The thread for space cadets!
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Space Force has a song now.
Enceladus shown to have all six of the essential elements for life New Scientist (paywalled, full text in spoiler)
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is producing phosphorus, meaning that this icy moon holds all the essential building blocks for life as we know it.
Every lifeform on Earth contains six key elements – carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. The existence of these, bar phosphorus, on Enceladus, combined with a liquid ocean and a warm core, make the moon one of the most likely places for life elsewhere in the solar system, if it exists. But the lack of phosphorus was thought by some to make life unlikely to exist on icy ocean worlds.
The spacecraft Cassini collected icy rock grains with its Cosmic Dust Analyzer for 13 years from 1999, in Saturn’s E-ring, which is thought to be fed from Enceladus’s plumes of water ice, which itself is fed from its oceans. But previous analyses of this material, in 2009, failed to turn up any phosphorus compounds.
Now, Frank Postberg at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, and his colleagues have reanalysed many of these grains with more advanced techniques than previously used and have identified phosphorus molecules. “Enceladus now satisfies what is generally considered one of the strictest requirements for habitability,” Postberg told the Europlanet Science Congress in Granada, Spain, on 20 September.
Spoiler Rest of article :
Ringed Neptune captured by James Webb telescope
The super space observatory returns spectacular imagery of the Solar System's most distant planet.
www.bbc.co.uk
Ringed Neptune captured by James Webb telescope
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
NASA is slamming a spacecraft into an asteroid on Monday to test planetary defence
Refrigerator-sized spacecraft will impact a small asteroid at 6.6 km/s
On Monday, in what seems like a scene out of a science fiction movie, NASA will slam a spacecraft into a distant asteroid to see whether it can nudge its orbit — all in an effort to test a way to protect Earth from any potential future threats.The good news is that there's no need to panic: The asteroid, which is part of a binary — or two-bodied — system, is not a threat to our planet, and there are no known ones that are headed our way for at least the next 100 years. However, space agencies like the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration want to be prepared should there ever be a threat.
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is testing a way in which a spacecraft may be able to nudge an asteroid on a collision course with Earth out of its orbit.
At 7:14 p.m. ET on Monday, the refrigerator-sized spacecraft will plunge itself into Dimorphos — a moonlet that orbits its larger companion, Didymos — at roughly 6.6 km/s.
The goal isn't to knock Dimorphos out of orbit but rather to change its 12-hour orbit around Didymos by 10 minutes. This means that scientists will know within roughly 12 hours whether they were successful.
So why target a binary asteroid system rather than a single asteroid to see whether you can change its orbit around the sun?
"A binary system was perfect for this test," said Mallory DeCoster, a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland and part of the DART Impact Modeling Working Group.
For one, the size of Dimorphos — about 164 metres across — is perfect to illustrate whether this would be an effective way of deflecting asteroids that pose a threat to Earth. Didymos is 780 metres across.
"But then the other piece is, if we were to impact a single asteroid, in order to characterize if we changed its orbit, we would have to wait until it completed its orbit around the sun, which could take many, many years."
The other advantage is that the binary system is relatively close to us, astronomically speaking, at just 11 million kilometres away.
Shooting gallery
NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies says that more than 90 per cent of near-Earth objects (NEOs) bigger than one kilometre have already been discovered. But that doesn't mean we're out of the woods when it comes to Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs).In 2013, the Chelyabinsk asteroid — which was roughly 20 metres in diameter— exploded over parts of Russia, injuring about 1,000 people and serving as a reminder of how even a small asteroid can be dangerous.
Basically, Earth flies through a shooting gallery in space. There are small chunks of debris that burn up in our atmosphere as meteors; bigger ones, like Chelyabinsk; and then even bigger ones that can be catastrophic — all left over from the formation of our solar system.
That's why space agencies like NASA and the European Space Agency have been trying to develop ways to deflect or nudge a PHA so that its orbit changes and poses no threat to Earth.
Mike Daly, a professor at York University's Lassonde School of Engineering in Toronto and a co-investigator on DART, said one of the most popular concepts is deflecting asteroids before they become a real threat. But that means we need to have advance warning that one is headed our way.
"So the simplest method is the one that DART is doing, which is essentially to take a spacecraft at high speed and crash it into the asteroid and use that transfer of the energy from the spacecraft to the asteroid to move it along," he said.
