Image (Credit): Pluto as seen by the New Horizons spacecraft. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)
You may enjoy last week’s Astronomy magazine video that is part of This Week in Astronomy with Dave Eicher titled “Is Pluto a Planet?“. The issue on the table is whether scientists were a little too quick to dismiss Pluto’s status under new criteria given that we may have not understood whether the Earth even met this criteria. Is Earth a dwarf planet?
Check out the video and the accompanying article, and then visit the NASA page on the earlier New Horizons mission for some interesting background on the little planet, or dwarf planet, depending on your view.
Image (Credit): A meteorite in the Antarctic. (Rutgers University)
“We get a piece for our collection and a new meteorite sample for potential research…In turn, they know what they can sell the specimen for because they know what kind of meteorite it is.”
-Statement by Alan Rubin, a research geochemist and curator of the University of California, Los Angeles meteorite collection, in a Wall Street Journal article titled “A $25,000 Prize Still Sits in the Maine Woods. Meteorite Hunters Aren’t Giving Up.” The article discusses the meteorite-hunting hobby of some individuals and how it has created a symbiotic relationship between hunters and scientists. As another scientist in the article stated, ““We as scientists, with a few exceptions, don’t have the time, effort or money to go hunting meteorites.” You can also find the article here.
While both Buzz Aldrin and I believe that lunar and Martian colonies are important, it would appear the public has other ideas about NASA’s priorities. The graphic above shows in a recent Pew Research Center study indicates the more Americans are interested in monitoring the Earth’s climate as well as watching for asteroids.
Even finding exoplanets that could support life seems to be more important than occupying local moons and planets. I am not sure how that would help us now if we want to spread the risk of living on one planet, as some propose. We are nowhere near sending a probe to exoplanets, let alone getting humans there.
The study has quite a bit to ponder, including:
58% of U.S. adults believe it is essential to include the use of human astronauts in the U.S. space program, while 41% say astronauts are not essential;
Some 44% of Americans have a great deal of confidence private companies will make a profit in their space-related ventures;
As the public considers the possibilities ahead for ordinary citizens to orbit the Earth in a spacecraft, more Americans say they would not want to orbit the Earth than say they would (58% to 42%); and
About seven-in-ten Americans (72%) say it is essential for the U.S. to continue to be a world leader in space exploration, and eight-in-ten (80%) say the space station has been a good investment for the country.
I am not sure the survey shows a lot of consistency in the answers, but this can be a difficult topic at the outset. NASA should just be worried if Americans saw no reason for a space program, which does not seem to be the case. As noted above, the majority of Americans want a strong space program. Let’s see if that helps with the ongoing congressional budget discussions.
Image (Credit): Astronaut Edwin E. (Buzz) Aldrin Jr., Lunar Module (LM) pilot, climbs down the LM ladder, preparing for his first steps on the Moon. (NASA)
On this day in 1969, the Apollo 11 crew stepped on the Moon for the first time, showing that mankind could actually travel to another world. The image above shows Astronaut Buzz Aldrin preparing the step on the Moon as the second human to ever walk on the lunar surface.
Buzz Aldrin has plenty of quotes related to his Moon mission and life in general, but I like his quotes about our next trip to Mars, like this one:
When we set out to land people on the surface of Mars, I think we should as a nation, as a world, commit ourselves to supporting a growing settlement and colonization there. To visit a few times and then withdraw would be an unforgivable waste of resources.
NASA’s Artemis mission is retracing Buzz Adrin’s steps, which is a good sign given that we visited only a few times and then withdrew for decades. Let’s hope Artemis gets us settlements on both the Moon and Mars.
The search for ice at the Moon’s poles has loomed large in the field of lunar science since an instrument on an Indian satellite discovered water molecules inside shadowed crater floors more than a decade ago. NASA is now assembling a golf cart-size rover to drive into the dark polar craters to search for ice deposits that could be used by future astronauts to make their own rocket propellant and breathable air.“A large group of people have been working on this idea for 10-plus years,” said Anthony Colaprete, project scientist for NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission.
In a first for white dwarfs, the burnt-out cores of dead stars, astronomers have discovered that at least one member of this cosmic family is two faced. One side of the white dwarf is composed of hydrogen, while the other is made up of helium. “The surface of the white dwarf completely changes from one side to the other,” says Ilaria Caiazzo, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who leads a new study on the findings in the journal Nature. “When I show the observations to people, they are blown away.”
A team of scientists, led by the researcher at the IAC and the University of La Laguna (ULL) Sebastién Comerón, has found that the galaxy NGC 1277 does not contain dark matter. This is the first time that a massive galaxy (it has a mass several times that of the Milky Way) has not shown evidence for this invisible component of the universe. “This result does not fit in with the currently accepted cosmological models, which include dark matter,” explains Comerón.
Our Awesome Universe 