Tag: science

Russia to take control of German telescope on space orbiter

9:12 am

Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, revealed today that he has issued orders for the scientists running the Spektr-RG telescope to figure out how to take over operations of the German instrument on the telescope.

“I gave instructions to start work on restoring the operation of the German telescope in the Spektr-RG system so it works together with the Russian telescope,” he said in an interview with the Rossiya-24 TV channel.

The head of Roscosmos said the decision was necessary for research. “They – the people that made the decision [to shut down the telescope] don’t have a moral right to halt this research for humankind just because their pro-fascist views are close to our enemies,” he said.

The Europeans had shut down operations when it broke off all of its space partnerships with Russia, following the Ukraine invasion and the decision of Russia to confiscate 36 OneWeb satellites rather than launch them as it was paid to do.

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Sunspot update: In May we had sunspots, sunspots, and more sunspots!

10:31 am

It is time for another sunspot update! On June 1 NOAA released its monthly update of its graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted it below, having added some addition details to provide a larger context.

In May the sunspot activity on the Sun almost literally exploded, producing some of the strongest solar flares in years as well as the most sunspots since the previous solar maximum in 2014. On several days there were as many as eight sunspot groups on the Sun, with one so large that it was visible to the naked eye on Earth (if viewed properly with a protective filter).
» Read more

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A rock stows away on Perseverance

10:24 am

Perseverance's stowaway
Click for full image.

Since early February the Mars Rover Perseverance has been toting with it a small rock in its front left wheel, as shown in the image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here and taken by the rover’s left hazard avoidance camera on February 6, 2022.

From an update today by the Perseverance science team:

Back on sol 341— that’s over 100 sols ago, in early February— a rock found its way into the rover’s front left wheel, and since hitching a ride, it’s been transported more than 5.3 miles (8.5 km). This rock isn’t doing any damage to the wheel, but throughout its (no doubt bumpy!) journey, it has clung on and made periodic appearances in our left Hazcam images.

You can see the most recent photo of the rock, taken on May 26, 2022, here. It is very clear that the rock’s repeated tumbling inside the wheel well has worn away its sharp edges as well as reduced its overall size. Given enough time its surface could even become somewhat smooth.

As the update notes, when this rock finally drops off it will create a potential mystery for future geologists, who if they are not aware that Perseverance moved it, will wonder how it got where it was, being geologically out-of-place in its new location.

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MAVEN returns to full operation

9:42 am

NASA announced yesterday that engineers have finally completely restored its Mars orbiter MAVEN, after a three month period when the spacecraft was in safe mode due to an attitude control problem.

To fix the problem engineers uploaded new software that allowed the spacecraft to determine its orientation in space not from its onboard inertial units, but from locking onto stars in the sky.

All instruments were healthy and successfully resumed observations; however, the spacecraft was constrained to pointing at the Earth until testing of all-stellar mode was completed, so the instruments were not oriented as they normally would be during science operations. Nevertheless, some limited science was still possible, and MAVEN even observed a coronal mass ejection impact Mars less than two days after the instruments were powered on.

Moreover, for some parts of the year it will still need its inertial units, so a fix for those time periods is still required.

Regardless, MAVEN can now resume acting as a communications relay between the Earth and the rovers on Mars, which for the past year has become its prime mission. While both rovers can communication without that relay, it is often necessary depending on a number of factors, and it also provides redundancy and a greater communications capacity.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Long Beach to discriminate against any employee who refuses COVID jab

1:07 pm

Genocide is coming to America
If they could, the Democrats would do this to anyone who opposes them.

Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: The local government of Long Beach, California will on June 6, 2022 begin harsh discrimination and punishment against any city employee who refuses to get the COVID jab.

Anyone granted the personal exemption option must pay for weekly COVID-19 testing (rapid antigen/PCR), which can be done during city work hours, with the cost of the testing deducted from the employee’s paycheck, according to Ambrosini’s memo. Those receiving medical or religious exemptions will still be subject to weekly COVID-19 testing, but at city expense, according to the memo.

All unvaccinated city employees must continue to wear a mask of at least medical or surgical grade while at work under this new policy, according to memo. Employees not doing so are subject to disciplinary measures, up to and including termination, according to the policy.

Employees found not in compliance with the vaccination mandate will be subject to a wide range of disciplinary measures, including up to six months of suspension and then possible separation or even termination should non-compliance continue, according to the city.

