Tag: science

Curiosity’s upcoming travels on Mount Sharp

12:31 pm

Curiosity's view on September 6, 2023
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

The panorama above, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was created on September 6, 2023 from eleven pictures taken by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity.

This mosaic looks south, into the slot canyon dubbed Gediz Valles. The red dotted line on the panorama as well as the overview map to the right indicates the planned route the science team plans on traveling as it sends Curiosity higher and higher on Mount Sharp. On the overview map Curiosity’s present position is indicated by the blue dot. The yellow lines show the approximate area covered by the panorama above.

As noted in today’s update from the science team:

The rover is currently driving across bumpy terrain consisting of rounded bedrock sticking up between dark sand and drift as she drives south, and slightly uphill, along the Mt. Sharp Ascent Route. Due to the rugged ground, the rover sometimes ends her drive with a wheel or two perched on a rock.

When the rover’s placement prevents use of the arm, the scientists have it do other things, such as take more images of the many layers on Kukenan.

As rocky as this future route is, it appears it is less rocky than earlier terrain, which the science team found impossible to traverse requiring several route detours. Thus, the pace forward has been a bit faster lately.

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Layered glaciers in two small Martian craters

11:19 am

Layered glaciers in two small Martian craters
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 7, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what planetary scientists label somewhat vaguely as “layered deposits,” because though the features inside both of these craters strongly resemble glacial ice features, until this is confirmed a good scientist remains skeptical.

I can be more bold, and call the layers glacial in both of these small and very shallow craters (less than a 100 feet deep). To explain this it is important to understand that the lighting and shadows make it hard to distinguish the high points of these layers. Based on the elevation data from MRO, the ground descends to the south, and the mesa in the southern half of each crater’s floor is actually far below the layers and material to the north.

This elevation data suggests that the layered material is surviving best against the crater’s northern interior wall, which at this latitude, about 36 degrees south, will be in shadow the most.
» Read more

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Ingenuity flies on, completing its 57th flight

10:06 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map

On September 3, 2023 Ingenuity successfully completed its 57th flight on Mars, traveling 713 feet for two minutes and nine seconds. As noted at the tweet at the link, the helicopter has now accumulated more than 100 minutes of flight time.

As it has on almost all its recent flights, the helicopter flew a slightly longer distance for slightly longer that its flight plan, probably because it was taking time to find a safe landing spot.

The green dot on the overview map above shows Ingenuity’s new location. It has moved west and north of Perseverance, following the rover’s planned route as indicated by the red dotted line. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present location. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area of the mosaic below, just released by the Perseverance science team, taken on July 8, 2023 by the rover’s high resolution camera and cropped and reduced to post here. It shows us the rover’s eventual path forward, into that mountain gap.

Mosaic looking west at the rim of Jezero Crater
Click for original, full resolution image (a large file).

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Japan successfully launches XRISM X-ray space telescope and SLIM lunar lander

4:57 pm

SLIM's landing zone
Map showing SLIM landing zone on the Moon.
Click for interactive map.

Japan today (September 7th in Japan) successfully used its H-2A rocket to place both the XRISM X-ray space telescope and SLIM lunar lander into orbit.

As of posting XRISM has been successfully deployed. SLIM has not, as it needs to wait until after a second burn of the rocket’s upper stage about 40 minutes later. The map to the right shows SLIM’s landing target on the Moon, where it will attempt a precision landing within a zone about 300 feet across.

This was Japan’s second launch this year, so it does not get included in the leader board for the 2023 launch race:

62 SpaceX
39 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 71 to 39. It also still leads the entire world combined, 71 to 64, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 62 to 64.

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Martian ice islands amidst a Martian ice ocean

12:18 pm

Glacier country on Mars
Glacier country on Mars

Martian ice islands in a Martian sea of ice
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 19, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The scientists simply labeled this “Deposit Layers,” but that description hardly covers the incredibly diverse and puzzling features within the picture. We see layers, swirls, and radiating groves, all suggesting glacial features. We see mesas apparently covered with ice, and a flat surrounding lower plain that appears to be also ice but acting more like an ocean or sea. If there is any visible bedrock at this location it is difficult to determine.

The dominance of ice features is not surprising however, considering the location. The red dot on the overview map above marks this location, in a large 80-by-56-mile-wide basin inside the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip I dub glacier country, because almost every image from MRO shows distinct glacial features. This particular basin is considered part of the segmented and indistinct canyon dubbed Mamers Valles, that winds its way through this glacier country of chaos terrain to eventually drain into the northern lowland plains.

From a geologist’s perspective, however, the layers are the most significant feature in the picture, as those layers mark the innumerable climate cycles that have apparently shaped the Martian surface. Mapping those layers will likely involve decades of work, but when largely completed we shall have a very precise history of the red planet’s geological history, going back several billion years.

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LRO takes image of Vikram on Moon

9:02 am


Click for interactive map. To see the original
image, go here.

The science team for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) yesterday released an oblique image taken of India’s Vikram lander, on August 27, 2023, four days after the lander touched down about 370 miles from the south pole.

The LROC (short for LRO Camera) acquired an oblique view (42-degree slew angle) of the lander. … The bright halo around the vehicle resulted from the rocket plume interacting with the fine-grained regolith (soil).

That image is shown in the inset to the right. I have cropped it to focus on Vikram itself, which is in the center of the inset, with its shadow to its right, the opposite of all the surrounding craters. Pragyan is in this image, but neither it nor its tracks appear visible. The rover had moved west from the lander, which would be downward to the line of three craters near the bottom of the inset. To get a better sense of Pragyan route, compare this image with the map India’s space agency ISRO released on September 2nd.

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Martian mounds surrounded by moats

11:07 am

Martian mounds with moats
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 1, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the camera team labels “Circular Mounds Surrounded by Moats,” which when all the known data is considered are probably caused by a spray of small meteorites landing on a field of ice.

Why ice? The location is at 37 degrees south latitude, in the cratered southern highlands of Mars, where many images show glacial-type features inside many craters. In fact, all the nearby craters at this location appear to have such features, suggesting the presence of near-surface ice trapped in these craters.

The picture actually looks at the floor of another such crater, with the mounds in the image’s upper left the crater’s indistinct central peaks. Though only 8.5 miles wide, the crater is deep, with interior walls that quickly rise 2,800 feet to the rim. That depth further suggests ice, as any snow that fell here in the far past could easily become trapped, inside what could be thought of a cold trap.
» Read more

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The New York Times suddenly allows two scientists to admit the Big Bang theory might be wrong

9:09 am

Modern science
Modern science

The refusal by many in the scientific community to deny there is any uncertainty of science has been best illustrated for decades by the cosmologists who have put together the framework of the standard model for the creation of the universe, centered on the Big Bang, and their pitchmen in the mainstream press. Since the 1960s any skepticism of this model was generally treated as equivalent to believing in UFO’s, aliens, and the Face on Mars.

Thus, astronomers and astrophysicists did what necessary to protect their careers. Even if they had great doubts about the standard model and the Big Bang, they generally kept their mouths shut, saying nothing. Meanwhile, our increasingly corrupt press pushed this one explanation for the formation of the universe, treating the cosmologists who pushed it as Gods whose every word was equivalent of an oracle that must never be questioned.

This past weekend the New York Times suddenly admitted to the uncertainty surrounding the Big Bang, and for possibly the first time in decades allowed two scientists to write an op-ed that carefully outlined the problems with the standard model and the Big Bang theory, problems that have existed and been growing since the 1990s but have been poo-pooed as inconsequential and easily solved. Data from the Webb Space Telescope however has made that poo-pooing more and more difficult, as astrophysicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser make clear:
» Read more

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Bubbling but frozen terrain on Mars

12:19 pm

Bubbling but frozen terrain on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 8, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows some of the more unusual terrain found at the higher latitudes in the Martian northern lowland plains.

How do we explain this strange landscape? Based on what little we presently know about Mars, at 40 degrees north latitude this bubbly-looking surface probably indicates the presence of a lot of near-surface ice that at some time in the past was heated for some reason and thus bubbled upward to form these mounds. Think of tomato soup simmering.

Unlike simmering tomato soup, this terrain is solid and no longer bubbling. We are looking at a soup that has frozen even as it bubbled. The process could have been like an ice volcano, the ice turning to thick slurry that froze quickly, like lava. Or it could have happened fast, and then froze to remain unchanging in the eons since.
» Read more

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A triangular spiral galaxy

9:25 am

A triangular spiral galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a follow-up observations of a supernova that occurred in this galaxy in 2015. The galaxy, dubbed IC 1776, is about 150 million light years away.

Hubble investigated the aftermath of the supernova SN 2015ap during two different observing programmes, both designed to comb through the debris left by supernovae explosions in order to better understand these energetic events. A variety of telescopes automatically follow up the detection of supernovae to obtain early measurements of these events’ brightnesses and spectra. Complementing these measurements with later observations which reveal the lingering energy of supernovae can shed light on the systems which gave rise to these cosmic cataclysms in the first place.

