Astro Blog

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://eos.org/articles/an-asteroid-double-disaster-struck-germany-in-the-miocene Source:  By  Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A Gothic church rises high above the medieval town of Nördlingen, Germany. But unlike most churches, St. George’s is composed of a very special type of rock:  suevite , a coarse-grained breccia that’s formed only in powerful impacts. That discovery and  other lines of evidence  have helped researchers determine that Nördlingen lies within an impact crater. Now, scientists have unearthed evidence that this crater and another one just 40 kilometers away were formed by a “double disaster” of two independent asteroid impacts. ...Our planet is dotted with  nearly 200 confirmed impact structures , and a handful of them appear in close pairs. Some researchers have proposed that these apparent double craters are scars created by  binary asteroids  slamming into Earth at the same time. ...However, scientists have theo...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/china-lands-its-moon-rocks-inner-mongolia Source:  By   Paul Voosen , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: China’s Chang’e-5 mission made a triumphant return around 1 p.m. EST today, landing in the middle of the night on the dark frozen plains of Inner Mongolia, Chinese   state media reported . The capsule’s return marks the first time China has collected rocks from the Moon—and the first time any nation has accomplished the feat since 1976. The 3-week-long mission   was the most complicated   in the history of China’s robotic space exploration program, involving a lunar landing, furious scooping and drilling of up to 2 kilograms of grit, and then an ascent and rendezvous with an orbiter, which carried the samples back to Earth. The China National Space Administration, typically secretive with its missions, showed growing confidence in its space program, with live broadcasts of the rocket launch and return of its sample caps...

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://eos.org/research-spotlights/moon-may-hold-billions-of-tons-of-subterranean-ice-at-its-poles Source:  By Jerald Pinson, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: New research indicates that if even a moderate amount of the water delivered by asteroids to the Moon was sequestered, the lunar poles would contain gigaton deposits (1 billion metric tons) of ice in sheltered craters and beneath its surface. ...“We looked at the entire time history of ice deposition on the Moon,” said   Kevin Cannon , a planetary scientist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden and lead author of the   new study   in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters. Cannon and his team used conservative estimates for the amount of water that asteroids were likely to contain upon impact with the Moon and how much of it was likely to be retained once the dust had settled. ...“If the very oldest regions have been stable and accumulating ice for billions of years, then some could have very substantial de...