Tag: science

Japan chooses Hayabusa-2’s next asteroid target

8:47 am

The new colonial movement: It appears that Japan has chosen the next asteroid that its probe Hayabusa-2 will visit in 2031, after it releases its samples to Earth in December from Ryugu.

Japan’s Hayabusa2 space explorer will aim to probe the asteroid “1998KY26” located between the orbits of Earth and Mars in 2031 after completing its current mission of collecting samples from another asteroid, the country’s science minister said Tuesday.

It is hoped Hayabusa2 will approach the ball-shaped asteroid, which has a diameter of around 30 meters and rotates about every 10 minutes, in July 2031, Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Minister Koichi Hagiuda said.

It will not obtain samples from this second asteroid, only observe it close up by camera.

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The frozen and changing mid-latitudes of Mars

12:51 pm

Glacial erosion on Mars
Click for full image.

Using “frozen” and “changing” to describe any single location might seem contradictory, but when it comes to the mid-latitudes of Mars, high resolution images keep telling us that both often apply, at the same time and at the same place.

The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, is a typical example. Taken on May 8, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows what the scientists label as “mesas and ridges.” Drainage is to the south, and it sure looks like some sort of glacial flow is working its way downward within the canyons between those mesas.

Overall the terrain has the appearance of a frozen ice sheet, or at least terrain that has a shallow ice table close to the surface. It also looks like chaos terrain in its infancy, the erosion process not yet cutting down enough to make the mesas stand out fully.

The location of these mesas and ridges is shown in the context map below, which also shows that this location is at the same latitude as SpaceX’s Starship prime Martian landing site, and only about 400 to 500 miles to the east.
» Read more

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Tiny amount of rare chemical found on Venus; it is NOT a sign of life

8:53 am

The coming dark age: Scientists today announced that they had detected a tiny amount of the rare chemical phosphine in the upper atmosphere of Venus, and immediately jumped to the absurd conclusion that this was a sign of life.

The international team, which includes researchers from the UK, US and Japan, estimates that phosphine exists in Venus’s clouds at a small concentration, only about twenty molecules in every billion. Following their observations, they ran calculations to see whether these amounts could come from natural non-biological processes on the planet. Some ideas included sunlight, minerals blown upwards from the surface, volcanoes, or lightning, but none of these could make anywhere near enough of it. These non-biological sources were found to make at most one ten thousandth of the amount of phosphine that the telescopes saw.

To create the observed quantity of phosphine (which consists of hydrogen and phosphorus) on Venus, terrestrial organisms would only need to work at about 10% of their maximum productivity, according to the team. Earth bacteria are known to make phosphine: they take up phosphate from minerals or biological material, add hydrogen, and ultimately expel phosphine. Any organisms on Venus will probably be very different to their Earth cousins, but they too could be the source of phosphine in the atmosphere.

To leap from finding twenty molecules out of a billion of a single rare chemical to claiming this is a sign of life is absurd. And yet, this is what these scientists do, in the European Space Agency (ESA) press release at the link above, as well as this Royal Astronomical Society press release.

This discovery is not giving us “a hint of life on Venus.” All these scientists have done is detect a chemical whose formation in Venus’ very alien environment is a mystery. Yes, on Earth this chemical comes from life related activities, but to claim that the presence of biology must explain it on Venus is not science, but witchcraft and the stuff of fantasy. We know practically nothing about the full make-up of Venus’ atmosphere, its chemistry and environment, which makes it impossible to hint at any theories, no less life.

The worst part of this is that we can expect our brainless media to run with these claims, without the slightest effort of incredulity.

We live in a world of make believe and made-up science. Data is no longer important, only the leaps of fantasy we can jump to based on the slimmest of facts. It was this desire to push theories rather than knowledge that locked humanity into a dark age for centuries during the Middle Ages. It is doing it again, now, and the proof is all around you, people like zombies and sheep, wearing masks based not on any proven science but on pure emotions.

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The alien Red Planet and the scientific method

1:05 pm

Spiders, dunes, and strange terrain in high latitude southern Martian crater
Click for full image.

As a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s and an avid reader of science fiction, I was constantly presented with stories about Mars and what people imagined it was like. At the time no spacecraft had as yet gotten a close look at the planet, so the theories of a desert planet, with many canals built by an alien race attempting to stave off death as the planet’s water disappeared, were still considered possible. So were theories that the changing colors across its surface seen seasonally in ground-based telescopes suggested the possibility of some form of lichen-like life that came and went with the seasons.

None of those fantasies have turned out to be true. All attempted to create an alien planet in the model of Earth, and thus were guaranteed to get it wrong. After a half century of increasingly sophisticated research, we now know a bit more about what Mars is like, and have learned that it is much stranger than we had imagined, an icy world quite possibly shaped by slowly shifting glaciers and ice sheets, creating surface features in ways so alien from what we are familiar with on Earth that even now scientists struggle to figure those processes out.

The photo above and to the right, taken on May 25, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), is a perfect example. At first glance it fits what I call a “what the heck?” image. Without knowing more, it is impossible to figure out what we see here.

The wider image below, taken by context camera on MRO, provides our first clue.
» Read more

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Texas sees 400% increase in homeschooling

11:42 am

The silver lining? Faced with odious rules and remote zoom classes in the public education system due to fear and terror over the corona virus, Texas parents are choosing to homeschool their children this year, with the numbers rising by 400%.

The spike, the group reported, stems directly from the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) pandemic schooling guidelines sparking a mass exodus from the public school system as parents opt to teach their children at home over enrolling them in a digitized, remote state-run classroom.

Our government public schools have been corrupted by leftist indoctrination for years, while they have steadily done a worsening job at educating children in the basics. (Witness for example the ignorance exhibited by the Antifa protesters about American history.) Maybe this disaster created by the Wuhan flu panic might have some benefits, such as getting parents more involved once again in their kid’s education, and thus improve it.

Because, based on everything I’ve seen and read about modern public school education and culture, parents really can’t do worse.

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Sharp Martian ridges sticking up from the dust

10:35 am

Sharp ridges sticking up from Martian dust
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image brings us back to the region of Mars where the rover Opportunity journeyed. Taken on June 25, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance orbiter (MRO), the photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, focuses on some sharp but low ridges that appear to stick up out of the Martian dust, hinting that they are the tops of some larger feature buried over the eons and only now revealed partly by recent erosion. I estimate that their height is roughly one to two hundred feet or so.

This image is in Arabia Terra, the widest and largest transitional zone region between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands. It is also only about 200 miles north of where Opportunity landed, and about 230 miles from where it died after almost fifteen years of operation, on the west rim of Endeavour Crater. The overview map below gives the context.
» Read more

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“We quarantined the healthy, and we exposed the sick.”

9:30 am

According to Jay Bhattacharya, director of both the Program on Medical Outcomes and the Center on the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging at Stanford University, the decisions made by most governments during the past six months in reaction to the Wuhan virus made no sense, and actually acted to worsen the epidemic.

“We essentially, in effect, exposed people who were at high risk in nursing homes, in assisted care facilities, elderly populations,” Bhattacharya said. “We essentially, in the early days of the epidemic, did the inverse of the right policy.”

“We quarantined the healthy, and we exposed the sick,” he added.

The professor noted that the World Health Organization, early on in the pandemic, suggested that the death rate for the disease might be as high as 3.4%, significantly higher than that of seasonal influenza. Revised estimates have put that rate as low as 0.26%, though some studies have put it closer to 0.5%. [emphasis mine]

The mortality rate for the flu is generally estimated at about 0.1%, so the Wuhan virus is higher, but really not by much. Moreover, these new estimates are much closer to what could have been gleaned from the early data, data that the WHO and many other government health officials ignored in favor of unreliable models. More important however is that, when compared to the flu, the data today suggests that COVID-19 is less dangerous to the healthy population, and a greater risk to the elderly sick, which once again shows that quarantining the healthy population (the lock downs) makes no sense. It only slows the arrival of herd immunity, giving the virus more time to reach the vulnerable population.

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The mystery of rust on the Moon

8:40 am

Link here. The data shows that there is rust on the Moon, in an environment lacking oxygen and water that should make it impossible for it to form.

