A graphic designer in Rhode Island, Jason writes about space exploration on his blog Lights In The Dark, Discovery News, and, of course, here on Universe Today. Ad astra!
From the initial expansion of the Big Bang to the birth of the Moon, from the timid scampering of the first mammals to the rise — and fall — of countless civilizations, this fascinating new video by melodysheep (aka John D. Boswell) takes us on a breathless 90-second tour through human history — starting from the literal beginnings of space and time itself. It’s as imaginative and powerful as the most gripping Hollywood trailer… and it’s even inspired by a true story: ours.
Just released, this mesmerizing animation was created by Kevin Ward from images acquired by NOAA’s GOES-O/14 satellite. It shows the progression of Hurricane Sandy, currently a Category 1 hurricane off the coast of the eastern U.S. that’s poised to make a devastating impact when its heavy rains, winds and storm surges strike the shores of many major metropolitan coastal areas — including New York City and Washington, D.C.
Nearly 12 hours of time are compressed into 30 seconds, revealing the evolution of Sandy as it churned over the Atlantic on Sunday, October 28.
From NASA’s Earth Observatory’s YouTube page: This time-lapse animation shows Hurricane Sandy from the vantage point of geostationary orbit—35,800 km (22,300 miles) above the Earth. The animation shows Sandy on October 28, 2012, from 7:15 to 6:26 EDT. Light from the changing angles of the sun highlight the structure of the clouds. The images were collected by NOAA’s GOES-14 satellite. The “super rapid scan” images — one every minute from 7:15 a.m. until 6:30 p.m. EDT — reveal details of the storm’s motion.
Launched by NASA as GOES-O on June 27, 2009, GOES-14 is now under control by the NOAA, keeping an eye on the mid-Atlantic region from a geostationary position approximately 22,300 miles (35,800 km) above the Earth.
Sandy is expected to bring up to 10 inches of rain into New York, with a surge possible over 6 feet above high tide and wind gusts in excess of 75 mph. Once the hurricane moves inland there could be millions left without electricity. States of emergency have already been declared in many areas within Sandy’s projected path.
Currently Sandy is off the coast of North Carolina (at the time of this writing, 34.5 N / 70.5 W) moving northeast at 14 mph (22 km/h) with a low pressure of 950 mb… that’s as low or lower than some of the most powerful storms to hit the eastern U.S. over the past century, including the “perfect storm” of 1991 (a low system which also struck at Halloween) and the deadly 1938 “Great Hurricane”, which devastated coastal regions all across southern New England.
Stay up to date on Hurricane Sandy’s progress on the NOAA page here, with the latest public advisories being posted here.
NASA animation by Kevin Ward, using images from NOAA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies.
Sea ice swirls in ocean currents off the coast of Greenland (NASA/GSFC)
Spooky spectral swirls of last season’s sea ice drift in currents off the coast of eastern Greenland in this image from NASA’s Aqua satellite, acquired on October 17. Although sea ice in the Arctic will start forming again after September’s record low measurements, these ghostly wisps are likely made up of already-existing ice that has migrated south.
As global temperatures rise — both over land and in the ocean — thinner sea ice builds up during the Arctic winter and thus more of it melts during the summer, a pattern that will eventually lead to an ice-free Arctic if trends continue. The past several years saw sea ice in the Arctic below the 1979-2000 average, with this past September displaying the lowest volumes yet recorded.
The graph below, made from data modeled by the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington, show the chilling — or, perhaps, not-so-chilling — results of this century’s recent observations.
Along Greenland’s east coast, the Fram Strait serves as an expressway for sea ice moving out of the Arctic Ocean. The movement of ice through the strait used to be offset by the growth of ice in the Beaufort Gyre.
Until the late 1990s, ice would persist in the gyre for years, growing thicker and more resistant to melt. Since the start of the twenty-first century, however, ice has been less likely to survive its trip through the southern part of the Beaufort Gyre. As a result, less Arctic sea ice has been able to pile up and form multi-year ice.
Thin, free-drifting ice — as seen above — moves very easily with winds and currents.
Aqua is a NASA Earth Science satellite mission named for the large amount of information that the mission is collecting about the Earth’s water cycle, including evaporation from the oceans, water vapor in the atmosphere, clouds, precipitation, soil moisture, sea ice, land ice, and snow cover on the land and ice. Aqua was launched on May 4, 2002, and carries six Earth-observing instruments in a near-polar low-Earth orbit. MODIS, which acquired the image above, is a 36-band spectroradiometer that measures physical properties of the atmosphere, oceans and land.
NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC. Graph by Jesse Allen based on modeled ice volume data from the Polar Science Center, University of Washington. Caption portions by Michon Scott with information from Ted Scambos, National Snow and Ice Data Center.
The International Space Station will have to look out for new debris from an exploded Russian rocket (NASA image)
Traveling through low-Earth orbit just got a little more dangerous; a drifting Russian Breeze M (Briz-M) rocket stage that failed to execute its final burns back on August 6 has recently exploded, sending hundreds of shattered fragments out into orbit.
Russia and the U.S. Defense Department (JFCC-Space) have stated that they are currently tracking 500 pieces of debris from the disintegrated Breeze M, although some sources are saying there are likely much more than that.
After a successful liftoff via Proton rocket on August 6 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the Breeze M upper stage’s engines shut off after only 7 seconds as opposed to the normal 18 minutes, leaving its fuel tanks filled with 10 to 15 tons of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants. Its payloads, the Indonesian Telkom 3 and the Russian Express-MD2 communications satellites, were subsequently deployed into the wrong orbits as the Breeze M computer continued functioning.
Although originally expected to remain intact for at least another year, the rocket stage “violently disintegrated” on October 16. Evidence of the explosion was first observed by astronomer Robert McNaught at Australia’s Siding Springs Observatory, who counted 70 fragments visible within the narrow field-of-view telescope he was using for near-Earth asteroid observations.
The exact cause of the explosion isn’t known — it may have been sparked by an impact with another piece of space junk or the result of stresses caused by the Breeze M’s eccentric orbit, which varied in altitude from 265 to 5,015 kilometers (165 miles to 3,118 miles) with an inclination of 49.9 degrees.
This was the third such breakup of a partially-full Breeze M upper stage in orbit, the previous events having occurred in 2007 and 2010, and yet another Breeze M still remains in orbit after a failed burn in August 2011.
Most of the latest fragments are still in orbit at altitudes ranging from 250 to 5,000 km (155 to 3,100 miles), where they are expected to remain.
“Although some of the pieces have begun to re-enter, most of the debris will remain in orbit for an extended period of time.”
– Jamie Mannina, US State Department spokesperson
According to NASA the debris currently poses no immediate threat to the Space Station although the cloud is “believed not to be insignificant.” Still, according to a post on Zarya.com the Station’s course will periodically take it within the Breeze M debris cloud, and “will sometimes spend several days at a time with a large part of its orbit within the cloud.”
Source: RT.com and SpaceflightNow.com. Inset image: the Breeze M (Briz-M) upper stage which disintegrated on Oct. 16. (Khrunichev)
A digital terrain model of a portion of Mars’ Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the Solar System. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
Anyone who’s visited the Grand Canyon in Arizona can attest to its beauty, magnificence and sheer sense of awe that comes upon approaching its rim, whether for the first time or hundred-and-first. “Grand” almost seems too inferior a title for such an enormous geological feature — yet there’s a canyon much, much bigger stretching across the surface of Mars, one that could easily swallow all of our Grand Canyon within one of its side gullies.
The image above, released online for the first time today by ESA, is a digital terrain model of a portion of Mars’ Valles Marineris: our Solar System’s grandest canyon. It’s easy to fall into hyperbole when describing Valles Marineris. Named for NASA’s Mariner 9 spacecraft, which became the first spacecraft to orbit Mars on November 14, 1971, the canyon is over 4000 km long, 200 km wide, and 10 km deep (2,480 x 125 x 6 miles) — that’s five times deeper than the Grand Canyon and long enough to stretch across the entire contiguous United States! It’s a rift unparalleled on any other world in the Solar System.
Valles Marineris is thought to be the result of the formation of the nearby Tharsis volcanic region, home to Olympus Mons, the Solar System’s largest volcano. As the region swelled with magma billions of years ago the planet’s crust stretched and split, collapsing into a vast, deep canyon.
Much later, landslides and flowing water would help erode the canyon’s steep walls and carve out meandering side channels.
The 45-degree view above was was made from data acquired during 20 individual orbits of ESA’s Mars Express. It is presented in near-true color with four times vertical exaggeration (to increase relief contrast.) Download a high-res JPEG version here.
The largest portion of the canyon seen crossing left to right is known as Melas Chasma. Candor Chasma is the connecting trough to the north, and Hebes Chasma is in the far top left.
Below is a video released by JPL in 2006 showing a virtual fly-through of Valles Marineris, shown as if you were on a Grand Canyon-style helicopter sightseeing tour (that is, if helicopters could even work in the thin Martian air!)
Hopefully someday we’ll be seeing actual videos taken above Valles Marineris and photos captured from its rim… perhaps even by human explorers! (Please exit through the gift shop.)
Image source: ESA. Video by Eric M. De Jong and Phil Christiansen et. al, Arizona State University.
Here’s a mesmerizing video from the folks over at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s visualization studio showing the Sun in a whole new light… well, a reprocessed light anyway.
Using what’s called a gradient filter, images of the Sun can be adjusted to highlight the intricate details of its dynamic atmosphere. Magnetic activity that’s invisible to human vision can be brought into view, showing the powerful forces in play within the Sun’s corona and helping researchers better understand how it affects space weather. (Plus they sure are pretty!)
