Space Stories: Remembering the Solar System Delivery System, