Astro Blog

By Zexian Cui et al, Science.  Summary: Between 1969 and 1976, the Apollo and Luna missions collected samples from the ...near side of the Moon—the one that always faces Earth. Observations from lunar orbit have shown that the far side has very different geology from the near side, for unknown reasons. ...In June 2024, the Chang’e-6 spacecraft landed within an impact basin on the far side of the Moon, collected samples, then brought them back to Earth. In a new Science paper , researchers present early results from analyses of a Chang’e-6 sample, which contains volcanic basalt...the volcanic eruption occurred 2.8 billion years ago....  Paper at https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt1093 . 

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 Dennis Normile , Science.  Excerpt: The BepiColombo mission is now scheduled to arrive at the tiny and little-studied planet in November 2026, 11 months behind schedule. The European Space Agency (ESA), which developed the $1.8 billion BepiColombo in cooperation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), said in a 2 September statement that the  mission's scientific objectives will not be affected  by the delay. Meanwhile, the revised trajectory has the craft passing 165 kilometers from Mercury's surface on 4 September during a gravity assist flyby. The encounter, 35 kilometers closer than originally planned, provides an opportunity to test instruments and study the interaction between the solar wind and the planet's magnetic field. Scientists are planning to make the most of the flyby, starting up 10 of the mission's 16 instruments. ...Launched in October 2018,  BepiColombo is carrying two probes , ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter, with 11 instruments,

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/04/science/moon-landing-sideways-gravity.html By Kenneth Chang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: When the robotic lander  Odysseus last month became the first American-built spacecraft to touch down on the moon  in more than 50 years, it toppled over at an angle. ...Just a month earlier, another spacecraft, the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, sent by the Japanese space agency, had also tipped during landing,  ending up on its head . ...people pointed to the height of the Odysseus lander — 14 feet from the bottom of the landing feet to the solar arrays at the top — as a contributing factor for its off-kilter touchdown. ...Philip Metzger, a former NASA engineer who is now a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida, explained  the math and the physics  of why it is more difficult to remain standing on the moon. ...“The side motion that can tip a lander of that size is only a few meters per second in lunar gravity.” ...Odysseus wa

https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2024/01/small-solar-sails-could-be-the-next-giant-leap-for-interplanetary-space-exploration By Marni Ellery, Berkeley Engineering.  Interview excerpt: ...a team of Berkeley researchers [...proposed] to build a fleet of low-cost, autonomous spacecraft, each weighing only 10 grams and propelled by nothing more than the pressure of solar radiation. These miniaturized solar sails could potentially visit thousands of near-Earth asteroids and comets, capturing high-resolution images and collecting samples. ...They describe their work, the Berkeley Low-cost Interplanetary Solar Sail (BLISS) project, in a  study published  in the journal Acta Astronautica. The BLISS project brings together researchers from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, as well as the  Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center  and the  Space Sciences Laboratory . Their work builds on other small spacecraft projects, i

https://eos.org/articles/mapping-the-moon-to-shield-astronauts-from-radiation By Sierra Bouchér , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In October 1989, the Sun spit a blast of high-energy particles into the solar system. Earth’s protective magnetic field kept us safe, but the Moon received an intense dose: More than 8 times the radiation received by plant workers during the Chernobyl nuclear disaster scorched the barren lunar surface. As NASA’s Artemis III mission prepares to return explorers to the Moon in 2025, scientists are working to protect them from this kind of unpredictable outburst from the Sun and other radiation from deep space. To do this, they’re turning to the Moon’s natural barriers. By mapping the topography of the lunar surface, researchers have calculated the shielding potential of each mountain range, crater wall, and shadowed slope near the south pole—Artemis III’s target. Their work will guide decisionmaking for the landing location of this mission and beyond.... 