Yet the rust is there, in the form of hematite, and in fact the data from India’s first lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, has found that the Moon’s nearside has much more of it. To explain how it got there the scientists have come up with a complex hypothesis, first requiring the Moon to be shielded from the Sun’s solar wind by the Earth’s magnetic field for part of its orbit, then having that magnet field transport oxygen from the Earth’s upper atmosphere to the Moon.

This oxygen then reacts with the tiny amount of water that some scientists believe Chandrayaan-1 detected scattered in the Moon’s regolith, the equivalent of its topsoil. The result, according to this hypothesis, is that over time that oxygen and water reacted with the surface iron on the Moon’s nearside, facing the Earth, causing it to rust.

The explanation is elegant, and fits the known facts (though the presence of that water in the lunar regolith remains unconfirmed). It is also complex, which should raise doubts. Regardless, the nearside of the Moon appears to have more hematite than the farside, and the formation of that iron oxide remains baffling.

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No coronavirus illnesses after 1,000 HS football games

6:49 pm

Why am I not surprised? Despite more than a thousand high school football games across several states in the past month, there have been no COVID-19 outbreaks related to those games, with cases continuing to drop in each state.

Utah, for example, launched youth sports more than five weeks ago. Alabama, Indiana and Tennessee commenced with high school football roughly four weeks ago. Alaska has been allowing games for more than two weeks.

Many have been wondering whether these events would ultimately lead to an increase in COVID-19 cases being spread within communities.

Despite more than a thousand individual games having taken place, no significant recorded outbreaks of COVID-19 have occurred as a result.

Since the very start of the epidemic the evidence strongly told us that young people did not get sick from this virus. Nothing, absolutely nothing, as occurred since to change that initial assessment.

And yet American politicians tremble in terror at the idea of having children return to classrooms, and mandate that little kids wear masks. It is beyond stupid.

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A Martian starburst spider

12:44 pm

A Martian starburst spider
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, illustrates an example of a wholly unique Martian phenomenon, that is not only unique to Mars but is also found only in its south polar regions. The image was taken on July 17, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

What we are looking at is a permanent spider formation etched into the layered deposits of ice and dirt that cover the widest area surrounding Mars’ south pole. The blue dot just north of Chasma Australe on the overview map below shows the location of these starbursts, on those layered deposits.

Each winter the poles of Mars are blanketed with a thin mantle of dry ice, generally less than six feet thick. When spring arrives and sunlight hits this mantle, it heats the ice and sand on which the mantle lies, and that warmth causes the mantle’s base to sublimate back into gas. Eventually gas pressure causes the mantle to crack at its weak points so the gas can escape. By the time summer arrives that mantle is entirely gone, all of it returning to the atmosphere as CO2 gas.

This sublimation process differs between the north and south pole, due to the different terrain found at each. In the north the mantle mostly lies on ice or sand dunes, neither of which is stable over repeated years. Thus, the mantle weak points do not occur at the exact same place each year, even though they occur at the same type of locations, such as the base and crests of dunes.
» Read more

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Bennu tosses particles from its surface routinely

9:26 am

Objects ejected from Bennu
Tracked particles after August 28, 2019 ejection event.

During OSIRIS-REx’s more than twenty months flying close to the Bennu, scientists have found that the asteroid routinely kicks particles from its surface into space, with these events linked to the asteroid’s day-night cycle.

Since arrival the scientists have seen and tracked more than 300 ejection events, with the almost seven hundred objects detected ranging from about an eighth to a half inch in size. Most moved about eight inches per second, comparable to “a beetle scurrying across the ground.”

The image to the right, cropped, reduced, and brightened to post here, comes from the introductory paper of a suite of papers on the subject, published today.

The timing of the events however reveals the most.

As Bennu completes one rotation every 4.3 hours, boulders on its surface are exposed to a constant thermo-cycling as they heat during the day and cool during the night. Over time, the rocks crack and break down, and eventually particles may be thrown from the surface. The fact that particle ejections were observed with greater frequency during late afternoon, when the rocks heat up, suggests thermal cracking is a major driver. The timing of the events is also consistent with the timing of meteoroid impacts, indicating that these small impacts could be throwing material from the surface. Either, or both, of these processes could be driving the particle ejections, and because of the asteroid’s microgravity environment, it doesn’t take much energy to launch an object from Bennu’s surface.

The link includes a cool movie showing the ejections events and the tracked paths of the ejected particles.

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NASA solicits lunar landers to bid on bringing science instruments to Moon

8:56 am

UPDATE: It appears I misunderstood the nature of this NASA solicitation in my initial post. I have rewritten it to correct it. Hat tip reader Rex Ridenoure.

Capitalism in space: NASA has issued a request from the private companies building unmanned lunar landers to bid on carrying a variety of science instruments to the Moon by ’23.

Initially NASA had indicated it was farming out the design and construction of the lunar landers to private companies, but would have the science instruments designed and built in-house. Since ’19 however NASA has had private companies designing and building these fourteen small science payloads, and is now in the process of determining which private landers will bring them to the Moon.

Though this approach is not very different than past NASA arrangements, what is different is NASA’s public approach. Instead of touting NASA’s part in this work, the agency is touting the work of the private companies.

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Another pit on Mars!

12:53 pm

Isolated small pit on Mars
Click for full image.

It has been several months since my last Martian pit update, mostly caused by the lack of new pit images coming down from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I think this lack is not because of a lack of additional pits or caves but instead signals the completion of a first high resolution survey of the known pits so far found on Mars. A full list of all past pit updates can be found at the bottom of this post.

Regardless, the image to the right, cropped to post here, is the only such image in months, taken on April 14, 2020, and shows a small isolated pit in the lava slopes between the giant volcanoes Arsia and Pavonis Mons. In the full photograph you can see how isolated is this pit. To the limits of the image there are no other such features, the terrain a relatively smooth plain with only some small ridges and and a scattering of what seem to be partly obscured or eroded small craters.

The overview below map shows this pit’s relationship to the volcanoes as well as to all other known nearby pits.
» Read more

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Astronomers look at one patch of sky and see no signs of alien life

9:12 am

Worlds without end: Using an Australian radio telescope array focused in the FM frequencies, astronomers did a seventeen hour sweep of one small of sky and found no evidence of alien transmissions.

“We observed the sky around the constellation of Vela for 17 hours, looking more than 100 times broader and deeper than ever before. With this dataset, we found no technosignatures—no sign of intelligent life.”

Professor Tingay said even though this was the broadest search yet, he was not shocked by the result. “As Douglas Adams noted in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, ‘space is big, really big’. … And even though this was a really big study, the amount of space we looked at was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth’s oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool.

The radio array used in this search is only a small precursor to a much larger array, dubbed the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which is under construction and many times more sensitive.

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Strange glacial flow features on Mars?

1:16 pm

Flow features in Reull Vallis
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on May 26, 2020, and shows what the scientists dub “Flow features in Reull Vallis.”

These features are typical in the mid-latitudes, and once again suggest the presence of buried glacial ice. The two lobes on the left and right both evoke such flows, as does the material in the drainage channel near the top of the photo.

What is more intriguing however are the strange features in the box. Below is that section, at full resolution.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: More evidence of an upcoming maximum

11:39 am

NOAA last week updated its monthly graph for tracking the Sun’s monthly sunspot activity. As I have done now for every month since 2011, I am posting that graph elow with additional annotations by me to show the past and new solar cycle predictions.

August 2020 sunspot activity

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community for the previous solar maximum. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007 for the previous maximum, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The blue curve is their revised May 2009 prediction. The red curve is the new prediction, first posted by NOAA in April 2020.

August continued the trends seen in the past two months whereby sunspot activity actually exceeded the prediction for this particular month.

Does this mean the prediction of a weak maximum in 2025 will be wrong? Hardly. Sunspot activity in any given month can easily be above or below the prediction, as is obvious if you compare the fluctuations of the last maximum with the prediction. We will not really know if these higher numbers the past few months mean anything until a lot more time has passed, with the gathering of a lot more data.

