Data from Southwest Research Institute-led instruments aboard ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft have helped reveal auroral emissions in the far ultraviolet around a comet for the first time.
Source: www.swri.org/press-release/rosetta-ultraviolet-aurora-comet-67p-churyumov-gerasimenko
NASA’s Mars Pathfinder mission landed on the Red Planet on July 4, 1997. It’s tiny rover, named Sojourner after abolitionist Sojourner Truth, spent 83 days of a planned seven-day mission exploring the Martian terrain, acquiring images, and taking chemical, atmospheric and other measurements. When the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft approached its destination, no NASA mission had successfully reached Mars in more than 20 years. The final data transmission received from Pathfinder was at 10:23 UTC on September 27, 1997.
This image shows the Twin Peaks, which are modest-size hills to the southwest of the Mars Pathfinder landing site. They were discovered on the first panoramas taken by the IMP camera on the July 4, and subsequently identified in Viking Orbiter images taken more than 20 years before. The peaks are approximately 100 feet tall (30-35 meters). North Twin is approximately 860 meters (2800 feet) from the lander, and South Twin is about a kilometer away (3300 feet). The scene includes bouldery ridges and swales or “hummocks” of flood debris that range from a few tens of meters away from the lander to the distance of the South Twin Peak.
Read more here –
Source: scitechdaily.com/mars-twin-peaks-super-resolution-image-from-mars-pathfinder/
Time capsules from the birth of our Solar System more than 4 billion years ago, the swarms of Trojan asteroids associated with Jupiter are thought to be remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets. The Trojans orbit the Sun in two loose groups, with one group leading ahead of Jupiter in its path, the other trailing behind. Clustered around the two Lagrange points equidistant from the Sun and Jupiter, the Trojans are stabilized by the Sun and its largest planet in a gravitational balancing act. These primitive bodies hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system, and perhaps even the origins of organic material on Earth.
Lucy will be the first space mission to study the Trojans. The mission takes its name from the fossilized human ancestor (called “Lucy” by her discoverers) whose skeleton provided unique insight into humanity’s evolution. Likewise, the Lucy mission will revolutionize our knowledge of planetary origins and the formation of the solar system.
Lucy will launch in October 2021 and, with boosts from Earth’s gravity, will complete a 12-year journey to eight different asteroids — a Main Belt asteroid and seven Trojans, four of which are members of “two-for-the-price-of-one” binary systems. Lucy’s complex path will take it to both clusters of Trojans and give us our first close-up view of all three major types of bodies in the swarms (so-called C-, P- and D-types).
The dark-red P- and D-type Trojans resemble those found in the Kuiper Belt of icy bodies that extends beyond the orbit of Neptune. The C-types are found mostly in the outer parts of the Main Belt of asteroids, between Mars and Jupiter. All of the Trojans are thought to be abundant in dark carbon compounds. Below an insulating blanket of dust, they are probably rich in water and other volatile substances.
While our Moon is airless, research indicates the presence of hematite, a form of rust that normally requires oxygen and water. That has scientists puzzled.
Mars has long been known for its rust. Iron on its surface, combined with water and oxygen from the ancient past, give the Red Planet its hue. But scientists were recently surprised to find evidence that our airless Moon has rust on it as well.
A new paper in Science Advances reviews data from the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 orbiter, which discovered water ice and mapped out a variety of minerals while surveying the Moon’s surface in 2008. Lead author Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii has studied that water extensively in data from Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument, or M3, which was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Water interacts with rock to produce a diversity of minerals, and M3 detected spectra – or light reflected off surfaces – that revealed the Moon’s poles had a very different composition than the rest of it.
Source: www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/the-moon-is-rusting-and-researchers-want-to-know-why
Not only has the discovery of eoxplanets throughout our galaxy provided a host of new worlds for astronomers to catalogue and observe, but also thrown up new challenges about their formation. New work published in Science by an international team including Carnegie’s Jaehan Bae could explain the architecture of multi-star systems in which planets are separated by wide gaps and do not orbit on the same plane as their host star’s equatorial center.
