Tag: science

Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander completes lunar flyby in preparation for entering lunar orbit

10:00 am

The Resilience lunar lander, built by the Japanese startup Ispace and launched in January on the same Falcon 9 rocket as Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, has now completed its closest flyby of the Moon as it prepares to enter lunar orbit sometimes in early May.

The spacecraft is actually still in Earth orbit, but with a apogee that is almost 700,000 miles out, or almost three times the distance of the Moon’s orbit. Once Ispace’s engineers have gotten a precise track of this orbit they will then determine the exact parameters of the engine burn in May that will place Resilience in lunar orbit.

This is Ispace’s second attempt to place a lander on the Moon. The first, Hakuto-R1, came close, but crashed in Atlas Crater (see the map in my previous post) when, at an altitude of several kilometers, its software thought it was only a few feet above the surface and shut the engines off.

Most of the instruments on Resilience are either symbolic or engineering experiments to observe the lander’s operations. It is however carrying a small rover, dubbed Tenacious, which will attempt to travel on the surface.

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Blue Ghost enters lunar orbit, targets March 2, 2025 for landing

9:50 am

Map of lunar landing sites
Landing sites for both Firefly’s Blue Ghost and
Ispace’s Resilience

Blue Ghost on February 13, 2025 successfully completed a long four-minute engine burn to complete its transfer from Earth to lunar orbit, with a target date for the actual landing on March 2, 2025.

Now that the lander is in lunar trajectory, over the next 16 days, additional maneuvers will take the lander from an elliptical orbit to a circular orbit around the Moon. Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeted to land Sunday, March 2, at 3:45 a.m. EST.

NASA has also announced the live stream coverage during landing:

Live coverage of the landing, jointly hosted by NASA and Firefly, will air on NASA+ starting at 2:30 a.m. EST, approximately 75 minutes before touchdown on the Moon’s surface. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media. The broadcast will also stream on Firefly’s YouTube channel. Coverage will include live streaming and blog updates as the descent milestones occur.

I will embed the Firefly live stream when it becomes available.

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A rose in space

10:02 am

A rose in space
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers have taken a very beautiful picture, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, of a nebula dubbed LH 88 that surrounds a star cluster and is located 160,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The bright stars seen in the image are widely separated, but their motions through space are similar, indicating that they have a common origin. The layered nebulous structures in LH 88 are the remnants of stars that have already died. The delicate leaves of the rose were formed by both the shockwaves from supernovae and the stellar winds of the O and B stars.

The intense radiation of these super giant O and B stars — that burn fast and explode as supernova after only a few million years of life — not only shapes the nebula, it lights the nebula’s different atoms and molecules in different colors, with red/orange representing hydrogen and blue oxygen. The white areas indicate a mixture of both.

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Astronomers demand more regulations to prevent industry from ruining the Moon’s “environment”

9:33 am

According to two articles yesterday in the British press (here and here), both quoting extensively one astronomer, if strong regulation and control (given to them of course) isn’t imposed immediately, the space tourism of billionaires is going to ruin the Moon’s pristine environment, which on its far side is especially perfect for radio astronomy. From the first link:

“There’s a rush of companies and states who might want to get in on the act on the moon,” said [astronomer Martin Elvis, who added that there were also other concerns. “There’s a desire there from the billionaire class, ‘Oh I would love to spend a week on the moon’. And you don’t need many billionaires to start adding up. If they go without coordination, then it’s a mess. We could well lose these unique opportunities to do science on a scale that we couldn’t possibly imagine.”

One of the most exciting possibilities is the use of the far side of the moon for radio astronomy. As all signals from the Earth are blocked, telescopes would, Elvis said, have the sensitivity to see into the so called “dark age” of the universe, after the big bang but before stars had formed.

Elvis is based at Harvard and also co-chairs a working group at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) that wants astronomers to be given full legal control of the Moon, preventing anyone from building anything without their permission so they can instead build their telescopes there instead.

The problem is that the astronomical community has so far shown little interest in building telescopes in space. It has instead focused on building giant Earth-based telescopes while trying to get governments to restrict the launch of satellite constellations that might interfere with those telescopes. Now it wishes to restrict lunar development as well.

Elvis however admits “It’s a sort of first come, first served situation, which encourages people to rush in and do things without thinking too hard.” Let me translate: Everyone else is beating us to the Moon because we haven’t been interested in going, so now that we might be interested we want governments to shut down our competition.

It is long past time for astronomers and the IAU to stop trying to use government to squelch everyone else and get in the game. Initiate the building of telescopes both in space and the Moon. Not only are these better places to build telescopes than on Earth, it will give astronomers some credibility when they ask others to give them their own space.

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The movement to ban smartphones in schools widens

1:39 pm

The smart phone: Bad for kids
The smart phone: Proven very bad for kids

According to a detailed Washington Examiner story earlier this week, the campaign to ban smartphones in schools is expanding rapidly, with widespread bi-partisan support, backed up by studies and school reports that consistently show significant improvements in student behavior and learning when smart phones are banned.

Eight states have banned cellphone use in schools, with Florida being the first to do so when Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a bill into law in 2023. The legislation in the Sunshine State allows teachers to ban cellphone use during classroom instruction and authorizes them to hold a student’s phone if it becomes a distraction.

Florida was followed by Indiana, Louisiana, Virginia, California, Minnesota, South Carolina, and Ohio in passing similar bans that have either been enacted or will be in the coming year. Each of the states that have passed bans has taken different approaches to implementing the policy.

Fifteen other states have proposed a ban, and an additional eight states are either doing test bans in selected regions or have issued recommendations endorsing bans. That makes for a total if 32 states out of 50 that are working to keep smart phones away from kids when they are in school.

The best aspect of this is the generally bi-partisan nature of the movement. While most of the initial action occurred in red states controlled by conservative politicians, blue states like California and Minnesota have also joined in. A Minnesota middle school for example was an early practitioner of the ban in 2023, finding it not only improved classroom participation, but the entire social atmosphere in the school improved. In California meanwhile Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law restricting smartphone that takes effect in July 2026. Even Washington, D.C. is debating legislation to institute a school ban.

The sooner the better. Kids don’t need smart phones. All they really need is a dumb phone to call their parents in case of an emergency. And when they are in school this is even less necessary. Spending their time staring at a screen is the worst way to learn to live with other humans, a learning experience that is probably their number one class assignment.

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Pits formed from sublimating underground ice on Mars?

12:29 pm

Pits formed from sublimating underground ice
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 31, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “Impact Ejecta with Marginal Pits,” though even on the full image I am not sure what the impact ejecta is. The pits themselves appear to have formed when near-surface ice sublimated away during the summer months. The location is at 59 degrees north latitude, deep within the Martian northern lowland plains. Since orbital data suggests much of those plains at this latitude has an ice table of some thickness near the surface, it is very reasonable to assume these pits formed when summer sunlight heated that ice, turning it to gas which eventually pushed out to form the pits.

But what about the impact ejecta? Where is it? And where is the crater from that impact?
» Read more

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European underwater neutrino telescope detects most powerful neutrino ever

8:53 am

A European underwater neutrino telescope that is still under construction recorded evidence in February 2023 of most powerful neutrino particle ever detected.

KM3NeT’s two neutrino detectors — one off the coast of Sicily, the other near southern France — are still under construction but already collecting data. Both contain cables hundreds of meters tall, which are strung with bundles of light sensors anchored to the seafloor.

When cosmic neutrinos interact with matter in or near a KM3NeT detector, they spawn charged particles such as muons. As those muons careen through water, they give off feeble flashes of bluish light that KM3NeT’s sensors can pick up. Clocking when different sensors spot this light can reveal a particle’s path; the brightness of the blue hue reflects the particle’s energy.

On February 13, 2023, the detector near Sicily was run through by an extremely energetic muon traveling nearly parallel to the horizon. At the time, only 21 of the planned 230 sensor cables were in place. Based on the muon’s energy and trajectory, KM3NeT scientists determined it must have been spawned by a neutrino from space rather than a particle from the atmosphere.

Simulations suggest the neutrino’s energy was around 220 petaelectron volts. The previous record holder boasted around 10 petaelectron volts.

