Tag: science

A barred spiral galaxy with distorted galaxy

10:58 am

A barred spiral galaxy
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, reduced and cropped to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and shows a barred spiral galaxy about 214 million light years away.

Scientists used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to image NGC 6956 to study its Cepheid variable stars, which are stars that brighten and dim at regular periods. Since the period of Cepheid variable stars is a function of their brightness, scientists can measure how bright these stars appear from Earth and compare it to their actual brightness to calculate their distance. As a result, these stars are extremely useful in determining the distance of cosmic objects, which is one of the hardest pieces of information to measure for extragalactic objects.

The press release of course focuses on this magnificent barred spiral. I however want to draw your attention to the smaller galaxy in the white box.

background distorted galaxy

Since we do not know the distance to this distorted galaxy, we do not know if its distortion is caused by the barred spiral. It could be the bigger galaxy’s gravity is pulling material away.

More likely, based on the shape of this smaller galaxy, is that it is many light years farther away — which is why it looks so much smaller — and has been distorted because it is actually a collusion of two galaxies. The two bright nuclei with the red dust between strongly suggests such a collusion.

I highlight this background galaxy because it illustrates the importance when looking at any Hubble image to look at everything. To coin a phrase, there is gold in them thar hills, if you make the effort to look.

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NASA loses contact with one hurricane satellite in constellation of eight

10:36 am

NASA has lost contact with one of the eight CYGNSS satellites it uses to track and measure hurricanes worldwide.

The remaining seven satellites that comprise the CYGNSS constellation remain operational and have continued collecting scientific data since FM06 went incommunicado last month, according to NASA’s primary statement about the incident. The constellation’s science work can continue without FM06, but if the team can’t reconnect with the spacecraft, the loss will reduce the spatial coverage of CYGNSS, which until November provided nearly gap-free coverage of Earth.

At the moment engineers do not know why contact was lost, or if they can regain it.

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Astronomers determine that two super-Earths are not as rocky as previously believed

10:32 am

Using observations from both the Hubble Space Telescope and the now retired Spitzer infrared space telescope, astronomers now think that two super-Earth-sized explanets are not as rocky as previously believed, and are in fact liquid worlds with as much as half their make-up comprised of water. From the press release:

Water wasn’t directly detected at Kepler-138 c and d, but by comparing the sizes and masses of the planets to models, astronomers conclude that a significant fraction of their volume – up to half of it – should be made of materials that are lighter than rock but heavier than hydrogen or helium (which constitute the bulk of gas giant planets like Jupiter). The most common of these candidate materials is water.

“We previously thought that planets that were a bit larger than Earth were big balls of metal and rock, like scaled-up versions of Earth, and that’s why we called them super-Earths,” explained Björn Benneke, study co-author and professor of astrophysics at the University of Montreal. “However, we have now shown that these two planets, Kepler-138 c and d, are quite different in nature and that a big fraction of their entire volume is likely composed of water. It is the best evidence yet for water worlds, a type of planet that was theorized by astronomers to exist for a long time.”

With volumes more than three times that of Earth and masses twice as big, planets c and d have much lower densities than Earth. This is surprising because most of the planets just slightly bigger than Earth that have been studied in detail so far all seemed to be rocky worlds like ours. The closest comparison, say researchers, would be some of the icy moons in the outer solar system that are also largely composed of water surrounding a rocky core.

This data simply underlines a basic point: The information we have of all exoplanets is sparse, practically nil. Any conclusions about their make-up is an educated guess, at best. Even now the conclusion that these are water worlds should be treated with great skepticism.

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Ingenuity completes 36th flight; preps for its 37th

10:08 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Ingenuity on December 10, 2022 successfully completed 36th flight, flying about 180 feet to the northwest and then returning the same distance to land at its take-off point.

This was the third flight in a row to land at this point, and was also the third flight since the Mars helicopter’s software was upgraded to allow it to fly higher and over rougher terrain.

The green dot on the map to the right shows Ingenuity’s present position. The blue dot shows where Perseverance presently sits. The rover has been moving eastward, away from the cliff face to the west where it had gathered more core samples, including the first to contain surface regolith (that is, the dirt of Mars).

Engineers are already planning Ingenuity’s 37th flight, which is scheduled for tomorrow and will reposition the helicopter to a new landing spot.

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More results from DART impact of Dimorphos

9:44 am

Didymos and Dimorphos as seen from Earth
Click for movie.

At a science conference this week scientists provided an update on the changes that occurred to the asteroid Dimorphos after it was impacted by the DART spacecraft in September, shortening its orbit around the larger asteroid Didymos by 33 minutes.

The image to the right is a screen capture from a short movie made from 30 images taken by the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico, and part of a new image release of the asteroid pair.

