations were simply that, observations, not theoretical. Because the distance estimates remain largely unchanged however the theorists are left with the same conundrum: The age and apparent nature of the most distant objects does not seem to fit with what the theories had predicted Webb would see.

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Hubble & Webb make first coordinated observations, tracking DART impact of Dimorphus

9:50 am

Webb and Hubble together look at DART impact of Dimorphus
Click for full image.

For the first time scientists have used both the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the same astronomical event, in this case the impact of the DART spacecraft on the asteroid Dimorphus on September 26, 2022.

The two images to the right show the asteroid several hours after impact. Both telescopes also captured images before the impact as well. From the press release:

Observations from Webb and Hubble together will allow scientists to gain knowledge about the nature of the surface of Dimorphos, how much material was ejected by the collision, and how fast it was ejected. Additionally, Webb and Hubble captured the impact in different wavelengths of light – Webb in infrared and Hubble in visible. Observing the impact across a wide array of wavelengths will reveal the distribution of particle sizes in the expanding dust cloud, helping to determine whether it threw off lots of big chunks or mostly fine dust. Combining this information, along with ground-based telescope observations, will help scientists to understand how effectively a kinetic impact can modify an asteroid’s orbit.

When Webb was first conceived in the late 1990s, it was exactly for this reason, to combine Hubble’s optical vision with Webb’s infrared view. Though more than a decade late, it has finally happened.

It will be months before scientists begin to decipher the data produced by all the telescopes and spacecraft used to observe the DART impact. What we are seeing now are merely hints at what has been learned.

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Ingenuity completed 33rd flight this past weekend

4:32 pm

This notice is a bit late, but then, there really isn’t much to report. According to the Ingenuity flight log, engineers successfully completed the helicopter’s 33rd flight on September 24, 2022, flying about 364 feet for 55 seconds.

The plan had been to fly 365 feet for 55.6 seconds, so that matched their plan almost exactly. According to the interactive map that tracks the movement of both the rover Perseverance and the helicopter, this flight continued the helicopter’s movement almost due west, bringing it closer to the rover so as to facilitate communications.

The primary goal of Ingenuity’s engineering team at this time is to refine the accuracy of their software in order to better understand how to fly robots on Mars. This will help prepare the next helicopters for future missions.

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Part 1: The ugly corrupt lie of the experimental COVID jab

2:16 pm

Joe Biden: dictator
Joe Biden: claiming the power to tell us what medicines we must take

On September 9, 2021, President Joe Biden announced harsh mandates nationwide that forced millions to get COVID shots. You had no choice. If you refused, you would be fired from your job and made a non-person, forbidden in all ways from participating normally in society.

“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin,” Biden said, making a direct appeal to the 80 million people who he said were still unvaccinated. “Your refusal has cost all of us.”

…”It’s simple [said an official]: If you want to work for the federal government, you must be vaccinated. If you want to do business with the government, you must vaccinate your workforce.”

Those mandates — unreasonably based on very uncertain knowledge at the time — have now been found to have killed thousands of people who did not need to die.

And worst of all, the people imposing those mandates were lying, and knew they were lying.

Killing young adults

For a large majority of the population that either voluntarily chose to get the COVID jab or were forced to submit under duress, the shots and boosters at this point appear to have been harmless. Most people have exhibited no negative symptoms once jabbed, and have so far been able to go on with their lives as if nothing had changed.

The problem is that for many, that jab was a death sentence, with the executioner often arriving unexpectedly but quickly, and completely unnecessarily.
» Read more

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Celestron to modify commercial amateur telescope for space use

9:19 am

Capitalism in space: Amateur telescope manufacturer Celestron has signed a deal to adapt one of its more expensive ground-based telescopes for use in space.

Trans Astronautica Corp. announced an agreement Sept. 27 with telescope manufacturer Celestron to develop a space-qualified version of the company’s Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt Astrograph (RASA) ground-based telescope. “We’ve been using Celestron’s RASA telescopes in our space domain awareness and asteroid prospecting systems, and we found them to be very affordable, high-quality optical systems,” Joel Sercel, TransAstra founder and CEO, told SpaceNews. “We looked at the designs and we realized it would not be that hard to adapt them for space use.”

Over the next year, TransAstra plans to modify the RASA telescope design and substitute materials to produce a telescope that can withstand radiation exposure, temperature swings, and the vibration and shock loads of space launch.

TransAstra provides tracking data on space junk to both the commercial and defense industry. It also has a new deal to use its telescopes to provide schools use of these telescopes for educational purposes. The goal is to put this capability into orbit.

The future ramifications however are profound. Once Celestron has a commercial relatively inexpensive telescope capable of operating in space (or on the Moon), it will not take long before customers begin lining up eager to buy and launch it. Think about it: though there will be engineering issues to overcome, the cost of placing one of these telescopes on one of the new commercial lunar landers for operation on the Moon will not be far beyond the budgets of many amateur astronomers, some of whom spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their own ground-based observatories.

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More glaciers in Mars’ glacier country

2:24 pm

Overview map

glacial layering in Clasia Vallis
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on June 18, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what appear to be layered glacial features on the floor of what at first glance appears to be a crater.

It is not a crater however. The depression in the lower right of this image is the rim and floor of a 77-mile-long meandering canyon on Mars dubbed Clasia Vallis. The red cross in the overview map above marks its location, at 34 degrees north latitude. This channel drains downward from the southern cratered highlands into the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude strip of mensae terrain that I dub glacier country because almost every hi-res image from this region shows glacial features.

Below is a wider view of Clasia Vallis, taken by the context camera on MRO on March 19, 2014.
» Read more

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First ground-based telescope view of DART impact on Dimorphus

10:10 am

LICIACube Explorer image of DART impact

We now have the first ground-based images of the DART impact on the 525-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphus yesterday, captured by the Hawaiian telescope ATLAS.

You need to watch the video of the full sequence of images, available here, to get a true sense of the impact. The cloud of material quickly expands to about twice the asteroid’s size, then dissipates away, with the remaining asteroid now appearing larger (?). That larger size could be caused by a remaining cloud of material that still needs to settle back to the surface.

More images have been released by a Chinese telescope. Also, the first images from the Italian cubesat LICIACube Explorer, flying in parallel with DART, have been released. I have posted one to the right. The large blob near the center is the parent half-mile-wide asteroid, Didymos. Dimorphus is buried in the debris cloud above and slightly to the right.

Hat tip stringer Jay for the links to these images.

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Radar data from Zhurong finds no ice to a depth of 260 feet

9:46 am

Zhurong's ground-penetrating radar data

Overview map

Chinese scientists today finally published their results from the ground-penetrating radar instrument on their Mars rover Zhurong, revealing that to a depth of 260 feet (80 meters), it detected no clear signal of water ice.

Figure 2 of their paper, posted above, summarizes their results. It shows the radar profile to 328 feet (100 meters) depth along Zhurong’s route, as shown in the map to the right, with the last bit of its recent travels ending somewhere in the blue circle. From the paper:

Our low-frequency radar imaging profile shows radar signals within the depth range of 0–80 m (Fig. 2a), precluding the existence of a water-rich layer within this depth range as the existence of water would strongly attenuate the radar signals and diminish the visibility of deeper reflections. The estimated low (less than 9) dielectric permittivity (Fig. 2c) further supports the absence of a water-rich layer as water-bearing materials typically have high (greater than 15) dielectric permittivity.

We further tested this assessment with thermal considerations by conducting a heat conduction simulation based on available thermal parameters estimated from previous studies (Methods). Our thermal simulation results … show that the Zhurong landing area has an annual average temperature of around 220K in the RoPeR detection depth range, which is much lower than the freezing point of pure water (273K), and also lower than the eutectic temperatures of typical sulfate and carbonate brines, but slightly above those of perchlorate brine systems. This observation suggests that the shallow subsurface of the Zhurong landing area could not stably contain liquid water nor sulfate or carbonate brines, consistent with the radar imaging result.

