Elizabeth Howell is the senior writer at Universe Today. She also works for Space.com, Space Exploration Network, the NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Astrobiology Magazine and LiveScience, among others. Career highlights include watching three shuttle launches, and going on a two-week simulated Mars expedition in rural Utah. You can follow her on Twitter @howellspace or contact her at her website.
The top of Cerro Armazones in Chile is blown off June 19, 2014 for the European Extremely Large Telescope. Credit: Vine / ObservingSpace
All’s clear for a huge telescope to start construction on a mountaintop in Chile! That puff you see is the top of Cerro Armazones getting a haircut, losing many tons of rock in just a few seconds. The aim is to clear the way for the European Extremely Large Telescope, a 39-meter (128-foot) monster of a telescope to occupy the mountain’s top. Once completed later this decade, the optical/near-infrared telescope has an ambitious research schedule ahead of it. It will search for planets that look like Earth, try to learn more about how nearby galaxies were formed, and even look for the mysterious dark energy and dark matter that pervade our universe. Construction is being overseen by the European Southern Observatory, which provided an enthusiastic livetweet of the process. You can learn more about E-ELT on ESO’s webpage here. Thanks to @observingspace for posting a Vine of the explosion. Below is an ESO video showing preparations for the blast.
#EELTblast wasn’t a big boom from Paranal, but its significance is Earth-shattering. Thank you for being part of it! Close-up views coming — ESO (@ESO) June 19, 2014
Artist's impression (from 2002) of the Philae lander on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA / AOES Medialab
Comets are notoriously hard to predict — just ask those people on Comet ISON watch late in 2013. So as Rosetta approaches its cometary target, no one really knows what the comet will look like from up close. Yes, there are pictures of other cometary nuclei (most famously, Halley’s Comet) but this one could look completely different.
Several artists have taken a stab at imagining what Rosetta will see when it gets close to the comet in August, and what Philae will touch on when it reaches the surface in November. You can see their work throughout this article.
Meanwhile, the European Space Agency just issued an update on what they can see of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko from half a million km away — the comet is quieter, they said.
“Strikingly, there is no longer any sign of the extended dust cloud that was seen developing around nucleus at the end of April and into May,” ESA stated in a press release. “Indeed, monitoring of the comet has shown a significant drop in its brightness since then.”
Artist’s impression (from 2002) of Rosetta orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA, image by AOES Medialab
This variability is common in comets, but it’s the first time it’s been seen from so close, ESA said. Comets warm up as they approach the sun, releasing ice, gas and dust that form a swarm of material.
“As comets are non-spherical and lumpy, this process is often unpredictable, with activity waxing and waning as they warm. The observations made over the six weeks from the end of April to early June show just how quickly the conditions at a comet can change,” ESA added.
Rosetta flies above the Philae lander on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in this artist’s impression from 2002. Credit: Astrium – E. ViktorArtist’s impression (from 2002) of the Philae lander during descent on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA, image by AOES MedialabRosetta flies above Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko in this 2013 artist’s impression. Credit: ESA–C. Carreau/ATG medialabArtist’s impression (from 2013) of the Philae lander on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk briefs reporters including Universe Today in Cocoa Beach, FL prior to SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blastoff with SES-8 communications satellite on Dec 3, 2013 from Cape Canaveral, FL. Credit: Ken Kremer/kenkremer.com
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, is a hot topic in the media these days. He recently unveiled a manned version of his successful Dragon spacecraft. He’s talking about retrieving the first stage of his Falcon 9 rocket, a feat that has never been accomplished.
Last night (June 18), Musk spoke on CNBC because his company was named #1 to the cable network’s second annual Disrupter 50 list. You can watch portions of the interview here and we’ve isolated the space-related parts below based on the transcript from CNBC (which does not exactly match Musk’s words, but is pretty close.)
And Musk is still a big fan of Mars exploration, as he says in the interview he hopes to see people walk on the planet in 10-12 years.
On attempting to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that will launch six Orbcomm satellites on Friday, if the weather holds (it is only 30% go according to local news reports):
Essentially what I was alluding to a moment ago was is to be able to recover the rocket booster and then refly it. That’s the revolutionary potential. Now we have been trying to do that for 12 years, and haven’t yet succeeded. But I feel as though we are finally close to achieving it. We have a shot with the next launch of recovering the rocket booster. If not with this launch, I think a very good chance later this year, and then potentially to refly the booster next year. This would really mark a significant change in the technology of rocketry.
‘Threading the needle’, the Falcon 9/Dragon vehicle passes through the catenary lightning wires as it roars from the pad on the CRS-3 mission. Credit: nasatech.net
Musck also spoke on what would happen if SpaceX does not get the next round of commercial crew funding from NASA. The company is right now being funded along with Boeing (CST-100) and Sierra Nevada (Dream Chaser), but NASA is still figuring out how many companies it can afford to back in the next stage, which will be announced later this year. Musk revealed the manned prototype version of its Dragon spacecraft to great media fanfare in late May.
First of all, I should acknowledge the critical role NASA played in the success of SpaceX. We wouldn’t be are where we are without the help of NASA. And it’s possible we may not win the commercial crew contract. We certainly have done that we can for our part. And I think we have got a great design solution. If NASA in the end doesn’t go with us, because also we are competing with big established companies like Boeing, then we’ll do our best to continue on our own with our own money. […]
Well it definitely would slow us down, but we would keep going and we should keep launching commercial satellites. We have an existing contract to transfer…from the space station so we would keep going. It just would be slower.
Elon Musk seated inside Dragon V2 explaining consoles at unveiling on May 29, 2014. Credit: SpaceX
Musk on how quickly he wants to see humans on Mars:
This is a very difficult thing, obviously. I’m hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10, 12 years. I think it’s certainly possible for that to occur. The thing that matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars. To make life multi-planetary. That will define a fundamental bifurcation of the future of human civilization. We’ll either be a multi-planet species and out there among the stars, or a single-planet species until some eventual extinction event, natural or man-made.
Why it’s difficult to get public funding right now:
The incentive structure tends to be short-term. You can trace it back to people that own the stocks, portfolio managers. They are evaluated on a quarterly basis, or at least an annual basis. They push companies to produce results on a quarterly or annual basis. With SpaceX we are trying to develop technology that will ultimately be able to take large numbers of people to Mars. That’s really difficult to get portfolio managers. It’s beyond their tenure in owning the stock. So it is difficult to ask them to like that.
The SpaceX Dragon capsule on approach to the ISS during the COTS 2 mission. Credit: NASA.
Which is harder, getting people to Mars or building a car battery that costs less than $5,000 (which is an oblique reference to Musk’s Tesla line of vehicles):
I think, probably, Mars. The car battery certainly is hard. I’m quite optimistic, though, about improvements in the battery price or the cost of the battery. The fundamental cost. We have daily meetings with Panasonic, our key development partner, on this. I am really feeling quite good about being able to produce a compelling mass market car in about three years.
What would be a “truly disruptive” technology:
I mean, at this point, human life span is mostly about old age. It’s not about cancer or anything else. If you cured cancer, I think the average life expectancy would increase from two years. You would go from 80 to 82, or something like that. We just have a genetic life span. It’s kind of like if you take a fruit fly and gave it the best exercise and diet possible, the perfect life. Maybe it will live four weeks instead of three weeks. Genetics just drives a lot of these things. So for something to be truly disruptive on that front, you would want to do something with genetics. I don’t have much involvement there. Or any involvement, really.
Artist's conception of the E-ELT (left) and Very Large Telescope compared with the Giza Pyramids. Credit: ESO
While we space geeks are lucky enough to watch rocket launches regularly, it’s not often we get to see a mountain top being blown off for the sake of astronomy!
Tomorrow, the European Southern Observatory plans an event centered on a blast on Cerro Armazones, a 3,060-meter (10,000-foot) mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert. The goal is to make way for construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope, which as its name implies will be a monster of an observatory. Read below for details on how to watch live.
“The E-ELT will tackle the biggest scientific challenges of our time, and aim for a number of notable firsts, including tracking down Earth-like planets around other stars in the ‘habitable zones’ where life could exist — one of the Holy Grails of modern observational astronomy,” ESO states on its page about the 39-meter (128-foot) optical/near-infrared telescope.
The set-up crew for the E-ELT blast looks at Cerro Armazones. Credit: ESO
“It will also perform ‘stellar archaeology’ in nearby galaxies, as well as make fundamental contributions to cosmology by measuring the properties of the first stars and galaxies and probing the nature of dark matter and dark energy.”
We’re sure astronomers can hardly wait for operations to start in the next decade or so. ESO will livetweet the event (also follow the hashtag #EELTblast, where you can ask questions) and watch the entire event live tomorrow here, starting around 12:30 p.m. EDT (4:30 p.m. UTC).
In related news, the last of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array’s (ALMA’s) 66 antennas recently arrived at the ALMA site, which is 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) high on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. This ESO telescope was officially inaugurated last year.
View of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) site, which is 5,000 meters (16,400 feet) on the Chajnantor Plateau in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Credit: A. Marinkovic/X-Cam/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)
Artist's impression of New Horizons' encounter with Pluto and Charon. Credit: NASA/Thierry Lombry
It’s going to be a really busy summer for the New Horizons team. While they’re checking out the newly awakened spacecraft to make sure it’s working properly for its close encounter with Pluto next year, NASA is already thinking about where to put it next: possibly towards a Kuiper Belt Object!
So now the Hubble Space Telescope (in Earth orbit) is scoping out icy objects beyond Pluto. Luckily for us, one of the team members — Alex Parker, a planetary astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, provided an entertaining livetweet of the process — even through a power failure.
So, the secret is out. On Friday, we were awarded the Hubble time to search for a @NewHorizons2015 KBO target!
There’s far more to Parker’s tweets than we are indicating here; his Twitter feed also has details about the collaborators, for example, so be sure to read through the entire exchange from yesterday. The survey is led by the Southwest Research Institute’s John Spencer.
What astronomers are doing now is a “pilot observation” where the space telescope looks at a spot in the constellation Sagittarius. Controllers will try to turn the telescope at the same rate as what a KBO would be orbiting around the sun. If the method works, stars will look like streaks and the KBOs will look like “pinpoint objects”, NASA stated.
A view of the Hubble Space Telescope from inside space shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-125 in 2009. Credit: NASA
“If the test observation identifies at least two KBOs of a specified brightness it will demonstrate statistically that Hubble has a chance of finding an appropriate KBO for New Horizons to visit. At that point, an additional allotment of observing time will continue the search across a field of view roughly the angular size of the full moon,” NASA said in a press release.
The reason for this step is Hubble is a high-profile telescope, receiving a lot of requests for observing time around the world. The agency wants to ensure that the telescope is being used for the best scientific return possible. NASA also noted the search might be difficult.
“Though Hubble is powerful enough to see galaxies near the horizon of the universe, finding a KBO is a challenging needle-in-haystack search. A typical KBO along the New Horizons trajectory may be no larger than Manhattan Island and as black as charcoal,” NASA stated.
This isn’t the first time the telescope has done a pinch-hit for Plutonian science. Four new moons have been found around Pluto, a discovery that involved Hubble time. The telescope has also looked for dust rings near the dwarf planet (to do a risk analysis for New Horizons’ approach) and done a map of the surface, to help controllers figure out where to target New Horizons.
Saturn's moon Atlas peeks out between the rings in this Cassini shot taken Jan. 23, 2014. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
See that small pixel? That’s an entire moon you’re looking at! Peeking between the rings of Saturn is the tiny saucer-shaped moon Atlas, as viewed from the Cassini spacecraft. The image is pretty, but there’s also a scientific reason to watch the planet’s many moons while moving around the rings.
“Although the sunlight at Saturn’s distance is feeble compared to that at the Earth, objects cut off from the Sun within Saturn’s shadow cool off considerably,” NASA stated.
“Scientists study how the moons around Saturn cool and warm as they enter and leave Saturn’s shadow to better understand the physical properties of Saturn’s moons.”
And if you look at Atlas close-up, it looks a little like a flying saucer! The moon is only 20 miles (32 km) across, which is a bit shy of the length of a marathon. The Voyager 1 team spotted the moon in 1980 when the spacecraft zoomed through the system. You can learn more about Saturn’s moons here.
Cassini is still in excellent health (it arrived at Saturn in 2004, and has been in space since 1997), and scientists are eagerly getting ready for when Saturn gets to its summer solstice in 2017. Among the things being looked at is a hurricane at Saturn’s north pole.
Saturn’s moon Atlas. Left image: viewed from the side, at a scale of 0.6 miles (1 km) per pixel. Right image: the mid-southern latitudes, at 820 feet (250 m) per pixel. The images are composite views from the Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI
Artist's conception of the Gaia telescope backdropped by a photograph of the Milky Way taken at the European Southern Observatory. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background: ESO/S. Brunier
Europe’s powerful Milky Way mapper is facing some problems as controllers ready the Gaia telescope for operations. It turns out that there is “stray light” bleeding into the telescope, which will affect how well it can see the stars around it. Also, the telescope optics are also not transmitting as efficiently as the design predicted.
Controllers emphasize the light problem would only affect the faintest visible stars, and that tests are ongoing to minimize the impact on the mission. Still, there will be some effect on how well Gaia can map the stars around it due to this issue.
“While there will likely be some loss relative to Gaia’s pre-launch performance predictions, we already know that the scientific return from the mission will still be immense, revolutionizing our understanding of the formation and evolution of our Milky Way galaxy and much else,” wrote the Gaia project team in a blog post.
Both of these problems have been known publicly since April, and the team has been working hard in recent months to pinpoint the cause. Of the two of them, it appears the team is having the most success with the optics transmission problems. They have traced the issue to water vapor in the telescope that freezes (no surprise since Gaia operates between -100 degrees Celsius and -150 Celsius, or -148 Fahrenheit and -238 Fahrenheit.)
Soyuz VS06, with Gaia space observatory, lifted off from Europe’s Spaceport, French Guiana, on 19 December 2013. (ESA–S. Corvaja)
The team turned on heaters on Gaia (on its mirrors and focal plane) to get rid of the ice before turning the temperature back down so the telescope can do its work. While some ice was anticipated (that’s why the heaters were there) there was more than expected. The spacecraft is also expected to equalize its internal pressure over time, sending out gases that again, could freeze and cause interference, so more of these “decontamination” procedures are expected.
The stray light problem is proving to be more stubborn. The light waves from sunlight and brighter sources of light in the sky are likely moving around the sunshield and bleeding into the telescope optics, which was unexpected (but the team is now trying to model and explain.)
Perhaps it was more ice. The challenge is, there were no heaters placed into the thermal tent area that could be responsible for the issue, so the team at first considered moving the position of Gaia to have sunlight strike that area and melt the ice.
GAIA Telescope Array – Credit: ESA
Simulations showed no safety problems with the idea, but “there is currently no plan to do so,” the team wrote. That’s because some tests on ground equipment in European laboratories didn’t show any strong evidence for or against layers of ice interfering with the stray light. So there didn’t seem to be much point to doing the procedure.
So instead, the idea is to do “modified observing strategies” to collect the data and then tweaking the software on the spacecraft and on the ground to “best optimize the data we will collect,” Gaia managers wrote.
“The stray light is variable across Gaia’s focal plane and variable with time, and has a different effect on each of Gaia’s science instruments and the corresponding science goals. Thus, it is not easy to characterise its impact in a simple way,” they added. They predict, however, that a star at magnitude 20 (the limit of Gaia’s powers) would see its positional accuracy mapping reduced by about 50%, while stars that are brighter would have less impact.
A diagram of the Gaia telescope payload (largest size available). Credit: European Space Agency
“It is important to realize that for many of Gaia’s science goals, it is these relatively brighter stars and their much higher accuracy positions that are critical, and so it is good to see that they are essentially unaffected. Also, the total number of stars detected and measured will remain unchanged,” the managers added.
The team is also tracking a smaller issue with a system that is supposed to measure the angle of separation between the two telescopes of Gaia. It’s needed to measure how small changes in temperature affect the angle between the telescopes. While the system is just fine, the angle is varying more than expected, and more work will be needed to figure out what to do next.
But nevertheless, Gaia is just about ready to start a science session that will last about a month. The team expects to have a better handle on what the telescope is capable of, and how to work with these issues, after that time. Gaia operates about 1.5 million km (932,000 miles) away from Earth in a gravitationally stable point in space known as L2, so it’s a bit too far for a house call such as what we were used to with the Hubble Space Telescope.
A fish-eye view of Titan's surface from the European Space Agency's Huygens lander in January 2005. Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
What’s in all that browny orangey stuff in the atmosphere around Titan? It’s a question that scientists have been trying to answer concerning Saturn’s moon for decades (Carl Sagan was among them). That’s because it’s hard to reverse-engineer the recipe.
There are hundreds of thousands of hydrocarbons (hydrogen and carbon molecules) that could form the compounds in the atmosphere along with nitriles (nitrogen-abundant chemicals). But scientists are hoping that their new recipe gets a bit closer to understanding how the atmosphere works.
The researchers put gases inside of a chamber and monitored their reactions, starting with nitrogen and methane — the gases that are the most common in Titan’s atmosphere. Then they included benzene — which the Cassini spacecraft has detected in the atmosphere — along with close chemical relatives.
