A European spacecraft that has been peering through the thick, roiling clouds of Venus for the past three years has found further evidence that the inhospitable planet once had oceans, volcanoes, and a system of plate tectonics similar to those at work on Earth. The Venus Express has mapped the planet’s southern hemisphere using infrared imaging, and found heat variations in the surface rocks, which allows researchers to speculate on the chemical composition of those rocks. Different surfaces radiate different amounts of heat at infrared wavelengths due to a material characteristic known as emissivity, which varies in different materials [SPACE.com].
In certain highland areas, researchers detected cooler patches of rock whose thermal signatures resemble those of granites on Earth. On our own planet, granites are made during the process of rock recycling that goes on at the edges of the great geologic plates that cover the Earth. At the boundaries of these plates, ancient rock is pulled deep into the planet, reworked with water and then re-surfaced at volcanoes. Critically, then, if there is granite on Venus, there must also have been an ocean and a process of plate movement in the past [BBC News].
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Does Galileo Galilei deserve yet another notch in his belt? Besides discovering four of Jupiter’s moons, studying sunspots, observing the phases of Venus, and examining the rough mountains and craters of the moon, Galileo may also have identified the planet Neptune more than two centuries before its official discovery, one researcher is arguing.
Its widely accepted that in 1612 and again in 1613 Galileo must have observed Neptune, although at the time he thought it was a star, spotted during his observation of Jupiter’s moons. But physicist David Jamieson from the University of Melbourne, Australia, says that history has judged Galileo incorrectly – and that his notebooks reveal that he knew he was looking at a planet after all [Nature blog].
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The first permanent node of the “interplanetary internet” has been installed and tested out aboard the International Space Station, in what NASA officials say is the first step to a communication system that could one day span the solar system. The interplanetary internet got its first deep space tryout last fall, when a spacecraft called EPOXI that’s on its way to a comet rendezvous used the system to send images back to its controllers on Earth. Now, researchers are ready to test it out in regular communications with the space station.
There’s a fringe benefit: In just a few months, astronauts will be able to tweet live from the international space station. “NASA is trying to leverage the popularity of Twitter to get its message out,” said [researcher] Kevin Gifford…. “To tweet from space will have a lot of glitz value” [Denver Post]. Currently, astronauts on the space station have to schedule times to send or receive data from mission control below; that’s why the first astronaut to make use of Twitter on a space shuttle flight, Mike Massimino, aka @Astro_Mike, had to send his tweets to Houston and have a NASA employee post them to his profile.
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As the second man to ever walk on the moon (he stepped out of the lunar module about 15 minutes after Neil Armstrong), Buzz Aldrin knows a little something about space exploration, about bold ambitions and great risks. Now, Aldrin is speaking out about NASA, and declaring loudly that the space agency has lost its boldness. The next step in humanity’s exploration of space must be a bootprint on Mars, he says.
Says Aldrin: “As I approach my 80th birthday, I’m in no mood to keep my mouth shut any longer when I see NASA heading down the wrong path. And that’s exactly what I see today. The agency’s current Vision for Space Exploration will waste decades and hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reach the moon by 2020—a glorified rehash of what we did 40 years ago. Instead of a steppingstone to Mars, NASA’s current lunar plan is a detour” [Popular Mechanics].
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Saturn’s moon Enceladus got humanity’s attention in 2005 when surprised astronomers detected jets of ice and gas spraying out from the moon’s icy surface, and since then researchers have eagerly investigated the possibility that the jets might emanate from liquid oceans beneath the frozen crust. A moon with liquid water would be of great interest, because it would be more likely to host extraterrestrial microbes. Now, two new studies with somewhat contradictory results have deepened the mystery of what lies beneath Enceladus’s shell of ice.
Both groups of researchers were looking for sodium near Enceladus; one found it, the other didn’t. Sodium is interesting because it indicates that deep under the ice, liquid water has been in contact with rocks, which leach salts [ScienceNOW Daily News]. The dissolved sodium, along with water, would be shot into space in the geysers, and some of the sodium would be trapped in ice crystals as they formed. The first research group found sodium traces in Saturn’s E ring, a wide band of ice particles that is believed to be replenished by Enceladus’s jets. “Those salty grains provide our current best smoking (or steaming) gun pointing to present-day liquid water near the surface of Enceladus” [Wired.com], wrote space scientist John Spencer in an essay accompanying the findings.
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Five days after their launch, NASA’s two new lunar probes have successfully rendezvoused with their target. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter fired its thrusters this morning to settle into orbit around the moon, while the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) swung past the moon, streaming live video all the while. (NASA promises to put the video playback online soon.)
