tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
"Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" should have been a Ship-name in a Culture novel.
The thread for space cadets!
- Thread starter hobbsyoyo
- Start date
"Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" should have been a Ship-name in a Culture novel.
EnglishEdward
Deity
I preferred the Guardian report:
www.theguardian.com
Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship rocket blows up minutes after launch
Largest and most powerful rocket ever built blasts off on test flight that is hoped to be step on human journey to Mars
www.theguardian.com
r16
not deity
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2008
- Messages
- 11,999
rapid whatever of Starship fame was apparently coined by NASA in the 1960s when Flopnik/Kaputniks were international embrassments .
actually googled it , and there were at least 3 more names for that one single event ... Oopsnik , Dudnick and Stayputnik .
actually googled it , and there were at least 3 more names for that one single event ... Oopsnik , Dudnick and Stayputnik .
The most powerful launch ever left a crater on the launch pad. 
10 seconds before the heavy as hell rocket started to leave the ground.
This van was 500 meters away I think?
Broke a window 6 miles (10km) away too.
Spaceship will revolutionize space launches if they can ever get it to work.
Won't have to fold stuff into a pretzel to fit inside because it is huge and roomy.
10 seconds before the heavy as hell rocket started to leave the ground.
This van was 500 meters away I think?
Broke a window 6 miles (10km) away too.
Spaceship will revolutionize space launches if they can ever get it to work.
Won't have to fold stuff into a pretzel to fit inside because it is huge and roomy.
I read a couple of things about that, no idea if they are right.The most powerful launch ever left a crater on the launch pad.
10 seconds before the heavy as hell rocket started to leave the ground.
This van was 500 meters away I think?
Broke a window 6 miles (10km) away too.
Spaceship will revolutionize space launches if they can ever get it to work.
Won't have to fold stuff into a pretzel to fit inside because it is huge and roomy.
WRT the damage to the launch pad:
The same stresses weren't put on the pad, but pad damage did happen during the test firings. SpaceX repaired and tried to reinforce the pad with a specialized concrete called FONDAG RS which "can be used in severe duty industrial concrete applications that may require refractory performance." If you want to go into depth on the repeated test firings, repeated concrete rain, and repeated pad rebuildings, see e.g. the CSI Starbase video "SpaceX's Major Concrete Problem + Water Deluge Construction Begins at Starbase".
Musk tweeted on 21 Apr
Recall also that the 31 engine static fire was "less than half of the booster's capability" but it still caused an audible post-fire rain of debris (from NASASpaceflight's 31 engine static fire coverage) (though possibly more from the OLM itself than the pad).
WRT the explosion:
At this time probably the most authoritative source is the livestream. There it is pretty clear that a lot of debris was flying during engine start, and by the time the engine status display appears several engines are inoperative. Take off is slow and during ascent more engines fail and the engines have visibly different plumes, suggesting problems with the remaining engines (possible burning out running 'engine rich').
Assuming the Methane and Oxygen indicators in the stream are correct the LOX is running out much faster than Methane, possibly indicating leaks or other issues that would complicate the planned separation.
While engines are still running it starts to tumble, and then several explosions, at least one claimed to be range safety system by commentator. Camera cut to the separation mechanism during this and it appears to remain static through to loss of signal, suggesting that any failure was to activate the system, not system partially operating.
Various you tubers have released videos such as this one by Scott Manley showing the shear amount of damage done to the pad during the launch, and also doing some math to compare observed vs expected performance that suggest the flight was in trouble throughout ascent.
So it is possible there was a failure of Starship to separate, but if so it happened on a rocket already well off nominal and would not be expected to be confirmed one way or another for a couple of months until official reports get written.
Balloon-borne telescope returns first photos in search for dark matter
Helium is way cheaper than rocket fuel, and the pictures are just as good if you get high enough
The world's first wide-field, balloon-borne telescope has begun returning images to Earth, with scientists keen to begin months of imagery to help investigate the existence of dark matter.
The telescope, a collaboration between the University of Toronto, Princeton University, Durham University and NASA, lifted off from New Zealand on April 16, and was carried to an altitude of 33.5 kilometers (20.8 miles) by one of NASA's stadium-sized super pressure balloons. At that altitude, SuperBIT is floating above all but the last half-percent of the Earth's atmosphere, giving it a level of visibility that ground-based telescopes can't match.
the Antennae: The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars.
Helium is way cheaper than rocket fuel, and the pictures are just as good if you get high enough
The world's first wide-field, balloon-borne telescope has begun returning images to Earth, with scientists keen to begin months of imagery to help investigate the existence of dark matter.
The telescope, a collaboration between the University of Toronto, Princeton University, Durham University and NASA, lifted off from New Zealand on April 16, and was carried to an altitude of 33.5 kilometers (20.8 miles) by one of NASA's stadium-sized super pressure balloons. At that altitude, SuperBIT is floating above all but the last half-percent of the Earth's atmosphere, giving it a level of visibility that ground-based telescopes can't match.
the Antennae: The two spiral galaxies started to interact a few hundred million years ago, making the Antennae galaxies one of the nearest and youngest examples of a pair of colliding galaxies. Nearly half of the faint objects in the Antennae image are young clusters containing tens of thousands of stars.
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
iSpace: First private Moon landing likely to have failed
A Japanese company hoping to make history by carrying out the first private Moon landing says its mission is likely to have failed.Communication was lost with the Hakuto-R lunar lander moments before it was due to touch down.
Engineers are investigating what happened.
The Tokyo-based iSpace had hoped the lander would release an exploratory rover, as well as a tennis ball-sized robot developed by a toymaker.
The craft was launched by a SpaceX rocket in December, and took five months to reach its destination.
"We have not confirmed communication with the lander," iSpace CEO Takeshi Hakamada said about 25 minutes after the planned landing.
"We have to assume that we could not complete the landing on the lunar surface," he added.
The M1 lander appeared set to touch down at around 16:40 GMT on Tuesday after coming as close as 295 feet (89 m) from the lunar surface, a live animation showed.
The lander was just over 2m tall and weighed 340kg, relatively small and compact by lunar spacecraft standards. It had been due for an hour-long landing manoeuvre from its orbit, around 100km above the surface, where it was moving at nearly 6,000km/hour.
After reaching the landing site in the Moon's northern hemisphere, the Hakuto-R was to deploy two payloads to analyse the lunar soil, its geology and atmosphere. One of them was made by the toy company TOMY, which created the Transformers.
The United States, Russia and China are the only countries to have managed to put a robot on the lunar surface, all through government-sponsored programmes.
The primary aim of the mission was to assess the viability of commercial launches to the lunar surface. It was the first test by iSpace of what they hope will be a series of commercial landers over the next few years, each more ambitious than the previous.
The company's vision is to provide commercial services for a sustained human presence on the lunar surface, such as sending up equipment for mining and producing rocket fuel.
According to Dr Adam Baker, who is director of a space consultancy firm not involved with the project, Rocket Engineering, a successful landing would have represented a "step change" in commercial involvement in space exploration.
"If it is affordable and can be repeated, it opens up the door for anyone who is prepared to pay the price to land something on the surface of the Moon," he told the BBC.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65389730
Black-hole image reveals details of turmoil around the abyss
The first image of a black hole wowed the world in 2019. Fresh data could now help to explain what exactly radio astronomers were looking at — including details of the maelstrom it creates. And in an updated image, the black hole’s original orange ring now appears thinner, courtesy of a new way of analysing the existing data.
The picture that graced the front pages of newspapers around the globe in 2019 showed the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87, called M87* (see ‘Black-hole image evolves’). By themselves, black holes do not emit any radiation, so the orange doughnut (representing radio-wavelength emissions) must have been produced not directly by the black hole, but by matter in its vicinity that is ‘superheated’ and twisted by magnetic fields. “Without any matter around, you would not even see a ring,” says Thomas Krichbaum, a radio astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. “Something has to radiate.”
The black hole’s gravity bent rays of light to produce the ring shape, as expected from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But although astrophysicists had theories, there was no clear indication — on the basis of that image alone — as to the origin of the radiation. The most likely explanation was that the glow resulted from the same mechanism that causes a stupendously bright jet of superheated matter to protrude far out from the host galaxy. The existence of this jet was known long before the black hole was imaged, and it had been photographed with more conventional instruments including the Hubble Space Telescope.
The original M87* image was blurry, and showed only the immediate vicinity of the black hole’s event horizon, the spherical surface that shrouds its interior. Any material that crosses the event horizon falls inwards, never to return. It was challenging to link the image to the larger-scale pictures of the jet.
In a paper published in Nature on 26 April1, radio astronomers including Krichbaum crunched through a separate data set and found a cone of radio emissions emanating from the black hole in the same direction as the jet.
The original M87* image used 2017 data from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of observatories scattered across four continents that examined the black hole at a wavelength of 1.3 millimetres. The latest paper used data taken in 2018 with the Global Millimetre VLBI Array (GMVA), a separate and older network that shares many collaborators with the EHT and uses some of the same facilities, but observes at 3.5 millimetres.
Both networks use a technique called interferometry, which combines data taken simultaneously at multiple locations. The larger the separation between the participating observatories, the better the resolution and the more details astronomers can discern; going to shorter wavelengths has the same effect. With its lower resolution, the GMVA cannot see the ring as sharply as the EHT, and it needs some extra data massaging. But the GMVA is able to see a wider picture. “For the first time, we see how the jet connects to the ring,” says Krichbaum.
In a separate paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on 13 April2, astrophysicist Lia Medeiros at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and her collaborators reanalysed the 2017 EHT data using a new machine-learning algorithm.
Algorithms that process the telescope data must overcome an intrinsic limitation of interferometry: even with observatories on opposite sides of the planet, the array does not truly gather data with an Earth-sized dish, but with shards of one. “There is an infinite number of images that are consistent with our data,” Medeiros says. “You need to make a choice about which one you think is most likely.”
In the 2019 results, the EHT team used conservative algorithms that artificially blurred the image. Medeiros’s team developed an algorithm based on a technique called dictionary learning that maximizes the resolution — and produces a substantially thinner ring. Medeiros is eager to apply the technique to data on Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our Galaxy. The EHT released an image of Sagittarius A* last year.
The EHT has also produced various versions of the M87* images, including one showing signatures of magnetic fields, and has used older data to show how the ring has evolved over the years, in images that can be combined into a movie. The collaboration conducted observation campaigns in 2018 and once a year between 2021 and 2023, but has not yet finished analysing those data. Most intriguingly, the 2023 campaign included observations at the challenging wavelength of 0.87 millimetres, which should further improve the resolution.
Spoiler Evolution of the image :
GreatLordofPie
Prince
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2009
- Messages
- 386
Sweet, Eldritch horror beyond human comprehension
The first up-close images of Mars’s little-known moonlet Deimos have revealed that it is made of the same material as the red planet. The tiny, 12.4-kilometre-wide moon probably formed together with Mars, rather than as an asteroid that was captured in the planet’s orbit.
Spoiler Flypast :
We have seen a star eat a planet
Planets with short orbital periods (roughly under 10 days) are common around stars like the Sun1,2. Stars expand as they evolve and thus we expect their close planetary companions to be engulfed, possibly powering luminous mass ejections from the host star3,4,5. However, this phase has never been directly observed. Here we report observations of ZTF SLRN-2020, a short-lived optical outburst in the Galactic disk accompanied by bright and long-lived infrared emission. The resulting light curve and spectra share striking similarities with those of red novae6,7—a class of eruptions now confirmed8 to arise from mergers of binary stars. Its exceptionally low optical luminosity (approximately 1035 erg s−1) and radiated energy (approximately 6.5 × 1041 erg) point to the engulfment of a planet of fewer than roughly ten Jupiter masses by its Sun-like host star. We estimate the Galactic rate of such subluminous red novae to be roughly between 0.1 and several per year. Future Galactic plane surveys should routinely identify these, showing the demographics of planetary engulfment and the ultimate fate of planets in the inner Solar System.
Planets with short orbital periods (roughly under 10 days) are common around stars like the Sun1,2. Stars expand as they evolve and thus we expect their close planetary companions to be engulfed, possibly powering luminous mass ejections from the host star3,4,5. However, this phase has never been directly observed. Here we report observations of ZTF SLRN-2020, a short-lived optical outburst in the Galactic disk accompanied by bright and long-lived infrared emission. The resulting light curve and spectra share striking similarities with those of red novae6,7—a class of eruptions now confirmed8 to arise from mergers of binary stars. Its exceptionally low optical luminosity (approximately 1035 erg s−1) and radiated energy (approximately 6.5 × 1041 erg) point to the engulfment of a planet of fewer than roughly ten Jupiter masses by its Sun-like host star. We estimate the Galactic rate of such subluminous red novae to be roughly between 0.1 and several per year. Future Galactic plane surveys should routinely identify these, showing the demographics of planetary engulfment and the ultimate fate of planets in the inner Solar System.
