Artist's conception of the NASA InSight Mars lander. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
It’s time to get ready for Mars, again! NASA has given the approval to begin construction on its 2016 mission, the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission.
As the mission implies, the lander (which isn’t moveable) will focus on learning more about the inside of Mars. The idea is to figure out how terrestrial planets are “differentiated” inside between core, mantle and crust. Also, watchers of the Mars program may recognize some parts of the lander, as it will borrow the design from the successful Phoenix mission in 2008.
“We will incorporate many features from our Phoenix spacecraft into InSight, but the differences between the missions require some differences in the InSight spacecraft,” stated Stu Spath, InSight program manager at Lockheed Martin.
“For example, the InSight mission duration is 630 days longer than Phoenix, which means the lander will have to endure a wider range of environmental conditions on the surface.”
View of Mars’ surface near the north pole from the Phoenix lander. Credit: NASA/JPL-Calech/University of Arizona
NASA mission planners are still determining where InSight will go, but they expect it will be a site near the equator of Mars and that it will last at least two years on the surface.
The Mars lander will include a robotic arm with “surface and burrowing” instruments whose projects are led by the French and German space agencies, which are CNES (National Center of Space Studies) and DLR (German Center for Aerospace), respectively. CNES will contribute a seismic experiment to look at “Marsquakes” and when meteors smack the surface, while DLR’s science experiment will look at interior planetary heat.
Mars on March 8, 2014 shows not only clouds over Hellas but evening limb clouds. Credit: W.L. Chin
The seismometer will sit on the surface, covered up to protect it from the cold and wind, while the heat-flow probe will be hammered in about three to five yards or meters. Investigators also plan an experiment that will communicate with NASA’s Deep Space Network antenna network to see how much the rotation of Mars wobbles, which could hint if the core of the Red Planet is solid or liquid. The mission will also include wind, temperature and pressure sensors, as well as a magnetometer.
“Mars actually offers an advantage over Earth itself for understanding how habitable planetary surfaces can form,” stated Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Both planets underwent the same early processes. But Mars, being smaller, cooled faster and became less active while Earth kept churning. So Mars better preserves the evidence about the early stages of rocky planets’ development.”
Construction will be led by Lockheed Martin. You can check out more information about InSight at this website. NASA has several missions working at Mars right now, such as the Mars Curiosity rover, the Opportunity rover and the orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey spacecraft.
Expedition 39 flight engineer Steve Swanson activates the Veg-01 experiment (NASA/Koichi Wakata)
In what could become the world’s first orbiting salad bar, NASA’s Veggie experiment was initiated on May 8 after a successful (if slightly delayed) launch to the Space Station on Friday, April 18 aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule. In development for several years, the LED-powered plant growth experiment is finally getting the chance to put down its roots.
After receiving the experiment on Sunday, April 20, Expedition 39 astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Steve Swanson installed the Veg-01 unit inside ESA’s Columbus module on May 7. The next day Veg-01 was turned on, with a root mat and six small pillows containing “Outredgeous” romaine lettuce seeds within a special fertilized clay inserted inside its collapsible Teflon bellows.
The inside of the Veg-01 unit aboard the ISS (Source)
The lettuce plants are scheduled to grow for 28 days, during which time they will be periodically photographed, watered, and tested for any microbial growth. The pillows will be thinned down to one plant each, and after the experiment is over the remaining lettuce leaves will be harvested and frozen to be returned to Earth aboard another Dragon capsule later this year. There they’ll be tested and compared with the results of an identical Veggie experiment that’s being conducted at the same time at Kennedy Space Center.
If all goes well, the lettuce will be found to be safe for astronauts to eat. While they await the results, the next experiment can be started.
“My hopes are that Veggie will eventually enable the crew to regularly grow and consume fresh vegetables,” said Dr. Gioia Massa, the NASA science team lead for Veggie.
In addition to providing healthy food, having living plants to care for could be therapeutic for astronauts on long-duration missions in low-Earth orbit and beyond. (Let’s just hope it doesn’t one day end up like Silent Running!)
The Veggie system was developed for NASA by Orbital Technologies Corporation (ORBITEC) in Madison, Wisconsin, via a Small Business Innovative Research Program. Its innovations may eventually lead to better food production not only in space but also in limited-resource regions on Earth. Learn more about the Veg-01 experiment in my previous article here.
Source/more info: NASA news release (Also, see some photos of Veg-01 installed on the ISS here.)
Galactic radio loops, with BICEP2 region indicated. Credit: Philipp Mertsch
Recently rumors have been flying that the BICEP2 results regarding the cosmic inflationary period may be invalid. It all started with a post by Dan Falkowski on his blog Resonaances, where he claimed that the BICEP2 had misinterpreted some data, which rendered their results invalid, or at least questionable. The story was then picked up by Nature’s Blog and elsewhere, which has sparked some heated debate.
So what’s really going on?
For those who might not remember, BICEP2 is a project working to detect polarized light within the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Specifically they were looking for a type of polarization known as B-mode polarization. Detection of B-mode polarization is important because one mechanism for it is cosmic inflation in the early universe, which is exactly what BICEP2 claimed to have evidence of.
Part of the reason BICEP2 got so much press is because B-mode polarization is particularly difficult to detect. It is a small signal, and you have to filter through a great deal of observational data to be sure that your result is valid. But you also have to worry about other sources that look like B-mode polarization, and if you don’t account for them properly, then you could get a “false positive.” That’s where this latest drama arises.
In general this challenge is sometimes called the foreground problem. Basically, the cosmic microwave background is the most distant light we can observe. All the galaxies, dust, interstellar plasma and our own galaxy is between us and the CMB. So to make sure that the data you gather is really from the CMB, you have to account for all the stuff in the way (the foreground). We have ways of doing this, but it is difficult. The big challenge is to account for everything.
A map of foreground polarization from the Milky Way. Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration
Soon after the BICEP2 results, another team noted a foreground effect that could effect the BICEP2 results. It involves an effect known as radio loops, where dust particles trapped in interstellar magnetic fields can emit polarized light similar to B-mode polarization. How much of an effect this might have is unclear. Another project being done with the Planck satellite is also looking at this foreground effect, and has released some initial results (seen in the figure), but hasn’t yet released the actual data yet.
Now it has come to light that BICEP2 did, in fact, take some of this foreground polarization into account, in part using results from Planck. But since the raw data hadn’t been released, the team used data taken from a PDF slide of Planck results and basically reverse-engineered the Planck data. It is sometimes referred to as “data scraping”, and it isn’t ideal, but it works moderately well. Now there is some debate as to whether that slide presented the real foreground polarization or some averaged polarization. If it is the latter, then the BICEP2 results may have underestimated the foreground effect. Does this mean the BICEP2 results are completely invalid? Given what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think it does. Keep in mind that the Planck foreground is one of several foreground effects that BICEP2 did account for. It could be a large error, but it could also be a rather minor one.
The important thing to keep in mind is that the BICEP2 paper is still undergoing peer review. Critical analysis of the paper is exactly what should happen, and is happening. This type review used to be confined to the ivory towers, but with social media it now happens in the open. This is how science is done. BICEP2 has made a bold claim, and now everyone gets to whack at them like a piñata.
The BICEP2 team stands by their work, and so we’ll have to see whether it holds up to peer review. We’ll also have to wait for the Planck team to release their results on B-mode polarization. Eventually the dust will settle and we’ll have a much better handle on the results.
When “nothing in our solar system can help us,” we need to “confront the reality of interstellar travel.” So says the new full trailer from the upcoming film “Interstellar.”
In a word: WOW. And at nearly 7 million views so far on YouTube, this trailer is generating a lot of interest and anticipation. Even before the release of this trailer over the weekend, “Interstellar” has been one of the most anticipated movies of the year, especially for space fans. Details about the plot have been kept fairly secret so far, but here’s what the film’s website says: Continue reading “ICYMI: Full Trailer for “Interstellar””
Floating ice at the calving front of Greenland's Kangerdlugssuaq glacier, photographed in 2011 during Operation IceBridge (Credit: NASA/Michael Studinger)
Greenland’s glaciers may contribute more to future sea level rise than once thought, despite earlier reports that their steady seaward advance is a bit slower than expected. This is just more sobering news on the current state of Earth’s ice from the same researchers that recently announced the “unstoppable” retreat of West Antarctic glaciers.