However, the science behind asteroid deflection in this manner is about more than just the combination of the spacecraft's size and incredibly high speed, called a hypervelocity impact.
"In a hypervelocity impact, you induce this pressure wave into the target that causes a lot of new physics to happen," Johns Hopkins University's DeCoster said.
"So what will happen, or what we think will happen, is that the size of the spacecraft might actually not matter that much. It might actually be: How does the asteroid respond to this pressure wave that is induced due to the hypervelocity impact? And we think that it will likely spew out a lot of material in the form of ejecta. And this ejecta might actually have a major component for changing the orbit. So much ejecta might get spewed out that that piece might matter more than the incoming energy from the spacecraft in changing its orbit."
The DART team hopes that an onboard camera, called DRACO, will show the close approach and then suddenly go black, which would be indicative of an impact.
But there's a straggler tagging along behind DART, by about three minutes: the Italian Space Agency's Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids, or LICIACube. Its job is to photograph the impact, study the plume of ejecta and help determine the morphology of the asteroid, as they can be made of iron, rock or just rocky clumps held together by gravity.
As this is the first test of a form of planetary defence, scientists are eagerly anticipating not only the impact of the event itself but what they will learn from it and, most importantly, what this may mean for the future of protecting Earth in the future. Telescopes from around the world will be observing the event and collecting followup data.
"We're really the first generation that can protect ourselves from these potentially catastrophic impacts," York University's Daly said. "And, you know, fortunately the really catastrophic ones don't happen very often, but they could happen, and never before have we been able to change our fate. So I think it's really up to us, given the potentially large consequences of not paying attention and our ability to do it."
The event will be broadcast on NASA TV, which is available online and through its app.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/nasa-dart-asteroid-mission-1.6590421
China’s Mars rover finds hints of catastrophic floods
Paper Writeup
China’s Zhurong rover has peered deep under the surface of Mars, finding evidence of two major floods that probably shaped the region the robot has been exploring since it landed in May 2021.
An analysis published in Nature today is the first result from Zhurong’s radar imager, which can probe up to 100 metres below the surface. “It is a very interesting paper, and I was particularly impressed by how deep they can see with this radar,” says Svein-Erik Hamran, a planetary scientist at the University of Oslo, who analysed the only previous data from ground-penetrating radar used on the planet, collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover.
Although alternative models deserve further scrutiny, the new radar image suggests the occurrence of episodic hydraulic flooding sedimentation that is interpreted to represent the basin infilling of Utopia Planitia during the Late Hesperian to Amazonian. While no direct evidence for the existence of liquid water was found within the radar detection depth range, we cannot rule out the presence of saline ice in the subsurface of the landing area.
Paper Writeup
Spoiler Legend :
From the onboard camera:
As the DART spacecraft flew past Didymos and approached Dimorphos for impact, it captured images during its final five minutes, shown here as a sped-up film
As the Italian probe LICIACube whizzed past asteroids Didymos (bottom) and Dimorphos (top), it captured a debris plume spraying out from the DART spacecraft smashing into Dimorphos
Source
Man space stuff like this is sooo cool!
NASA, SpaceX to Study Hubble Telescope Reboost Possibility
NASA, SpaceX to Study Hubble Telescope Reboost Possibility
NASA and SpaceX signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement Thursday, Sept. 22, to study the feasibility of a SpaceX and Polaris Program idea to boost the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit with the Dragon spacecraft, at no cost to the government.
File photo: An astronaut aboard the space shuttle Atlantis captured this image of the Hubble Space Telescope on May 19, 2009.
Credits: NASA
File photo: This image from April 24, 2021, shows the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour as it approached the International Space Station.
Credits: NASA
NASA and SpaceX signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement Thursday, Sept. 22, to study the feasibility of a SpaceX and Polaris Program idea to boost the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit with the Dragon spacecraft, at no cost to the government.
There are no plans for NASA to conduct or fund a servicing mission or compete this opportunity; the study is designed to help the agency understand the commercial possibilities.
SpaceX – in partnership with the Polaris Program – proposed this study to better understand the technical challenges associated with servicing missions. This study is non-exclusive, and other companies may propose similar studies with different rockets or spacecraft as their model.
Teams expect the study to take up to six months, collecting technical data from both Hubble and the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. This data will help determine whether it would be possible to safely rendezvous, dock, and move the telescope into a more stable orbit.