The data suggests that below the surface topsoil layer, the regolith, there are two distinct layers of material that the scientists interpret as possible evidence of past catastrophic floods. That conclusion however is very very uncertain. The main take-away is that in the northern lowland plains of Utopia Planitia at 25 degrees north latitude, where Zhurong landed, Mars is definitely a dry desert, with no water close to the surface.

This data also suggests that if you establish a colony anywhere in Mars’ dry equatorial regions within 30 degrees latitude of the equator, you will likely have to travel north or south a considerable distance to get to easily accessible ice. The global map of Mars below shows the regions where ice is most evident, north and south of 30 degrees latitude.
» Read more

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DART hits Dimorphus

4:42 pm

Didymos and Dimorphus

Dimorphus

The surface of Dimorphus

The probe DART today successfully impacted the small 525-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphus. From the data produced engineers will calculate how much that impact changed Dimorphus’ orbit around it parent asteroid, half-mile-wide Didymos.

The three images to the right give a sense of the approach and impact.

The first, at 2 minutes and 30 seconds from impact, shows Didymos in the left bottom corner. You can actually see individual boulders on its surface. At this distance and resolution is is unclear whether it is a rubble pile or a more solid body. Dimorphus is no longer a mere dot, but no surface features can yet be discerned.

The second image, only seventeen seconds before DART crashed into Dimorphus, shows us the entire asteroid. Though it appears to be a pile of rocks, it also appears less of a rubble pile than both Ryugu and Bennu, visited by probes in 2019 and 2020. Those rubble-piles had almost no smooth surface areas. Dimorphus however at this distance and resolution does appear to have a lot of areas where the surface is relatively smooth, suggesting its structure is more solid than a rubble pile.

At only 525 feet across, some of those bigger boulders are about 50 to 60 feet in diameter.

The white dot in the center of Dimorphus marks the rocks seen in the third image, taken about five seconds before impact. At this resolution so close to the surface, it appears the smooth areas are actually made up of many tiny pebbles and dust.

The biggest rock in the center of the picture is probably between ten to twenty feet in diameter.

The primary data from this mission will not be available for a few weeks. Scientists have to observe both asteroids to see how much, if at all, Dimorphus’s orbit was shifted by the impact. Also, the images from the Italian cubesat, LICIACube Explorer, which was flying parallel to DART and taking pictures of the impact, plume, and back side of Dimorphus, won’t be available until later this week. Those images should give us a measure of the spacecraft’s effect on the asteroid. They will also reveal a lot more about the asteroid’s geology.

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Zig-zag ridges on Mars

2:26 pm

Zig-zag ridges on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on April 9, 2022v by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a series of parallel zig-zag ridges in a flat, knobby terrain.

I don’t presume to explain this at all. According to one research paper,

This interplana region consists of extensive networks of ridges—the eponymous Aeolis Dorsa—and is interpreted as having formed by topographic inversion of fluvial and alluvial deposits.

Why these ridges zig-zag however does not seem to fit into either a fluvial or alluvial explanation, both of which involve the flow of water. The quote implies these could be inverted stream channels (where the compacted streambed becomes a ridge when the surrounding terrain erodes away), but once again, the distinct zig-zag pattern seems wrong. Rivers meander, but they don’t generally turn right and left so sharply. And why should we see parallel zig-zags? This doesn’t seem to fit with a river channel origin.

The particular location, as shown on the overview map below, is close to the dry Martian equator, on the edge of Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest field of volcanic ash dust on Mars.
» Read more

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A galaxy slowly being eaten by its black hole

10:16 am

Spiral galaxy
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. From the caption:

NGC 5495, which lies around 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra, is a Seyfert galaxy, a type of galaxy with a particularly bright central region. These luminous cores — known to astronomers as active galactic nuclei — are dominated by the light emitted by dust and gas falling into a supermassive black hole. This image is drawn from a series of observations captured by astronomers studying supermassive black holes lurking in the hearts of other galaxies.

