Astro Blog

By European Space Agency (ESA).  Excerpt: Thanks to its  newly tilted orbit  around the Sun, the European Space Agency-led  Solar Orbiter  spacecraft is the first to image the Sun’s poles from outside the ecliptic plane. Solar Orbiter’s unique viewing angle will change our understanding of the Sun’s magnetic field, the  solar cycle  and the workings of space weather. ...Any image you have ever seen of the Sun was taken from around the Sun’s equator. This is because Earth, the other planets, and all other operational spacecraft orbit the Sun within a flat disc around the Sun called the ecliptic plane. By tilting its orbit out of this plane, Solar Orbiter reveals the Sun from a whole new angle....  Full article at https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_gets_world-first_views_of_the_Sun_s_poles . 

https://www.science.org/content/article/number-known-moonquakes-tripled-discovery-apollo-archive By  PAUL VOOSEN , Science Excerpt:  THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS— The Moon suddenly seems more alive. From 1969 to 1977, seismometers left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts detected thousands of distinctive “moonquakes.” Now, half a century later, a new analysis has cut through the noise in the old data and nearly tripled the number of moonquakes, adding more than 22,000 new quakes to 13,000 previously identified ones.  The finding,  presented  last week here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, shows “that the Moon may be more seismically and tectonically active today than we had thought,” says Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna, a geophysicist at the University of Arizona unaffiliated with the work, which is  in review  at the  Journal of Geophysical Research . “It is incredible that after 50 years we are still finding new surprises in the data.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/india-makes-history-landing-spacecraft-near-moon-s-south-pole By SANJAY KUMAR , Science.  Excerpt: “India is on the Moon!” declared Sreedhara Somanath, chair of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), today to a packed mission control room. At 6:04 p.m. local time, the Chandrayaan-3 mission softly deposited the Vikram lander on the Moon’s surface, making India the fourth nation to succeed at the task after the United States, the Soviet Union, and China. India also becomes the first nation to land near the lunar south pole, an uncharted territory thought to contain frozen water that could support future human exploration.... 

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/perseverance-finds-complex-organics-not-life-on-mars/ By Colin Stuart, Sky & Telescope Magazine.  Excerpt: Planetary scientists analyzing data from NASA’s Perseverance rover have found signs of organic molecules on Mars, hinting that the planet had a more complex geochemical cycle in the past than previously thought. If true, it shows that the building blocks of life have been present on the Red Planet for around billions of years. These new findings, published in  Nature , come from examining the floor of Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometer- (28-mile-) wide impact basin just north of the Martian equator. NASA picked it as Perseverance’s landing site due to geological signs that an ancient river flooded into the crater some 2.5 billion years ago.... 

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/four-of-uranuss-moons-might-contain-briny-oceans/ By Emily Lakdawala, Sky & Telescope.  Excerpt: A  new paper re-analyzing Voyager observations  suggests that four of Uranus’ five icy satellites also host oceans: Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. (Only small Miranda, intermediate in size between Saturn’s Mimas and Enceladus, appears not to.) The oceans are desperately thin: less than 30 kilometers (20 miles) thick inside Ariel and Umbriel (both of which are about 1,000 kilometers across, similar in size to Saturn’s Tethys and Dione), and less than 50 kilometers thick within Titania and Oberon (which are larger at about 1,500 kilometers, similar to Saturn’s Rhea and Iapetus). If the oceans exist, they would be left over from much larger liquid layers that formed when the moons first formed. ...They’d be extremely briny, hyper-concentrated with whatever dissolved materials helped to lower the temperature at which water would...

https://eos.org/features/marine-science-goes-to-space By Damond Benningfield , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Cassini  discoveries added  Enceladus to a growing list of possible ocean worlds in our own solar system—bodies with large amounts of liquid water hidden from view. Some of them could contain more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. And in addition to Enceladus, planetary scientists have counted at least one other member of the list, Jupiter’s moon  Europa , among the ranks of the “possibly habitable.” “There could be life in our own solar system, and we may already have flown past it,” said  Christopher German , a senior scientist at  Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a coleader of  Network for Ocean Worlds  (NOW), a NASA-funded effort to advance research on these intriguing bodies. “Instead of just a sci-fi thing, suddenly we have grounds for wondering if there’s life on these nearby worlds—places we have the technology to reach.” ......

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/12/15/nasa-touches-sun-spacecraft-parker By  Timothy Bella , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: A NASA spacecraft became the first to “touch the sun,” scientists announced Tuesday — a long-awaited milestone and a potential giant leap in understanding the sun’s influence on the solar system. The Parker Solar Probe successfully flew through the sun’s corona, or upper atmosphere, in April to sample particles and its magnetic fields, according to research published in the journal  Physical Review Letters . The findings were also announced Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in New Orleans. ...The spacecraft, launched three years ago in an effort to study the sun and its dangers, will help scientists uncover significant and unknown information about Earth’s closest star, including how the flow of the sun’s particles can influence the planet. ...The spacecraft’s brush with the sun is the culmination of a missio...