The absurdity and injustice of this is even more pronounced considering the vast evidence now available to show the COVID shots don’t provide any real protection while carrying a potential health risk to those that take it. The link above, from May 11, 2022, provides links to a lot of this research. Here are just a few more examples, published in only the past few weeks:
» Read more

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Curiosity on a steep slope

11:57 am

null
Click for full panorama.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was compiled from 29 photos taken on May 31, 2022 by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It shows the steepness of the slope that the rover ended up parking on yesterday after it completed its drive. As noted in today’s rover update by Abigail Fraeman, Planetary Geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

Curiosity starts the plan parked at an impressive 17˚ pitch (front up) and 17˚ roll (left up) for a total 24˚ tilt. You can get a bit of a sense of the rover’s non-horizontal position by looking at its orientation with respect to the ground in the above Navcam mosaic. Even though this slope is getting close to the limit of what Curiosity can traverse, we don’t think we’ll have any problems unstowing the arm or driving the rest of the way to the top because of the terrain we’re on – nice smooth bedrock with only a thin sand cover is almost the Martian equivalent of a paved road.

On the far right of the image you can also see Curiosity’s tracks. The rover had first approached this slope about 80 feet to the west, then backed off slightly to parallel the slope as it came east and then turned uphill. In the far far distance can be seen the rim of Gale Crater, about about 30 miles away and obscured by the atmosphere’s winter dust.

The overview map above shows Curiosity’s location with the blue dot. The approximate area covered by the section of the panorama above is indicated by the yellow lines. The red dotted line shows the rover’s original planned route. The white arrows indicate what the scientists have dubbed the “marker horizon,” a distinct layer found in many places on the flanks of Mount Sharp that they are very eager to study up close. The green dot marks the approximate location of a recurring slope lineae, a place where the cliff is seasonally darkened by a streak that appears each spring and then fades.

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Astronomers used Japanese weather satellite to monitor the dimming of Betelgeuse

10:19 am

Belelgeuse as seen by weather satellite
From Figure 1 of the paper. Click for full image and caption.

In a paper published on May 30th, astronomers described how they used the Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8 to monitor the dimming of Betelgeuse that occurred in 2019 and 2020.

“We saw a tweet stating that the moon was in its images,” Daisuke Taniguchi, a Ph.D. student in astronomy at the University of Tokyo and first author of the paper, told Space.com. “I chatted with [third author] Shinsuke Uno on the usage of meteorological satellites for astronomy, found Betelgeuse is in the field of view of Himawari-8 and realized that maybe the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse could be investigated.”

Himawari-8 has been positioned 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth’s equator since 2015 to study weather and natural disasters (including the eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano on Jan. 15). Although the satellite is up there to image Earth every 10 minutes, the edges of its images include stars.

Taniguchi and his colleagues were able to see Betelgeuse in images taken throughout Himawari-8’s lifetime and measured its brightness roughly every 1.7 days between January 2017 and June 2021.

The scientists were lucky that the star’s unexpected dimming happened to occur during this time period. The image above is Figure 1 from their paper (which you can read here).

They note that their observations appeared to confirm the theory that the dimming was caused by a dust cloud crossing in front of the star, not the theory that it was caused by a dark spot on the star’s surface. Moreover, their data suggests that dust was relatively close to the star, and could even been created by a burst from the star.

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Webb to release first science images July 12th

9:41 am

The science team for the James Webb Space Telescope announced today that the first infrared science images from the telescope will be released on July 12, 2022.

The first images package of materials will highlight the science themes that inspired the mission and will be the focus of its work: the early universe, the evolution of galaxies through time, the lifecycle of stars, and other worlds. All of Webb’s commissioning data – the data taken while aligning the telescope and preparing the instruments – will also be made publicly available.

In many ways this first release will likely mirror the first release of images from the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, after its serious focus problem had been solved. Then, the science team and NASA picked images for the press conference that, to them, would pass what they called the “grandmother test,” whereby an ordinary person not familiar with space objects would still instantly recognize the object imaged.

The result of that criteria was that some of Hubble’s best ground-breaking first images were not included, such as its first sharp picture of the exploding star Eta Carinae. While the images shown were beautiful, they did not immediately demonstrate what Hubble was going to accomplish. The Eta Carinae picture did however.