Essentially Seyfert galaxies are galaxies whose central supermassive black hole has become dominant, large enough that its gravity is slowly eating up the rest of the galaxy. As it increasingly swallows stars and gas, the black hole emits more and more energy, thus becoming an active galactic nuclei.

Two stars from our own galaxy also dominate this picture, one inside and to the right of the galaxy’s center, and the other the bright star at the bottom of the picture, both identified by the diffraction spikes.

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Watch DART smash into asteroid today

9:27 am

At 7:14 pm (Eastern) the NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft will crash into the small and harmless asteroid Dimorphus to see if such an impact could be used in the future to change the path of another asteroid aimed at Earth.

Dimorphus is 525 feet in diameter, and is a small moon of the larger half-mile-wide asteroid Didymos. Both are presently about 7 million miles away from Earth.

I have embedded the live streams below, one from a DART camera, dubbed DRACO, that will view the asteroid as the spacecraft approaches, and the other from NASA’s official live stream. From the DRACO live stream webpage:
» Read more

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Ganymede as seen by Juno

10:29 am

Ganymede as seen by Juno
Click to see full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on June 7, 2021 when Juno made a close fly-by of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. It has been reprocessed to bring out the details by citizen scientist Brian Swift.

Note the bands and parallel light and dark ridges that criss-cross the planet. Scientist as yet do not understand what caused them. Note also the bright impact craters, suggesting the release of water ice from below.

This image anticipates Juno’s upcoming September 29, 2022 fly-by of Europa, one of Jupiter’s other Galilean moons. The orbiter will pass only 221 miles above its surface, and get the best images in decades, since the Galileo mission in the 1990s.

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Above ground and underground Martian drainages

2:28 pm

Overview map

Cool image time! Today we are going to zoom into our cool image. The overview map to the right provides us the context. Our target is the small white rectangle inside the small box just below the north rim of 185-mile-wide Newton Crater, located 200 to 800 miles from the southwest edge of the lava plains dubbed Daedalia Planum that flowed down from Mars’s biggest volcanoes.

Newton Crater has a number of interesting features. Only two weeks ago I featured 4-mile-wide Avire Crater in Newton’s western quadrant, long known to have many gullies on its interior slopes as well as glacier features on its floor. Scientists have been monitoring those gullies now for more than a decade to see if they change seasonally, in a attempt to figure out their cause.

Today’s cool image looks at the very intriguing meandering canyons that appear to flow south from Newton’s north rim.
» Read more

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A hot wave in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere has been discovered, flowing away from the pole

9:59 am

Jupiter heat wave

Using data obtained by ground-based telescopes, scientists have discovered a hot wave, with temperatures in the range of 700 degrees Celsius (about 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit), rolling outward from Jupiter’s hot polar atmospheric regions, believed caused by the gas giant’s intense aurora.

Jupiter’s atmosphere, famous for its characteristic multicoloured vortices, is also unexpectedly hot: in fact, it is hundreds of degrees hotter than models predict. Due to its orbital distance millions of kilometres from the Sun, the giant planet receives under 4% of the amount of sunlight compared to Earth, and its upper atmosphere should theoretically be a frigid -70 degrees Celsius. Instead, its cloud tops are measured everywhere at over 400 degrees Celsius.

…Just like the Earth, Jupiter experiences auroras around its poles as an effect of the solar wind. However, while Earth’s auroras are transient and only occur when solar activity is intense, auroras at Jupiter are permanent and have a variable intensity. The powerful auroras can heat the region around the poles to over 700 degrees Celsius, and global winds can redistribute the heat globally around Jupiter.

The graphic above, adapted from the research presentation [pdf], shows that wave propagating away from the pole. The wave’s width is about the size of the Earth, with different sections moving from about 1,000 feet per second to 8,000 feet per second.

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Watching DART impact asteroid on September 26, 2022

9:35 am

A NASA planetary probe, dubbed DART, is on course for a planned impact of the asteroid Dimorphos this coming Monday, September 26, 2022, at 4:14 PM (Pacific).

DART was launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base, CA on November 23, 2021 PST (November 24 EST) headed to the asteroid Didymos and its tiny moon Dimorphos 7 million miles away. The plan is for DART to ram itself into Dimorphos while scientists on Earth measure whether its orbit around Didymos changes.

Dimorphos is about 525 feet in diameter, while Didymos is much larger, about a half mile in width. The goal is to see if this method can be used in the future to adjust an asteroid’s orbit enough to shift it away from hitting the Earth.

The impact will be observed by a camera on DART, as well as an Italian cubesat dubbed LICIACube.

NASA TV will be live streaming the event, and I will embed that live stream here when it goes live. Once DART gets close, its camera will record the asteroid’s approach through impact.

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Martian layers everywhere!

1:38 pm

Layers in Argyre Basin
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the left, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on June 1, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the rim edge to a fifteen-mile-wide canyon, with many apparent layers exposed on the high plateau.

The layers are intriguing in that they suggest several things. First, they give us a glimpse into the top and youngest layers that make up the interior canyon wall. Second, they tell us that erosion has removed much of those top and youngest layers, resulting in the mesas on that plateau.

Finally, the gullies flowing down into the canyon indicate further erosion processes, eating away at the canyon wall over time.

The location of this canyon is also intriguing.
» Read more

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Another model attempts to show how liquid water could have once existed on Mars

11:07 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists today published a new model that attempts to show how it was possible in the distant past for liquid water to have existed on the surface of Mars.

New research published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters suggests that Mars was born wet, with a dense atmosphere allowing warm-to-hot oceans for millions of years. To reach this conclusion, researchers developed the first model of the evolution of the Martian atmosphere that links the high temperatures associated with Mars’s formation in a molten state through to the formation of the first oceans and atmosphere. This model shows that — as on the modern Earth — water vapor in the Martian atmosphere was concentrated in the lower atmosphere and that the upper atmosphere of Mars was “dry” because the water vapor would condense out as clouds at lower levels in the atmosphere. Molecular hydrogen (H2), by contrast, did not condense and was transported to the upper atmosphere of Mars, where it was lost to space. This conclusion – that water vapor condensed and was retained on early Mars whereas molecular hydrogen did not condense and escaped – allows the model to be linked directly to measurements made by spacecraft, specifically, the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity.

As a model, this theory proves nothing, though it is very intriguing. The scientists propose that the heat from the planet’s interior replaces the known lack of energy that came from the Sun in Mars’ far past. While this could work, what makes it very uncertain is that its surface data is based on a single measurement from Curiosity, hardly a deep and convincing baseline.

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Ingenuity completes 32nd flight

10:21 am

According to a tweet from JPL, Ingenuity successfully completed its 32nd flight on Mars on September 18, 2022.

The 55.3-second flight covered 93.74m at a max speed of 4.75 meters per second.

That is about 308 feet distance, comparable to the helicopter’s previous flight. Though it probably continued to the west, as with that last flight, JPL’s tweet did not provide any directional information.

This second short hop in a row however suggests that the team’s focus has definitely shifted from scouting for Perseverance to practicing precision landings, thus gathering data to help build the future Martian helicopter that will be used to pick up Perseverance’s core samples some time in the future.

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Want to do a virtual hike in Jezero Crater on Mars? You can!

10:01 am

Using data from Mars orbiters, Perseverance, and Ingenuity, scientists have now created a virtual hiking map of Jezero Crater, allowing anyone to explore in detail the same places that the rover and helicopter have visited.

You can view the map here. From the press release:

The map allows virtual hikers to zoom in and out, and pan rapidly across scenes, so that they can explore the landscape from large scales down to centimetre-detail. Some of the 360° panoramas integrated with the waypoints have been synthetically rendered from orbital image data. Others are real panoramas stitched together from a multitude of single images taken by the Mastcam-Z camera instrument onboard the Mars 2020 Rover Perseverance, which have been provided by the University of Arizona. The sounds have been recorded by the SuperCam instrument on that same rover mission.

I’ve played with the map only a little, but find it quite amazing and useful, especially because it seems to work well on my relatively ordinary desktop Linux computer.

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Webb’s first infrared image of Neptune

9:30 am

Webb's infrared view of Neptune
Click for full image.

The science team for the James Webb Space Telescope today released that telescope’s first infrared image of Neptune.

That image is to the right, cropped and reduced slightly to post here. It is, as the press release touts, the best view in decades of Neptune’s rings. From the caption:

The most prominent features of Neptune’s atmosphere in this image are a series of bright patches in the planet’s southern hemisphere that represent high-altitude methane-ice clouds. More subtly, a thin line of brightness circling the planet’s equator could be a visual signature of global atmospheric circulation that powers Neptune’s winds and storms. Additionally, for the first time, Webb has teased out a continuous band of high-latitude clouds surrounding a previously-known vortex at Neptune’s southern pole.

The dots around the gas giant are the heat signatures of seven of its fourteen moons.

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InSight’s power level holding steady

9:57 pm

InSight's on-going power levels

The Energizer bunny of Mars, the InSight lander, continues to hold on. The engineering team tonight issued another status report, as shown in the graph to the right. For the past week the lander continued to produce 420 watt-hours per day, even though the tau level of dust in the atmosphere increased from 0.8 to 0.85.

The tau level of dust outside of the winter dust season is normally between 0.6 and 0.7. Even though Mars is moving out of winter, that level has increased slightly above InSight. And yet, even with a higher dust content and thus less sunlight, the lander’s dust-covered solar panels are generating power, at a very slightly higher level.

The InSight team had expected the lander to die in early September, at the latest. Instead, it keeps running, thus allowing it to detect on September 5th an impact created by a cluster of three asteroids, the first time scientists have ever pinpointed exactly when such a new impact occurred on Mars.

For the lander to survive for even longer, all it needs is one gust of wind across the solar panels to clean them off. The science team had expected this to happen periodically, based on past experience with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Unfortunately for InSight, it has not yet happened even once since it arrived on Mars in 2018. Nonetheless, it only has to happen once to save the lander.

Stay tuned. All is not yet lost.

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Jupiter’s endless interweaving storms

1:01 pm

Jupiter's endless interweaving storms

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated so that north is up and then reduced slightly to post here, was created by citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos from a raw photo taken by Juno during its 44th orbit of Jupiter.

To bring out the details Thomopoulos enhanced the colors, then enlarged the entire photo and cropped the area of interest.

Unfortunately, the Juno team that releases these photos does not provide information for easily establishing scale. In an email to me Thomopoulos noted that the largest circular storm in the northern half of the image is likely a vortex, which on Jupiter tend to range from 600 to 3,500 miles in diameter. He also noted that Juno was a little less than 27,000 miles away from Jupiter when this photo was snapped on August 17, 2022. Thus, I suspect this particular vortex sits on the larger end of that size range, which makes it a little less than half the size of the Earth.

As for the colors, as with many similar Juno images, the white clouds appear to almost always sit at the top of these storms and jets, almost like thunderheads.

Though the largest feature here is that large vortex to the north, most of the gigantic Jupiter storms visible seem instead to form as bands, the storms churning about madly as they are driven along the gas giant’s very fast ten hour rotation period.

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The strange scattered rocks of Gediz Vallis on Mars

10:28 am

The strange rocks of Gediz Vallis
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced to post here, was taken on August 20, 2022 by Curiosity’s high resolution camera. It shows some of the scattered and very delicate rocks that it is finding on the floor of Gediz Vallis, the valley the rover had been striving for since landing more than a decade ago and finally entered in mid-August.

Because of Mars weak gravity, about 39% of Earth’s, and very thin atmosphere, about 1% of Earth’s, it is possible for surface rocks to erode into such delicate shapes. The shapes appear to be further encouraged by the many layers that exist in Mars, with each layer having different characteristics. In the case of the hanging flakes to the right, these layers were more resistant to erosion and thus remains intact while material above and below was slowly blown away.