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
The crazy plan to explode a nuclear bomb on the Moon
In the 1950s, with the USSR seemingly sprinting ahead in the space race, US scientists hatched a bizarre plan – nuking the surface of the Moon to frighten the Soviets.The moment astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped out on to the Moon's surface in 1969 is one of the most memorable moments in history.
But what if the Moon Armstrong stepped onto was scarred by huge craters and poisoned from the effects of nuclear bombardment?
At first reading, the title of the research paper – A Study of Lunar Research Flights, Vol 1 – sounds blandly bureaucratic and peaceful. The kind of paper easy to ignore. And that was probably the point.
Glance at the cover, however, and things look a little different.
Emblazoned in the centre is a shield depicting an atom, a nuclear bomb, and a mushroom cloud – the emblem of the Air Force Special Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, which played a key role in the development and testing of nuclear weapons.
Down at the bottom is the author's name: L Reiffel, or Leonard Reiffel, one of America's leading nuclear physicists. He worked with Enrico Fermi, the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor who is known as the "architect of the nuclear bomb".
Project A119, as it was known, was a top-secret proposal to detonate a hydrogen bomb on the Moon. Hydrogen bombs were vastly more destructive than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, and the latest in nuclear weapon design at the time. Asked to "fast track" the project by senior officers in the Air Force, Reiffel produced many reports between May 1958 and January 1959 on the feasibility of the plan.
Incredibly, one scientist enabling this horrific scheme was future visionary Carl Sagan. In fact, the existence of the project was only discovered in the 1990s because Sagan had mentioned it on an application to an elite university.
While it might have helped to answer some rudimentary scientific questions about the Moon, Project A119's primary purpose was as a show of force. The bomb would explode on the appropriately named Terminator Line – the border between the light and dark side of the Moon – to create a bright flash of light that anyone, but particularly anyone in the Kremlin, could see with the naked eye. The absence of an atmosphere meant there wouldn't be a mushroom cloud.
There is only one convincing explanation for proposing such a horrendous plan – and the motivation for it lies somewhere between insecurity and desperation.
In the 1950s, it didn't look like America was winning the Cold War. Political and popular opinion in the United States held that the Soviet Union was ahead in the growth of its nuclear arsenal, particularly in the development, and number, of nuclear bombers ("the bomber gap") and nuclear missiles ("the missile gap").
In 1952, the US had exploded the first hydrogen bomb. Three years later the Soviets shocked Washington by exploding their own. In 1957 they went one better, stealing a lead in the space race with the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in orbit around the world.
It didn't help American nerves that Sputnik was launched on top of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile – albeit a modified one – nor that the US's own attempt to launch an "artificial moon" ended in a huge, fiery explosion. The inferno that consumed their Vanguard rocket was captured on film and shown around the world. A British newsreel at the time was brutal: "THE VANGUARD FAILS…a big setback indeed…in the realm of prestige and propaganda..."
All the while, US schoolchildren were being shown the famous "Duck and Cover" information film, in which Bert the animated turtle helps teach children what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.
Later that same year, US newspapers citing a senior intelligence source reported that "Soviets to H-Bomb Moon On Revolution Anniversary Nov 7" (The Daily Times, New Philadelphia, Ohio) and then followed it up with reports that the Soviets might already be planning to launch a nuclear-armed rocket at our nearest neighbour.
Like with other Cold War rumours, its origins are hard to fathom.
Strangely, this scare also likely motivated the Soviets to develop their plans. Codenamed E4, their plan was a carbon copy of the Americans', and eventually dismissed by the Soviets for similar reasons – the fear that a failed launch could result in the bomb dropping down on Soviet soil. They described the potential for a "highly undesirable international incident".
They may have simply realised that landing on the Moon was the bigger prize.
But Project A119 would have worked.
In 2000 Reiffel had his say. He confirmed that it was "technically feasible", and that the explosion would have been visible on Earth.
The loss of the pristine lunar environment was less of a worry to the US Air Force despite the scientists' concerns.
"Project A119 was one of several ideas that were floated for an exciting response to Sputnik," says Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear technology, "that included shooting down Sputnik, which feels very spiteful. They refer to them as stunts… designed to impress people.
"Now what they did in the end was put up their own satellite, and that took a little while, but they continued this project somewhat seriously, into at least the late 1950s.
"It is a pretty interesting window into the sort of American mindset at that time. This push to compete in a way that creates something very impressive. I think, in this case, impressive and horrifying are a bit too close to each other."
He isn't sure that fear of the anti-communist witch hunt made nuclear physicists work on this project. "Anyone who's in these roles is probably self-selected to some degree," he says. "They don't mind doing the work. If they were afraid, they could do a million other things. A lot of scientists did this in the Cold War; they said physics has gotten too political."
There may have been more self-examination by the Vietnam War.
"Project A119 reminds me of the segment in The Simpsons when Lisa sees Nelson's 'Nuke the Whales' poster on his wall," says Bleddyn Bowen, an expert in international relations in outer space. "And he says, 'Well you've got to nuke something.'
"These were serious studies, but they didn't get any serious funding or attention when they left the space community. It was part of the late 50s, early 60s space mania before anybody knew exactly what nature the Space Age was going to take," he says.
"If there is going to be anything resembling this kind of lunar hysteria again it is going to run afoul of the established international legal order… agreed by almost every state in the world."
Could these plans surface again, despite the international consensus? "I've heard some noises coming out from some places and the Pentagon about looking at US Space Force missions for the lunar environment," Bowen says.
If some of the more outlandish ideas don't find root in the US, that doesn't mean that they couldn't find favour further afield – such as China. "I wouldn't be surprised if there's a community in China now wanting to push some of these ideas because they think the Moon is cool, and they work in the military," Bowen adds.
Most of the details of Project A119 are still shrouded in mystery. Many of the were apparently destroyed.
Its ultimate lesson, perhaps, is that we should never gloss over the research paper with the blandly bureaucratic name without, at least, reading it first.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230505-the-crazy-plan-to-explode-a-nuclear-bomb-on-the-moon
So now NASA reckon the milky way has two fewer arms? They are going to tell us it has grown legs next!
New images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are shedding light on the true structure of the Milky Way, revealing that it has just two major arms of stars instead of the four it was previously thought to possess.
New images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are shedding light on the true structure of the Milky Way, revealing that it has just two major arms of stars instead of the four it was previously thought to possess.
AdamCrock
Polish Pirate
Hey this question may sound stupid but how can they make pictures of our own galaxy like the one above ?
My stupid answer :They fly a probe millions of light years away from our galaxy to take a picture of it whole and then they send it back via FTL data transmitter back to Earth .
Or maybe it's a picture of another galaxy ? Or maybe there is a gigantic mirror out there somewhere ?
edit : oh yeah , I've entered the link and they say exactly that :
"After all, we sit in the midst of it and can't step outside for a bird's eye view."
and
"An artist's concept of the structure of our two-armed Milky Way"
Now I feel even more stupid Forget I've asked 
My stupid answer :They fly a probe millions of light years away from our galaxy to take a picture of it whole and then they send it back via FTL data transmitter back to Earth .
Or maybe it's a picture of another galaxy ? Or maybe there is a gigantic mirror out there somewhere ?
edit : oh yeah , I've entered the link and they say exactly that :
"After all, we sit in the midst of it and can't step outside for a bird's eye view."
and
"An artist's concept of the structure of our two-armed Milky Way"
Now I feel even more stupid
Forget I've asked
Last edited:
Fair question, and that is why the galaxy is growing and loosing arms like they are a fashion fad. For a more realistic view have a look here (http://gruze.org/galaxymap/map_2020/). That map shows the data from the GAIA satellite. While extensive it covers not even half the radius of the galaxy. Add to that we can't easily observe objects behind the core, because there is too much stuff and you see why it is so difficult to nail down something as simple as the number of arms.
