Astro Blog

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

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

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

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