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.
Composite image of the far side of the moon taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009. Credit: NASA
In these days of daily image releases from Saturn, Mars, the Moon and other spots in the universe, it’s hard to remember just how exciting it was back in the 1950s and 1960s when a few images trickled out to the world at the time. Perhaps one of the biggest early surprises was how jagged and cragged the back side of the moon looked. Where were the lunar “seas” that we are familiar with on the Earth-facing side of the moon?
About 55 years after the first Soviet images of the farside were sent to Earth, a team of researchers led by graduate astrophysics student Arpita Roy (at Penn State University) may have an explanation.
They say it’s due to the violent way that the Moon formed — likely after a Mars-sized object collided with our Earth, creating a sea of debris that gradually coalseced into the Moon we see today. The huge crash and gathering together heated up both our planet and the Moon, but the Moon got cooler first because it was smaller.
Since the Earth was still hot — radiating at more than 2,500 degrees Celsius (4,500 degrees Fahrenheit) — and the Moon very close to the planet, the heat of the Earth had quite the effect. The far side of the Moon cooled down while the near side remained very hot.
“This gradient was important for crustal formation on the moon. The moon’s crust has high concentrations of aluminum and calcium, elements that are very hard to vaporize,” Penn State stated.
Credit-Scott Chapman
Calcium and aluminum are the first elements that “snow out” as rock vapor cools, and they would have remained in the atmosphere on the Moon’s far side. (The near side was too hot.)
“Thousands to millions of years later, these elements combined with silicates in the Moon’s mantle to form plagioclase feldspars, which eventually moved to the surface and formed the Moon’s crust,” Penn State added. “The farside crust had more of these minerals and is thicker.”
The seas themselves were formed after huge meteors crashed into the Moon’s Earth-facing side, rupturing the crust and letting the basaltic lava beneath burst forth. The crust on the far side was too thick for the meteors to penetrate, in most cases, leaving the rugged surface we are familiar with today.
Still from the first Vine video from space showing the Sun never setting on the International Space Station. Video taken in June 2014. Credit: Reid Wiseman/Vine
Isn’t there something so soothing about watching the Sun go around and around in this short video? This is the first Vine video from space. Vine is a social website that publishes short videos (around six seconds), and it’s used to great illustration in this message beamed from the International Space Station.
Going around Earth usually takes the space station around 90 minutes, but NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman explained that at this time of year, it is flying parallel with the “terminator line” — the location where the Sun rises or sets on Earth.
This left the space station in 24-hour sunlight, providing some great marathon space station watching for those people wanting to wave at the guys from the ground. According to Universe Today writer Bob King, the marathon wraps up tomorrow, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the space station from your location.
Artist's conception of how the Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science (OPALS) beams information from the International Space Station. Credit: NASA
What’s the first thing you would say to Earth if you were sending a message from space? Well, the old computer expression “Hello, World!” seems apt. That in fact was the content of the video message sent by laser from an experiment on the International Space Station that aims to speed up communications in space.
Laser could change communications with spacecraft forever. For half a century we’ve been used to puttering around with radio waves, receiving a few bits of information at a time, which makes transmitting images and videos from distant planets an exercise of patience.
Enter the OPALS (Optical Payload for Lasercomm Science) payload, which transmitted the video (which you can watch above) at a maximum of 50 megabits per second — the standard speed for many home Internet connections. The testbed technology could speed up comms about 10 to 1,000 times faster than traditional radio, which would definitely get science information to the ground faster. The tradeoff is you have to be extremely precise.
“Because the space station orbits Earth at 17,500 mph [28,200 km/h], transmitting data from the space station to Earth requires extremely precise targeting,” NASA stated. “The process can be equated to a person aiming a laser pointer at the end of a human hair 30 feet away and keeping it there while walking.”
OPALS did this by communicating with a laser beacon at the Table Mountain Observatory in Wrightwood, California. The transmission took 148 seconds, and the video message itself only took 3.5 seconds for each copy to come to Earth — compared with 10 minutes under traditional methods!
The Moon sets above the Continental Divide in Colorado from 86,000 feet. Taken June 27, 2013 on a meteorological balloon launched from Boulder, Colorado. Credit and copyright: Patrick Cullis.
