Space Stuff

[Robert]

Some truly wonderful images here (click to go to the article and see larger versions):
Mars Express has revealed the Red Planet in stunning new ways
Mesas. Chasms. Icy poles. River-like features. Mars is both alien and familiar.

The Mars Express spacecraft (and lander) was the first interplanetary mission fully developed by the European Space Agency, representing both a failure and a spectacular success for the continent. It launched on June 3, 2003.

 

[adz]

Naked eye Vesta

Imagine if you could look up in the sky and see an asteroid with nothing but your eyeballs. Guess what — you can! In the coming month, 4 Vesta will shine its brightest in years, affording skywatchers a rare opportunity.

 

[adz]

Meet Betelgeuse, the Red Giant of Orion

Betelgeuse is a colossal object — and a very bright one at that. As a red supergiant nearing the final phases of its life cycle, Betelgeuse has an estimated diameter around a thousand times that of the Sun, with an estimated absolute luminosity of 100,000 times the Sun. We’re talking about an object larger than the entire orbit of Jupiter — an amazing fact to recall the next time you’re out observing this star.

 

[Robert]

SpaceX flies its 11th rocket of the year

 

[Robert]

With a simple and cheap rocket, Virgin Orbit aims for the extraordinary
With a first flight months away, we take a long look at the launch company.

A late May view of the Virgin Orbit factory floor showing an essentially complete LauncherOne in the middle ground, lacking only the payload fairing. This booster will be used for captive carry and drop testing.
LONG BEACH, Calif.—The black outline of a rocket painted on a concrete factory floor measures a little more than 20 meters in length. As Will Pomerantz strides along it, he admits that the depicted LauncherOne vehicle won’t exactly amaze aerospace enthusiasts. In designing the rocket, Virgin Orbit opted for a workhorse rather than a show pony.

 

[Robert]

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Delays Plans for First Space Tourists to Circle Moon
Space-transportation company misses another deadline for putting humans in its Dragon capsule

 

[Robert]

NASA spots asteroid on crash course with Earth – with just hours to go
Not enough time to even call Bruce Willis and Armageddonoutofhere

Asteroid 2018 LA ... Now spread over several grid locations in Africa

Scientists at NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office have made a rare sighting – an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.

The rock, dubbed 2018 LA, was picked up by the Catalina Sky Survey on Saturday morning, just hours before it piled into our home world at a speed of 10 miles per second, or 0.5368 per cent of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum in El Reg units.

However, since the rock in question was just six feet (two metres) across, no one panicked about imminent doom. It burned up and burst into scraps in our atmosphere.

"The discovery of asteroid 2018 LA is only the third time that an asteroid has been discovered to be on an impact trajectory, said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, on Sunday.

 

[Robert]

Calm your conspiracy theories, latest glimpse reveals Planet Nine may just be a pipe dream
Dodgy outer orbits all down to asteroids and gravity

Artist's impression of Sedna. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The mysterious, so-called Planet Nine, may not be a planet after all but just gravitational trickery, according to a new study.

A team of researchers have published a new theory explaining why objects on the edge of the Solar System like Sedna - classified as a large minor planet - have such weird, giant circular orbits. Sedna circles round the Sun at a distance of a whopping eight billion miles, making it one of the most distant objects in the Solar System, other than faraway comets.

In 2014, a pair of astrophysicists speculated that an undiscovered planet, dubbed Planet Nine, might exist beyond Neptune. It would account for the strange orbits of not only Sedna, but for other trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) too.

 

[Robert]

NASA makes the James Webb Telescope a looker with a heart of gold
Astroboffins get precious about heat protection in space

While the spaceship name Heart of Gold was taken by the late, great Douglas Adams, NASA has come up with something similar for its forthcoming space telescope.

To capture incoming radiation, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will need to fend off outgoing radiation. The telescope, scheduled to launch in 2020 following several delays, contains four scientific instruments for making space observations of visible and infrared light.

 

[Robert]

Juno finds some lightning on Jupiter is the polar opposite to bolts here on Earth
Spacecraft gets mission extension to keep on gazing

Artist's impression of lightning on the north pole of Jupiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/JunoCam
Data from the Juno spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter has shown the highly unusual nature of lightening on the gas giant, according to twonew studies published in Nature on Wednesday.

We've known that Jupiter has lightning for nearly 40 years, after the first probes went out there. But Juno has discovered that these natural discharges occur most at the polar regions, whereas on Earth the bulk of strikes are found on or near the equator.

 

[Robert]

More evidence that the Universe is making lots of massive stars
Distant galaxies are creating lots of stars eight times the mass of the Sun or more.

A starburst galaxy, which produces stars at a high rate.

The size of a star determines its ultimate fate. The smallest stars will burn lighter elements for tens of billions of years; stars like the Sun will make some heavier elements before shrinking into white dwarfs; and massive stars will create the heavier elements and scatter them into the Universe as they explode. So knowing how many we have of each type of star form tells us a lot about what the Universe should look like.

Estimating the frequency at which different mass stars form is relatively easy—we can simply survey the Milky Way, counting how many of each type of star we see. That, however, assumes the Milky Way is typical of other galaxies out there. Earlier this year, we got a hint that it wasn't. Observations of one of the dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way suggested a star-forming region within it had an excess of massive stars.

But a dwarf galaxy is even more likely to have an atypical star-formation process than the Milky Way. So we really needed more general measures of the sizes of stars being formed in the larger Universe. We now have one, and big stars are still showing up at much higher rates than previous estimates would suggest.

 

[Robert]

NASA finds more stuff suggesting Mars could have hosted life, maybe
Organic material and methane finds can’t be tied to biological processes

NASA’s Curiosity rover has again found evidence that Mars was potentially capable of hosting life.