Using data collected by several international radar-mapping satellites and NASA’s airborne Operation IceBridge surveys, scientists at NASA and the University of California, Irvine have discovered deep canyons below the ice sheet along Greenland’s western coast. These canyons cut far inland, and are likely to drive ocean-feeding glaciers into the sea faster and for longer periods of time as Earth’s climate continues to warm.
Some previous models of Greenland’s glaciers expected their retreat to slow once they receded to higher altitudes, making their overall contribution to sea level increase uncertain. But with this new map of the terrain far below the ice, modeled with radar soundings and high-resolution ice motion data, it doesn’t seem that the ice sheets’ recession will halt any time soon.
According to the team’s paper, the findings “imply that the outlet glaciers of Greenland, and the ice sheet as a whole, are probably more vulnerable to ocean thermal forcing and peripheral thinning than inferred previously from existing numerical ice-sheet models.”
“The glaciers of Greenland are likely to retreat faster and farther inland than anticipated, and for much longer, according to this very different topography we have discovered. This has major implications, because the glacier melt will contribute much more to rising seas around the globe.”
– Mathieu Morlighem, project scientist, University of California, Irving
Many of the newly-discovered canyons descend below sea level and extend over 65 miles (100 kilometers) inland, making them vulnerable — like the glaciers in West Antarctica — to undercutting by warmer ocean currents.
The team’s findings were published on May 18 in a report titled Deeply Incised Submarine Glacial Valleys Beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Who knows what mysteries lurk at the military’s Area 51 complex in Nevada? Conspiracy theorists and UFO chasers think it’s a big alien coverup. But it’s probably something more boring, like advanced military aircraft. Let’s talk about what we know, and what we think we know about this infamous military base. Continue reading “Astronomy Cast Ep. 346: Area 51”
Yikes! The Mothership has returned to Wyoming a la “Close Encounters of the Third Kind!” Yesterday a gigantic storm cloud spun into a flying saucer shape in eastern Wyoming near Newcastle and a storm-chasing group called Basehunters captured it all on film. Luckily, by the end of the footage, the storm dissipates.
And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space. If you’ve got a space-related blog, you should really join the carnival. Just email an entry to [email protected], and the next host will link to it. It will help get awareness out there about your writing, help you meet others in the space community – and community is what blogging is all about. And if you really want to help out, sign up to be a host. Send an email to the above address.
It could be the best of meteor showers, or it could be the…
Well, we’ll delve into the alternatives here in a bit. For now, we’ll call upon our ever present astronomical optimism and say that one of the best meteor showers of 2014 may potentially be on tap for this weekend.
This is a true wild card event. The meteor shower in question hails from a periodic comet 209P LINEAR discovered in 2004 and radiates from the obscure and tongue-twisting constellation of Camelopardalis.
But whether you call ‘em the “209/P-ids,” the “Camelopardalids,” or simply the “Cams,” this weekend’s meteor shower is definitely one worth watching out for. The excitement surrounding this meteor shower came about when researchers Peter Jenniskens and Esko Lyytinen noticed that the Earth would cross debris streams laid down by the comet in 1803 and 1924. Discovered by the LIncoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) automated all-sky survey located at White Sands, New Mexico, comet 209P LINEAR orbits the Sun once every 5.1 years. 209P LINEAR passed perihelion at 0.97 AUs from the Sun this month on May 6th.
Looking north from latitude +30N at 7:00 UT on the morning of May 24th. Created using Starry Night.
The meteor shower peaks this coming U.S. Memorial Day weekend on Saturday, May 24th. The expected peak is projected for right around 7:00 Universal Time (UT) which is the early morning hours of 3:00 AM EDT, giving North America a possible front row seat to the event. Estimates for the Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) of the Camelopardalids run the gamut from a mild 30 to an outstanding 400 per hour. Keep in mind, this is a shower that hasn’t been witnessed, and it’s tough enough to forecast the timing and activity of known showers. It’s really a question of how much debris the 1803 and 1924 streams laid down on those undocumented passages. One possible strike against a “meteor storm” similar to the 1998 Leonids that we witnessed from Kuwait is the fact that the “Cams” have never been recorded before. Still, you won’t see any if you don’t try!
The orientation of the Earth, the day/night terminator, the Sun, Moon and radiant of the meteor shower on May 24th at 7:00 UT. Created by author.