They have found an earth sized rocky planet that may have liquid water only 90 light-years from Earth
I am not sure it will be good target for colonisation. It is tidally locked to its star, with a year of about 3 days. The overall average temperature is over 120° C, but on the dark side there may well be a cool bit that could support liquid water. Because it is so close to its star, and as it has a sub-neptune like planetary neighbor it is likely to be highly volcanic from the tidal forces.
Writeup Paper
Purple d is the "earthlike" one
I am not sure it will be good target for colonisation. It is tidally locked to its star, with a year of about 3 days. The overall average temperature is over 120° C, but on the dark side there may well be a cool bit that could support liquid water. Because it is so close to its star, and as it has a sub-neptune like planetary neighbor it is likely to be highly volcanic from the tidal forces.
Writeup Paper
Purple d is the "earthlike" one
JWST spots biggest water plume jet spewing from a moon of Saturn
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted Saturn’s moon Enceladus spraying out a huge plume of water vapour, far bigger than any previously seen there. This enormous cloud might contain the chemical ingredients of life, escaping from beneath the moon’s icy surface.
In 2005, a NASA spacecraft called Cassini discovered icy particles squirting from Enceladus’s subsurface ocean through cracks in the moon’s surface. But JWST shows that material is spraying much farther than previously thought — many times deeper into space than the size of Enceladus itself.
Enceladus excites astrobiologists because it is one of the few ‘ocean worlds’ in the Solar System, making it one of the best places to look for extraterrestrial life. The salty ocean that lies beneath Enceladus’s outer covering of ice is a possible haven for living organisms, which could be sustained by chemical energy at hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.
The material that squirts out of Enceladus, primarily through fractures known as tiger stripes around the moon’s south pole, is a direct link to that potential extraterrestrial ecosystem. The plumes seen by Cassini contained silica particles that were probably carried up from the sea floor by churning fluids. Cassini flew many times through Enceladus’s plumes, measuring ice grains and life-friendly chemicals such as methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia.
On 9 November 2022, JWST peeked briefly at Enceladus. Just 4.5 minutes’ worth of data revealed the enormous, very cold plume of water vapour. The forthcoming paper will quantify how much water is spraying out and its temperature, Faggi said. But the plume is likely to be of low density, more like a diffuse, cold cloud than a damp spray. That’s not great news for anyone looking to grab samples from the plume and hoping to find life, as the signs of life may be too sparse to detect. Ice grains seen by Cassini much closer to Enceladus are more likely to have high concentrations of organic particles, says Shannon MacKenzie, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted Saturn’s moon Enceladus spraying out a huge plume of water vapour, far bigger than any previously seen there. This enormous cloud might contain the chemical ingredients of life, escaping from beneath the moon’s icy surface.
In 2005, a NASA spacecraft called Cassini discovered icy particles squirting from Enceladus’s subsurface ocean through cracks in the moon’s surface. But JWST shows that material is spraying much farther than previously thought — many times deeper into space than the size of Enceladus itself.
Enceladus excites astrobiologists because it is one of the few ‘ocean worlds’ in the Solar System, making it one of the best places to look for extraterrestrial life. The salty ocean that lies beneath Enceladus’s outer covering of ice is a possible haven for living organisms, which could be sustained by chemical energy at hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.
The material that squirts out of Enceladus, primarily through fractures known as tiger stripes around the moon’s south pole, is a direct link to that potential extraterrestrial ecosystem. The plumes seen by Cassini contained silica particles that were probably carried up from the sea floor by churning fluids. Cassini flew many times through Enceladus’s plumes, measuring ice grains and life-friendly chemicals such as methane, carbon dioxide and ammonia.
On 9 November 2022, JWST peeked briefly at Enceladus. Just 4.5 minutes’ worth of data revealed the enormous, very cold plume of water vapour. The forthcoming paper will quantify how much water is spraying out and its temperature, Faggi said. But the plume is likely to be of low density, more like a diffuse, cold cloud than a damp spray. That’s not great news for anyone looking to grab samples from the plume and hoping to find life, as the signs of life may be too sparse to detect. Ice grains seen by Cassini much closer to Enceladus are more likely to have high concentrations of organic particles, says Shannon MacKenzie, a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Last edited:
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Enceladus is so tiny it makes Europa look like a gas giant. Still, it's one of the good ones. And exciting that it's even more exciting than before.
Similar threads
