Astro Blog

https://eos.org/agu-news/oceans-of-opportunity By Caryl-Sue Micalizio , Eos/AGU.   Our solar system’s ocean worlds—planets and moons covered in ice-crusted oceans—are weird, wonderful, and ripe for exploration. [Here are a series of articles] Uranus: A Time to Boldly Go by Kimberly Cartier; Marine Science Goes to Space by Damond Benningfield on how ocean worlds are redefining what constitutes a habitable zone and how missions in development, like JUICE and Europa Clipper, are relying on terrestrial deep-sea scientific advances to look for oceanic activity that’s out of this world. ...older missions are still contributing to the discourse, as archival  Cassini data helped scientists identify phosphorus —the rarest element necessary for life as we know it—on Enceladus. ...Erik Klemetti explores Cryovolcanism’s Song of Ice and Fire .... 

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-delivers-bounty-asteroid-samples-earth By PAUL VOOSEN , Science.  Excerpt: ...today, after detaching from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, a capsule carrying asteroid samples descended gently by parachute before touching down in the Utah desert. The cupful of pebbles and grit it delivered—the culmination of 7 years of effort and $1 billion of expense—is only the third sample of an asteroid ever returned to Earth, and it’s the largest haul of extraterrestrial material NASA has collected since the Apollo Moon missions. ...In 2020, Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft returned some 5 grams of material from Ryugu, another carbon-rich, near-Earth asteroid, which was thought to be relatively dry. Instead, it appears to have been fully altered by water. “We were all terribly wrong about Ryugu,” says Edward Young, a cosmochemist at the University of California, Los Angeles. ...If they are wrong about Bennu, it will be the opposite mistake. Remote observations

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg4155 By SAMANTHA K. TRUMBO  AND  MICHAEL E. BROWN , Science.  Excerpt: [Editor's summary:] Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter, has a subsurface ocean beneath a crust of water ice. Solid carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) has previously been observed on its surface, but the source was unknown. Two teams analyzed infrared spectroscopy of Europa from the James Webb Space Telescope to investigate the CO 2  source. Trumbo and Brown found that the CO 2  is concentrated in a region with geology that indicates transport of material to the surface from within the moon, and they discuss the implications for the composition of Europa’s internal ocean. Villanueva  et al . also identified an internal origin of the CO 2  and measured its  12 C/ 13 C isotope ratio. They searched for plumes of volatile material breaching the surface but found a lower activity than earlier observations. Together, these studies demonstrate that there is a source of carbon within Europa

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/science/jupiter-comet-flashes.html By Katrina Miller , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Ko Arimatsu, an astronomer at Kyoto University in Japan, received an intriguing email... An amateur astronomer in his country had spotted a bright flash in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Dr. Arimatsu, who runs an  observation program  to study the outer solar system using backyard astronomy equipment, put out a call for more information. Six more reports of the Aug. 28 flash — which, according to Dr. Arimatsu, is one of the brightest ever recorded on the giant gas planet — came in from Japanese skywatchers. Flashes like these are caused by asteroids or comets from the edges of our solar system that impact Jupiter’s atmosphere. “Direct observation of these bodies is virtually impossible, ...,” Dr. Arimatsu wrote.... But Jupiter’s gravity lures in these objects, which eventually slam into the planet, “making it a unique and invaluable tool for studying them directly,” he said. .

https://www.science.org/content/article/peak-solar-activity-arriving-sooner-expected-reaching-levels-not-seen-20-years By ZACK SAVITSKY , Science.  Excerpt: In 2019, as the Sun approached a minimum in its 11-year cycle of magnetic activity, a dozen scientists assembled for a traditional exercise: forecasting the next peak. Now, a few years into the Sun’s resurgence, it’s becoming clear that the official prediction from the panel, convened by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the International Space Environment Service (ISES), missed the mark. The Sun’s activity has already surpassed the forecast, reaching levels not seen in 20 years, and solar maximum may arrive within the next year, months ahead of its presumed schedule....