“In our Solar System, the eight planets and many other minor objects orbit in a flat plane around the Sun; but in some distant systems, planets orbit on an incline—sometimes a very steep one,” Bae explained. “Understanding the origins of extremely oblique orbital angles such as these could help reveal details about the planetary formation process.”
Stars are born in nurseries of gas and dust called molecular clouds—often forming in small groups of two or three. These young stars are surrounded by rotating disks of leftover material, which accretes to form baby planets. The disk’s structure will determine the distribution of the planets that form from it, but much about this process remains unknown.
Led by University of Exeter’s Stefan Kraus, the team found the first direct evidence confirming the theoretical prediction that gravitational interactions between the members of multi-star systems can warp or break their disks, resulting in misaligned rings surrounding the stellar hosts.
Read more at the link below –
Source: carnegiescience.edu/news/peculiar-planetary-system-architecture-around-three-orion-stars-explained
For as long as there has been a Universe, space has been expanding. It winked into existence roughly 13.8 billion years ago, and has been puffing up ever since, like a giant cosmic balloon.
Source: www.sciencealert.com/we-can-t-figure-out-how-fast-the-universe-is-expanding-here-s-why/
Gamma ray pulars werep discovered a little while ago, and in onepone family, the spider pulsar, it accretes or gains matter from a nearby companion star in much the same way some spiders eat their mates. In this “Black Widow” type of spider pulsar the companion haschas been confirmed by the people, through gamma-ray pulsations for the first time.
A win for Einstein@Home !
Source: astrobites.org/2020/08/22/gamma-ray-pulsar-by-the-people/
The last time we saw NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission was on July 30, 2020, as it disappeared into the black of deep space on a trajectory for Mars. But with NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System, you can follow in real time as humanity’s most sophisticated rover – and the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter traveling with it – treks millions of miles over the next six months to Jezero Crater.
“Eyes on the Solar System visualizes the same trajectory data that the navigation team uses to plot Perseverance’s course to Mars,” said Fernando Abilleira, the Mars 2020 mission design and navigation manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “If you want to follow along with us on our journey, that’s the place to be.”
No surprises that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought out the inner astronomer in many folks. Maybe one of the few silver linings to this wretched thing.
Source: www.salon.com/2020/08/16/amateur-astronomy-trend-pandemic-comet-neowise/
The iconic Parkes radio telescope, otherwise known as The Dish, has been officially recognised for its contribution to Australian astronomy and humankind’s understanding of the Universe with its addition to the National Heritage List.
Source: www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2020/CSIRO-Parkes-radio-telescope-added-to-National-Heritage-List
Astronomers are worried about the SpaceX satellites ruining astro images but what’s there are the moment is nothing compared to what could happen once crashes between satellites produces a cascading fields of space debris. Crashes in space are not only extremely costly, but they also leave behind huge amounts of orbital debris that can hurtle through orbit at incredible speeds for thousands of years in some cases.
The oldest zombie satellite still in orbit is Vanguard-1, which was launched by the US in 1958.
“Space junk is a big problem now, after 60 years of humans flinging spacecraft into the sky with not enough thought about the long-term consequences,” said Dr Gorman, a space debris expert.
“It’s going to become an even bigger problem as massive constellations like Starlink are launched.”
Source: www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-07/spacex-amazon-satellites-scramble-for-space-around-earth/12512978?
Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) announced today the discovery of a complex set of spiral arms extending to 1000 astronomical units from the young variable star, RU Lup.
Source: www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2020-16
A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Ting Li and Alexander Ji discovered a stellar stream composed of the remnants of an ancient globular cluster that was torn apart by the Milky Way’s gravity 2 billion years ago, when Earth’s most-complex lifeforms were single-celled organisms. This surprising finding, published in Nature, upends conventional wisdom about how these celestial objects form.
Source: carnegiescience.edu/node/2646
In October 2020 Mars will be roughly the closest it gets to Earth. This close approach is call an “opposition” and means that the Earth and Mars are on the same side of the Sun. This happens about once every two years. Here’s a great and detailed overview of this event.
THE 2020-2021 PERIHELIC APPARITION OF MARS By: Jeffrey D. Beish (08-NOV-2016)