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Some scientists make educated guess as to the number of ants on Earth

9:38 am

It’s time for junk science! By combing through thousands of research papers, a team of scientists have estimated the Earth’s population of ants numbers approximately 20 quadrillion.

So for the work, researchers combed through 12,000 reports from databases in many languages, including Bulgarian and Indonesian, finding 489 studies with rigorous enough methods of collecting and counting ants to be included. Most of the studies were not focused on ants per se but on larger questions of biodiversity and evolution and just happened to sample ants. The team was surprised to find how concentrated ants are in the tropics, being most plentiful there in savannas and moist forests.

This estimate is 2 to 20 times higher than previous guesses. It is also a somewhat pointless exercise, mostly because there is no way to check the number. It is simply an educated guess, from which little real knowledge can be gleaned.

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Webb instrument has technical issue partly preventing its use

9:31 am

Because a an issue with the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI) on the James Webb Space Telescope, the telescope’s engineering team has paused use of that instrument while it reviews the situation.

On Aug. 24, a mechanism that supports one of these modes, known as medium-resolution spectroscopy (MRS), exhibited what appears to be increased friction during setup for a science observation. This mechanism is a grating wheel that allows scientists to select between short, medium, and longer wavelengths when making observations using the MRS mode. Following preliminary health checks and investigations into the issue, an anomaly review board was convened Sept. 6 to assess the best path forward.

The Webb team has paused in scheduling observations using this particular observing mode while they continue to analyze its behavior and are currently developing strategies to resume MRS observations as soon as possible. The observatory is in good health, and MIRI’s other three observing modes – imaging, low-resolution spectroscopy, and coronagraphy – are operating normally and remain available for science observations.

I am quoting almost entirely NASA’s short announcement. The announcement is vague, confusing, and (quite typically) written to minimize the reality of the issue. I can’t figure out how MIRI’s other observing modes are available if they have paused use of a mechanism that allows them to choose modes.

Regardless, Webb is awful young to have this kind of problem.

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Interstellar clouds backlit by nearby massive star

1:27 pm

Interstellar clouds backlit by nearby massive star
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduce to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of what astronomers believe is a newly formed massive star about 9,000 light years away that has periodically spewed out material during eruptions.

The scientists hope to use Hubble to determine the speed in which this material is flying away from the star by taking pictures at intervals and then measuring the amount of change from image to image. This data will also allow the scientists to better gauge the distance to this star, as well as its actual mass, information that will help them better understand what is happening.

I highlight this picture however simply because of its beauty. The interstellar clouds on the left are all apparently backlit by the brightest star on the right, and thus their shape is easy to perceive.

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InSight’s seismometer detects its first new impact on Mars

1:13 pm

Martian impact discovered by InSight
Click for full image.

Using data from InSight’s seismometer that suggested a new impact had occurred at a specific location on September 5, 2022 on Mars, scientists used the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to search and find that impact.

The photo to the right, reduced to post here, is that MRO photo.

The initial impact itself created a small marsquake that was detected by InSight’s seismometer. The instrument recorded seismological data that showed the moment the meteoroid entered Mars’ atmosphere, its explosion into pieces in the atmosphere, and finally, the impact that created a series of at least three craters in the surface.

MRO then flew over the approximate site where the impact was “felt” to look for darkened patches of ground using its Context Camera. After finding this location, HiRISE captured the scene in color. The ground is not actually blue; this enhanced-color image highlights certain hues in the scene to make details more visible to the human eye – in this case, dust and soil disturbed by the impact.

This was thus the first new Martian impact detected based on its actual occurrence, rather than simply finding a change between two photos taken at different times. The latter only tells you a time period when the impact occurred. InSight’s detection here marks the impact’s exact moment.

Nor is this the only such discovery. It appears that InSight detected at least two other impacts (here and here), that only subsequently were linked to MRO impacts. In those cases, the new impact had already been found by MRO, and only afterward were scientists able to identify its seismic vibration in InSight data, thus pinpointing the exact date it took place.

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