It shows the motion of the Didymos system across the sky over the course of roughly 80 minutes, and features a long, linear tail stretching to the right from the asteroid system to the edge of the frame. The animation is roughly 32,000 kilometers across the field of view at the distance of Didymos.

According to the scientists, the impact displaced more than two million pounds of material from Dimorphos.

Observations before and after impact, reveal that Dimorphos and its larger parent asteroid, Didymos, have similar makeup and are composed of the same material – material that has been linked to ordinary chondrites, similar to the most common type of meteorite to impact the Earth. These measurements also took advantage of the ejecta from Dimorphos, which dominated the reflected light from the system in the days after impact. Even now, telescope images of the Didymos system show how solar radiation pressure has stretched the ejecta stream into a comet-like tail tens of thousands of miles in length.

Putting those pieces together, and assuming that Didymos and Dimorphos have the same densities, the team calculates that the momentum transferred when DART hit Dimorphos was roughly 3.6 times greater than if the asteroid had simply absorbed the spacecraft and produced no ejecta at all – indicating the ejecta contributed to moving the asteroid more than the spacecraft did.

This information is teaching us a great deal about these two particular asteroids, which could be used if for some reason their totally safe orbit got changed and they were going to impact Earth. However, NASA’s repeated effort to make believe this info would be useful for deflecting other asteroids is somewhat absurd. It is helpful, but each asteroid is unique. The data from DART is mostly helping astronomers get a better understanding of the geology of these specific asteroids, which will widen their understanding of asteroids in general. Planetary defense is really a very minor aspect of this work.

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SpaceX launches oceanography satellite

8:57 am

SpaceX early this morning used its Falcon 9 rocket to successfully launch an oceanography satellite, dubbed SWOT, for both NASA and France’s space agency CNES.

The satellite it designed to measure the height of water on 90% of the Earth’s surface.

The first stage was making its sixth flight, and successfully returned to Earth, touching down on its landing pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

59 China
57 SpaceX
21 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 81 to 59 in the national rankings, but trails the entire world combined 91 to 81.

These numbers however should change again later today, as SpaceX has another launch scheduled.

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Perseverance records sound of dust devil

9:23 am

For the first time scientists have used the microphone on the Mars rover Perseverance to successfully record the sound of dust devil as it flowed overhead.

I have embedded a video of the recording below. The research paper can be read here.

Dust devils on Mars, while much less dense in its very thin atmosphere, are generally much larger than found on Earth.

The dust devil recently detected by Perseverance was 25 meters wide and 118 meters tall (82 feet by 387 feet), putting it squarely in the average zone in terms of size for Martian dust storms. But they can grow much bigger, too, as dust on Mars can be whipped up in huge global dust storms.

The data also picked up the sound of dust particles hitting the microphone, which will allow the scientists to measure the density of the devil.
» Read more

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Curiosity looks down Gediz Vallis

12:03 pm

Curiosity's looks down Gediz Vallis
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

The panorama above was taken by Curiosity’s right navigation camera today, December 14, 2022, looking down into Gediz Vallis, the giant slot canyon that the rover will use as its route up Mount Sharp.

The red dotted lines above and on the overview map to the right indicate approximately the planned route for Curiosity. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama above.

At present the scientists are attempting to drill into the marker band on which Curiosity sits. This marker layer is visible at many places at about the same elevation on all sides of Mount Sharp’s flanks. The white arrows indicate other examples of it in this overview map. It generally appears smooth and flat, which suggests it is made of a harder substance more resistant to erosion. That hardness was confirmed when Curiosity’s first drill attempt into it last week failed. The scientists are now trying again.

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Juno snaps heat image of Jupiter’s volcano-covered moon Io

10:24 am

Io's volcanoes
Click for full image.

The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 5, 2022 by one of the infrared instruments on the Jupiter orbiter Juno of the moon Io, known for having many many active volcanoes.

This infrared image was derived from data collected by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard Juno. In this image, the brighter the color the higher the temperature recorded by JIRAM.

Each bright spot is an active volcano, some of which have been in the past photographed during eruptions. In fact, the first such photo was taken in March 1979 by the Voyager-1 spacecraft just after its fly-by of Jupiter, and was the first time any active volcano outside of Earth had ever been identified.

What made that discovery more profound was that only a week earlier scientists had published a paper predicting active volcanoes on Io, caused by the strong tidal forces from Jupiter’s gravity.

Since then planetary scientists have been studying Io’s volcanism repeatedly, tracking the evolution of specific volcanoes over time as they erupt and then become dormant.

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Hakuto-R sends first image back to Earth

9:04 am

Hakuto-R's first released images
Go here and here for original images.

The private Hakuto-R lunar lander, owned and built by the Japanese-based company Ispace, is operating as planned and has sent back its first images from two different cameras.