What physical evidence exists of a huge collision that formed our Moon and nearly blew the Earth apart, about 4.5 billion years ago? This is the leading theory for how the Moon came to be, but given it happened so long ago the physical evidence is scarce.
Readers may recall the story from last week talking about how oxygen in Moon rocks shows evidence of this crash. This week, there’s a new study from the same conference that focuses on the other side of the puzzle piece: what can we see on planet Earth? Turns out there might be a “signal” showing us the way.
As the theory goes, the colliding body — which some researchers call “Theia” — would have created a cloud of fragments surrounding our planet that eventually coalesced into the Moon.
The new research says that evidence of this collision would have showed up in the mantle, a layer of the Earth’s interior, and could explain a puzzling difference in isotopes (types) of certain elements that was known before.
“The energy released by the impact between the Earth and Theia would have been huge, certainly enough to melt the whole planet,” stated research lead Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, an associate professor at Harvard University.
Layers of the Earth
“But we believe that the impact energy was not evenly distributed throughout the ancient Earth. This means that a major part of the impacted hemisphere would probably have been completely vaporized, but the opposite hemisphere would have been partly shielded, and would not have undergone complete melting.”
The team said that the impact did not completely stir the mantle, which would explain why the ratio of isotopes of helium and nitrogen inside the shallow part of the mantle is much higher than the deep mantle.
They also analyzed two isotopes of xenon. Scientists know already that the material on the surface has a lower isotope ratio to what is inside, but what is new is comparing these isotopes pointed to an age of the collision: about 100 million years after the Earth formed.
The research was presented today at the Goldschmidt conference in Sacramento, California.
A 'Blue Marble' image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012. Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring.
Earth’s lifespan for life is finite. In about five billion years, our Sun will transform into a red giant and make our planet uninhabitable, to put it lightly, as our closest star gets bigger and swallows up Mercury and Venus. But perhaps there is a way to help our life colonize other spots in the universe.
One researcher’s vision would see microbes from our planet being sent to distant planetary systems in formation and seeding the area with exports from Earth.
The idea is of course highly theoretical and requires careful thought of the ethics (what if our life destroys others?) and technology (how to get the microbes out there)? But it’s something that Michael Mautner, a chemistry researcher at the Virginia Commonwealth University College of Humanities and Sciences, is considering.
“I suggest we give life a chance,” he said in an interview with Universe Today.
These are the steps that Mautner suggests for those considering his method of spreading life into the universe.
Artist’s impression of a baby star still surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which planets are forming. Credit: ESO
1. Think long-term. Many planets or systems are under formation, dozens if not hundreds of light-years away from us. We can send hardy microorganisms to start new life there, but travelling will take many thousands of years. This new life can then take millions or perhaps billions of years to evolve, some to intelligent life that can spread life further in the galaxy. Planning on such time-scales is key to our cosmological future.
2. Find a habitable system. One idea could be to look for a habitable planet; he observed that the Kepler space telescope has made great strides in showing us potentially habitable worlds from afar. As telescope technology improves, finding these worlds will be easier. That said, there’s a risk that any Earth-borne life could obliterate any native life there. His solution is to find star systems under formation instead: “There hasn’t been enough time for life, especially advanced life-forms, to start there,” he says.
Kepler-62f, an exoplanet that is about 40% larger than Earth. It’s located about 1,200 light-years from our solar system in the constellation Lyra. Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
3. Aim carefully. A planet would take a very precise aiming system, he acknowledges, but aiming for larger star-forming interstellar clouds where a planetary systems are being formed, would be easier for current technology.
4. Freeze the microbes. Transit in cold interstellar space will put the microbes into deep hibernation and also make them more radiation-resistant: “the challenge is to maybe be able to bio- engineer microbes that can survive for that period,” Mautner points out. He added that there are plenty of examples on Earth of extremophiles surviving harsh environments, such as outside in satellites in or in hot vents near the bottom of the ocean. And microbes are also capable of hibernating. They could then be woken up when they get to a region near planetary systems that allows for liquid water, in conditions that could let them grow.
