Artist’s rendering of AVIATR flying on Titan.
Saturn’s moon Titan is a lot like Earth: it has rain, seasons, volcanoes, and maybe even life. Well, it’s not exactly like Earth: the rain is liquid methane, the volcanoes spew ice, and any life would be based on methane. But still, it’s an interesting and relatively Earth-like place, considering the other planets and moons in our solar system. And University of Idaho physicist Jason Barnes says he has a perfect way to explore this moon: with a flying drone.
Why use a flying machine rather than the rovers that worked so well on Mars? With 1/7 the gravity but 4 times the atmospheric density of Earth, flying through Titan is 28 times easier than on our own planet. In fact, it’s the easiest place to fly in our entire solar system. Drones on Titan can be heavier while requiring less fuel. With these facts in hand, University of Idaho physicist Jason Barnes has proposed AVIATR, otherwise known as the Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance.
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Humankind’s experience visiting worlds beyond our own begins and ends with the dozen Apollo astronauts who skipped about on tiny swaths of the moon. But that doesn’t mean we can’t experiment with how and where we might visit (or live) on the extreme surfaces of other worlds. A few studies out recently are doing just that.
Radiation? Big deal
Our planet provides a protective shield from the most damaging radiation produced by the sun—a shield not available on the moon or Mars. It’s a hazard for any human leaving the planet, and it’s a hazard for plants, too.
However, a new study of the Chernobyl area in the Ukraine, site of the famous nuclear accident, is actually raising hopes for space farming.
Even 25 years after the catastrophic nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the area around the site harbors radioactive soil. But researchers working there have found that oil-rich flax plants can adapt and flourish in that fouled environment with few problems. Exactly how the flax adapted remains unclear, but what is clear is that two generations of flax plants have taken root and thrived there, and that could have big implications for growing plants aboard spacecraft or on other planets at some point in the future. [Popular Science]
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A hibernating bear might appear to be the perfect metaphor for laziness, laying around half the year in carefree slumber. But in fact, it is a marvel of efficiency. New research in the journal Science shows that bears can drop their metabolic rate all the way down to 25 percent of normal while losing only about 10 degrees in body temperature.
Øivind Tøien and colleagues got lucky when a few black bears came a little too close to residents of Alaska for the Alaskans’ comfort. The state’s Department of Fish and Game intended to remove them as a “nuisance,” so the researchers got their hands on the bears and did a little hibernation experiment. They built artificial dens for the large mammals, complete with cameras and observational equipment including radio transmitters, allowing them to track the bears’ body temperatures and other vitals.
It was thought that, like most animals, the bears would have to drop their body temperatures to put the brakes on metabolism—each 18-degree Fahrenheit (10-degree Celsius) drop in temperature should equal a 50-percent reduction in the chemical activity. [National Geographic]
The fact that bears were so much more efficient than other hibernators came as a big surprise, Tøien says:
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NanoSail-D, phone home.
On December 6, NASA launched its Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite (FASTSAT), which, among other cargo, carried the test craft NanoSail-D. No bigger than a breadbox, NanoSail-D was supposed to blast free from FASTSAT and spend three days floating free before spreading a 100-square-foot solar sail—what would be NASA’s first successful solar sail project. But while all signs initially indicated the 8-pound box succeeded in ejecting from the satellite, now NASA is not so sure. The agency is having trouble communicating with NanoSail-D, and its whereabouts are unknown.
“We have not been able to locate or make contact with NanoSail-D,” says Kim Newton of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The sail was scheduled to unfurl on 9 December, but NASA reports that the deployment of the sail cannot be confirmed, and it is not clear whether the sail was successfully ejected into space. [New Scientist]
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This summer, Japan’s golden solar sail unfurled in space, becoming the first successful mission to sail on the physical pressure of the sun’s radiation. Its success led dreamers like Planetary Society director Bill Nye to envision a future of machines pushed forward by the pressure of lasers to explore the cosmos. And now, down here on Earth, researchers say they have demonstrated one of the key principles needed to realize such a vision: a “lightfoil” that uses light to create lift.
The lightfoil described in Nature Photonics is only micrometers in scale, but lead researcher Grover Swartzlander argues that it shows scientists can create and control optical lift. It operates on the property of refraction–how glass bends light.
Optical lift is different from the aerodynamic lift created by an airfoil. A plane flies because air flowing more slowly under its wing exerts more pressure than the faster-moving air flowing above. But in a lightfoil, the lift is created inside the object as the beam shines through. The shape of the transparent lightfoil causes light to be refracted differently depending on where it goes through, which causes a corresponding bending of the beam’s momentum that creates lift. [Science News]
This neat trick could potentially be used to steer a spacecraft, the researchers say.
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At long last, here comes the sun (mission).
Never mind NASA’s numerous observatories; never mind the unmanned Pioneer 10 and Voyager probes careening toward the far reaches of the solar system—no craft has ever gone to the center of the solar system, the sun. This decade that will change. NASA is in the process of selecting the instruments for its Solar Probe Plus, a mission to launch by 2018 that will get closer to then sun than ever before, and hopefully find some answers to the open questions that remain about our life-giving star.
“The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics: why is the Sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than the Sun’s visible surface, and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our Solar System,” said Dick Fisher, director of Nasa’s Heliophysics Division in Washington DC. [BBC News]
The probe isn’t quite setting the controls for the heart of the sun, Pink Floyd-style, but it will draw dangerously close.
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Mars has quite a bit more water than previously thought, according to a new report in the journal Science. NASA said its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted ice at five new Martian craters, likely kicked up by meteor impacts [Reuters]. It’s no surprise that the NASA orbiter found water, it’s the size of the find—twice as much as in Greenland’s ice sheet—that surprised scientists. The ice is just under the surface, so it was only visible after the recent meteor impacts.
The ice was found half way between the north pole and the equator, which is the farthest south ice has been found on Mars. Scientists believe that water once flowed across the planet, but most thought the surface had been largely dry and parched, with planet-wide dust storms, for billions of years. They had long known that water ice and carbon dioxide ice accumulated at the poles in winter, but until now, they had no idea how far from the poles the underground ice sheet extended [Los Angeles Times].
This image shows two craters with blueish ice, which—when exposed to the Martian atmosphere—sublimates over the course of 15 weeks.
Related Content:
Bad Astronomy: Water on (shakes Magic 8 ball) Mars this time
80beats: Solar Protons + Lunar Dust = Lots of Water on the Moon
80beats: The Real Problem With a Human Trip to Mars: Radiation
80beats: Buzz Aldrin Speaks Out: Forget the Moon, Let’s Head to Mars
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems
