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First Images of the Sun’s Flares Released From a New Space Telescope

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By Katrina Miller , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Before  the northern lights  fill the night sky on Earth with their eerie neon glow, a blast of electrified gas flares up from the sun’s surface. And scientists are now getting a powerful new view of how those ejections move through the corona, the sun’s tempestuous outer atmosphere. On Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  unveiled the first imagery  from its newest telescope in space. Meteorologists will use pictures from the device to help them better forecast space weather, including when you can expect to see auroras. The new instrument is called the Compact Coronagraph, or CCOR-1. It launched in June aboard GOES-19, the newest of NOAA’s fleet of weather satellites. The coronagraph can continuously monitor the sun, and it will send data to scientists on the ground every 15 minutes. ...Earlier this month, NASA and NOAA  announced  that the sun had reached a peak in activity, which fluctuates in an 11-year cyc
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An Ancient Asteroid Impact Both Harmed and Helped Life

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By Douglas Fox , SciAm.  Excerpt: Sixty-six million years ago a 10-kilometer-wide space rock fell out of the sky over what is now the Yucatán Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico. ...Yet the event’s infamous impactor was nothing compared with the asteroid that struck Earth 3.26 billion years ago, amid what scientists call the Archean eon of our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. The Archean space rock in that impact, dubbed “S2,” was 50 to 200 times larger—big enough to blast at least 10,000 cubic kilometers of vaporized rock into the skies that then recondensed into molten droplets and rained back to Earth. Unsurprisingly, those circumstances would have been “really disastrous for early life,” says Nadja Drabon, a geologist at Harvard University. But her latest research suggests that—much like the more celebrated dino-killing space-rock impact—this vastly greater and more ancient collision also had an upside, giving Earth’s early biosphere a powerful boost. ...her scrutiny of rock layers i
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Clipper Sets Sail for an Ocean Millions of Miles Away

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By Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Europa Clipper launched at 12:06 pm EDT on 14 October from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Clipper successfully deployed its solar panels and communicated with mission control once in space. ...NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft...will head to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and determine whether it’s a hospitable place for life. ...There will be 49 flybys of Europa to study the moon from pole to pole ...The craft is set to  arrive  at Jupiter in April 2030. ...Europa is one of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons. Past missions to the Jovian system discovered that Europa, along with fellow icy moons Ganymede and Callisto, have vast liquid water oceans sloshing around beneath icy shells. “ Ocean worlds  have been considered potentially habitable environments for a while,” said  Monica Vidaurri , a doctoral student in planetary modeling at Stanford University in California. “This is the first time we’re really dedicating a spacecraft to [explorin
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Fifteen Years Later, Scientists Locate a Lunar Impact Site

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By Nathaniel Scharping , agu.  Excerpt: In 2009, NASA intentionally crashed a spacecraft into the Moon ...The  Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite  (LCROSS) was designed to search for frozen lunar water and other volatiles in the lunar regolith by knocking them off the Moon. ...The LCROSS impact kicked up a cloud of regolith containing plenty of water (5.6% by mass), ...But it did so in a permanently shadowed area of the Moon, leaving scientists unable to directly observe the crater after its formation. ... Fassett et al.  ...researchers ...see the LCROSS crater directly.... The LCROSS impact crater is about 22 meters across, the researchers report, slightly smaller than the LCROSS team  originally estimated . ...the volatiles themselves are young and came from outside the Moon—perhaps from comets, asteroids, or the solar wind—rather than from volcanic eruptions early in the Moon’s history. ...These data could be complemented by future missions, such as the Volatiles Investi
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Scientists successfully ‘nuke asteroid’ — in a lab mock-up

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By Jonathan O'Callaghan , Nature.  Excerpt: Experiment shows that, in a worst-case scenario, humanity could use a nuclear explosion to save the planet from a deadly impact. A blast of X-rays from a nuclear explosion should be enough to save Earth from an incoming asteroid, according to the results of a first-of-its-kind experiment. The findings, published 1  on 23 September in  Nature Physics [ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-024-02633-7 ], “showed some really amazing direct experimental evidence for how effective this technique can be”, says Dawn Graninger, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “It’s very impressive work.”  Full article at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03128-4 . 
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Ice skater

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By Robin George Andrews , Science.  Excerpt: ...Jupiter’s moon Europa ...NASA hopes will greet its Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will begin its journey to the Jupiter system next month. ...Something extraordinary is concealed beneath the ice: a liquid saltwater ocean, potentially as clement and welcoming to life as Earth’s. ...Equipped with a battery of nine science instruments, Clipper will swoop past Europa in a series of nearly 50 ice-skimming flybys, remotely probing the ocean in hopes of finding a chemistry that could support life. ...“We’re not a life search mission. We’re a habitability mission,” says Robert Pappalardo, Clipper’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission. But even Pappalardo, a cautious scientist who is constitutionally averse to hyperbole, says finding a hint of life is “not out of the question.”...  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-spacecraft-probe-possibility-life-europa-s-salty-ocean .
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Our Island Universe: Two Small Pieces of Glass Ushered in a Revolution in Science

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https://www.mercury-messenger.org/history-culture/galileo-telescope By Shanil Virani, Astronomical Society of the Pacific - Mercury online Excerpt: Between January 7 and January 13, 1610, a series of observations was made that would forever change how we would view the cosmos. The observer detailed in this log book a discovery made using a relatively new invention at that time. The observer had discovered four small, point sources of light very close to the (giant) planet Jupiter. On January 10, one of them disappeared for a short period. The observer attributed the disappearance of the object as being hidden behind Jupiter. Given his extensive observations, he was now forced to conclude that these four points of light were orbiting Jupiter and not Earth. The observer, Galileo Galilei, and his two small pieces of glass would usher in a scientific revolution that reverberates to this day. Until this discovery, and for some 1,500 years prior to Galileo, our ancestors accepted the model
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