Tracking that trajectory backwards, astronomers say the particle came from a region of space where there are a lot of active galaxies, any one of which could be the source of the neutrino. It is also possible the neutrino came instead from an interaction of high energy cosmic rays and the photons from the faint microwave background left over from the Big Bang.

As noted very correctly by one scientist, “At this point, it’s very difficult to make conclusions about the origins,” says Kohta Murase, a theoretical physicist at Penn State not involved in the research. “It’s dangerous to rely on one event.”

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Astronomers catalog large ring systems surrounding 74 stars

11:32 am

74 rings surrounding stars
Click for original image.

Using a variety of ground-based telescopes in many wavelengths, astronomers have now produced a detailed catalog of 74 stars with large dust rings similar to the Oort cloud that is believed to exist at the very outer fringes of our own solar system.

The image to the right, reduced to post here, shows all 74 stars.

The new gallery shows a remarkable diversity of structure in the belts. Some are narrow rings, while others are wider and could be categorized more as “disks” than “belts”. Moreover, some of the 74 exocomet systems have multiple rings or disks and some of those are “eccentric,” meaning not a circular orbit but more like an oval. This provides evidence that yet undetectable planets or perhaps moons are present and their gravity affects the distribution of pebbles in these systems.

You can read the paper here [pdf].

The press release implies the discovery of “exocomets” but that is not true. The belts and rings mapped are likely to have comets in them, but no such comets have been found.

The scientists say that this database can be used to better understand the formation of solar systems, though they also admit that the “limited (although much improved) size of our sample” makes any conclusions based on it very uncertain. They hope however that over time that sample size will grow.

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Blue Ghost leaves Earth orbit

9:06 am

Artist rending of Blue Ghost on the Moon
Artist rending of Blue Ghost on the Moon

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander has successfully completed the mid-course correction engine burn that has taken it out of Earth orbit and into a transfer orbit to the Moon.

After a successful Trans Lunar Injection burn on Saturday, Feb. 8, Firefly’s spacecraft carrying NASA science and tech to the Moon has departed Earth’s orbit and begun its four-day transit to the Moon’s orbit. Blue Ghost will then spend approximately 16 days in lunar orbit before beginning its descent operations. Since launching more than three weeks ago, Blue Ghost has performed dozens of health tests generating 13 gigabytes of data. All 10 NASA payloads onboard are currently healthy and ready for surface operations on the Moon.

I post the artist’s rendering of Blue Ghost to the right to contrast its design with Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander that fell over when it landed last year. Note how much lower to the ground Blue Ghost is. This will certainly reduce the chances it will have the same problem as Odysseus, even if one leg breaks upon landing.

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A pimple on Mars

3:44 pm

A pimple on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 1, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely not taken as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature. When the camera team does this they try to pick something interesting, and sometimes succeed.

I think they succeeded in this case. At first glance this appears to be a crater, but on closer inspection it is instead a small mound. The picture was taken in the winter, at the high latitude of 55 degrees north. The featureless white surface surrounding this dark mound is almost certainly the mantle of dry ice that falls as snow and covers the poles during the winter. If not that, it is then likely to be a water ice sheet that orbital data suggests covers much of Mars’ high latitudes.
» Read more

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The weird landscape in Mars’ glacial country

1:33 pm

Overview map
Glacier country in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars

The weird landscape in Mars' glacier country

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 4, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels the features in the lowland below the mesas “ribbed terrain.” To me it looks like peeling paint. What it is however is glacial material, a lot of it. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, in the middle of the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude strip in the northern hemisphere I label glacier country, because practically every high resolution image of this region shows glacial features like those on the right.

The mesa with the crater on top gives a clue on the geological history. This is chaos terrain, a region of random mesas cross-crossed with canyons and wide low plains, as shown in the inset. The entire surface was probably once at the same height as the top of that mesa with the crater. Over time glacial ice eroded away along fault lines. As that sublimation process continued, the fault lines widened to became canyons, then the flat plains, with the isolated mesas remaining between.

The “peeling paint” terrain is likely a layer of ice that is in the process of sublimating away.