What is clear is that the activity does herald the next maximum. As in the past few months, the sunspots in August all had polarities that assigned them to the new maximum. While it is not impossible for there to be a handful of sunspots in the next few months that belong to the last maximum, it now appears that the last cycle is pretty much over. We are entering the ramp up to the next maximum, presently predicted by a portion of the solar science community aligned with NOAA to be a weak one.

Above all, the real scientific mystery remains: Scientists do not really yet understand the causes and processes that produce this sunspot cycle. They know without question that it is caused by cycles in the Sun’s magnetic dynamo, but their understanding of the details behind this process remain quite unknown.

Furthermore, the Sun’s importance to the climate on Earth is unquestioned. What we still do not know is its precise influence on long term climate changes. There is circumstantial evidence that it causes cooling and warming of the climate on scales of decades and centuries, but this remains unconfirmed. Once again, our understanding of the details behind the changes in the climate remain quite unknown.

And as always, the devil is in the details.

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The icy Erebus Mountains near where Starship will land on Mars

2:20 pm

Overview of all SpaceX images in Arcadia Planitia

Glacial filled crater in Erebus Montes
Click for full image.

It has been several months since I posted any new photos of the region on Mars which SpaceX considers its prime candidate landing site for its Starship spacecraft/rocket, now under development. The map to the right shows the location of all the images that SpaceX has obtained from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of this landing region, located in the northern lowland plains at the border between Arcadia and Amazonis and to the east of the Erebus Mountains. (See my post on November 13, 2019 for an analysis of the reasoning for SpaceX to choose this region, along with links to each of the numbered images.)

Time to take another look, this time at the very center of the southern cluster of the Erebus mountains. The crater to the right, its location indicated by the tiny red rectangle on the map above, was taken by MRO on May 6, 2020, and shows the typical glacial features scientists find in mid-latitude Martian craters. The floor appears filled with glacial material, with the repeated cyclical flows repeatedly coming down off the north-facing interior rim. That rim would generally be colder and get less sunlight, so snowfall is more likely to pile up there and then flow downward like a glacier, only to sublimate away once it moves out of shadow.

What makes these mountains enticing, only about 400 miles from the Starship landing zone, is not simply what is inside this crater, but what surrounds it. Below is the wider view provided by MRO’s context camera.
» Read more

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InSight has buried its Mole

9:58 am

The Mole buried

Using the scoop on InSight’s robot arm, engineers have now successfully filled the large hole that had formed around the spacecraft’s mole, the drill that has been trying but failing to dig down about fifteen feet so that a heat sensor could measure the internal temperature of Mars.

The image to the right shows the filled hole with the mole’s communications tether snaking away. Earlier this month they used InSight’s scoop to scrape surface material into the hole, as planned in June. According to the mole’s principle investigate, Tilman Spohn,

I had estimated that the first scrape of 12 centimetres swath length would raise the bottom of the pit but leave the Mole sticking out of the sand. By the way, this was the condition for some to agree to the quite controversial ‘scratch test’. As one can see in the image from Sol 600 shown below, that estimate was not quite right. The scraping was a complete success! The scrape was much more effective than expected and the sand filled the pit almost completely. The Mole is now covered, but there is only a thin layer of sand on the back cap.

Their next step will be to use the scoop to press down on the dirt of the filled hole, with the hope this added pressure will keep the dirt pressed against the mole as it hammers downward, thus holding it place with each downward stroke.

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Newly upgraded solar telescope sees first light

9:39 am

Early image from upgraded solar telescope.

Astronomers have finished a major instrument upgrade of the GREGOR solar telescope in the Canary Islands, making it possible for them to observe features on the Sun’s surface as small as thirty miles in diameter.

The image to the right is an example of the telescope’s new capability, showing the Sun’s granular surface features. From the introduction of the paper describing the upgrade:

GREGOR is Europe’s largest solar telescope. … Its 1.5 m diameter with an optical footprint of 1.44 m allows us to resolve structures on the Sun as small as 50 km at 400 nm.