Hopefully this time the scientists will be more daring, and have a greater respect for the general public, and include some infrared images that are not familiar to non-scientists. It is such data that is almost always the most exciting.

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Astronomers discover pulsar with slowest rotation rate of any known neutron star

10:05 am

The uncertainty of science: Using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, astronomers have discovered a pulsar with the slowest rotation rate of any known neutron star, completing each rotation every 76 seconds.

According to the press release:

Neutron stars are extremely dense remnants of supernova explosions of massive stars. Scientists know of about 3,000 of these in our Galaxy. However, the new discovery is unlike anything seen so far. The team think it could belong to the theorised class of ultra-long period magnetars – stars with extremely strong magnetic fields.

From the paper’s abstract:

With a spin period of 75.88 s, a characteristic age of 5.3 Myr and a narrow pulse duty cycle, it is uncertain how its radio emission is generated and challenges our current understanding of how these systems evolve. The radio emission has unique spectro-temporal properties, such as quasi-periodicity and partial nulling, that provide important clues to the emission mechanism. Detecting similar sources is observationally challenging, which implies a larger undetected population. Our discovery establishes the existence of ultra-long-period neutron stars, suggesting a possible connection to the evolution of highly magnetized neutron stars, ultra-long-period magnetars and fast radio bursts.

Essentially, a pulsar with this length rotation was not expected, and its existence throws a wrench into present theories about their formation and evolution. That its existence might provide a link between neutron stars, magnetars, and the as-yet unexplained fast radio bursts, however, is very intriguing.

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Rogozin: Russia’s first lunar lander in decades to launch by end of September

9:54 am

The landing area for Luna-25

The new colonial movement: Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s Roscosmos space corporation, revealed yesterday that it is now targeting the end of September for the launch of Luna-25, the first Russian lunar lander to the Moon since Luna-24 in 1976.

The Russians hope to land the rover near 60-mile-wide Boguslawsky crater, located about 550 miles from the Moon’s south pole. The map to the right, figure 1 from a 2018 paper, provides the reasoning for picking this location.

The Luna–Glob mission [the title for the entire Russian program of future lunar probes] is designed for investigations in the polar regions of the Moon and targeted primarily on testing a new generation of technologies for landing a descent module. In this regard, the choice of scientific tasks of this mission is rather subordinate. Further realization of our lunar program, inclusive of the Luna–Resource mission with an extended complex of scientific tasks, and subsequently, a new generation of lunar rovers and modules for lunar subsurface sampling and return to the Earth, depends on the results of the present mission [Luna-25]. …The detailed photo geological analysis of the surface in the Luna–Glob mission landing sector (70°–85° S, 0°–60° E) using high-resolution images and topographic data made it possible to select the definite landing site. This site (the eastern landing ellipse, 73.9° S, 43.9° E) on the Boguslawsky floor represents a higher scientific priority and also provides relatively safe landing conditions.

The Russians have been attempting to launch this Luna-Glob program for almost a quarter of a century. Hopefully the first launch will finally happen this year.

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MAVEN out of operation since February

5:48 pm

The American Mars orbiter MAVEN has been unable to do any science observations since February 22, 2022 because its attitude control system has not been functioning properly, according to a NASA update only released on May 18th, almost two months later.

In the weeks that followed, NASA managed to revive MAVEN from safe mode, but in a limited capacity. The orbiter is in a stable orbit with its primary antenna pointed at Earth to maintain high-rate communications with its flight control team. “In this configuration, however, MAVEN cannot perform communications relays for other spacecraft on Mars and is performing only limited science observations,” NASA officials wrote in the update (opens in new tab). “The mission team began science instrument recovery on April 20.” The orbiter normally serves as a communication relay for NASA’s Curiosity rover and Perseverance rover on Mars to beam the latest images and research from the Martian surface to Earth.

Though it can still do its own observations, MAVEN’s main task at this time is to act as a communications relay for the rovers on Mars. This issue prevents that task.

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Flaky Martian rock

11:41 am

Flaky Martian rock
Click for full image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 15, 2022 (sol 3474) by the high resolution camera on the Mars rover Curiosity, and shows a rock that was near the rover at that time that I estimate to be around three to four feet long.