The larger image to the right was taken by a camera on one of Canada’s payloads. It shows the Earth two minutes after launch, with the rocket’s upper stage acting as a frame. The inset, reduced to insert here, was taken 19 hours after launch by the lander’s main camera, and shows the Earth at night. Both images demonstrate that the spacecraft is stable and functioning perfectly.

The goals of the mission remain mostly engineering. Its focus is demonstrating first that Ispace’s lander can do what it says so that future customers will be confident buying payload space. Similarly, the payloads, such as the UAE’s Rashid rover, are doing the same thing.

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The featureless volcanic ash plains of Mars

2:04 pm

The featureless volcanic ash plains of Mars

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 10, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what appears to be a relatively featureless plain with a surface resembling stucco.

At -9 degrees south latitude, this is in the Martian dry equatorial regions. No ice or glaciers here. However, the consistent orientation of the knobs and hills suggest dunes and sand blown by prevailing winds, and that guess holds some truth. This location is deep within the Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash deposit on Mars, covering an area about as big as India, and believed to be the source of most of the red planet’s dust.

We are thus looking at thick layer of ash, its surface shaped over eons by the winds of Mars’ thin atmosphere.
» Read more

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NASA approves $1.2 billion asteroid-hunting space telescope

8:51 am

NASA has given the go-ahead to build NEO-Surveyor for $1.2 billion, more than twice the cost of its original proposal, to launch by 2028 and then look for potentially dangerous asteroids.

Notably, NEO Surveyor was earlier estimated to cost between $500 million and $600 million, or around half of the new commitment. The NASA statement said that the cost and schedule commitments outlined align the mission with “program management best practices that account for potential technical risks and budgetary uncertainty beyond the development project’s control.” Earlier this year, the project’s launch was delayed two years, from 2026, due to agency budget concerns.

The mission is designed to discover 90% of potentially Earth-threatening asteroids and comets 460 feet (140 meters) or larger that come within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of Earth’s orbit. The spacecraft will carry out the survey while from Earth-sun Lagrange Point 1, a gravitationally stable spot in space about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) inside the Earth’s orbit around the sun.

A prediction: It will cost more, and not launch on time. NASA’s decision to double the budget and delay the launch two years suggests it did not trust the JPL cost and time estimates. Based on most NASA-centered projects, however, it is likely the new numbers will still be insufficient.

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InSight still going, but barely

10:47 pm

InSight's daily power levels as of December 12, 2022

The InSight science team issued another update today, outlining the continuing low power levels produced by the Mars lander, barely enough to keep its seismometer, and nothing else, running.

As of Dec. 12, 2022, InSight is generating an average of ~285 watt-hours of energy per Martian day, or sol. The tau, or level of dust cover in the atmosphere, was estimated at .96 (typical tau levels outside of dust season range from 0.6-0.7).

I have added these numbers to the graph at right in order to show their context over time. Since the October dust storm the levels have held steady, even as the dust in the atmosphere has cleared somewhat.

Nonetheless, InSight’s future continues to be day-to-day. Should it fail to respond to two consecutive scheduled communications sessions, the team will declare it dead, and make no effort at recovery. Though they have been expecting this to happen since the end of October, the lander continues to hang on.

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NOAA once again over-predicts the hurricane count

12:22 pm

As it has done repeatedly in recent years, NOAA in 2022 once again over-predicted the hurricane count for this past hurricane season, predicting an above-normal season when it actually ended up to be well below-normal.

In late May and again in early August 2022 NOAA predicted that the year 2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season (between June to end November calendar period) would be an “above normal” season with 14-21 named storms, between 6-10 hurricanes including 3-6 major hurricanes (Category 3,4 and 5) as shown in NOAA’s diagram below.

Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science/Tropical Meteorology Project has compiled the year 2022 tropical storm data, establishing that, compared to its 30 year North Atlantic data records covering the Climatological period 1991-2020, the year 2022 hurricane season was below average in Named Storms, Named Storm Days, Hurricane Days, Major Hurricanes, Major Hurricane Days and Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE).

The many graphs at the link also demonstrate that the predictions that there will be an increase in extreme weather events due to increased use of fossil fuels is also proving false.

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A wall of smoke, as seen by Hubble

9:57 am

A wall of smoke, as seen by Hubble
Click for full image.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have produced a magnificent image of an interstellar cloud, cropped and reduced to post here. From the caption:

A portion of the open cluster NGC 6530 appears as a roiling wall of smoke studded with stars in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 6530 is a collection of several thousand stars lying around 4350 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The cluster is set within the larger Lagoon Nebula, a gigantic interstellar cloud of gas and dust. It is the nebula that gives this image its distinctly smokey appearance; clouds of interstellar gas and dust stretch from one side of this image to the other.

Astronomers investigated NGC 6530 using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. They scoured the region in the hope of finding new examples of proplyds, a particular class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding newborn stars. The vast majority of proplyds have been found in only one region, the nearby Orion Nebula. This makes understanding their origin and lifetimes in other astronomical environments challenging.

