Astro Blog

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/nasa-s-new-rover-will-collect-martian-rocks-and-clues-planet-s-ancient-climate Source:  By Paul Voosen, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: NASA’s newest Mars rover, Perseverance, is going back in time to the bottom of a vanished lake. If all goes well, in February 2021 it will land in Jezero crater and pop the dust covers off its camera lenses. Towering in front of it, in all likelihood, will be a 60-meter cliff of mudstone: the edge of a fossilized river delta. These lithified martian sediments could hold answers to urgent questions about the earliest days of Earth’s chilly, parched neighbor: How did this pintsize planet, so distant from a faint young Sun, support liquid water on its surface? How much water was there, and how long did it persist? And did Mars ever spawn life?....  See also Martian Chronicler, Science Magazine 2020 June 26 article by Paul Voosen [ http://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6498/1416 ]

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/mars-mission-would-put-china-among-space-leaders Source:    By Dennis Normile, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: NASA’s Perseverance rover may have company on the Red Planet. China aims to leap to the front ranks in planetary exploration with an ambitious Mars mission, its first independent bid to reach the planet. Tianwen-1—“quest for heavenly truth”—consists of not only an orbiter, but also a lander and a rover, a trifecta no other nation has accomplished on its first Mars bid. “A successful landing would put China among elite company,” says Mason Peck, an aerospace engineer at Cornell University....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3QQQu7QLoM Source:    NASA Excerpt: YouTube video - As of June 2020, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory — SDO — has now been watching the Sun non-stop for over a full decade. From its orbit in space around the Earth, SDO has gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, amassing 20 million gigabytes of data over the past 10 years. This information has enabled countless new discoveries about the workings of our closest star and how it influences the solar system. ...While SDO has kept an unblinking eye pointed towards the Sun, there have been a few moments it missed. The dark frames in the video are caused by Earth or the Moon eclipsing SDO as they pass between the spacecraft and the Sun. A longer blackout in 2016 was caused by a temporary issue with the AIA instrument that was successfully resolved after a week. The images where the Sun is off-center were observed when SDO was calibrating its instruments....   

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/science/mars-helicopter-nasa.html URL Source:  By Kenneth Chang, The New York Times.  Excerpt: As part of its next Mars mission, NASA is sending an experimental helicopter to fly through the red planet’s thin atmosphere....  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/science/meteorites-chondrites-chondrules.html Source:  By Jonathan O’Callaghan, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Researchers propose a new model to explain the formation of most of the meteorites that make it to Earth. “Droplets of fiery rain.” That’s how Henry Clifton Sorby, a 19th-century British mineralogist, described the tiny spheres called chondrules found within meteorites. Chondrules are such dominant features of these meteorites that they are called chondrites, and they account for 86 percent of meteorites that have been found on Earth. Their origin, however, remains a mystery. ...Now some scientists think they have a new answer to this rocky enigma: The chondrites may have formed in an unusual event during a narrow window of time in the early solar system. The findings [ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103517302476 ], presented at a virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society this month by William Herbst an

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/what-our-universe-looks-x-ray-eyes Source:  By Daniel Clery, Science Magazine. Excerpt: A telescope designed to study the universe’s mysterious dark energy released its first all-sky image today (pictured), showing what we would see if we had x-ray eyes. After half a year of observing, the scope—known as eROSITA (extended Roentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array)—has already logged more than 1 million objects that shine in the x-ray spectrum, including black holes gobbling matter, compact burned-out stars like white dwarfs and neutron stars, and gas between stars so hot that it gives off an x-ray glow. The eROSITA team says this first image identifies twice as many x-ray sources as have previously been detected in 60 years of x-ray astronomy, and stretches four times farther out than the previous x-ray survey 3 decades ago. Most of the dots in the image—and eROSITA’s primary targets—are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/missing-mass-planet-formation-found-young-disks-gas-and-dust Source:   By Adam Mann, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Planets are forming around young stars far faster than scientists expected, arising in a cosmic eye blink of less than half a million years, according to a new study. ...Planets coalesce from massive disks of gas and dust that surround newborn stars. But detecting these embryonic worlds is difficult because both the star and the disk shine far brighter than any tiny planet. To find out how much material is available for planet formation, researchers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to weigh the disks around young stars between 1 million and 3 million years old. Past studies found that some lacked the mass to form even a single Jupiter-size world. The results suggested astronomers were either overlooking some hidden reservoir of material or they were looking too late in the planet-forging proc

https://eos.org/articles/sunburned-surface-reveals-asteroid-formation-and-orbital-secrets Source:   By Megan Sever, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Newly analyzed high-resolution images from the Hayabusa2 landing on the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu revealed a reddish hue to surface materials. Scientists interpret that coloration to be a result of a brief orbital excursion close to the Sun. When combining this information with previously collected data from Ryugu, scientists can now paint a clearer picture of how and when the asteroid formed, how its orbit has changed over time, and what its surface looks like.... 

https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/map-every-mars-landing-attempt.html Source:  By Emily Lakdawalla, The Planetary Society   ... has a new and improved guide to all the places we've landed—or crashed—on Mars...