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03271-4 By Alexandra Witze , Nature.  Excerpt: A meteorite that slammed into Mars in September 2021 has rewritten what scientists know about the planet’s interior. By analysing the seismic energy that vibrated through the planet after the impact, researchers have discovered a layer of molten rock that envelops Mars’s liquid-metal core. The finding, reported today in two papers in  Nature 1 , 2 , means that the Martian core is smaller than previously thought. It also resolves some lingering questions about how the red planet formed and evolved over billions of years. The discovery comes from NASA’s InSight mission,  which landed a craft with a seismometer on Mars’s surface . Between 2018 and 2022, that instrument  detected hundreds of ‘marsquakes’ shaking the planet . Seismic waves produced by quakes or impacts can slow down or speed up depending on what types of material they are travelling through, so seismologists can measure the waves’ pass

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/realestate/nasa-homes-moon-3-d-printing.html By Debra Kamin , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...NASA is going to build houses on the moon — ones that can be used not just by astronauts but ordinary civilians as well. They believe that by 2040, Americans will have their first subdivision in space. Living on Mars isn’t far behind. Some in the scientific community say NASA’s timeline is overly ambitious, particularly before a proven success with a new lunar landing. But seven NASA scientists interviewed for this article all said that a 2040 goal for lunar structures is attainable if the agency can continue to hit their benchmarks. The U.S. space agency will blast a 3-D printer up to the moon and then build structures, layer by additive layer, out of a specialized lunar concrete created from the rock chips, mineral fragments and dust that sits on the top layer of the moon’s cratered surface and billows in poisonous clouds whenever disturbed — a moonshot of

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/content/article/ancient-mud-cracks-mars-point-conditions-favorable-life By Phil Jacobs, Science.  Excerpt: ...the discovery of distinctive mud cracks on the planet’s surface suggest ancient Mars cycled through sustained wet and dry seasons for millions of years. Not only would the climate have been habitable, scientists say, but the cycling might have also given the basic chemistry of life a boost. The discovery, reported today in Nature, is  compelling evidence for an Earth-like climate on early Mars .... the Curiosity rover has discovered patterns of hexagon-shaped cracks in ancient rocks that add to the evidence for a sustained warm climate. They resemble patterns found on Earth in places like Death Valley, where they only form after years of wet-dry cycling.... 

https://eos.org/articles/saturns-shiny-rings-may-be-pretty-young By  Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: ...Data from NASA’s Cassini mission showed how fast dust has been pelting the Saturnian system, revealing that for the rings to have remained as shiny and dust-free as they are, they can be only as much as 400 million years old, much younger than the planet itself. ...The Sun and its planets formed around 4.5 billion years ago, and many of the planets’ moons, including ours, followed not long after. Astronomers initially thought that  Saturn’s rings  formed during that early dynamical period, when large collisions were common. ...The rings’ orbits and compositions support the idea they are old. ...Measurements of the rainfall rate and the total mass of the rings from NASA’s  Cassini spacecraft , which orbited Saturn for 13 years, suggested that the rings must be far younger than the planet; otherwise, they would have disappeared already. Cassini also revealed that the rings

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/06/07/parker-solar-probe-flies-into-the-fast-solar-wind-and-finds-its-source/ By  Robert Sanders , UC Berkeley News.  Excerpt: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has flown close enough to the sun to detect the fine structure of the solar wind close to where it is generated at the sun’s surface, revealing details that are lost as the wind exits the corona as a uniform blast of charged particles. It’s like seeing jets of water emanating from a showerhead through the blast of water hitting you in the face. In a paper to be published this week in the journal  Nature , a team of scientists led by Stuart D. Bale, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and James Drake of the University of Maryland-College Park, report that the Parker Solar Probe has detected streams of high-energy particles that match the supergranulation flows within coronal holes, which suggests that these are the regions where the so-called “fast” solar wind originates. ...T

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/science/mars-deimos-moon-photos.html By Jonathan O’Callaghan , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Deimos, the smaller of the two moons of Mars, might be a chip off the old block — quite literally. That’s the conclusion drawn by scientists in the United Arab Emirates, whose Hope orbiter — also called the Emirates Mars Mission and the country’s first interplanetary spacecraft — just snapped the best views of Deimos ever taken by human spacecraft. ... Mars has two irregularly shaped moons , and neither is mighty. Phobos, the larger of the two, is about 17 miles in diameter at its widest, and orbits closer to the red planet at an altitude of about 3,700 miles. Deimos is just nine miles across on its longest side, and completes an orbit of Mars every 30 hours at an altitude of 15,000 miles. The moons’ small size and quirky dimensions led to suggestions that they may be asteroids captured by Mars long ago. Not so, say researchers analyzing data recorded by Hope,