As the caption notes, the spiral arms of this galaxy “are difficult to distinguish.” At first glance the galaxy instead appears triangular in shape, an impression that dissolves with a closer look.

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JAXA schedules last H-2A rocket launch, carrying X-Ray telescope and lunar lander

9:06 am

SLIM's landing zone
Map showing SLIM landing zone on the Moon.
Click for interactive map.

Japan’s space agency JAXA today announced that it has finally rescheduled the launch of its XRISM X-Ray telescope and its SLIM lunar lander launch for September 7, 2023, lifting off using the last flight of its H-2A rocket.

The previous launch attempt several weeks ago was scrubbed due to high winds. This new launch date has a window of seven days, which means if weather scrubs the September 7th launch they will be able to try again immediately within that window.

The white dot on the map to the right shows the targeted landing site of SLIM, which is testing the ability of an unmanned probe to land precisely within a tiny zone of less than 300 feet across.

Meanwhile, with the retirement of the H-2A rocket and its replacement having not yet flown successfully (its first launch failed in March), Japan after this launch will be in the same boat as Europe, without a large rocket and lacking the ability to put large payloads into orbit.

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Engineers had Vikram do short flight hop prior to shutting down

8:36 am

Indian engineers revealed today that prior to putting the Vikram lander to sleep for the long lunar night, they had the lander use its rocket engines to do a short up and down flight. From the first link:

“On command it (Vikram lander) fired the engines, elevated itself by about 40 cm as expected and landed safely at a distance of 30 to 40 cm away,” ISRO said in an update on ‘X’.

Before doing the hop engineers stored Vikram’s instruments and rover ramp, then redeployed them afterward to gather a tiny bit of new data before putting everything into hibernation.

The hop test proved that Vikram’s engines could be restarted even after being on the Moon for almost two weeks, and thus could potentially be used on a future sample return mission. It also suggested a future mission could choose to change its landing site periodically by use of its landing engines.

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Engineers place Pragyan into sleep mode

9:26 am

With lunar sunset looming, engineers have completed all work on both the lander Vikram and the rover Pragyan and have prepared Pragyan as best as possible to survive the long 14-Earth-day long lunar night.

Currently, the battery is fully charged. The solar panel is oriented to receive the light at the next sunrise expected on September 22, 2023. The receiver is kept on.

All data from Vikram’s instruments has been transmitted back to Earth, through the rover. It appears that the mission has been using the rover has the main communications relay, not the lander. It also appears there is no expectation of the lander surviving the lunar night.

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The sunspot count in August demonstrates fully the utter uncertainty of science

1:46 pm

In doing these sunspot updates every month since I started Behind the Black thirteen years ago, one of the repeated common themes has been noting how little we really know about the basic fundamental processes within the Sun. We know the process involves nuclear fusion combined with fission, and that process also creates a powerful magnetic field that every eleven years flips in its polarity. We also know that this eleven year cycle corresponds to an eleven year cycle of rising and then falling sunspot activity.

The devil however is in the details, and we know very little about those details. How those larger processes link to the specific changing features on the Sun remains little understood, if at all. The sudden and entirely unexpected steep drop in sunspot activity in August, as noted in the release yesterday of NOAA’s monthly update of its graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, demonstrates this level of ignorance quite starkly.
» Read more

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India successfully launches its first solar observation satellite

11:44 pm

India’s space agency ISRO tonight (September 2, 2023 in India) successfully used its PSLV rocket with six strap-on boosters to place in orbit its first solar observation satellite, Aditya-L1, lifting off from its coastal Sriharikota spaceport.

The spacecraft will eventually maneuver itself to the L1 point about one million miles closer to the Sun, where it will make continuous observations of the star’s visible hemisphere, using seven different instruments. Its observations will supplement those of the SOHO solar observatory (also located at the L1 point), which was launched in 1995 and is long overdue for replacement, or at least some redundancy.

For India, this was the seventh launch in 2023, which ties its previous annual launch high achieved in both 2016 and 2018. The country however has three more launches tentatively scheduled for this year, though none has as yet a specific launch date.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

60 SpaceX
38 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 69 to 38. It also leads the entire world combined, 69 to 62, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) 60 to 62. SpaceX however has launches scheduled for September 2nd and 3rd, so these numbers are likely to change.

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Petrified dunes on Mars?

11:27 am

Petrified dunes on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 31, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

I think the many parallel ridges are likely hardened and petrified dunes of sand because of their craggy nature. Dunes of sand would have a smoother, softer look, and in fact, if you look at some of the dunes inside the depression at the bottom-right of the picture you will see ridges with exactly that look, smooth and curved.