…A past drawback of GREGOR was that its image quality did not reach the theoretical limit, partly because a risk was taken with untested technologies, such as silicon carbide mirrors, which could not be polished well enough, and partly because of design problems. These difficulties have recently been solved by replacing all silicon carbide mirrors with mirrors made of Zerodur, which can be polished to the required quality, and by redesigning the AO relay optics. GREGOR now operates at its diffraction limit. [emphasis mine]

In other words, the initial mirrors did not work as promised, requiring them to replace them to get the telescope to function as initially designed. By the image above, it looks like their upgrade has worked admirably.

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A star with giant misaligned rings

8:52 am

Star with misaligned rings

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have detected a nearby star, dubbed GW Ori, with multiple rings of dust with several tilted in relation to the others.

The rings, with dust equaling 75, 170, and 245 Earth masses each, are 46, 188, and 336 astronomical units (au) each from their star. (An au is the distance of the Earth to the Sun.) If you look closely at the image to the right, you can see that the inner rings are circular, while the outer rings appear oval, suggesting that we are looking directly down at the inner rings, but the outer rings are tilted to our line of sight. Moreover, another team of astronomers

…observed GW Ori with ALMA and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Near infrared observation with VLT showed for the first time that the innermost ring casts a shadow on the outer rings, which is clear evidence of disk misalignment. Kraus and his colleagues also performed a computer simulation and suggest that the triple star system can create misaligned rings, without gravitational assistance from planets. The two teams have different theories for the origin of the misaligned rings, but no conclusions have been reached so far. Nevertheless, GW Ori is a precious example to understand planet formation in the complex gravitational environment around multiple stars. [emphasis mine]

As noted, there is no agreement on the cause of the misalignment, only that it does exist.

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Bright-tipped perplexing terrain on Mars

1:29 pm

Perplexing terrain on Mars
Click for full image.

The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on June 24, 2020, and shows a bit of inexplicable country in Arabia Terra, the widest and largest transition zone region on Mars between the northern lowland plains and southern cratered highlands.

The stuff visible in this image falls into what I call “What the heck?” geology. It is very clear we are looking at a collection of straight and curved ridges and mesas, all of which for some reason are bright at their tips and edges. Some of the curved ridges might be the rims of craters, but only some. Other ridge lines look more like leftovers following a strange erosion process. The problem is that to my uneducated eye I can find little rhyme or reason to these shapes. The mesas and canyon on the image’s right edge might be explained by the erosion processes that create chaos terrain on Mars, but that process does not do a good job of explaining anything else in the photo.

That this uncaptioned image is merely labeled “Arabia Terra” suggests that the scientists involved in getting this image were equally perplexed by it, and could not give it a better description.

The overview map below provides some location context, including how this geology relates to the landing site of Europe’s Rosalind Franklin rover, now scheduled for a 2022 launch.
» Read more

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Biggest black hole merger yet detected by gravitational waves

3:30 pm

The uncertainty of science: In May 2020 scientists using the LIGO and VIGO gravitational waves telescopes detected evidence of a merger from two giant black holes, one of which was of a size that according to all theories had been considered “impossible.”

The short gravitational wave signal, GW190521, captured by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave observatories in the United States and Europe on 21 May last year, came from two highly spinning, mammoth black holes weighing in at a massive 85 times and 66 times the mass of the Sun, respectively.

But that is not the only reason this system is very special. The larger of the two black holes is considered `impossible’. Astronomers predict that stars between 65 – 130 times the mass of the Sun undergo a process called pair instability, resulting in the star being blown apart, leaving nothing behind.

With a mass of 85 solar masses, the larger black hole falls squarely in that forbidden range, referred to as the upper black hole mass gap, and should be `impossible’.

The explanation the scientists propose is that this black hole initially formed with a mass smaller than 65 solar masses, and then sucked in matter, including a possible additional black hole merger, that raised its weight to 85 solar masses.

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The longest lava tube in the solar system?

9:19 am

A lava tube on Mars
Click for full image.

Before I delve into today’s cool image, I think it important to explain to my readers why I seem to post so many cool images from Mars. The simple explanation is that Mars right now is where almost all the cutting edge planetary research is taking place, and as a science journalist focused on space exploration I must go to that cutting edge. My dear readers know that I love variety (just consider the evening pauses on Behind the Black), but you can’t ignore the reporting of real discoveries simply to increase the diversity of one’s posts. This is too often what modern news outlets do, which is also why they often miss the real story.