The paired satellites will spend the next year mapping the moon and searching for traces of water ice, culminating in a dramatic crash when LCROSS plunges into a crater. But for now, NASA is busy celebrating the successful first steps. The $504 million LRO is the first NASA vessel to orbit the moon since 1998. “LRO has returned NASA to the moon,” a flight controller said as NASA’s LRO mission control center erupted in applause. The probe’s lunar arrival comes just under one month ahead of the 40th anniversary of NASA’s first moon landing by Apollo 11 astronauts on July 20, 1969 [SPACE.com].
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Is planetary Armageddon just a matter of time? Will Earth meet its fiery doom when the orbits of the planets in our solar system become destabilized, leading Mars, Mercury, or Venus to crash into our home turf? A new study predicts that there is indeed a very slim possibility that such a cataclysm will rock our world, but notes that the possible collisions wouldn’t happen for more than 3 billion years, by which time humans may be long gone. “I see the results as a case of the glass being 99 percent full and 1 percent empty…. While it’s possible that a collision could occur billions of years from now, it’s actually very unlikely” [SPACE.com], says Gregory Laughlin, an astronomer who wasn’t involved in the current research.
Astronomers had thought that the orbits of the planets were predictable. But 20 years ago, researchers showed that there were slight fluctuations in their paths. Now, the team has shown how in a small proportion of cases these fluctuations can grow until after several million years, the orbits of the inner planets begin to overlap [BBC News]. The researchers simulated the interactions of the eight major planets, Pluto, and the moon over the course of 5 billion years, up until our sun is expected to expand into a red giant. The simulation, described in the study published in Nature, covered more than 2,500 possible futures.
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While it may not be a colorful extravaganza like autumn in New England, astronomers have been awaiting the change of seasons on Saturn’s moon Titan with considerable anticipation. The Cassini space probe has been monitoring Titan since 2004, but as the moon’s year lasts 30 Earth years, it has only ever seen one season. The equinox marking the end of summer in the south will come this August. “This is our first opportunity to look at seasonal change,” says [researcher] Bonnie Buratti…. “And it’s not as simple as it might have been” [New Scientist].
Indeed, Cassini’s observations have revealed some surprises in Titan’s atmosphere. The moon currently has clouds of methane (which sometimes produce methane rain showers) in its southern hemisphere. These southern clouds are thought to be caused by convection in Titan’s atmosphere, driven by the heat of the sun [New Scientist]. But astronomers’ models of Titan predicted that the southern clouds would have disappeared by now as the moon approaches its equinox. Says study coauthor Sebastien Rodriguez: “Titan’s clouds don’t move with the seasons exactly as we expected…. We see lots of clouds during the summer in the southern hemisphere, and this summer weather seems to last into the early fall. It looks like Indian summer on Earth, even if the mechanisms are radically different on Titan from those on Earth” [UPI].
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The man tasked with steering NASA through difficult transitions and pointing the space agency boldly towards the stars will be a former astronaut who has piloted the space shuttle. On Saturday, President Barack Obama announced his long-awaited nomination for NASA administrator: Charles F. Bolden Jr. If confirmed by the Senate, the former astronaut and retired Marine Corps general will be the first African-American to head the space agency.
The pick has been celebrated by NASA insiders, and is viewed as a signal that, after some signs of ambivalence, President Obama is now embracing the expensive manned spaceflight program. “Clearly Charlie Bolden would not have taken the job if he were being asked to shut down human spaceflight,” said John Logsdon, a space policy expert in Washington…. He added that a recent announcement of the administration’s plans to review the Ares 1 rocket and Orion spacecraft, which are to replace the space shuttle by 2015, is not a shot across the bow of NASA’s human spaceflight program. He said it would be a review of the hardware, not the destination or goals [Los Angeles Times].
However, it is not clear whether the new leadership will adopt all of the goals for human exploration of the solar system that were laid out by the Bush administration: namely, returning to the moon by 2020 and then working towards landing humans on Mars.
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Early Mars may have been both wet and cold, with average temperatures well below freezing, according to a new study. But researchers also saw signs of the presence of dissolved minerals that would allow for liquid water—the same way salt can melt ice on a road—thus opening up the possibility that the planet sustained life.