This picture was taken the same day Curiosity also took a panorama and close-up images of a row of teeth-like boulders that sat a short distance in front of the rover. Those rocks, much larger than the one to the right, had numerous large flakes protruding from their sides.

This smaller rock has even more such flakes, all much smaller and clearly more delicate.

The overview map to the right shows Curiosity’s present position with the blue dot. The yellow dot marks where it was when it took this photograph. The red dotted line shows the rover’s original planned route. The white arrows indicate what the scientists have dubbed the “marker horizon,” a distinct layer found in many places on the flanks of Mount Sharp that they are very eager to study up close.

The green dot marks the approximate location of a recurring slope lineae, a place where the cliff is seasonally darkened by a streak that appears each spring and then fades.

The two orange dotted lines are my guesses for the two possible routes the rover will take from here to get back to its planned route, abandoned in mid-April when the Greenheugh Pediment was found too rough for Curiosity’s wheels. Though science team has not published a new route, the direction traveled in recent weeks suggests these are the possibilities. If I had to choose, I would favor the east route, as it bypasses more completely the pediment with its rough terrain.

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A high mountain inside Valles Marineris

6:12 pm

A high mountain inside Valles Marineris
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on January 4, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the flat top of a mountain inside Candor Chasma, one of the side canyons of the solar system’s largest canyon, Valles Marineris.

The image was taken when the sun was about 32 degrees above the horizon, to the west, and thus apparently low enough to put the flat top mostly in shadow.

What is most spectacular about this photo is the sense of scale it portrays once you know the overall context. Note the many layered slope to the west. That slope will continue downward far beyond the left edge of this image, dropping for dozens of miles and about 13,000 feet. The overview map below makes this clearer.
» Read more

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Another grand galaxy imaged by Hubble

2:30 pm

NGC 3631
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced to post here, was released today and is one in what has become a steady string of recent and quite spectacular galaxy images produced by scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope. From the caption:

This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope features the Grand Design Spiral, NGC 3631, located some 53 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. The “arms” of grand design spirals appear to wind around and into the galaxy’s nucleus.

Close inspection of NGC 3631’s grand spiral arms reveals dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions along the inner part of the spiral arms. Star formation in spirals is similar to a traffic jam on the interstate. Like cars on the highway, slower moving matter in the spiral’s disk creates a bottleneck, concentrating star-forming gas and dust along the inner part of their spiral arms. This traffic jam of matter can get so dense that it gravitationally collapses, creating new stars (here seen in bright blue-white).

This spiral follows the classic shape of these whirlpool galaxies. The Milky Way, though also a spiral, is now thought to be a barred spiral, whereby the galaxy’s whirlpool shape is distorted by a large straight bar of stars crossing its center.

Scientists also released today a second photo from Hubble of a different spiral galaxy, which you can check out here.

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Astronomers: Shut down satellite companies so we don’t have to adapt!

9:31 am

The Hubble Space Telescope
Space-based astronomy, a concept apparently alien to astronomers

In an article published today in Nature, the astronomy community continued its crybaby complaining of the last three years about the interference posed to their ground-based telescopes by the tens of thousands of small satellites scheduled for launch in the next few years.

These quotes typify the apparent attitude of astronomers:

“This is an unsustainable trajectory,” says Meredith Rawls, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle. “At the moment, our science is fine. But at what point will we miss a discovery?”

…“It’s really quite horrifying,” says Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Canada.

…The growing threat of satellite constellations adds to other degradations of the night sky such as light pollution, says Karlie Noon, a PhD candidate in astronomy and an Indigeneous research associate at Australian National University in Canberra. “In the same way that our lands were colonized, our skies are now being colonized,” she says. “And this isn’t just Indigenous people.” She points out that companies have launched satellites without necessarily consulting the scientific community. [emphasis mine]

Oh the horror. Scientists weren’t consulted! The nerve of these companies!

In response, astronomers have decided their only solution is to enlist the UN to shut down these satellite companies.
» Read more

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Martian ridge sticking up out of a lava flood plain

1:27 pm

Martian ridge sticking up out of a lava flood plain
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on August 9, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and was featured today as this camera’s picture of the day. As today’s caption notes:

This observation focuses a ridge that is standing above the old lava surface of the floor of Echus Chasma. What is this ridge doing here? Is it preexisting material surrounded by lava? Is it material pushed up at a restraining bend? If the ridge is not lava, it may have colorful flanks.