Anyway, today’s cool image to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, shows only a small section of what might be the longest lava tube in the entire solar system. Taken on May 5, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows a string of pits along a meandering depression coming down the northwest flank of the giant volcano Arsia Mons. The image was a follow-up to a July 2014 photo of the same location, and was taken to produce a stereo pair.

The feature strongly suggests a lava tube, with the pits being skylights into the meandering underground void. From top to bottom this section of the tube is a little over three miles long. Since there are lava tubes on Earth far longer, this one image hardly makes this the longest tube in the solar system.

The tube, however, extends off the image both at the bottom and at the top. Not many high resolution images have been taken in this area, so it is therefore hard to say how far the tube extends. Other nearby high resolution images in this area however have found similar lava tubes, which conceivably could be part of the same tube. The overview map below shows the relationship.
» Read more

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A collapsed Martian crater in a glacier?

12:43 pm

Collapsed crater in glacier?
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, is another example of evidence that the mid-latitudes of Mars are covered with glaciers and ice. The photo, taken on April 25, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), shows many of the squashed and blobby features found in these mid-latitudes.

What makes the image even more interesting is the small crater in the center of the larger crater. The floor of that larger crater seems filled with glacial fill, and it appears that when that smaller impact occurred it caused the nearby surrounding fill to collapse downward, producing the oblong off-center depression. At least that’s my uneducated guess, which I admit could easily be wrong.

Even if my hypothesis is wrong, the visual evidence here supports the theory that this region, dubbed Deuteronilus Mensae, has lots of buried ice glaciers. Consider for example the distorted crater to the southwest of the big crater. It sure looks like at some point it was heated suddenly, maybe by the impact of the main crater, so that its rim was warped and reshaped, in the manner that ice would be warped and reshaped by sudden heat. Moreover, all the craters in full image appear to have glacial fill.

The overview map below adds weight to this conclusion.
» Read more

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Revisiting Mars’ glacier country

1:16 pm

Glacial cracks or pits on Mars
Click for full image.

With today’s cool image we return to what I have labeled glacier country on Mars, though this time the image shows a Martian glacial feature that while resembling vaguely such features seen on Earth, has an alienness to it that requires some explanation.

The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on March 24, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The section I have focused on is the floor of a depression with a number of parallel pits, more or less aligned with the packed north-south ridges that cover the entire floor.

Normally, the north-south ridges would suggest repeated glacial flows moving to either the west or to the east. Such movement could over time, cause the ridges to separate, creating the cracks or pits that we see here. The trouble is that the slope of this depression is very unclear. In fact, the wider view below shows that this depression appears mostly enclosed, or if not it does not seem to be flowing in any particular direction.
» Read more

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Problem with InSight’s weather station

3:18 pm

Engineers are troubleshooting a problem with the weather sensors on the InSight lander on Mars that has prevented them from collecting data since August 16th.

[The weather system] is in safe mode and unlikely to be reset before the end of the month while mission team members work toward a diagnosis. JPL engineers are optimistic that resetting the control computer may address the issue but need to investigate the situation further before returning the sensors to normal.

Overall InSight has turned out to be of mixed success. The seismometer has worked as planned, but the mole designed to drill the heat thermometer sixteen feet into the ground has so far failed to work, and now the weather station has shut down, though hopefully only temporarily.

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Cracks and scallops on the lowland plains of Mars

2:37 pm

Utopia Basin cracks and scallops
Click for full image.

Cool image time! To the right is some of the strange terrain seen in the northern lowland plains of Mars. The photo, cropped to post here, was taken on May 4, 2020 by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of an area in the northwest part of Utopia Planitia.

Next year China’s first attempt to soft land a rover on Mars will occur somewhere in Utopia Planitia. Utopia Planitia, also called Utopia Basin, is quite large, however, and in fact is the largest recognizable impact basin on Mars, with a diameter of more than 2,000 miles or about two thirds the width of the United States. If this strange spot was put near Seattle, Tianwen-1 is expected to touch down somewhere near Houston, Texas.