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Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander gets commercial rover to replace NASA’s VIPER rover

11:51 am

Astrobotic’s commercial Griffin lunar lander has signed a deal with the space rover startup Venturi Astrolab to fly its FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) in place of NASA’s cancelled VIPER rover.

Last year NASA announced that it would be cancelling the VIPER lander that was set to travel aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander, just months after the company’s first attempt at a moonshot failed. Now, the company has secured a contract to transport a rover developed by California-based aerospace firm Venturi Astrolab. That rover, the FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform, or FLIP for short, will be deployed to the Nobile region of the lunar south pole. The mission is scheduled for the end of the year and NASA’s contract with Astrobotic has been modified for the mission to serve as large lander demonstration flight.

This deal has significant ramifications outside of Astrobotic’s effort to make money hauling payloads to the Moon. Astrolab is one of three companies with NASA design contracts to develop a manned lunar rover for its later Artemis manned missions. By flying this smaller version now and successfully operating it on the Moon Astrolab puts itself in a better position to win the larger final rover contract from NASA, beating out Intuitive Machines and Lunar Outpost.

Astrolab was clearly aiming for the VIPER slot when it unveiled FLIP in October 2024. As I predicted then:

FLIP was clearly designed to match the fit of NASA’s now canceled VIPER rover that was to be launched on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. Griffin is still being prepped for its lunar mission to be launched in 2025, but no longer has that prime payload. It is very obvious that Astrolab is vying to make FLIP that prime payload.

Note however how private enterprise moves. NASA can’t get it done but the competition to win contracts and make profits has these private companies scrambling to make things happen, quickly and cheaply.

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Martian hardened dunes untouched by dust devils

2:58 pm

Hardened dunes and dust devils
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on September 26, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

I picked this image out of the MRO archive because of the many dust devil tracts that cut across the entire image, traveling in all directions with no apparent pattern. I also picked it because those tracks also cut across the many parallel small ridges that appear to be ancient ripple dunes that have since hardened into rock. What makes this landscape puzzling is how those dust devil tracks leave no evidence on those ridges. It is as if the ancient ripple dunes were laid down after the very recent dust devil tracks, even though that is chronologically entirely backwards.

Apparently, the dust devil tracks form because the devil only disturbs the dust that coats the flat low ground between the ridges. The ridges themselves are hard, and thus the devils, produced in Mars’ extremely thin atmosphere, can leave no mark.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: Sunspot activity continued its decline in January

11:58 am

Another month has passed, meaning it is time for another update on the Sun’s sunspot cycle, based on NOAA’s monthly graph tracking that activity but annotated by me with additional information.

In January the decline in sunspot activity on the hemisphere facing Earth since August 2024 continued, with the number of sunspots dropping to a level not seen since May 2023, when the Sun’s was ramping up from solar minimum to solar maximum.
» Read more

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The uncertainty of science: Scientists now say eating eggs reduces your chances of a heart attack

9:52 am

I wish they’d make up their minds: For decades scientists — and the U.S. government — claimed with absolute certainty that eating eggs increased your risk of a heart attack because of the egg’s cholesterol content.

Now they say “Never mind.”

The researchers analyzed data from 8,756 Australian and American adults aged 70-plus who participated in the ASPirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly (ASPREE) study and one of its sub-studies, the ASPREE Longitudinal Study of Older Persons (ALSOP) study. As part of the latter study, participants self-reported their total egg intake, which was categorized as never/infrequently (never or one-to-two times a month), weekly (one-to-six times a week), and daily (daily or several times a day). The association between egg intake and all-cause and cause-specific mortality – in this case, cardiovascular disease and cancer – was assessed after adjusting for sociodemographic, health-related and clinical factors, and overall diet quality. The follow-up period was close to six years.

Participants who fell into the weekly category of egg consumption, that is, they consumed one to six eggs per week, had a 29% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a 17% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to those participants who ate eggs never or infrequently. There was no statistically significant association between egg consumption and deaths due to cancer.

The study found that eating eggs with a high quality diet reduced the risk of heart disease even more. It also found that eating eggs has the same exact benefit even for those who already had high levels of cholesterol.