The overview map below shows that this location in Echus Chasma is even more interesting, as some scientists believe it once also held a large lake.
» Read more

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Scientists: Plow the solar system through a dense-enough interstellar cloud and the heliosphere would no longer protect the Earth

11:20 am

The Earth's orbit outside the heliosphere

The uncertainty of science: Using a computer simulation, scientists have determined that if the solar system had two million years ago passed through one of the known nearby interstellar clouds within the relatively empty Local Bubble of space, it would have shrunk the Sun’s heliosphere enough so that the Earth would no longer be inside it, thus exposing the planet to interstellar space.

The image to the right comes from that simulation, and is figure 1 of the scientist’s paper [pdf]. The red line marks the Earth’s orbit (tilted sideways slightly to make it obvious), the yellow blob the shrunken heliosphere.

From the paper’s abstract:

There is overwhelming geological evidence from 60Fe and 244Pu isotopes that Earth was in direct contact with the ISM [interstellar medium] 2 million years ago, and the local ISM is home to several nearby cold clouds. Here we show, with a state-of the art simulation that incorporate all the current knowledge about the heliosphere that if the solar system passed through a cloud such as Local Leo Cold Cloud, then the heliosphere which protects the solar system from interstellar particles, must have shrunk to a scale smaller than the Earth’s orbit around the Sun (0.22).

Using a magnetohydrodynamic simulation that includes charge exchange between neutral atoms and ions, we show that during the heliosphere shrinkage, Earth was exposed to a neutral hydrogen density of up to 3000cm-3. This could have had drastic effects on Earth’s climate and potentially on human evolution at that time, as suggested by existing data.

This model is just one possible explanation of the presence of 60Fe and 244Pu isotopes on Earth. Another popular hypothesis is that a supernova occurred about 30 light years away, close enough to expose the Earth to interstellar space but not so close as to cause the total extinction of life.

With both theories, the event could also be an explanation for the significant climate changes two million years ago — such as the beginning of the most recent and now-ending ice age (no SUVs required) — as well as major evolutionary changes that occurred at that time among the ancestor species of humanity.

All is uncertain however. The scientists have no evidence the Earth actually entered a local dense cloud two million years ago. All they are doing is postulating that if such a thing happened, the dense cloud could shrink the heliosphere so much the Earth would be exposed to the interstellar medium.

Since we also do not yet have evidence of a specific nearby supernovae event either, neither theory can be favored. In fact, both could have been happened at different times in the past. Or neither.

Hat tip to reader Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.

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Chinese scientists plant seeds bred on Tiangong space station

9:45 am

The new colonial movement: Chinese scientists have now planted on Earth some of the 12,000 seeds that were bred on China’s Tiangong space station for six months and brought back to Earth in April.

The seeds, including alfalfa, oats and fungi, were selected by multiple research institutions last year. They were brought back to Earth by the Shenzhou-13 on April 16. Space breeding refers to the process of exposing seeds to cosmic radiation and microgravity during a spaceflight mission to mutate seed genes and then send them back to Earth to generate new species.

The goal is to see which seeds survive best in the harsh environment of space, which would thus make them better candidates for transport to other planets for planting.

While some of the results of this research will be published, much will not. China tends to keep what it learns close to the vest.

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Finding ways to clean ISS and future interplanetary spaceships

9:33 am

Fungi on ISS

According to multiple studies (see here, here, and here), a whole range of microorganisms, from bacteria (some dangerous) to fungi, have been found prospering on ISS.

The photo to the right shows a typical example of fungi growing on one of ISS’s older surfaces.

A European Space Agency (ESA) project is attempting to developing new coatings that will not only protect surfaces but act to clean them as well.

“With astronauts’ immune systems suppressed by microgravity, the microbial populations of future long-duration space missions will need to be controlled rigorously,” explains ESA material engineer Malgorzata Holynska. “So ESA’s Materials’ Physics and Chemistry Section is collaborating with Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, IIT, to study antimicrobial materials that could be added to internal cabin surfaces.”

The IIT team has begun work on titanium oxide, also known as ‘titania’, used for example in self-cleaning glass down here on Earth, as well as in hygienic surfaces. When titanium oxide is exposed to ultraviolet light, it breaks down water vapour in the air into ‘free oxygen radicals’, which eat away whatever is on the surface, including bacterial membranes. “Bacteria gets inactivated by the oxidative stress generated by these radicals,” says Mirko Prato of IIT. “This is an advantage because all the microorganisms are affected without exception, so there is no chance that we increase bacterial resistance in the same way as some antibacterial materials.”