“This study is an exciting example of the innovative approaches NASA is exploring through private-public partnerships,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “As our fleet grows, we want to explore a wide range of opportunities to support the most robust, superlative science missions possible.”
While Hubble and Dragon will serve as test models for this study, portions of the mission concept may be applicable to other spacecraft, particularly those in near-Earth orbit like Hubble.
Hubble has been operating since 1990, about 335 miles above Earth in an orbit that is slowly decaying over time. Reboosting Hubble into a higher, more stable orbit could add multiple years of operations to its life.
At the end of its lifetime, NASA plans to safely de-orbit or dispose of Hubble.
“SpaceX and the Polaris Program want to expand the boundaries of current technology and explore how commercial partnerships can creatively solve challenging, complex problems,” said Jessica Jensen, vice president of Customer Operations & Integration at SpaceX. “Missions such as servicing Hubble would help us expand space capabilities to ultimately help all of us achieve our goals of becoming a space-faring, multiplanetary civilization.”
Adverts in Space
Please no.
Please no.
The boffins from Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology said:
What we propose to consider is a dedicated space system. A long-term space advertising mission would rely on a complex satellite system orbiting the Earth and demonstrating pixel images to observers on the ground. In this case, an advertisement appears as a constellation of bright artificial stars formed into an image that can be observed in clear night sky for several minutes.
The tl;dr of the paper – "Satellite Formation Flying for Space Advertising: From Technically Feasible to Economically Viable" – is to send up a constellation of about 50 12U-cubesats and place them in a Sun-synchronous orbit so that they are always in direct sunlight.
Each small satellite (about 20cm x 20cm x 34.05cm and weighing around 6-8kg) would then deploy solar reflectors, bouncing that sunlight down onto consumers. These satellites could be programmed to assume certain formations – like, perish the thought, "I'm lovin' it" – that change depending on the city below and the advertiser willing to shell out for that prime real estate we know as the sky.
But with space missions costing multiple millions, is it economically viable? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be yes, and much of the paper is dedicated to showing how. The boffins estimate, based on prior examples, the cost of manufacturing the satellites to be $48.7 million; testing, support and engineering comes in at $11.5 million; and launch itself $4.5 million – so we're looking at $65 million to have everything in place.
"A mission demonstrating images with magnitude of individual pixels ... has the payback period of 33.7 days, while a formation operating for 91.5 days ... can perform 24 image demonstrations within the lifetime, meaning 24 potential contractors for the mission with a net income of about $111.6 million."
It just occurred to me that chronically cloudy nights could be a good thing.
This has to be stopped.
This has to be stopped.
Omg, orbital advertisements.
That is almost as bad as using brain tech to try and make prisoners actually serve out 800 year sentences.
A new hell.
tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
Searching for the vomiting reaction right now, had to settle for the me-angry-not-like...
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
A titanic collision could have formed the moon within hours, new simulation shows
Bob McDonald's blog: A Mars-sized object hitting a proto-Earth formed a new moon surprisingly quickly
Scientists have been struggling for decades to answer a question an inquisitive child might ask: Where did the moon come from?Now, the most high resolution computer simulation ever made shows it could have been formed in a matter of hours following a collision between a proto-Earth and a Mars-sized orbital intruder.
Researchers from NASA and the Institute for Computational Cosmology's Planetary Giant Impact group and Durham University in the U.K. developed the simulation.
Theories about the origin of the moon have varied greatly over time, spurred by the fact that the moon is an unusual planetary satellite. No other rocky planet in our solar system has such a large moon.
One earlier idea suggested the moon was formed elsewhere in the solar system, wandered close to the Earth and was captured by our planet's gravity.
Another notion was that the Earth and moon peacefully formed together from the protoplanetary disk of dust and rocks that surrounded our Sun more than four billion years ago.
Then there is the fission idea, which proposes the primitive molten Earth was spinning so fast, part of its surface was flung off to become the moon. Some suggested the chunk that formed the moon came from what eventually became the Pacific Ocean.
Many of those early theories were cast into doubt over time. When the rocks brought back from the moon by the Apollo astronauts during the moon missions from 1969 to 1973 were analyzed, they were found to have a similar chemical and isotopic composition to the Earth. If the moon formed somewhere else in the solar system and was captured, it would most likely have a different composition.