The MRO science team labeled the image “Scalloped terrain in Utopia Planitia.” The curved cliffs in the image illustrate those scallops, found frequently in Utopia. Their formation is believed related to the sublimation of underground ice, changing directly from ice to gas. The theories of this process however are somewhat uncertain at this time.

What stuck me about the image were the north-south oriented cracks. They extend through the full image, all oriented in the same direction. I haven’t the faintest idea what caused them, but they are intriguing, are they not?

This terrain is also different than most Utopia Planitia images I have previously posted. Most look squishy and blobby and distorted, suggesting the presence of soft slush and underground ice. This image instead suggests hard bedrock, even though it is farther north than the previous images and should thus be expected to have more ice underground. Quite mysterious.

I suspect the ice is here, but is simply not made obvious by any surface event. Then again, who knows? The geology of Mars is definitely not obvious, no matter how obvious it sometimes seems.

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Curiosity captures a dust devil

11:33 am

During its recent and last several-week-long drilling effort in the clay unit in Gale Crater, the rover Curiosity was also able to luckily capture the passing of a nearby dust devil.

It’s almost summer in Gale crater, which puts us in a period of strong surface heating that lasts from early spring through mid-summer. Stronger surface heating tends to produce stronger convection and convective vortices, which consist of fast winds whipping around low pressure cores. If those vortices are strong enough, they can raise dust from the surface and become visible as “dust devils” that we can image with our cameras. The animated GIF shows a dust devil movie we took with Navcam on Sol 2847, covering a period of about five minutes. We often have to process these images, by enhancing what’s changed between them, before dust devils clearly show up. But this dust devil was so impressive that – if you look closely! – you can just see it moving to the right, at the border between the darker and lighter slopes, even in the raw images.

I have embedded the movie below the fold. The dust devil looks like a ghostly white tower moving from the left to the right just above the darkest band of landscape cutting across the middle of the image.
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NASA’s first Orbiting Geophysical Observatory to burn up in atmosphere

11:11 am

The first of six Orbiting Geophysical Observatories, dubbed OGO-1, is set to to burn up in the atmosphere sometime in the next week.

Launched September 5, 1964, OGO-1 operated until 1969. It along with the five later OGO satellites were designed to study the Earth’s magnetic field as well as the Van Allen Belts across a solar minimum and maximum. Together they proved the magnetosphere was homogeneous, somewhat the same wherever data was obtained.

As the first such observatory, the spacecraft was also a technology test. Thus, the failure of its attitude control system, preventing about half its instruments from gathering data, was not really a failure. It laid the groundwork for all such research satellites to follow over the next half century.

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More glaciers and eroding gullies on Mars

2:51 pm

Crater with gullies and glacial fill
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows the interior south-facing rim of a small crater in the southern cratered highlands of Mars. Taken on May 30, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the image release is merely labeled “Gullied Slope”. The photo was taken as part of regular monitoring of these gullies since 2011 to see if they change from season to season. The 2011 image was captioned by planetary scientist Alfred McEwen, who wrote the following about the gullies:

These are erosional features with depositional fans. Some of the gully fans have a bluish color: these are probably quite recent deposits, less than a few tens of years old.

Since they were considered so very young, it makes great sense to look at them frequently. In making a quick comparison between the 2011 and 2020 images however I could not spot any changes, but that might be because the versions I downloaded are not at the fullest resolution.

This crater, at 39 degrees south latitude, is also worthwhile because its floor appears covered with glacial material, what scientists have dubbed concentric crater fill. As McEwen noted in his 2011 caption,

On the floor of the crater (bottom of this image) are ridges that likely formed from the flow of ice, perhaps a few million years ago.

Those glaciers, generally protected by thin layers of dust and debris, are considered inactive at this time in Martian geological history. The many ridges however hint at the many many cycles in the Martian climate, fluctuating between periods when these mid-latitude glaciers were growing while the polar ice caps were shrinking, and periods when the mid-latitude glaciers were shrinking while the polar ice caps were growing.

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