Scientists have long been at odds over the history of Mars, debating whether water formed much of its landscape or whether temperatures were simply too cold to have allowed liquid water to flow. But in the new study, published in Nature, researchers used a computer model to show that both could have been possible because fluids containing dissolved minerals would have remained liquid at temperatures well below 273 degrees Kelvin — the freezing point of pure water. “Our results are compatible with Mars lander and orbiter data and with climate modeling, and suggest a cold and wet early Mars” [Reuters], the authors wrote.
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To explore the dark reaches of the solar system, NASA is going to need a lot more plutonium-238, the space agency has told the Department of Energy. NASA’s deep space probes are powered by pellets of the plutonium isotope: The electricity that powers onboard instruments comes from devices called radioisotope power generators. The RPGs make electricity with the heat from the radioactive decay of small amounts of plutonium-238 carried on board [Los Angeles Times]. Such devices are the only option for probes that voyage far from the sun and can’t absorb enough solar energy to power their operations.
But a new report from the National Research Council notes that the world’s stockpile of Pu-238 is rapidly dwindling, and explains that NASA only has enough left for a couple more missions. The isotope isn’t found in nature, and its production is at a dead halt all around the world. The United States stopped making Pu-238 at the end of the Cold War; although the isotope cannot be used in nuclear weapons, it’s a byproduct of the production of weapons-grade Pu-239. For the past few years NASA has been buying its supply from Russia, but Russia’s plutonium-making reactors were also shut down years ago. NASA will soon receive its last shipment of the isotope from Russia, after which the space agency will be looking for a new supplier.
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When the Messenger spacecraft swooped low past the planet Mercury on October 6 2008, it gathered up a wealth of data that will have planetary scientists puzzling for years. As researchers sort through findings regarding Mercury’s volcanic past, meteor impacts, and the effect of the solar wind on the innermost planet’s magnetosphere, one broad conclusion stands out: Mercury isn’t just a boring chunk of rock. Marilyn Lindstrom, a NASA program scientist, said the Messenger findings show that Mercury is “just an amazingly dynamic planet, both in the past and in the present” [Baltimore Sun].
Superficially, Mercury looks a lot like the moon: small, grayish-brown and pockmarked with craters. Some scientists assumed that Mercury’s surface formed the same way the moon’s did, with lighter rocks rising to the surface of a magma ocean and congealing into a brittle crust early on. But the new observations reveal that 40 percent of the surface was formed by volcanoes. “Up until before Messenger’s arrival, we weren’t even sure that volcanism existed on Mercury” [Wired], says researcher Brett Denevi. The presence of titanium oxide also suggests that the planet was hot enough in its first 100 million years to be covered in magma oceans.
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NASA astronauts may not be assigned to a stint at a lunar base anytime soon. A statement by a NASA official suggested that the space agency is likely to scrap the idea of a permanent moon base, but could instead try to speed up other, more ambitious manned missions to explore our solar system.
NASA has been working towards returning astronauts to the moon by 2020 and building a permanent base there. But some space analysts and advocacy groups like the Planetary Society have urged the agency to cancel plans for a permanent moon base, carry out shorter moon missions instead, and focus on getting astronauts to Mars [New Scientist]. When the agency’s acting administrator, Chris Scolese, testified before a congressional subcommittee yesterday, he said that the agency probably won’t aim to build an outpost on the moon, suggesting that the agency may be following those advocates’ advice.
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The Kepler space telescope, which was launched in early March, has taken and sent home its first images of the region in the galaxy where it will spend the next three years searching for Earth-like planets.
The images sent to NASA show a “vast starry field” in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way galaxy, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. One image shows millions of stars in the craft’s full field of view, while two other images zoom in specific sections of that region [Computerworld]. Kepler’s primary mission is to survey stars for regular slight dips in their brightness, a sign that an orbiting planet is blocking the star’s light [Nature blog]. Eventually, the craft will measure the stars’ brightness every half hour.
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Astronomers are hoping to catch a glimpse of debris that could be leftover from a cosmic collision between our Earth and a Mars-sized planet called Theia–if, in fact, it existed at all. “It’s a hypothetical world. We’ve never actually seen it, but some researchers believe it existed 4.5 billion years ago — and that it collided with Earth to form the moon,” said Mike Kaiser, a NASA scientist [SPACE.com].
The research will be done with the two Stereo spacecraft that are on their way to observe the sun; on their way they’ll have a chance to do some “bonus science,” as one researcher called it. The spacecraft are passing through two regions of space, called Lagrangian points, where the gravity from the Earth and the sun combine to form wells that tend to collect solar system detritus…. Scientists think Theia may even have formed in one of these gravitational points of balance from the accumulation of flotsam that had built up there [SPACE.com].
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