As detailed in a new Science paper, “Organic matter preserved in 3-billion-year-old mudstones at Gale crater, Mars”, some of the soil samples Curiosity took from the bottom of Gale Crater turned up molecules of “thiophenes, benzene, toluene, and small carbon chains, such as propane or butene.”

As some of those molecules are often fragments of kerogens – organic molecules known to be the residue of living matter – the paper’s authors cautiously suggest the Martian finds could suggest biological processes once took place on Mars.

There's also excitement because Curiosity found this stuff without having to look very hard: the organics turned up in some mud that looked likely. Also pleasing is that the presence of chlorine and sulphur, which both preserve organics, suggests the presence of many more deposits from which to learn more about Mars' past and possible ecosystems.

But the boffins are far from certain the the organic molecules or methane that Curiosity turned up have anything to do with life. As NASA put it, Water-rock chemistry might have generated the methane, but scientists cannot rule out the possibility of biological origins.”

 

[redrumloa]

Calm your conspiracy theories, latest glimpse reveals Planet Nine may just be a pipe dream
Dodgy outer orbits all down to asteroids and gravity

Artist's impression of Sedna. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The mysterious, so-called Planet Nine, may not be a planet after all but just gravitational trickery, according to a new study.

A team of researchers have published a new theory explaining why objects on the edge of the Solar System like Sedna - classified as a large minor planet - have such weird, giant circular orbits. Sedna circles round the Sun at a distance of a whopping eight billion miles, making it one of the most distant objects in the Solar System, other than faraway comets.

In 2014, a pair of astrophysicists speculated that an undiscovered planet, dubbed Planet Nine, might exist beyond Neptune. It would account for the strange orbits of not only Sedna, but for other trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) too.

That would be Planet X (10), thank you. I still reject demoting Pluto. It looks like the numb nuts who demoted it are getting challenged again now the world has seen it, ruining most of the arguments for demotion.

Welcome Back, Pluto? Planethood Debate Reignites

 

[Robert]

Astroboffins trace mysterious noise from hard rock in space
Signs in the sky from diamonds

An artist's impression of diamonds emitting radiation around a protostar. Image credit : S. Dagnello, NRAO/AUI/NSF
The source of unusual faint pockets of microwave radiation found only in a few regions of the Milky Way has been traced back to tiny specks of nanodiamond dust.

A paper published in Nature Astronomy on Monday cracks the mystery of anomalous microwave emission (AME). It was first discovered in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century when scientists began probing the cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang.

 

[Robert]

This could possibly also be a fit for Bizarro news but here'll do:
Neil Armstrong gave me moondust; I don’t want NASA to take it away
Lawyer: "Lunar material is not contraband."

Laura Murray Cicco says that as a 10-year-old, she got a "glass vial with a rubber stopper full of light grey dust," along with a signed note from the famed Apollo 11 astronaut.

A woman who claims to own a small vial of lunar dust that she says was given to her as a child by Neil Armstrong has now sued NASA.

She is seemingly concerned that the government might attempt to come after her—NASA has previously taken the legal position that "private persons cannot own lunar material," and has criminally investigated people claiming to sell such lunar material or otherwise tried to seize such artifacts.

The woman, Laura Murray Cicco, says that as a 10-year-old, she received a "glass vial with a rubber stopper full of light grey dust," along with a signed note from the famed Apollo 11 astronaut.

 

[adz]

A private citizen should have the right to be a custodian of lunar material, but as the mission to retrieve it was primarily funded with public money, they should not have the right to own it as it would be considered public property.

 

[Robert]

Solar winds will help ESA probe smell what Mercury's cookin'
Sun's exhalations whip up molecules on planets with weak magnetic fields

Researchers at the Technische Universität Wien in Austria have found that solar wind can do far more than project lights in the Earth's night sky.

The work, published in the journal Icarus, found that while we on Earth are treated to displays such as the Northern Lights, bodies that lack the Earth's protective magnetic field, such as the Moon or Mercury, have a considerably tougher time of it.

 

[Robert]

A private citizen should have the right to be a custodian of lunar material, but as the mission to retrieve it was primarily funded with public money, they should not have the right to own it as it would be considered public property.

I suppose that makes sense. OTOH, the story of the paperweight sting in the linked article does not show NASA in a very good light either. Doesn't seem to have been any need for the over the top, heavily armed response to an old lady asking for help.

 

[Robert]

Astroboffins spot planets swimming in the mists of forming stars
New technique looks for patterns in protostars

Scientists have found a trio of baby planets using a new technique of spotting unusual gas motion around developing stars.

The new technique described in a pair of papers in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s the first time it’s been used to find planets and has spotted three around the newborn star codenamed HD163296.

Two independent teams of astronomers analysed radio data gathered from the observations of the star using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a series of telescopes in Chile. HD 163296 is about four million years old and is 330 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.

Most exoplanets are detected using the transit method. It measures a star’s brightness and looks out for the characteristic dip when a planet crosses its path and blocks out its light. Although it has been very successful at uncovering thousands of new exoplanets, it cannot be used to find ones around protostars.

 

[Robert]

Ceres is crawling with carbon organics
Comets might have seeded the surface over millennia

Ceres contains more carbon-based compounds - the chemical building blocks for life - than previously thought, according to a new study.

Last year, scientists discovered that not only was Ceres’ surface peppered with patches of organic material, but that it is rich in water iceand its crust contains ice, salts and hydrated materials - a sign that an it may have harbored an ancient ocean in its past. Liquid water and carbon are both considered essential ingredients for the creation of life.

Now, a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters shows that there is a higher concentration of carbon-based compounds on its surface than previous estimates. And a team of scientists from Brown University and Carnegie Institution of Washington aren’t quite sure why.