Could humans follow in their wake? Mautner says he would be happy for humans to go, but it could take thousands of years or more to make the journey. He doesn’t rule out the possibility of cryogenics making that trip more possible, and says there is a “fair chance” that it could work.
Here’s another marvel of technology: there are people on Earth who are formulating solar weather forecasts … for Venus. While that sounds counterintuitive — isn’t the sun far away from that planet? — it actually does have a big effect on the planet’s atmosphere. And with Venus Express taking the plunge into the planet’s atmosphere, it’s important to know how the sun is behaving to predict its effect.
As the spacecraft skims the top of the planet’s atmosphere, it’s possible that if an extreme weather event occurs, this could change the orbit from what would be predicted.
“The space weather reports will … allow us to better understand anomalous behaviour that we may subsequently observe on the spacecraft,” stated Adam Williams, Venus Express’ deputy spacecraft operations manager.
“And in extreme cases, we would be more ready to react to a serious situation. For example, if our startrackers were to be overloaded by radiation.”
We’re used to regular solar weather reports on Earth, but getting them ready for Venus — a first — is a bit more difficult. The European Space Agency is using observatories such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and the Proba-2 spacecraft, just like it does for Earth forecasts.
On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at over 900 miles per second.
Venus presents an extra challenge, however, because it’s 59 degrees ahead of Earth in its orbit (as things stand right now) and there are no spacecraft in between the Sun and Venus to see how conditions change as particles head toward the planet. The updates are being issued through ESA’s Space Weather Coordination Centre in Belgium.
By the way, we’re also lucky enough to get weather forecasts for another planet — Mars! Malin Space Science Systems provides weekly weather reports from the Red Planet through the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Here’s part of its report from between May 26 and June 1. (Be sure to click through the link to watch a recent video of Mars rotating).
Dust storm frequency increased this week in the southern tropical latitudes west and north of Argyre with local storms of varying size and duration observed in Aonia, Solis, Syria, and Tharsis. Dust haze resulting from these storms was present in the western portions of Valles Marineris. Other storm activity occurred in Noachis, as well as in the northern hemisphere off the residual north polar cap. Diffuse water ice clouds were present over Utopia and equatorial latitudes. At southern mid-to-high latitudes, seasonal frost was present up to approximately 55 degrees south latitude. Other than occasional diffuse water ice clouds over Meridiani, skies were relatively storm free over the Opportunity rover site at Endeavor Crater and the Curiosity rover site at Gale Crater.
Artist's conception of the Titan Aerial Daughtercraft on Titan, a moon of Saturn. Credit: NASA
Sometimes a good idea takes some tinkering. You have a thought that it will work, but what it really requires is you take some money and time and test it out in a small form. This principle is sound if you’re trying to do home renovation (a paint splash on a wall can let you see if the color will work) and it is especially true if you’re planning a multi-million dollar mission to another planet.
This is the thought behind the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts office, which announced a dozen far-flung drawing-board proposals that received $100,000 in Phase 1 funding for the next 9-12 months. There are vehicles to explore the soupy moon of Titan, a design to snag a tumbling asteroid, and other ideas to explore the solar system. (But be patient: These testbed ideas would take decades to come to fruition, if they are even accepted for further study and funding.) Check out a full list of the concepts below.
Titan Aerial Daughtercraft: A small rotorcraft that can touch down from a balloon or lander, with the idea being that it can jump between several spots to do close-up views. It would then bring its samples back to the “mothership” and possibly recharge there as well. “The autonomy needed for this concept is also applicable to exciting rotorcraft mission concepts for Mars and to in-situ exploration of Enceladus,” the description stated, referring to an icy moon of Saturn.
Titan Submarine: A small submarine would dive into Kraken Mare on Saturn’s moon, and there would be plenty to explore: 984 feet (300 meters) of depth, stretching across 621 miles (1,000 km). “Kraken Mare is comparable in size to the Great Lakes and represents an opportunity for an unprecedented planetary exploration mission,” the description stated. It would explore “chemical composition of the liquid, surface and subsurface currents, mixing and layering in the ‘water’ column, tides, wind and waves, bathymetry, and bottom features and composition.”