Compiled into a video, these images reveal the hidden beauty — and power — of our home star in action.
Artist’s impression of an impact of two planet-sized worlds (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Scientists have uncovered a history of violence hidden within lunar rocks, further evidence that our large, lovely Moon was born of a cataclysmic collision between worlds billions of years ago.
Using samples gathered during several Apollo missions as well as a lunar meteorite that had fallen to Earth (and using Martian meteorites as comparisons) researchers have observed a marked depletion in lunar rocks of lighter isotopes, including those of zinc — a telltale element that can be “a powerful tracer of the volatile histories of planets.”
The research utilized an advanced mass spectroscopy instrument to measure the ratios of specific isotopes present in the lunar samples. The spectrometer’s high level of precision allows for data not possible even five years ago.
Scientists have been looking for this kind of sorting by mass, called isotopic fractionation, since the Apollo missions first brought Moon rocks to Earth in the 1970s, and Frédéric Moynier, PhD, assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis — together with PhD student, Randal Paniello, and colleague James Day of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography — are the first to find it.
The team’s findings support a now-widely-accepted hypothesis — called the Giant Impact Theory, first suggested by PSI scientists William K. Hartmann and Donald Davis in 1975 — that the Moon was created from a collision between early Earth and a Mars-sized protoplanet about 4.5 billion years ago. The effects of the impact eventually formed the Moon and changed the evolution of our planet forever — possibly even proving crucial to the development of life on Earth.
(What would a catastrophic event like that have looked like? Probably something like this:)
“This is compelling evidence of extreme volatile depletion of the moon,” said Scripps researcher James Day, a member of the team. “How do you remove all of the volatiles from a planet, or in this case a planetary body? You require some kind of wholesale melting event of the moon to provide the heat necessary to evaporate the zinc.”
In the team’s paper, published in the October 18 issue of Nature, the researchers suggest that the only way for such lunar volatiles to be absent on such a large scale would be evaporation resulting from a massive impact event.
“When a rock is melted and then evaporated, the light isotopes enter the vapor phase faster than the heavy isotopes, so you end up with a vapor enriched in the light isotopes and a solid residue enriched in the heavier isotopes. If you lose the vapor, the residue will be enriched in the heavy isotopes compared to the starting material,” explains Moynier.
The fact that similar isotopic fractionation has been found in lunar samples gathered from many different locations indicates a widespread global event, and not something limited to any specific regional effect.
The next step is finding out why Earth’s crust doesn’t show an absence of similar volatiles, an investigation that may lead to clues to where Earth’s surface water came from.
“Where did all the water on Earth come from?” asked Day. “This is a very important question because if we are looking for life on other planets we have to recognize that similar conditions are probably required. So understanding how planets obtain such conditions is critical for understanding how life ultimately occurs on a planet.”
“The work also has implications for the origin of the Earth,” adds Moynier, “because the origin of the Moon was a big part of the origin of the Earth.”
Felix Baumgartner salutes his suit-mounted camera before stepping off his capsule’s platform at 128,000 feet (Red Bull Stratos)
Yesterday, October 14, Austrian pilot and BASE jumper Felix Baumgartner became the first person to skydive from over 128,000 feet, breaking the sound barrier during his 4 minute, 20 second plummet from the “edge of space.” A new video from Red Bull Stratos includes views from Felix’s suit-mounted cameras as he drops through virtually no atmosphere, smoothly at first but then going into a wild spin… but eventually stabilizing himself for the remainder of his fall and opening his chute at just over 6,000 feet. Incredible!
Check out the video below:
Here’s how Baumgartner described the spin and how he got out of it during the press conference after his jump yesterday:
“It started out really good because my exit was perfect, I did exactly what I was supposed to do… It looked like for a second I was going to tumble two more times and then get it under control, but for some reason that spin became so violent over all axis and it was hard to know how to get out of it, because, if you are trapped in a pressurized suit – normally as a skydiver you can feel the air and get direct feedback from the air — but here you are trapped in a suit that is pressurized at 3.5 PSI so you don’t know how to feel the air. It is like swimming without touching the water. And it’s hard because every when time it turns you around you have to figure out what to do. So I was sticking my arm out and it became worse and then I stuck arm out the other side and it became less, so I was fighting all the way down to regain control because I wanted to break the speed of sound. And I hit it. I don’t know how many seconds, but I could feel air was building up and then I hit it.”
So, in that quote, Baumgartner seemed to describe that he could feel when he broke the speed of sound, but in answering the next question of how it felt, he kind of backtracked and said he didn’t feel it.
