Evan Gough, Author at Universe Today

October 3, 2019October 3, 2019 by Evan Gough

Here’s NASA’s New Plan to Get InSight’s Temperature Probe Into Mars

The mole with its wiring harness, and the scoop. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The mole is still stuck.

The mole is the name given to the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument on NASA’s Mars InSight lander. It’s job is to penetrate into the Martian surface to a depth of 5 meters (16 ft) to measure how heat flows from the planet’s interior to the surface. It’s part of InSight’s mission to understand the interior structure of Mars, and how it formed.

But it’s stuck at about 35 centimers (14 inches.) The mole can do science shy of its maximum depth of 5 meters, but not this shallow. And NASA, and the DLR (German Aerospace Center) who provided the mole, have a new plan to fix it.

October 3, 2019October 4, 2019 by Evan Gough

Juno is Afraid to Death of Jupiter’s Shadow. So it Fired its Thruster for Over 10 Hours to Avoid It.

Illustration of NASA's Juno spacecraft firing its main engine to slow down and go into orbit around Jupiter. Lockheed Martin built the Juno spacecraft for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Credit: NASA/Lockheed Martin

In a death-defying maneuver for the spacecraft, NASA’s Juno has completed an unprecedented and unplanned engine burn. The purpose? To save the spacecraft’s “life,” or at least the rest of its mission to Jupiter.

Jupiter casts a deep, dark shadow. Dark enough, in fact, to effectively kill Juno if it flies through it. Rather than let the spacecraft spend 12 battery-draining hours in Jupiter’s shadow, and then attempt a risky resuscitation on the other side, NASA took another course of action: a 10.5 hour burn of Juno’s reaction thrusters that will steer it clear of Jupiter’s life-draining shadow.

via Gfycat

October 2, 2019October 2, 2019 by Evan Gough

InSight Has Already Detected 21 Marsquakes

NASA's SEIS instrument on the Martian surface. SEIS is protected by a dome. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The SEIS (Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure) instrument on NASA’s InSight lander has sensed 21 Marsquakes since it was deployed on December 19th, 2018. It actually sensed over 100 events to date, but only 21 of them have been identified as Marsquakes. SEIS is extremely sensitive so mission scientists expected these results.

SEIS is a key part of InSight, NASA’s mission to understand the interior of Mars. Along with other instruments, it’ll help scientists understand what’s going on inside Mars.

October 2, 2019October 2, 2019 by Evan Gough

China’s Lander Successfully Grew Some Cotton Plants on the Moon. Fruit Flies and Potatoes Didn’t Fare So Well

A 3D reconstruction based on image processing and data analysis shows two cotton leaves grown in the Chang’e-4 lander on the far side of the moon. Image Credit: Chongqing University.

When China’s Chang’e-4 spacecraft landed on the lunar far side on January 3rd 2019, it made history. It was the first spacecraft to visit that part of the Moon, and among its payload was a 2.6 kg (5.7 lb) mini-biosphere called the Lunar Micro Ecosystem (LME).

The sealed, cylindrical biosphere is only 18 cm (7.1 in) long and 16 cm (6.3 in) in diameter. The LME carried six lifeforms, kept in mostly Earth-like conditions except for micro-gravity and lunar radiation.

October 2, 2019October 2, 2019 by Evan Gough

Nine Astronauts from Four Different Space Agencies are on the International Space Station Right Now

The usual six-astronaut crew of the International Space Station welcomed three more and a cargo vehicle last week, making for a full house on the orbital outpost. Image Credit: ESA

The International Space Station’s usual complement of six astronauts grew by 50% recently, making things a little crowded up there. The nine astronauts come from four separate space agencies, and for the first time, an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is onboard the ISS.

The ISS is a multicultural place. Astronauts from around the world serve on the station to advance the scientific goals of humanity and to build cooperative ties between Earth’s different peoples. It’s kind of like Star Trek, but in space.

October 1, 2019October 1, 2019 by Evan Gough

India’s Crashed Lander is In This Picture, Somewhere

The Chandrayaan-2 lander, Vikram, attempted a landing September 7th (Friday the 6th in the United States), on a small patch of lunar highland smooth plains between Simpelius N and Manzinus C craters. Unfortunately the landing was not successful and location of the spacecraft has not been announced. The scene above was captured from an LROC Quickmap fly-around of the site, image width is about 150 kilometers across the center [NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University].

This image of the lunar highlands is from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. You’d need superhuman eyesight to spot it, but India’s crashed Vikram lander is in there somewhere. The lander attempted to land on the Moon on September 6th, but when it was only 2.1 km above the surface, within reach of its objective, ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) lost contact with the spacecraft.

October 1, 2019October 1, 2019 by Evan Gough

A Red Dwarf Star Has a Jupiter-Like Planet. So Massive it Shouldn’t Exist, and Yet, There It Is

Artist's illustration of the newfound gas-giant planet GJ 3512b, which circles a red dwarf star. (Image credit: Guillem Anglada-Escude—IEEC/Science-wave, using SpaceEngine.org (CC BY 4.0))

Thanks to the Kepler mission and other efforts to find exoplanets, we’ve learned a lot about the exoplanet population. We know that we’re likely to find super-Earths and Neptune-mass exoplanets orbiting low-mass stars, while larger planets are found around more massive stars. This lines up well with the core accretion theory of planetary formation.

But not all of our observations comply with that theory. The discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a small red dwarf means our understanding of planetary formation might not be as clear as we thought. A second theory of planetary formation, called the disk instability theory, might explain this surprising discovery.

September 30, 2019September 30, 2019 by Evan Gough

Confirmed. Fossils That Formed 3.5 billion Years Ago, Really are Fossils. The Oldest Evidence of Life Found So Far

A stromatolite from the Pilbara Craton in Australia. Image Credit: By Didier Descouens - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15944367

The title of Earth’s Earliest Life has been returned to the fossils in the Pilbara region of Australia. The Pilbara fossils had held that title since the 1980s, until researchers studying ancient rocks in Greenland found evidence of ancient life there. But subsequent research questioned the biological nature of the Greenland evidence, which put the whole issue into question again.

Now a new study of the Pilbara fossils has identified the presence of preserved organic matter in those fossils, and handed the ‘Ancient Life’ crown back to them.

September 27, 2019September 27, 2019 by Evan Gough

Mice That Spend a Month in Space Were Able to Reproduce Once They Got Back to Earth

The International Space Station (ISS), seen here with Earth as a backdrop. Credit: NASA

A team of Japanese researchers have used sperm from mice that spent time aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to fertilize female mice back on Earth. While previous research has shown that freeze-dried mouse sperm stored in space can experience radiation damage, these results show that the sperm from live mice may not suffer the same damage.

September 27, 2019September 27, 2019 by Evan Gough

Astronomers Have Found a Place With Three Supermassive Black Holes Orbiting Around Each Other

The three black holes at the center of three separate galaxies as imaged by Chandra and other telescopes. Image Credit: Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/George Mason Univ./R. Pfeifle et al.; Optical: SDSS & NASA/STScI

Astronomers have spotted three supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of three colliding galaxies a billion light years away from Earth. That alone is unusual, but the three black holes are also glowing in x-ray emissions. This is evidence that all three are also active galactic nuclei (AGN,) gobbling up material and flaring brightly.

This discovery may shed some light on the “final parsec problem,” a long-standing issue in astrophysics and black hole mergers.