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-first-planetary-defense-mission-will-nudge-asteroid By Adam Mann, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Intentional crash of robotic probe will test way to avert asteroid impacts on Earth. In the name of planetary defense, NASA is set to launch a robotic probe next week that in late 2022 will hurtle into a sizable space rock in the hopes of nudging its orbit. Although the celestial target of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) poses no danger to our planet, the mission will assess the feasibility of deflecting potentially hazardous objects away from Earth.… [ DART successfully launched last night (Tuesday, Nov. 23, at 10:21 p.m. PST)] See also New York Times article .

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-fleet-moon-landers-will-set-sail-next-year-backed-private-companies Source: By Joel Goldberg, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Who knew outsourcing could extend to outer space? In some ways, that’s the aim of NASA’s $2.6 billion initiative meant to galvanize the private sector’s development of Moon landers and rovers. The Commercial Lunar Payload Services program has tasked a number of companies—including Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic—with delivering landers to the Moon’s surface twice a year. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander, roughly the size of a tree house, is set to blast off this year from Cape Canaveral, Florida, as is Houston-based Intuitive Machines’s Nova-C. A second Astrobotic lander, Griffin, is expected to launch in 2023, ferrying the well-equipped, NASA-designed Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover. Its neutron counter, spectrometers, and specialized drill will seek out evidence of water and attempt to identify its origin. ....

https://eos.org/articles/fifteen-years-of-radar-reveal-venuss-most-basic-facts Source: By  Kimberly M. S. Cartier , Eos/AGU .  Excerpt: Venus’s heavy atmosphere tugs the planet’s surface enough to change the length of its day by up to 21 minutes [per day]. ...In a recent paper in  Nature Astronomy , astronomers used 15 years of radar measurements to reveal a few of these fundamental properties of our closest planetary neighbor that have long remained elusive. ...The 70-meter radio antenna at the  Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex  in California served as the flashlight, ...The researchers carefully measured the timing of the returned waves with two radio telescopes: Goldstone in California and the  Green Bank Telescope  in West Virginia. ...they found that Venus’s spin axis is tilted 2.6392° from its orbital plane and that tilt precesses once every 29,000 Earth years, 3,000 years longer than Earth’s precession. These measurements are 5–15 tim...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/15/china-mars-rover/ Source: By   Antonia Noori Farzan , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: China successfully landed a rover-carrying spacecraft on Mars for the first time, state-run media reported Saturday, marking another major victory for the country’s ambitious space program.... China now joins the United States as the only other nations to have successfully landed and operated rovers on Mars, and Chinese President Xi Jinping hailed a   “milestone”  achievement. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft, launched from the Chinese province of Hainan in July, has been orbiting Mars since February while looking for potential landing sites. Early Saturday, it released an entry capsule containing a lander and a rover that began to plummet through the Mars atmosphere, according to   state-run Xinhua News Agency . The entry capsule safely touched down in a flat plane on Mars’ surface at 7:18 a.m. Beijing time (7:18 p.m. Friday Eastern time)...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/martian-rover-sends-back-overwhelming-video-audio-red-planet Source:    By   Catherine Matacic , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Just four martian days after   touching down on the Red Planet , NASA’s Perseverance rover has sent back its first video of its new home: a 1-minute arabesque of color and motion captured from four on-board cameras, as the car-size rover dangles from its rocket-propelled descent vehicle, a red-and-white parachute snaps into place, and the pitted surface of Mars comes slowly into view, dark canyons giving way to ripples of dust that look like giant, rust-colored dunes (see video, above). But perhaps even more thrilling, an unexpected gift arrived along with the video and the   thousands of new images   that were downloaded over the weekend: the   first sound recording   taken from the surface of Mars....  See also   Perseverance’s ‘sky crane’ captures Mars descent .

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/touchdown-confirmed-perseverance-landing-marks-new-dawn-mars-science Source:    By   Paul Voosen , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: It’s a new day on Mars. NASA’s $2.7 billion Perseverance rover has successfully landed in Jezero crater, alighting just 35 meters away from hazardous boulders it had identified during descent. At about 3:55 p.m. EST, confirmation came back of the rover safely touching its wheels down, resulting in exuberant but socially distanced applause from double-masked engineers at the mission’s control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)....   See also   Perseverance’s ‘sky crane’ captures Mars descent ; and New York Times article   Perseverance’s Pictures From Mars Show NASA Rover’s New Home .

https://www.thetelegram.com/lifestyles/entertainment/martian-new-year-on-sunday-a-second-chance-to-start-fresh-earthling-549591/ Source:  By Chris Knight, The Telegram.  Excerpt: ...Feb. 7 [2021] marks the beginning of [Martian] year 36. Back at the turn of the (Earth) century ...scientists decided they needed a way to count Martian years. Earth years wouldn’t do, since Mars takes 687 days to circle the sun. They picked the Martian spring equinox of 1955 as the start of year one. ...Mars, like Earth, has an elliptical orbit that brings it closer to the sun at certain points of the year. It also has an axial tilt of 25 degrees. (Earth’s is just over 23.) Together this creates seasons, with variations in temperature, sunlight and even air pressure, since some of the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere freezes at the poles in the winter. ...the overlap of tilt and orbit means northern Martian winters are significantly milder than in the south, with repercussions on any rovers operat...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/japan-s-hayabusa2-capsule-lands-carbon-rich-asteroid-samples Source:    By  Dennis Normile , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Japan has once again retrieved samples from a distant asteroid, which scientists will scrutinize for clues about the ancient delivery of water and organic molecules to Earth. The return capsule of the Hayabusa2 mission—about the size and shape of a wok—parachuted to a landing in the red desert sand of Woomera, Australia, in the early morning of 6 December, after a nearly 5.3-billion-kilometer trip to the asteroid Ryugu. A helicopter team homed in on a radio beacon and found the capsule intact. Launched in 2014 by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Hayabusa2 spent 18 months circling Ryugu, making remote observations of  the diamond-shaped rubble pile . It also released several tiny rovers that hopped on the surface gathering data. After ide...

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-sofia-discovers-water-on-sunlit-surface-of-moon/ Source:   NASA RELEASE 20-105.  Excerpt: NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. ...Previous observations of the Moon’s surface detected some form of hydrogen, but were unable to distinguish between water and its close chemical relative, hydroxyl (OH). Data from this location reveal water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million – roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water – trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface. The   results are published   in the latest issue of Nature Astronomy. ...As a comparison, the Sahara desert has 100 times the amount of water than what SOFIA detected in the lunar soil. ...the discovery ra...

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-s-osiris-rex-spacecraft-successfully-touches-asteroid Source:  NASA RELEASE 20-103.  Excerpt: NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft unfurled its robotic arm Tuesday, and in a first for the agency, briefly touched an asteroid to collect dust and pebbles from the surface for delivery to Earth in 2023. This well-preserved, ancient asteroid, known as Bennu, ... offers scientists  a window into the early solar system  as it was first taking shape billions of years ago and flinging ingredients that could have helped seed life on Earth. If Tuesday’s sample collection event, known as “Touch-And-Go” (TAG), provided enough of a sample, mission teams will command the spacecraft to begin stowing the precious primordial cargo to begin its journey back to Earth in March 2021. Otherwise, they will prepare for another attempt in January.... See also New York Time...

https://eos.org/geofizz/dune-universe-inspires-titans-nomenclature Source:  By  JoAnna Wendel , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Frank Herbert’s Dune tells the story of Paul Atreides, a son of a noble family sent to the hostile desert planet Arrakis to oversee the trade of a mysterious drug called melange (nicknamed “spice”), which gives its consumers supernatural abilities and longevity. ... Arrakis Planitia —belongs to the second-largest moon in our solar system,  Titan . Arrakis is a vast, undifferentiated plain of sand, but not sand as we know it. Titan’s sand is made of large organic molecules, which would make it softer and stickier, said  Mike Malaska , a planetary scientist.... ...Malaska likes to imagine that Titan’s hydrocarbon sand, which is actually referred to as tholin, or  complex organic gunk,  could double as the infamous spice at the center of Dune’s expansive narrative arc. ...Arrakis isn’t the only name from the Dune novels that adorns Titan’s ...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/10/nasa-mission-about-capture-carbon-rich-dust-former-water-world Source:  By  Paul Voosen , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: OSIRIS-REx is ready to get the goods. On 20 October,  after several years of patient study  of its enigmatic target, NASA’s $800 million spacecraft will finally stretch out its robotic arm, swoop to the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, and sweep up some dust and pebbles. The encounter, 334 million kilometers from Earth, will last about 10 seconds. If it is successful, OSIRIS-REx could steal away with up to 1 kilogram of carbon-rich material from the dawn of the Solar System for return to Earth in 2023. Since OSIRIS-REx (short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) arrived in 2018, Bennu has yielded surprises…. Despite the logistical challenge, the boulders contain a prize:  veins of carbonate minerals thicker than your hands , the team rep...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/09/moon-safe-long-term-human-exploration-first-surface-radiation-measurements-show Source:  By  Adam Mann , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: ...China’s Chang’e 4 lander has made the first detailed measurements of the intense radiation that blasts the lunar surface and found that it’s safe for human exploration. ...The robotic Chang’e 4  made history last year  when it touched down in Von Kármán crater on the Moon’s far side, bringing a suite of instruments along for the ride. One of these was a new dosimeter.... The device measured hourly radiation rates and found that astronauts would be exposed to roughly  200 times the radiation levels  as people on Earth, they report today in Science Advances. The dosimeter’s placement inside the Chang’e 4 probe provides partial shielding, much as an astronaut’s spacesuit would to their body, so the findings are quite applicable to human explorers, Wimmer-Schweingruber says. The me...