Comet Hitchhiker:This would be a “tethered” spacecraft that swings from comet to comet to explore icy bodies in the solar system. “First, the spacecraft harpoons a target as it makes a close flyby in order to attach a tether to the target. Then, as the target moves away, it reels out the tether while applying regenerative brake to give itself a moderate (<5g) acceleration as well as to harvest energy,” the description stated.
Artist’s conception of the Weightless Rendezvous And Net Grapple to Limit Excess Rotation (WRANGLER). Credit: NASA
Weightless Rendezvous And Net Grapple to Limit Excess Rotation (WRANGLER): This idea would capture space debris and small asteroids. It will use a small nanosatellite equipped with a “net capture device” and a winch. “The leverage offered by using a tether to extract angular momentum from a rotating space object enables a very small nanosatellite system to de-spin a very massive asteroid or large spacecraft,” the description stated.
The Aragoscope: A telescope that would look through an opaque disk at a distant object, which is different from the usual mirror arrangement.”Rather than block the view, the disk boosts the resolution of the system with no loss of collecting area,” the description states. This architecture … can be used to achieve the diffraction limit based on the size of the low cost disk, rather than the high cost telescope mirror.”
Mars Ecopoiesis Test Bed:A machine that would test how well bacteria from Earth could survive on Mars, which could be a precursor to “terraforming” the planet to make it more like our own. Researchers would select “pioneer organisms” and put them into a device that would embed itself into the Martian regolith (soil) in an area that would have liquid water. It would “completely seal itself to avoid planetary contamination, release carefully selected earth organisms (extremophiles like certain cyanobacteria), sense the presence or absence of a metabolic product (like O2), and report to a Mars-orbiting relay satellite,” the description states.
Artist’s conception of ChipSats. Credit: NASA
ChipSats: Instead of having an orbiter and a lander in separate missions, why not put them in one? While there have been combinations before (e.g. Cassini/Huygens), this is a bit different: This concept would have a set of tiny sensor chips (ChipSats) that deploy from a larger mothership to make a landing on a distant planet or moon.
Swarm Flyby Gravimetry: While whizzing by a comet or asteroid, a single spacecraft would release a swarm of tiny probes. “By tracking those probes, we can estimate the asteroid’s gravity field and infer its underlying composition and structure,” the description stated.
Probing icy worlds concept: How thick is the ice on Jupiter’s Europa or Ganymede, or Saturn’s Enceladus? Open question, and makes it hard to predict how tough of a drill one would need to probe the ice — or how well life could survive. This concept would send a probe to one of these locations and receive “a naturally occurring signal generated by interactions of deep penetrating cosmic ray neutrinos” to better get a sense of the depth. This could allow for maps of the ice.
The cracked ice surface of Europa. Credit: NASA/JPL
Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System (HERTS):This would be a mission that goes deep into the solar-system and out to the heliopause, the spot where the sun’s sphere of influence gives way to the interstellar medium. Using no propellant, the spacecraft would use solar wind protons to bring it out into the solar system. “The propulsion system consists of an array of electrically biased wires that extend outward 10 to 30 km [6.2 miles to 18.6 miles] from a rotating spacecraft,” the researchers stated.
3D Photocatalytic Air Processor:A new design to make it easier to generate oxygen on a spacecraft, using “abundant high-energy light in space,” the proposal states. ” The combination of novel photoelectrochemistry and 3-dimensional design allows tremendous mass saving, hardware complexity reduction, increases in deployment flexibility and removal efficiency.”
PERIapsis Subsurface Cave OPtical Explorer (PERISCOPE): A way to probe caves on the moon from orbit. Using a concept called “photon time-of-flight imaging”, the researchers say they would be able to bounce the signal off of the walls of the canyon to peer into the crevice and see what is there.
Artist's conception of two celestial bodies smacking into each other. Such a collision is believed to have formed Earth's moon. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Billions of years ago, so the theory goes, a Mars-sized body (sometimes called “Theia”) smashed into our young planet and caused a near-catastrophe. Earth fortunately survived the risk of blowing apart, and the fragments from the crash gradually coalesced into the Moon that we see today.