The application however is not as simple as painting the surface. Right now they wish to keep this coating as thin as possible (“50 to 100 nanometres, millionths of a millimetre”) so that it could even be applied to clothing, which requires using complex techniques similar to those used to make semi-conductors.

Though hand cleaning would likely be much simpler and cheaper, there are issues. First, it isn’t as easy to scrub a surface by hand in weightlessness. Second, in a closed environment like ISS cleaning materials pose a greater hazard to both the occupants and the equipment. Better if the surfaces of equipment and clothing are designed to stay clean, on their own.

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Software issues delay Psyche launch seven weeks

9:05 am

Engineers preparing to stack the Psyche probe on top of its Falcon Heavy rocket for an August 1, 2022 launch have been forced to delay that launch at least seven weeks until September 20th at the earliest because of a software issue.

Technicians unboxed the Psyche spacecraft and moved it to a handling fixture for a series of hardware and software tests to make sure the probe survived the cross-country trip from California.

But a technical issue interrupted the test campaign, and will delay the launch of the Psyche mission at least seven weeks.

“An issue is preventing confirmation that the software controlling the spacecraft is functioning as planned,” NASA said in a written statement, responding to questions from Spaceflight Now. “The team is working to identify and correct the issue.”

Assuming no further delays, the spacecraft will still reach Psyche in January 2026.

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Mars: Are these eroding glaciers or impacts in lava?

1:38 pm

Eroding lava or glaciers?
Click for original image.

Cool image time and a mystery! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on March 29, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of an 18-mile-wide crater in the southern cratered highlands of Mars. The full picture, dubbed “Steep Cliff,” was taken apparently to get a good view of the crater’s northern rim. The rim’s steepness suggests that the floor of the crater is significantly filled.

More intriguing however are the scattering of strange depressions about six miles south of the rim. What caused them? The crater’s location is in a part of Mars where it is not unusual to find both glacial features as well as flood plain lava. In fact, the crater’s northeast and southwest rims appear to have been buried by what appears to be flood lava. The northern rim’s shallowness also suggests the crater is well filled with flood lava.

However, the crater is also at 38 degrees south latitude, a latitude where planetary scientists have found lots of glacial features. Much of this crater fill could be glacial.

The overview map below illustrates this mystery.
» Read more

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A pair of spiral galaxies

2:02 pm

IC 4271, or AP 40, a pair of active galaxies
Click for full image.

Another cool image to herald in the weekend! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and shows a pair of spiral galaxies about 800 million light years away.

The smaller galaxy is superimposed on the larger one, which is a type of active galaxy called a Seyfert galaxy.

Seyfert galaxies are named for astronomer Carl K. Seyfert who, in 1943, published a paper about spiral galaxies with very bright emission lines. Today we know that about 10% of all galaxies may be Seyfert galaxies. They belong to the class of “active galaxies” – galaxies that have supermassive black holes at their centers accreting material, which releases vast amounts of radiation. The active cores of Seyfert galaxies are at their brightest when observed in light outside the visible spectrum. The larger galaxy in this pair is a Type II Seyfert galaxy, which means it is a very bright source of infrared and visible light.

In other words, both of these galaxies emit a lot of radiation in the infrared, radio, and X-rays due to activity taking place at the supermassive black holes believed to be at their cores.

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Dry flows on Mars?

1:50 pm

Flows in Orson Welles Crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on September 21, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows what appear to be a variety of flows, from alluvial fill to slope streaks to dust coming down the southeastern interior rim of 77-mile-wide Orson Welles Crater on Mars.

The location is almost right on the equator, so none of these flows are ice- or water-related. Nor are such flows unusual in the meandering 800-mile-long canyon that cuts through Orson Wells crater, dubbed Shalbatana Vallis. I featured similar flows at a spot to the north and downstream from this one in May 2021, also on the canyon’s eastern rim.

The overview map below provides some context.
» Read more

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Perseverance’s upcoming travel plans

10:12 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Today’s update from the Perseverance’s science team provided a rough outline of their travel and drill-sampling plans for the Mars rover in Jezero Crater as it begins its climb up onto the delta that once poured into the crater. The route they plan to travel initially is dubbed Hawksbill Gap.