Titan’s surface is almost completely hidden from view by its thick orange “smog” (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI. Composite by J. Major)
In the end, it seemed the best third ingredient was choosing an “aromatic”, a sort of hydrocarbon, that includes nitrogen. That’s because the scientists saw that the spectrum of this gas appeared to be similar to what was spotted by Cassini.
“This is the closest anyone has come, to our knowledge, to recreating with lab experiments this particular feature seen in the Cassini data,” stated lead author Joshua Sebree, a former postdoctoral fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center who is now an assistant professor at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.
Scientists say the recipe still needs some modifications, but this is a good start. The research is available in the journal Icarus.
A picture of NGC 7538 from data taken by the Herschel Space Observatory. Credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Whitman College
Long after telescopes cease operating, their bounty of scientific data continues to amaze. Here’s an example of that: this Herschel Space Telescope image of this dust and gas cloud about 8,000 light-years away.
The examination of NGC 7358 revealed a “weird” dusty ring in the cloud — nobody quite knows how it got there — as well as a baker’s dozen of huge dust clumps that could one day form gigantic stars.
“The 13 clumps spotted in NGC 7358, some of which lie along the edge of the mystery ring, all are more than 40 times more massive than the sun,” NASA stated.
“The clumps gravitationally collapse in on themselves, growing denser and hotter in their cores until nuclear fusion ignites and a star is born. For now, early in the star-formation process, the clumps remain quite cold, just a few tens of degrees above absolute zero. At these temperatures, the clumps emit the bulk of their radiation in the low-energy, submillimeter and infrared light that Herschel was specifically designed to detect.”
Artist’s impression of the Herschel Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/AOES Medialab/NASA/ESA/STScI
More observations are planned to learn about the nature of the dusty ring. So far, astronomers can say it is 35 light-years at its longest axis, 25 light-years at its shortest-axis, and has a mass of about 500 times of the sun. The astronomers took a look at it with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to gain some more information.
“Astronomers often see ring and bubble-like structures in cosmic dust clouds,” NASA added.” The strong winds cast out by the most massive stars, called O-type stars, can generate these expanding puffs, as can their explosive deaths as supernovas. But no energetic source or remnant of a deceased O-type star, such as a neutron star, is apparent within the center of this ring. It is possible that a big star blew the bubble and, because stars are all in motion, subsequently left the scene, escaping detection.”
It’s a lot of speculation right now, but the buzz in a new NASA study is Pluto’s largest moon (Charon) could have a cracked surface.
If the New Horizons mission catches these cracks when it whizzes by in 2015, this could hint at an ocean underneath the lunar surface — just like what we talk about with Europa (near Jupiter) and Enceladus (near Saturn). But don’t get too excited — it’s also possible Charon had an ocean, but it froze out over time.
“Our model predicts different fracture patterns on the surface of Charon depending on the thickness of its surface ice, the structure of the moon’s interior and how easily it deforms, and how its orbit evolved,” stated Alyssa Rhoden of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who led the research.
“By comparing the actual New Horizons observations of Charon to the various predictions, we can see what fits best and discover if Charon could have had a subsurface ocean in its past, driven by high eccentricity.”
It seems an unlikely proposition given that Pluto is so far from the Sun — about 29 times further away than the Earth is. Its surface temperature is -380 degrees Farhenheit (-229 degrees Celsius), which — to say the least — would not be a good environment for liquid water on the surface.
But it could happen with enough tidal heating. To back up, both Europa and Enceladus are small moons fighting gravity from their much larger gas giant planets, not to mention a swarm of other moons. This “tug-of-war” not only makes their orbits eccentric, but creates tides that change the interior and the surface, causing the cracks. Perhaps this might have kept subsurface oceans alive on these moons.
Encaladus, a moon of Saturn, as shown in this Voyager 1 image. Credit: NASA
Since Charon once had an eccentric orbit, perhaps it also had tidal heating. Scientists think that the moon was created after a large object smacked into Pluto and created a chain of debris (similar to the leading theory for how our Moon was formed). The proportionally huge Charon — it’s one-eighth Pluto’s mass — would have been close to its parent planet, causing gravity to tug on both objects and creating friction inside their interiors.
“This friction would have also caused the tides to slightly lag behind their orbital positions,” NASA stated. “The lag would act like a brake on Pluto, causing its rotation to slow while transferring that rotational energy to Charon, making it speed up and move farther away from Pluto.”
But this friction would have ceased long ago, given that observations show Charon orbits in a stable circle further away from Pluto, and there are no extraneous tugs on its path today. So another possibility is there was an ocean beneath the moon’s surface that today is a block of ice.