The physics of gravitational capture and simultaneous formation proved to be unworkable with an object as large as our moon, and there is no evidence that the Earth was spinning super fast in the distant past.
The giant impact
This similarity between the composition of Earth and moon led to the giant impact model. This theory suggests that during the early days of planetary formation, a smaller proto-Earth was struck by another body, now referred to as Theia, that was roughly the size of Mars.The collision would have been colossal.
The violent impact would have destroyed Theia and mixed material from both worlds was thrown out into space, some returning to Earth and some eventually becoming the moon.
Earlier computer simulations showed how the debris temporarily turned the Earth into a ringed planet like Saturn. Over decades, or hundreds of years, material in the ring eventually coalesced into the moon. But exactly how that scenario played out had not been well understood. Now, this new, more detailed simulation shows the ring theory might be wrong and suggests the moon could have been born in a matter of hours.
Several parameters were tested, such as the angle of attack, speed of the impact and whether Theia was spinning or not. The scenario this detailed model predicts that results in the moon as it is today, starts with Theia hitting the Earth with a glancing blow, blending together with the Earth.
After that, the "splash" from the impact sends a giant blob into orbit that wobbled like jelly, with a smaller blob breaking off. The larger piece was drawn back into the Earth by gravity, while the smaller was thrown far enough away to remain in orbit and become the moon.
It is hard to believe that the peaceful orb shining in our night skies had such a violent beginning. But that is the history of all planets and moons in our solar system as they banged and crashed into each other inside a giant primordial cloud of gas and dust.
Rings of dust and gas have been spotted around other stars in our galaxy, with evidence of collisions happening within. One can only imagine the violence taking place there and strange new worlds that might emerge.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/moon-formed-hours-1.6616434
Narz
keeping it real
Cool! Was hoping the simulation link would have a graphical representation of the impact tho
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
James Webb telescope spies 'Pillars of Creation'
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63319814
EnglishEdward
Deity
Closes my eyes, and imagines the outline of Vlad Putin's face made from imitation stars.
Well I suppose it is a change from the black swastika on the moon.
Biggest explosion ever!!
BOAT – the brightest of all time puts out ~10,000 the sun's total lifetime energy
GRB221009A is the pink dot towards the centre of the image
BOAT – the brightest of all time puts out ~10,000 the sun's total lifetime energy
Astronomers have spotted what may be the most powerful explosion ever seen. The gamma ray burst, called GRB221009A, was spotted on 9 October, and even its afterglow is brighter than most objects in the sky.
This type of gamma ray burst (GRB) is thought to occur when a massive star explodes in a supernova, leaving behind a black hole. The explosion creates an extraordinary jet of light which makes up the GRB itself, and then the supernova causes a dimmer afterglow. This particular GRB appears so bright partially because it is about 2.4 billion light years away from Earth, making it one of the closest GRBs ever spotted in addition to being the brightest.
“If we look at all of the gamma ray bursts that have been detected, this one stands apart,” says Jillian Rastinejad at Northwestern University in Illinois. “Informally, we’ve been calling it the BOAT – the brightest of all time.” She and her colleagues calculated that a GRB this bright is expected to occur only once every thousand years or so.
We don’t know exactly how powerful this burst is, though, despite the fact that many telescopes around the world are looking at it. That is partially because it is so bright that it saturates the detectors of gamma-ray telescopes, so all they see are completely white pixels with no detail, says Andrew Levan at Radboud University in the Netherlands, one of Rastinejad’s colleagues. “If you had gamma-ray eyes, you’d be blinded,” he says. Current estimates put the energy of the GRB between 10^54 and 10^55 ergs, he says – in contrast, the total energy released by the sun throughout its lifetime is expected to be about 10^51 ergs.
GRB221009A is so bright that it is affecting Earth, even from billions of light years away. Naval radio transmitters recorded a strange disturbance in the upper atmosphere, which seems to have been caused by the powerful light from the GRB slamming into it. Detectors that search for high-energy photons – particles of light – have also seen extraordinary particles with energies far higher than anything produced at the Large Hadron Collider.
This has made a splash among astronomers. “It seems like pretty much every telescope in the world is starting to look at it,” says Rastinejad. But to learn more about the supernova itself and its home galaxy, they will have to wait until the bright jet fades, which could take months. Once that occurs, we should have a better idea of why this GRB was so extraordinarily bright.
GRB221009A is the pink dot towards the centre of the image
