Astro Blog

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://eos.org/articles/subsurface-oceans-could-boost-exoplanet-habitability By  Javier Barbuzano , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A group of researchers led by planetary scientist  Lujendra Ojha  of Rutgers University crunched the numbers to reveal that our galaxy is likely brimming with planets hosting subsurface oceans like those on  Enceladus ,  Europa , and  Ganymede . “Before we started to consider this subsurface water, it was estimated that around one rocky planet [orbiting] every 100 stars would have liquid water,” Ojha said. “The new model shows that if the conditions are right, this could approach one planet per star.”... 

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://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-mission-update-voyager-2-communications-pause By Calla Cofield, Jet Propulsion Laboratory.  Excerpt: ... Voyager 2  is located more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth...A series of planned commands sent to NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft July 21 inadvertently caused the antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth. As a result, Voyager 2 [was] unable to receive commands or transmit data back to Earth. The agency’s Deep Space Network facility in Canberra, Australia, sent the equivalent of an interstellar “shout” more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) to Voyager 2, instructing the spacecraft to reorient itself and turn its antenna back to Earth. With a one-way light time of 18.5 hours for the command to reach Voyager, it took 37 hours for mission controllers to learn whether the command worked. At 12:29 a.m. EDT on Aug. 4, the spacecraft began returning science and telemetry data, indicating it is ope...

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/webb-snaps-highly-detailed-infrared-image-of-actively-forming-stars   By NASA, ESA, CSA. Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) .  Excerpt: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the “antics” of a pair of actively forming young stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47, in high-resolution near-infrared light. ...They are buried deeply in a disk of gas and dust that feeds their growth as they continue to gain mass. The disk is not visible, but its shadow can be seen in the two dark, conical regions surrounding the central stars. The most striking details are the two-sided lobes that fan out from the actively forming central stars, represented in fiery orange. Much of this material was shot out from those stars as they repeatedly ingest and eject the gas and dust...over thousands of years. When material from more recent ejections runs into older material, it changes the shape of these lobes. ...The stars’ more recent ejections appea...

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/spot-venuss-creeping-cusps-at-solar-conjunction By Bob King, Sky & Telescope.  Excerpt: With Venus approaching inferior conjunction in August, here’s a foolproof way to follow its thinning crescent as the planet transitions from Evening Star to Morning Star. ...Venus currently shines about 25° east of the Sun and sets about 45 minutes after sundown. On August 13th the two bodies will be in conjunction and rise and set together. For about a week before and after that date, Venus will be difficult-to-impossible to see with the naked eye because of interference from solar glare but remain visible in a telescope if you know exactly where to look. The orbit of Venus is tipped 3.4° relative to the plane of the ecliptic [Earth's orbit plane]. At inferior conjunction, when the two planets are closest, Venus can pass up to 8.4° north or south of the Sun. If Venus lies at or close to either one of its  nodes  — the two points where it ...

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2023/webb-detects-water-vapor-in-rocky-planet-forming-zone By NASA.  Excerpt: Water is essential for life as we know it. However, scientists debate how it reached the Earth and whether the same processes could seed rocky exoplanets orbiting distant stars. New insights may come from the planetary system PDS 70, located 370 light-years away. The star hosts both an inner disk and outer disk of gas and dust, separated by a 5 billion-mile-wide (8 billion kilometer) gap, and within that gap are two known gas-giant planets. New measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) have detected water vapor in the system’s inner disk, at distances of less than 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from the star – the region where rocky, terrestrial planets may be forming. (The Earth orbits 93 million miles from our Sun.) This is the first detection of water in the terrestrial region of a disk already known to host two o...