At Hawksbill Gap, however, we may instead carry out the first portion of the sampling sol path (which includes abrasion and collecting observations using our proximity science instruments) at up to 5 locations along our ascent. After that, we’ll turn around and begin a descent back down Hawksbill Gap and collect rock core samples at 3 of our abrasion locations.

This modified sampling strategy is intended to provide the team with valuable contextual information as we climb Hawksbill Gap and interpret the delta stratigraphy around us. With proximity science data in-hand, we can down-select our sampling sites to ensure we’ll be collecting the most scientifically valuable cores along our descent. Of course, we still maintain the option of collecting sample cores at any point during our ascent, if the team decides a particular abrasion site warrants immediate sampling.

The map above shows my guess (the red dotted lines) as to their potential routes uphill. As the science team has so far not published a map indicating exactly where Hawksbill Gap is, I can only guess at this point. The blue dot indicates Perseverance’s present position, the green dot Ingenuity.

As for the helicopter, there is no word yet whether the engineers have successfully gotten its batteries back to full charge. Until then, it cannot fly, and is also at risk of freezing up in the cold Martian winter.

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Zhurong goes into hibernation

9:30 am

Overview map

According to a report today in China’s state-run press, the team running its Zhurong Mars rover have placed it into a hibernation mode in order to sit out the Martian winter.

To tackle the dust storms and low-temperature challenges, the Chinese rover went into dormancy on Wednesday. It is expected to wake up and resume work in December when the dust clears and Mars enters its spring season, the administration said in a statement.

The rover sits somewhere in the blue circle in the map to the right, created using elevation data and images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This region is about 25 degrees north latitude, so though it is in the dry equatorial regions of Mars, it still gets very cold in winter, down to -180 degrees Fahrenheit at night. Furthermore, the increased winter dust storms block the light from the Sun, which reduces the available power the rover’s solar panels can produce.

Chinese engineers have apparently adapted the hibernation techniques they use on the Moon with their Yutu-2 rover to place Zhurong in hibernation.

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ESA releases new images from Solar Orbiter

10:53 am

The Sun's south pole, as seen by Solar Orbiter at perihelion
The Sun’s south pole, as seen by Solar Orbiter at perihelion. Click for full movie.

The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday released a few of the images taken by its Solar Orbiter spacecraft before and during its first perihelion (closest point in its orbit) on March 26, 2022.

The spacecraft was inside the orbit of Mercury, at about one-third the distance from the Sun to the Earth, and its heatshield was reaching around 500°C. But it dissipated that heat with its innovative technology to keep the spacecraft safe and functioning.

Solar Orbiter carries ten science instruments – nine are led by ESA Member States and one by NASA – all working together in close collaboration to provide unprecedented insight into how our local star ‘works’. Some are remote-sensing instruments that look at the Sun, while others are in-situ instruments that monitor the conditions around the spacecraft, enabling scientists to ‘join the dots’ from what they see happening at the Sun, to what Solar Orbiter ‘feels’ at its location in the solar wind millions of kilometres away.

The photo above, cropped, reduced, and revised slightly to post here, looks at the Sun’s south pole, from the side. The surface of the Sun (the top two thirds) almost looks like thunderheads on Earth, except the rain coming from them are high energy heat and radiation.

The data produced a lot of fascinating short movies, all available at the link, including a phenomenon the scientists have nicknamed a “space hedgehog” because of its look. About 15,000 miles across, “At present no one knows exactly what it is or how it formed in the Sun’s atmosphere.”

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Puzzling telemetry from Voyager-1 suggests problem

9:49 am

Engineers are puzzling over strange operational data coming from Voyager-1, launched in 1977 and now in interstellar space more than 14 billion miles away, that suggests a technical problem but also makes no sense.

The engineering team with NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is trying to solve a mystery: The interstellar explorer is operating normally, receiving and executing commands from Earth, along with gathering and returning science data. But readouts from the probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) don’t reflect what’s actually happening onboard.

The AACS controls the 45-year-old spacecraft’s orientation. Among other tasks, it keeps Voyager 1’s high-gain antenna pointed precisely at Earth, enabling it to send data home. All signs suggest the AACS is still working, but the telemetry data it’s returning is invalid. For instance, the data may appear to be randomly generated, or does not reflect any possible state the AACS could be in.