In other words, our lovely government and the American Heart Association had been handing out guidelines for decades based on nothing more than very uncertain science, and doing it with an air of arrogant certainty that should make everyone want to vomit.

I should note that the results above are uncertain as well. It is based merely on a correlation of eating eggs and lower heart disease, and we must remind ourselves that correlation does not prove causation. The study says nothing about how eating eggs might lower your risk of heart disease, and the correlation might very well be unrelated entirely.

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Gullies on crater wall

3:11 pm

Gullies on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 8, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The picture’s research focus is the gullies, which the scientists’ describe as “perched pole-facing gullies on ancient crater wall.” Perched means the start and end of each gully is on that crater wall, linked neither to the top or bottom of the wall itself. That the gully starts below the top means whatever caused it came from within the wall itself, not from the plateau above. That it ends before the crater floor means the process that cut the gully out was not powerful enough to reach the bottom.

That the gullies are on the interior north wall of this unnamed 25-mile-wide crater means they get less sunlight year round, something that must play a part in causing the gullies.
» Read more

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Astronomers find galaxy with nine rings

11:15 am

The Bullseye Galaxy
Click for original image.

Using both the Hubble Space Telescope as well as the Keck telescope in Hawaii, astronomers have discovered a galaxy with nine rings, something never seen before.

The gargantuan galaxy LEDA 1313424 is rippling with nine star-filled rings after an “arrow” — a far smaller blue dwarf galaxy — shot through its heart. Astronomers using Hubble identified eight visible rings, more than previously detected by any telescope in any galaxy, and confirmed a ninth using data from the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. Previous observations of other galaxies show a maximum of two or three rings.

More information from Keck can be found here.

Keck Observatory and Hubble’s follow-up observations helped the researchers prove which galaxy plunged through the center of the Bullseye — a blue dwarf galaxy to its center-left. This relatively tiny interloper traveled like a dart through the core of the Bullseye about 50 million years ago, leaving rings in its wake like ripples in a pond. A thin trail of gas now links the pair, though they are currently separated by 130,000 light-years.

The Hubble picture is to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here. The small blue dwarf galaxy to the left is believed to be the galaxy that plowed through LEDA 1313424 to create the rings. LEDA is itself thought to be two and a half times the size of the Milky Way, making one of the larger known galaxies.

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NASA suspends numerous advisory committees to comply with Trump executive orders

10:47 am

In what appears to be an over-reaction by NASA, it has ordered that numerous science advisory committees suspend all meetings and work so that it make sure they are complying with Trump’s executive orders requiring the removal of all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs.

More here and here.

The orders listed twenty different working groups as well as the cancellation of the first in-person meeting of the Mercury working group this week.

In reviewing the released list of these groups, only two, the EDIA Working Group (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) and the H2O program (Here to Observe), are expressly focused on promoting these racist policies. EDIA’s job is to make sure DEI is implemented across all working groups and science projects. H2O is an educational program restricted to “under-represented students” only, which really means minorities only. All other kids need not apply.

All the other research groups are focused on research and science, not DEI. While a review of their work to make sure they don’t have racial quotas might make sense, it seems NASA’s memos shutting them down entirely during that review appears to be overkill, and might actually be an example of malicious compliance, a tactic used by the bureaucracy to generate bad press against a politician’s policy orders. By over reacting the bureaucrats try to make the elected official’s new policy look stupid.

For example, the cancellation of the first in-person meeting of the Mercury exploration working group (MExAG) seems absurd. It was scheduled to occur this week in Maryland to discuss for example the Japanese/Italian BepiColombo mission, and the sudden cancellation resulted in quotes like this:

“We are forced, therefore, to cancel MExAG 2025,” the Mercury committee’s chair Carolyn Ernst, a planetary scientist with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, wrote in a memo obtained by Space.com. “This turn of events is shocking and concerning, and is extra painful given the order comes four days before our first in-person meeting.” Some committee members had already begun travel for the meeting, Ernst added.

The nearly three-day hybrid meeting was expected to include at up 200 scientists attending either in person of virtually, one scientist Ed Rivera-Valentin shared on the social media site Bluesky. It was expected to include a number of researchers connected to the BepiColombo Mercury mission run by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the European Space Agency. The probe just made its sixth flyby of Mercury on Jan. 8.