Nor is it unreasonable to believe these ridges are petrified dunes, as orbital data over time has found that many of the dunes on Mars, even those that look active, are not and have likely been hardened for centuries.

As for the ridges running at right angles to each other in the picture’s middle left, I have no idea. Possible we are looking at ancient dykes of lava that pushed up through cracks and faults, but this is pure guess.
» Read more

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Ingenuity completes 56th flight on Mars

9:52 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

According to a tweet yesterday by the Ingenuity engineering team, the helicopter successfully completed its 56th flight on Mars on August 25, 2023, flying 1,345 feet to the northwest at a height of 39 feet for 141 seconds, or two minutes and twenty-one seconds. The distance traveled and the flight time were slightly longer than planned, but that likely was because the helicopter used that extra time to determine a safe landing site.

The green line on the map above shows the approximate new position of Ingenuity, positioned close to the planned route of Perseverance as indicated by the red dotted line. Perseverance’s present location is marked by the blue dot.

Neretva Vallis is the gap in the western rim of Jezero crater through which the delta had flowed eons before, and is the rover’s eventual target in order to begin exploring the terrain beyond, known to be very rich in mineral content.

Meanwhile, the Ingenuity engineering team has already released its flight plan for the 57th flight, heading north about 670 feet and targeting tomorrow for flight.

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The splatter surrounding a mid-latitude Martian crater

12:26 pm

A channel in the splatter of a Martian crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 12, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists simply label as “Northern Mid-latitude Terrain”.

I have focused in on that meandering channel and the landscape around it. On Earth we would assume that channel marks the drainage of a river or stream, possibly also shaped by a glacier at some point because of its U-shaped profile. This guess is strengthened by the elevation data from MRO, which shows the channel descending to the southwest about 440 feet along its 2.2 mile length.

The channel and the eroded look of the surrounding terrain suggests strongly the presence of near-surface ice at this location, which is not unreasonable based on its 32 degree north latitude. The wider look below only adds further strength to this hypothesis, but also adds a lot more details explaining the genesis of this strange landscape.
» Read more

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Webb takes infrared image of Supernova SN1987A

10:04 am

Annotated infrared image from Webb
Click for original image.

The Webb Space Telescope has taken its first infrared image of Supernova SN1987A, the closest supernova to Earth in five centuries at a distance of 168,000 light years away in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud.

The annotated image to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, shows that supernova remnant as Webb sees it. Most of the structures identified here have been observed now for decades as the material from the explosion has been expanding outward. However,

While these structures have been observed to varying degrees
by NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and Chandra X-ray Observatory, the unparalleled sensitivity and spatial resolution of Webb revealed a new feature in this supernova remnant – small crescent-like structures. These crescents are thought to be a part of the outer layers of gas shot out from the supernova explosion. Their brightness may be an indication of limb brightening, an optical phenomenon that results from viewing the expanding material in three dimensions. In other words, our viewing angle makes it appear that there is more material in these two crescents than there actually may be. [emphasis mine]

I highlight that one word because it is unnecessary, and is only inserted to punch up Webb’s abilities for public relations purposes. Moreover, the rest of the text of the full press release at the link is even worse. It provides little information about the evolution of this supernova since its discovery more than three decades ago, but instead waxes poetic again and again about how wonderful Webb is.

Though Webb certainly has much higher resolution than the earlier infrared space telescope Spitzer and can do far more, this tendency of NASA press releases to use these superlatives only devalues Webb. The images themselves sell the telescope. No need to oversell it in the text.

Meanwhile, the significance of SN 1987A is not explained. Since the development of the telescope by Galileo in the early 1600s, there has been no supernova inside the Milky Way. SN 1987A has been the closest, so it has been photographed repeatedly in multiple wavelengths to track the evolution of the explosion’s ejecta. Webb now gives us a better look in the infrared, though in truth the small amount of new details is actually somewhat disappointing.

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Vikram takes movie of Pragyan rover as it roves

9:30 am

Pragyan as seen by Vikram
Click for movie.

Using one of Vikram’s lander cameras, engineers have produced a short movie of India’s Pragyan rover as it rotated to avoid a small crater about ten feet ahead.

The picture to the right is from that 16-second movie, near its end. It appears that the engineers operating Pragyan were unhappy with almost any route ahead from its present position, as they rotated Pragyan almost 360 degrees, and even attempted forward motion at one point and then resumed rotation.

It is not clear if any of the craters visible in this picture are the crater that caused the detour. The movie however does provide a sense of scale. Pragyan is small, but it is able to maneuver easily using its six wheels.

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