The issue hasn’t triggered any onboard fault protection systems, which are designed to put the spacecraft into “safe mode” – a state where only essential operations are carried out, giving engineers time to diagnose an issue. Voyager 1’s signal hasn’t weakened, either, which suggests the high-gain antenna remains in its prescribed orientation with Earth.

Figuring out what has happened is made more difficult by distance. It takes about 20 hours for signals to get from Voyager-1 to Earth, even at the speed of light. Thus, any attempted fix will arrive almost two days after it first occurred, at the soonest.

Both Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 are still operating, though at significantly reduced power. It is expected that sometime in the next few years their nuclear power sources will finally be unable to produce enough power to keep them functioning. If so, both spacecraft will have survived the maximum time predicted when launched.

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A giant elliptical galaxy

3:14 pm

A giant elliptical galaxy
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The image to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 474.

Located some 100 million light-years from Earth, NGC 474 spans about 250,000 light-years across – that’s 2.5 times larger than our own Milky Way galaxy! Along with its enormous size, NGC 474 has a series of complex layered shells that surround its spherical-shaped core. The cause of these shells is unknown, but astronomers theorize that they may be the aftereffects of the giant galaxy absorbing one or more smaller galaxies. In the same way a pebble creates ripples on a pond when dropped into the water, the absorbed galaxy creates waves that form the shells.

About 10% of elliptical galaxies have shell structures, but unlike the majority of elliptical galaxies, which are associated with galaxy clusters, shelled ellipticals usually lie in relatively empty space. It may be that they’ve cannibalized their neighbors.

NGC 474 is no exception, also located in a relatively empty region of space.

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The tuffy ground in the foothills of Mount Sharp

11:50 am

Shelfstone on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 13, 2022 by the high resolution camera on the rover Curiosity, looking down at some of the unusual features on the ground near the rover.

The lighter circular feature in the center is not natural, but created by Curiosity’s Dust Removal Tool (DRT). As explained on May 16th on the science team’s blog:

When that dust settles on rocks, it can partially mask the chemistry and surface texture of these rocks from APXS and MAHLI in particular [two other Curiosity instruments]. Brushing rock surfaces with the DRT is not always possible, but it does improve scientific assessments of these surfaces.

What attracted me to this photo was the tuff-like look of that uplifted flat rock. It looks just like many surfaces one sees in a cave, where the surface gets covered with calcite flowstone or popcorn, due to either water flow or condensation and then evaporation of calcite-saturated water on the surface. In this case the cave formation this flat rock most resembles visually is shelfstone, though the formation process and chemistry was certainly different. It does suggest strongly however that some form of water process occurred here.

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InSight likely to shut down by the end of summer

9:33 am

Martian quake map as seen by InSight
Martian quake map as seen by InSight, adapted from this 2021
presentation [pdf]

According to the InSight science team, the Mars lander and its seismometer will likely shut down operations by the end of the summer due to lack of power.

“Towards the end of summer of ’22, we anticipate our seismometer will be turned off, not because we want to turn it off but unfortunately, we don’t have the energy to run it,” Garcia said. She said the team will use it intermittently after that as long as power is available, but by the end of the year the spacecraft is expected to fall silent.

The intermittent readings of the seismometer will be of extremely limited use, as it will then be pure luck whether it detects a quake, and any detection will not provide the true rate of quakes on Mars.

The loss of power is due to dust on the solar panels. The team had hoped a dust devil would come by periodically to blow the panels clean, as happened routinely with the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, but InSight has not been so lucky.

It appears the safe mode that occurred shortly after InSight detected its largest Mars quake yet on May 10th was very temporary, though right now the seismometer is essentially the only instrument they have power to run.

Overall, this mission has a very spotty history. Its launch was delayed two years when the French attempt to build the seismometer failed. The delay cost NASA’s planetary program $150 million, at a minimum.

Then lander’s second of two main instruments, a German experiment to dig down 16 feet to insert a heat sensor into the ground, failed when its digging tool, dubbed the mole, was unable to penetrate the alien Martian soil.

Fortunately, InSight’s prime instrument, the seismometer (finally completed by JPL) worked, giving us a first look into the structure of Mars’ interior as well as where earthquakes are found on its surface.

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