“It’s hard to describe because I didn’t feel it. When you are in the pressure suit, you don’t feel anything, it is like being in a cast…. We have to look at the data – at what point did it happen — was I still spinning or was I under control? If you want to chart speed you need a reference point of things that pass you by, or sound, or your suit if flapping. I didn’t have that.”
Read more about Baumgartner’s record (and sound!) -breaking achievement and see lots more images and video here.
ADDED: A version of the video showing his chute opening (and with some background music added) can be found here on iloveskydiving.org.
An image of debris, ejected from Cabeus crater and into the sunlight, about 20 seconds after the LCROSS impact. The inset shows a close-up with the direction of the sun and the Earth. Image courtesy of Science/AAAS
An image of water-filled debris ejected from Cabeus crater about 20 seconds after the 2009 LCROSS impact. Courtesy of Science/AAAS.
Comets? Asteroids? The Earth? The origins of water now known to exist within the Moon’s soil — thanks to recent observations by various lunar satellites and the impact of the LCROSS mission’s Centaur rocket in 2009 — has been an ongoing puzzle for scientists. Now, new research supports that the source of at least some of the Moon’s water is the Sun, with the answer blowing in the solar wind.
Spectroscopy research conducted on Apollo samples by a team from the University of Tennessee, University of Michigan and Caltech has revealed “significant amounts” of hydroxyl within microscopic glass particles found inside lunar soil, the results of micrometeorite impacts.
According to the research team, the hydroxyl “water” within the lunar glass was likely created by interactions with protons and hydrogen ions from the solar wind.
“We found that the ‘water’ component, the hydroxyl, in the lunar regolith is mostly from solar wind implantation of protons, which locally combined with oxygen to form hydroxyls that moved into the interior of glasses by impact melting,” said Youxue Zhang, Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Michigan.
Hydroxyl is the pairing of a single oxygen atom to a single hydrogen atom (OH). Each molecule of water contains two hydroxyl groups.
Although such glass particles are widespread on the surface of the Moon — the researchers studied samples returned from Apollo 11, Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions — the water in hydroxyl form is not something that could be easily used by future lunar explorers. Still, the findings suggest that solar wind-derived hydroxyl may also exist on the surface of other airless worlds, like Mercury, Vesta or Eros… especially within permanently-shadowed craters and depressions.
“These planetary bodies have very different environments, but all have the potential to produce water,” said Yang Liu, University of Tennessee scientist and lead author of the team’s paper.
The discovery of hydroxyl within lunar glasses presents an “unanticipated, abundant reservoir” of water on the Moon, and possibly throughout the entire Solar System.
The study was published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Illustration of 55 Cancri e, a super-Earth that’s thought to have a thick layer of diamond (Yale News/Haven Giguere)
If diamonds are forever then this planet should be around for a very, very long time; it appears to be literally made of the stuff.
55 Cancri e — an exoplanet discovered in 2004 — is more than twice Earth’s diameter and over eight times more massive, making it a so-called “super Earth.” Earlier this year it made headlines by being the first Earth-sized exoplanet whose light was directly observed via the infrared capabilities of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
Using information about 55 Cancri e’s size, mass and orbital velocity, as well as the composition of its parent star 55 Cancri (located 40 light years away in the constellation Cancer) a research team led by scientists from Yale University created computer models to determine what the planet is most likely made of.
They determined that 55 Cancri e is composed primarily of carbon (as graphite and diamond), iron, silicon carbide, and possibly some silicates. The researchers estimate that at least a third of the planet’s mass — the equivalent of about three Earth masses — could be diamond.
“This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a fundamentally different chemistry from Earth. The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite.”
– Nikku Madhusudhan, Yale postdoctoral researcher and lead author
So what would one expect to find on a world made of diamond?
“On this planet there would basically be a thin layer below the surface which will have both graphite and diamond,” Madhusudhan told Universe Today in an email. “But, below that there will be a thick layer (a third of the radius) with mostly diamond. For a large part the diamond will be like the diamond on Earth, except really, really pure.
“But at greater depths the diamond could also be in liquid form,” Madhusudhan added.
Scientists had previously thought that 55 Cancri e might have a lot of water — superheated water, due to the planet’s incredibly high 4,000-degree (F) temperatures — based on the assumption that its composition is similar to Earth’s. But this new research indicates that it doesn’t have much water at all.
“By contrast, Earth’s interior is rich in oxygen, but extremely poor in carbon — less than a part in thousand by mass,” said Kanani Lee, Yale geophysicist and co-author of the paper.
This study shows that we can’t assume that planets in other systems are made of the same stuff that ours is, even if they are of similar size (and also that diamonds aren’t necessarily a valuable commodity on all worlds!)
The team’s paper “A Possible Carbon-rich Interior in Super-Earth 55 Cancri e” was accepted for publication in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. Read more on Yale News here.
Top image by Haven Giguere. Inset image shows visible location of 55 Cancri, by Nikku Madhusudhan using Sky Map Online.