I can see no logical reason for NASA’s management to cancel this meeting other than to create bad press for Trump.

There one other possibility. NASA’s management might simply be running scared, and has decided it must over-react in order to make sure it doesn’t get fired for appearing defiant.

I must add that the suspension of the Earth science working groups is not related to DEI, but to adhere to the Trump executive orders requiring a review of the government’s global warming and climate research. For that order a larger suspension of work makes more sense.

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Curiosity’s view from the heights

10:36 am

Panorama of Gale Crater taken February 3, 2025
Click for full resolution panorama. Original images can be found here, here, and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above was created by me from three images taken by Curiosity’s left navigation camera today (available here, here, and here).

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position. The red dotted line marks the planned route, while the white dotted line its actual travels. The yellow lines indicate the area covered by the panorama above.

The butte in the center where the red dotted line ends is about a half mile away. The far rim of Gale Crater is about 25 to 30 miles beyond. Though Curiosity has climbed about 3,000 feet from the floor of the crater where it landed, it still sits about 5,000 feet below the top of the crater’s rim.

As you can see, the air at Gale Crater has cleared somewhat from December 2024. Then the rim was barely visible. Now it can be seen, though the crater floor is still obscured by a layer of dust.

The journey west continues to slow but steady. The rover can only go so far each day across this very rough terrain, so as to protect its already damaged wheels.

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Hardened dunes or eroded lava?

2:07 pm

hardened dunes or eroded lava?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 4, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is labeled as a “terrain sample,” so it likely was taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

The picture shows a flat rippled plain with a handful of very small thin ridges, oriented 90 degrees from the smaller ripples and sticking up a few feet above them.

The rough surface of the small ripples suggest these are dunes of sand that have hardened into rock. The thin larger ridges suggest an underlying topography buried by the sand. The dunes however might not be dunes at all, as indicated by their location.
» Read more

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Ispace posts first picture taken by its Resilience lunar lander

9:30 am

Map of lunar landing sites
Landing sites for both Firefly’s Blue Ghost and
Ispace’s Resilience

The Japanese startup Ispace on January 29, 2025 released the first picture taken by its Resilience lunar lander, a series of images of Earth.

More important, the company reported that the spacecraft is “in excellent health.”

Though launched on the same rocket with Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, Resilience is taking a longer route to the Moon. Blue Ghost plans to land on the Moon in about six weeks. Resilience won’t get there for about four more months. Both are using the same technique, slowly over time raising the spacecraft’s Earth orbit until its high point enters the Moon gravitational sphere of influence, where each will transfer to lunar orbit. This method saves weight and fuel, as it requires a smaller rocket engine to make the trip. That Resilience is taking longer is simply because it uses an even smaller engine that can only raise that orbit in smaller increments.

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A big crack on Mars

1:40 pm

A big crack on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 1, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label “a fracture with clays.”

This canyon is about a mile and a half wide, with the floor ranging from 800 to 1,100 feet to the rim. It was not formed initially by any ice or water flow, but by a spreading of the crust, forcing cracks to form that might have later been modified by wind, ice, or water. The presence of clays in this canyon strengthens that later ice/water modification, as clays require water to form.

The streaks on the northern wall are slope streaks, an unexplained phenomenon unique to Mars. While at first glance they look like avalanches, they have no debris piles at their base, and do nothing to change the topography. In fact, streaks can sometimes go uphill for short distances, following the surface. They happen randomly throughout the year, and fade with time.

It is believed their cause is related to dust avalanches, but this is only one of a number of theories that attempt to explain them. None is entirely satisfactory.
» Read more

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Samples from the asteroid Bennu reshape entirely our understanding of the solar system’s early make-up

11:11 am

Nightingale landing site on Bennu
The sample site on Bennu, with OSIRIS-REx
superimposed for scale. Click for full image.

First, I hope my readers will notice that — unlike NASA and the entire press — I make no mention in my headline above of the discovery of a “mix of life’s ingredients” or “the key building blocks of life” from the samples brought back by the probe OSIRIS-REx from the asteroid Bennu.

