Astro Blog

Source:   Lee Billings, Scientific American Excerpt: Follow the pioneering spacecraft’s final descent to the bizarre surface of the distant space traveler.... Shortly before 5 A.M. Eastern time on Friday, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft [did] gently fire its thrusters for a few minutes and begin a 14-hour descent to Comet 67P, a mountain-size, snowy dust ball drifting through the darkness that reigns more than half a billion kilometers from the sun. Starved of solar power, Rosetta’s mission is coming to an end after more than a decade of operations, concluding with a crash into the comet it has shadowed through deep space for two years.  [Includes links to other articles about Rosetta's successes.] See also Silence, hugs, and applause as Rosetta’s 12-year mission ends with landing on comet , by Daniel Clery, and  New York Times article  Rosetta Mission Ends With Spacecraft’s Dive Into Comet http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/watch-the-action-as-

Source:   NASA RELEASE 16-096 Excerpt: Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what may be water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. ...The observation increases the possibility that missions to Europa may be able to sample Europa’s ocean without having to drill through miles of ice. “Europa’s ocean is considered to be one of the most promising places that could potentially harbor life in the solar system,” said Geoff Yoder, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “These plumes, if they do indeed exist, may provide another way to sample Europa’s subsurface.” The plumes are estimated to rise about 125 miles (200 kilometers) before, presumably, raining material back down onto Europa's surface. Europa has a huge global ocean containing twice as much water as Earth’s oceans, but it is protected by a layer of extremely cold and hard ice of unknown thickness. ...If confirmed, Europa wo

Source:  By Shannon Hall, Earth & Space News (EOS; AGU) Excerpt: ...A new hypothesis might reconcile two opposing theories that have tried to explain Mars's mysterious history... suggests that lush periods just long enough to form water-created surface features, such as canyons, punctuated much longer, planet-wide frozen spells. ...In the 1970s, images of Mars taken by the Mariner and Viking spacecraft revealed enormous channels and valley networks—both of which are reminiscent of catastrophic floods and river drainage systems on Earth. The fluvial features were the first sign that 3.8 billion years ago, the planet was once a lush oasis, awash with oceans, lakes, and rivers. ...a 40-year-long debate that has divided planetary astronomers into two camps: those that think Mars must have once contained a thicker and warmer atmosphere—which made the Red Planet hospitable to liquid water and potentially the evolution of life—and those that think Mars was mostly cold save for sho

Source:   By Jonathan Corum, The New York Times Excerpt: NASA’s mission to grab pieces of an asteroid and bring them back to Earth took off on Thursday night. “You’ll be glad to know we got everything just exactly perfect,” Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, said at a news conference after the launch of the Osiris-Rex spacecraft. The craft began its journey on top of an Atlas 5 rocket that lifted off into the summer sky above Cape Canaveral, Fla. Seven years from now, the craft is to return and parachute a capsule with the asteroid bits into a Utah desert, giving scientists a window to some of the material that made up the early solar system, including some of the molecules that gave rise to life on Earth.... http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/08/science/space/nasa-osiris-rex-launch.html

Source:   By Jonathan Corum, The New York Times Excerpt: NASA’s mission to grab pieces of an asteroid and bring them back to Earth took off on Thursday night. “You’ll be glad to know we got everything just exactly perfect,” Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator, said at a news conference after the launch of the Osiris-Rex spacecraft. The craft began its journey on top of an Atlas 5 rocket that lifted off into the summer sky above Cape Canaveral, Fla. Seven years from now, the craft is to return and parachute a capsule with the asteroid bits into a Utah desert, giving scientists a window to some of the material that made up the early solar system, including some of the molecules that gave rise to life on Earth.... http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/08/science/space/nasa-osiris-rex-launch.html

Source:   By Nicholas St. Fleur, The New York Times Excerpt: the very first close-up of Jupiter’s big blue north pole. NASA released several images taken by its Juno spacecraft during its initial orbit around the largest planet in our solar system. For NASA’s astronomers, the images reveal a hardly recognizable picture of the gas giant known for its Great Red Spot. “It’s bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms,” Scott Bolton, the principal investigator for Juno, said in a statement. “It looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before.”... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/science/juno-nasa-jupiter.html