The first proplyds were seen in the very first images taken by Hubble after it was fixed and could finally take sharp pictures. That so few have been seen since is thus somewhat surprising.

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Remembering Apollo 17, fifty years after the last manned mission to the Moon

9:37 am

LRO oblique view of Apollo 17 landing site
Click for full image.

Link here.

The article comes from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team, and includes a number of LRO photos of the landing site, including the oblique annotated image to the right, reduced to post here. As the article notes:

The Apollo 17 crew was the last of an era in human space exploration and the last to set foot on the Moon. Fifty years later, the landing sites, hardware, and footsteps remain delicately preserved on the lunar surface. Join the LRO team as we commemorate their inspiring achievements with additional images, research, maps, interactive sites, and a dedicated video. LRO continues to image the Apollo sites whenever possible, under multiple lighting conditions, and combine these images into interactive sites, like the Apollo 17 Temporal Traverse. The Lunar QuickMap 3D tool can be used to preview the Apollo landing sites and search for LROC images of the areas. For downloadable maps of the Taurus-Littrow Valley, visit the Map Sheets section on our downloads page here. Finally, the Apollo 17 fiftieth anniversary video below presents highlights of the mission with landing site views reconstructed using LROC images and topography.

I have embedded that video below. It does a marvelous job summarizing this mission, which in many ways remains the most daring human exploration mission since Columbus dared cross an ocean in a tiny ship only slightly larger than many lifeboats.
» Read more

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Update on the ten cubesats launched by SLS

9:16 am

Link here.

At this moment six of the ten cubesats either accomplished their mission successfully or are still operating, while four cubesats failed entirely.

Of those still working, two will go into lunar orbit and try to find evidence of both hydrogen and ice on the Moon. A third is testing “solid iodine” thrusters, while a fourth will observe how yeast samples react to a long exposure in deep space. A fifth cubesat is a joint NASA-JAXA mission, and is testing how to fly a smallsat in the low gravity of a Lagrangian point.

Finally, an Italian cubesat was used to successfully take images of the Moon and Orion, and has completed its mission.

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SpaceX successfully launches Ispace’s Hakuto-R private mission to Moon

12:51 am

Lunar map showing Hakuto-R's landing spot
Hakuto-R’s planned landing site is in Atlas Crater.

Using its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully launched Ispace’s Hakuto-R lunar lander, the first private mission attempting to softly land on the Moon.

The Falcon 9 first stage completed its fifth flight, landing successfully at Cape Canaveral.

Hakuto-R, which is actually the first of two missions, carries seven payloads, including two small rovers, Rashid, which is the United Arab Emirates first lunar mission, and a smaller rover built by Ispace. Both will operate for about a week, one lunar day. Hakuto-R will land on the Moon in April, 2023.

A second payload is a cubesat from JPL, called Lunar Flashlight. It will go into lunar orbit, testing new fuel technologies while also attempting to identify water in the permanently shadowed craters at the lunar south pole.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

57 China
56 SpaceX
21 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 80 to 57 in the national rankings, but trails the entire world combined 87 to 80.

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Ancient lava flows down the flanks of the solar system’s largest volcano

11:52 am

Lava flows on Olympus Mons
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 2, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what appears to be very old and eroded lava on the northeast flanks of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars as well as the entire solar system. About 600 miles across, from the edge to its peak, Olympus rises about 54,000 feet, with an actual height relative to Mars’ “sea level” of just under 70,000 feet, more than twice as high as Mount Everest on Earth.

The white arrow show the downward grade. Several different flows can be seen throughout the picture, some confined to a central channel with smooth aprons of overflows on either side. Others are more broken and less coherent, and suggest that either the flows were inherently different, or are much older and have deteriorated with time.
» Read more

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Astronomers confirm Webb galaxies from the early universe

9:40 am

Astronomers using Webb have now confirmed with spectroscopy the age of at least four galaxies from the very very early universe, existing only a short time after the theorized Big Bang.

Four of the galaxies studied are particularly special, as they were revealed to be at an unprecedentedly early epoch. The results provided spectroscopic confirmation that these four galaxies lie at redshifts above 10, including two at redshift 13. This corresponds to a time when the universe was approximately 330 million years old, setting a new frontier in the search for far-flung galaxies. These galaxies are extremely faint because of their great distance from us.

The scientists had aimed Webb at Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field, doing a long infrared exposure lasting 28 hours over three days in order to gather the faintest infrared radiation (that Hubble could not see) and thus the most distant galaxies. The spectrum of individuals stars was then measured, which indicating their redshift and their estimated age.

The astronomers will next aim Webb at the more famous Hubble Deep Field, the first such long exposure that optical telescope took back in the late 1990s.

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