https://www.science.org/content/article/spacecraft-explore-habitability-jupiter-s-ocean-moons By Paul Voosen, Science.  Excerpt: Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon, is practically a planet. Larger than Mercury, it is the only moon with its own magnetic field, produced by churning molten iron in its core. Its icy crust, more than 100 kilometers thick, ...And beneath the crust, many researchers believe, is a salty ocean, kept warm by the moon’s inner heat and Jupiter’s gravitational kneading. ...Ganymede is one of three jovian moons that may hold hidden oceans, all potential habitats for life. They are the targets of the $1.6 billion  Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer  (Juice), a European Space Agency (ESA) mission set for a 13 April launch on an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana. ...Juice will take 8 years to reach Jupiter. It will spend another 3 years promenading among the moons, eventually ending up in a tight orbit around Ganymede—the first time a spacecraft will orbit a moon other than Ear

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-lays-out-vision-robotic-mars-exploration By Paul Voosen, Science.  Excerpt: Rover by rover, NASA’s exploration of Mars is building to an expensive climax: a multibillion-dollar mission later this decade to collect the rock samples  currently being gathered by the Perseverance rover  and return them to Earth. But then what? NASA ...envisions a series of lower cost Mars missions, costing up to $300 million, at every 2-year launch window. The program could begin as soon as 2030, said Eric Ianson, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, in a  presentation today  to the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. ...planetary scientists have been investigating what cheaper missions to Mars might look like. In 2018, Mars Cube One, a pair of small spacecraft, flew along with the InSight lander, successfully relaying its signal to Earth as they flew past the planet. And the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, which landed with Per

https://eos.org/articles/wind-could-power-future-settlements-on-mars By Alakananda Dasgupta , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Using a sophisticated global climate model adapted to Mars, space scientists explore the hidden potential of wind energy on the Red Planet. ...there’s the question of where to find a viable and steady source of energy that would be required for any  human mission to Mars . The answer to that question may be blowing in the Martian wind, according to a new study. ...with the atmospheric density of Mars being 1% that of Earth, much larger turbine blades would be needed to generate sufficient energy. ...Now, a study published in  Nature Astronomy  has suggested that wind energy could, indeed, be harnessed to power human settlements on Mars. “We were excited to find that there are many locations across the planet where winds are strong enough to provide a really stable power resource” and compensate for a shortfall in solar power using wind turbines, said  Victoria Hartwick , le

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/space-missions-to-watch-in-2023/ By Sky & Telescope.  Excerpts: ...SpaceX’s Starship ...Axiom Space’s AX2 ... to the International Space Station ...ESA’s  Euclid  space telescope ...an infrared instrument, aimed at studying dark matter and dark energy ...Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) ...X-ray Polarimeter Satellite, ...and the Aditya L1 solar mission, headed to the Earth-Sun L 1  point. ...China’s  Xuntian Space Telescope , a sky survey telescope ...China also plans to launch two X-ray telescopes in 2023 ...The Moon will be bustling in 2023. Three missions [to the Moon] are at least partially NASA-funded through its  Commercial Lunar Payload Services . ...The  Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment  (PRIME 1) is set to launch in June, carrying with it The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain. The TRIDENT drill will delve three feet deep to bring lunar regolith up to the surface. ...[Russian] Roscosmos’ Luna 25 lander

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/liftoff-nasa-s-artemis-i-mega-rocket-launches-orion-to-moon NASA  RELEASE 22-117 .  Excerpt: Following a successful launch of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket in the world, the agency’s Orion spacecraft is on its way to the Moon as part of the Artemis program. Carrying an uncrewed Orion, SLS lifted off for its flight test debut at 1:47 a.m. EST Wednesday from Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch is the first leg of a mission in which Orion is planned to travel approximately 40,000 miles beyond the Moon and return to Earth over the course of 25.5 days. Known as  Artemis I , the mission is a critical part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, in which the agency explores for the benefit of humanity. It’s an important test for the agency before flying astronauts on the  Artemis II  mission.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/30/science/europa-nasa-juno-photos.html By  Kenneth Chang , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Juno, a NASA spacecraft that has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016, zipped within 219 miles of Europa’s surface early on Thursday, speeding by at more than 30,000 miles per hour. Less than 12 hours later, the four images taken during the flyby, the closest observations of the moon since January 2000, were back on Earth. “They’re stunning, actually,” said Candice J. Hansen-Koharcheck, a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., who is responsible for the operation of the spacecraft’s primary camera,  JunoCam . ...All four images were available  on Juno’s website .…