Even though this happened a heck of a long time ago, scientists believe they have found traces of Theia in lunar rocks pulled from the Apollo missions.
The isotopes or types of oxygen revealed in the new research appear to be different between the Earth and the Moon. And that’s important, because it implies that a body of different composition caused the changes. “If the Moon formed predominantly from the fragments of Theia, as predicted by most numerical models, the Earth and Moon should differ,” the study states.
An airplane at about 2,400 meters above the ground passes in front of the Moon on its way to landing at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, France. Taken from about 70 km from Paris. Credit and copyright: Sebastien Lebrigand.
Scientists scanned samples from the Apollo 11, 12 and 16 missions with scanning electron microscopes that are more powerful than what was available in the 1960s and 1970s, when scientists first looked at these samples from the manned moon missions.
Before, the “resolution” of these microscopes couldn’t find any significant differences, but the new data reveals the moon rocks have 12 parts per million more oxygen-17 than the Earth rocks.
“The differences are small and difficult to detect, but they are there,” stated lead researcher Daniel Herwartz, who was formerly with the University of Gottingen and is now with the University of Cologne. “This means two things; firstly we can now be reasonably sure that the giant collision took place. Secondly, it gives us an idea of the geochemistry of Theia.”
The work was published in Science and will also be presented at the Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in California on June 11.
The SpaceX Dragon capsule on approach to the ISS during the COTS 2 mission. Credit: NASA.
Hot off the excitement of showing off the inside of its manned Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX is prepared to offer a few members of the public a rare chance for a tour of its facilities. There’s a lot on the agenda, including seeing an uncrewed Dragon that has actually returned from space.
Here’s the deal: SpaceX has partnered with Charitybuzz to offer a single tour for up to 10 people. Bidding is open now and closes June 19 at this site.
“At SpaceX your party will tour the world’s largest facility developing the complete design, fabrication and assembly of rockets, engines and spacecraft,” SpaceX stated on the Charitybuzz website.
“You will see Falcon 9 rockets being assembled, Merlin engines being constructed, Dragon spacecraft in production and even a Dragon that has returned from space! Following the tour, guests will have a chance to meet Gwynne Shotwell, President and COO [chief operating officer] of SpaceX in person.”
Just like for NASA Socials, you are responsible for your own travel and accommodation. The tour is expected to last 1.5 to 2 hours and will take place at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. The benefitting charity is the Women in Technology Foundation, whose stated mandate is “education to create awareness, excitement, and opportunity among girls and women, and to encourage them to work in technology-related fields.”
More details are available at Charitybuzz. SpaceX uses its Dragon spacecraft to make regular cargo shipments to the International Space Station, and is one of three companies competing for the chance to do the same with astronauts.
A large crater in Meridiani Planum on Mars, about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) northwest of Opportunity's landing site and 42 kilometers (24.6 miles) northwest of Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity is right now. The crater is older than Victoria Crater (another target of Opportunity's), which is clear because it is more filled in with sediments and eroded. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Mars, that ever-changing and beautiful Red Planet practically next door to us, is one of the most well-studied places humans have in the universe. We’ve sent spacecraft there for about 50 years. Yet there’s still a lot of mysteries out there.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is among the investigating spacecraft in the area checking out the planet’s past and looking for any interesting clues to tell us more about how Mars — and the Earth, and the solar system, and planets in general — formed. Mars had a wetter past (as the rovers have showed us), but where the water went and why its atmosphere are so thin are among the things scientists are trying to understand.
Luckily for us, the catalog of the University of Arizona’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) is easily available online for all of us to marvel at. Here are just some of the pictures sent back from across the solar system. To see more, look below and check out this HiRISE web page.
This image from Mars shows a variety of sandy features: ripples, transverse aeolian ridges (which are larger and lighter), dunes (dark) and draa (very large bedforms that are greater than 1 kilometer or 0.62 miles). Credit: NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaA Martian alluvial fan on the floor of a 60-kilometer (38-mile) crater near the equator of Mars. Scientists commonly study these features to learn more about the Red Planet’s wet past. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaShiny dunes on Mars taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaDunes migrating across the surface of Mars. Picture taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