This is the game NASA does all the time, to hint at the discovery of life when this is not the real discovery. NASA does it because it knows that if you hint at such a discovery, the press will go crazy and give you lots of press.

The real news from the two papers published this week, available here and here, however, is more fundamental. Before the samples from Bennu and Ryugu (brought back by the Japanese probe Hayabusa-2) had arrived, our understanding of the make-up and chemistry of the early solar system was very incomplete and badly biased. The only asteroid samples we had of carbonaceous chondrite asteroids, the most primitive and fragile carbon-rich asteroids in the solar system, had came from meteorites that had survived the journey through the Earth’s atmosphere. Thus, the only material that survived was robust enough to do so. The more fragile molecules however were always destroyed and thus missing from meteorites, even though it was very clear from spectroscopy of these asteroids in the solar system that such molecules did exist, and likely formed the majority of these asteroids’ make-up.

Thus, though carbonaceous chondrite asteroids represent the early solar system, our understanding of them was warped and very incomplete. The whole point of both missions to Bennu and Ryugu was to fill in this data, to get a more complete census of the real make-up of the early solar system.

The two papers published this week have given us that. That’s their real discovery.
» Read more

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Astroforge names the target asteroid for its first commercial interplanetary mission

3:48 pm

The asteroid mining startup Astroforge today finally named the asteroid that its first commercial interplanetary mission will do a close fly-by, set to launch as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on February 26, 2025.

The mining startup is headed to asteroid 2022 OB5 as soon as Feb. 26, launching alongside Intuitive Machines’ second lunar mission. CEO Matt Gialich told Payload that they picked that asteroid for the initial mission for a few reasons:

  • It’s under a kilometer wide.
  • It could be a high-value, metal-filled M-type asteroid.
  • AstroForge’s spacecraft will fly by the asteroid when it’s close to Earth, so imagery can be sent back quickly.

This will be Astroforge’s second mission, the first being an Earth-orbit demo flight to prove out its systems. The spacecraft, dubbed Odin, was quickly prepped when the planned satellite satellite failed vibration testing. The company quickly replaced it with the cubesat intended for the third mission.

The company is also proud that the entire cost for this asteroid mission is just $6.5 million. “Hopefully we’re going to show the world that NASA doesn’t need to be funded for $5B missions when we can do it for much less,” said Gialich. The company also announced it has signed a multi-launch contract with the rocket startup Stoke Space, though no specifics were released.

Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.

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200-foot-wide asteroid has a 1-in-83 chance of hitting the Earth in 2032

10:12 am

New data that has refined the solar orbit of 200-foot-wide asteroid discovered in 2024, dubbed 2024 YR4, suggests it has a 1-in-83 chance of hitting the Earth on December 22, 2032.

“Odds have slightly increased to 1 in 83,” Catalina Sky Survey engineer and asteroid hunter David Rankin wrote on BlueSky. “This is one of the highest probabilities of an impact from a significantly sized rock ever.”

Amateur astronomer Tony Dunn shared a simulation of the asteroid approach on his X feed. “Recently-discovered #asteroid 2024 YR4 may make a very close approach to Earth in 8 years. It is thought to be 40-100 meters wide. Uncertainty is still high and more and more observations are needed confirm this.”

The asteroid is rated three on the Torino risk scale, which indicates a close encounter that warrants close attention from astronomers and an over 1% chance of impact.

Though most reports say the asteroid is about 200 feet across, there is great uncertainty in that number. It could also be as large as 320 feet, or as small as 130 feet.

At the moment the risk of impact is still small. If it does occur, there is a chance it could either cause a major airburst similar to the Chelyabinsk meteor impact in 2013 that injured more than 400 people, or even impact the ground or ocean. If it hits the ocean there is a considerable risk of tsunamis. At the moment it appears its path will cross from South America to Africa in the southern hemisphere, but this data remains very uncertain at this time.

Though there will be doom-sayers, overall this is not a world destroyer. It carries some risk, but we have eight years to refine our knowledge significantly, especially when it will make a close approach of five million miles in 2028. At that time scientists should be able to better measure its size as well as its future orbit, determining more precisely whether it will even hit the Earth in 2032.