Comet 209P/LINEAR passes 0.055 AUs — about 8.3 million kilometres — from the Earth on May 29th, shining at +11th magnitude and crossing south into the constellation of Leo Minor in late May. Interestingly, it also passes 0.8 degrees from asteroid 2 Pallas on May 26th. Though tiny, comet 209P/LINEAR’s 2014 passage ranks as the 9th closest recorded approach of a comet to the Earth.
A recent image of comet 209/P LINEAR. credit: The Virtual Telescope Project.
The Moon is also at an ideal phase for meteor watching this coming weekend as it presents a waning crescent phase just 4 days from New and rises at around 4:00 AM local.
The expected radiant for the Cams sits at Right Ascension 8 hours and declination 78 degrees north in the constellation of Camelopardalis, the “camel leopard…” OK, we’ve never seen such a creature, either. (Read “giraffe”). Unfortunately, this puts the radiant just 20 degrees above the northern horizon as seen from +30 degrees north latitude here in Florida at 7:00 UT. Generally speaking, the farther north you are, the higher the radiant will be in the sky and the better your viewing prospects are. Canada and the northern continental United States could potentially be in for a good show. Keep in mind too, the high northern declination of the radiant means that it transits the meridian (crosses upper culmination) a few hours before sunset Friday night at 6 PM local; this means it’ll have an elevation of about 38 degrees above the horizon as seen from 30 degrees north latitude just after sunset. It may well be worth watching for early activity after dusk!
A look ahead at the cloud cover prospects for the morning of May 24th. Credit: NOAA.
Clouded out or live on the wrong side of the planet to watch the Camelopardalids? Slooh will be carrying a live broadcast of the event starting at 3:00 PM PDT/ 6:00 PM EDT/ 22:00 UT. Also, the folks at the Virtual Telescope Project will carry two separate webcasts of the event, one featuring the progenitor comet 209P LINEAR starting at 20:00 UT on May 22nd and another featuring the meteor shower itselfstarting at 5:30 UT on May 24th.
Observing meteors is fun and easy and requires nothing more than a good pair of “mark-1 eyeballs” and patience. And although the radiant may be low to the north, meteors can appear anywhere in the sky. We like to keep a pair of binocs handy to examine any lingering smoke trains left by bright fireballs. Counting the number of meteors you see from your location and submitting this estimate to the International Meteor Organization may help in ongoing efforts to understand this first time meteor shower. And capturing an image of a meteor is as simple as setting a DSLR on a tripod with a wide field of view and taking time exposures of the sky… something you can start practicing tonight.
Our humble meteor observing rig… (Photo by author).
Don’t miss what could well be the astronomical event of the year… I’d love to see a meteor shower named after an obscure constellation such as the #Camelopardalids trending. And we fully expect to start fielding reports of “strange rocks falling from the sky” this week, which the cometary dust that composes a meteor shower isn’t. In fact, Meteorite Man Geoffrey Notkin once noted that no confirmed meteorite fall has ever been linked to a periodic meteor shower.
Don’t miss the celestial show!
-Got pics of the Camelopardalids? Send ‘em to Universe Today. There’s a good chance that we’ll run an after-action photo-round up if the Cams kick it into high gear.
-Read more about the Camelopardalidshere in a recent outstanding post by Bob King on Universe Today.
Several images of an aurora on Saturn's north pole taken in April and May 2013 by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA, Acknowledgement: J. Nichols (University of Leicester)
It’s amazing to see what some flashes of light can tell us. New images the Hubble Space Telescope took of Saturn not only reveal auroras dancing in the north pole, but also reveal some interesting things about the giant planet’s magnetic field.
“It appears that when particles from the Sun hit Saturn, the magnetotail collapses and later reconfigures itself, an event that is reflected in the dynamics of its auroras,” the European Space Agency wrote in a description of the image.
“Saturn was caught during a very dynamic light show – some of the bursts of light seen shooting around Saturn’s polar regions traveled more than three times faster than the speed of the gas giant’s roughly 10-hour rotation period.”
And for those readers that remember the music video from Saturn that the Cassini spacecraft took — also of auroras — ESA said this new research complements what the other spacecraft did, too.
The research has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.