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Juno detects the largest volcanic event on Io yet

9:51 am

Changes on Io since April 2024
Changes on Io since April 2024. Click for original image.

Infrared detection of volcanic hot spot
Infrared detection of volcanic hot spot.
Click for original image.

Using Juno’s Italian JIRAM infrared instrument image as well as its optical camera, scientists have detected what appears to be the largest volcanic event yet measured on the Jupiter moon Io, covering an area larger than Lake Superior,

Scientists with NASA’s Juno mission have discovered a volcanic hot spot in the southern hemisphere of Jupiter’s moon Io. The hot spot is not only larger than Earth’s Lake Superior, but it also belches out eruptions six times the total energy of all the world’s power plants.

…The JIRAM science team estimates the as-yet-unnamed feature spans 40,000 square miles (100,000 square kilometers). The previous record holder was Io’s Loki Patera, a lava lake of about 7,700 square miles (20,000 square kilometers). The total power value of the new hot spot’s radiance measured well above 80 trillion watts.

The pictures above were taken by Juno’s optical camera during the last three close flyby’s, looking down at the south pole, with the red arrows indicating the change to the pole’s right during each pass. The infrared image to the right shows a similar view during the fly-by, and shows that same hot spot as the bright area to the pole’s right.

Juno will do another fly-by of Io in March, though from a greater distance. Scientists plan to use both instruments to see how this hot spot has changed again since the end of December.

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The blobby bottom of Utopia Basin

3:05 pm

The blobby bottom of Utopia Basin
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 25, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so as to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

The terrain is definitely blobby, with some hollows appears to have ripple dunes suggesting dust and sand. The rounded mounds and some hollows however suggest instead near surface ice or places where sublimation of that underground ice caused the hollows.

Some of the circular depressions might suggest impact craters, but if so, those craters have been significantly modified and softened since impact. Some do appear to be filled with glacial debris.
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Barren Mars

10:45 am

Panorama by Perseverance on sol 1400, January 27, 2025
Click for full resolution panorama. For original images, go here, here, and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above was created by me using three pictures taken today (here, here, and here) by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Perseverance. The top of the rover can be seen to the right, as well as its tracks.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present position. The white dotted line its past travel route, with the red dotted line indicating the planned route. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama.

Though the planned route had the rover head west and then south, the rover team instead had the rover retreat eastward about 450 feet the past few days, where it sits now. At the previous western location the team had attempted to find a location to drill a sample core, but apparently the ground was not satisfactory. By retreating to this previous location it could be they think they will have better luck.

What strikes me about this hilly terrain just outside Jezero Crater is its barrenness. You would have great difficulty anywhere on Earth finding terrain so empty of life. On Mars however there is nothing but dirt and rocks, for as far as the eye can see.

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Engineers confirm OSIRIS-APEX successfully completed its second of six close fly-bys of the Sun

10:19 am

Engineers have now confirmed that the asteroid probe OSIRIS-APEX successfully completed its second of six close fly-bys of the Sun in September, using its solar panels to shield its instruments from the Sun’s heat and light.

On Jan. 23 the mission team completed its review of all the data recorded by the spacecraft and its instruments during the solar pass [about 46 million miles from the Sun]. “There were no surprises, and the spacecraft is operating well,” said Mike Moreau, OSIRIS-APEX deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

As planned, on Sept. 2, 2024, OSIRIS-APEX passed through perihelion — the phase of its orbit closest to the Sun. The trajectory to Apophis takes the spacecraft much closer to the Sun than it was originally designed for. Between Aug. 1 and Oct. 13, the spacecraft was configured in a special orientation that uses one of the solar arrays to shade the most heat-sensitive components, keeping them within safe operating temperatures.

Because of the improvised orientation during the close approach, full data communications was not possible until months afterward. Only now have engineers completed their analysis.

OSIRIS-APEX original mission was to visit the asteroid Bennu and return samples from it to Earth. Once that mission was successfully completed, the probe was repurposed to go to the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it makes its next close approach to the Earth in April 2029.

I have embedded below a short video showing the spacecraft’s journey to get to Apophis.
» Read more

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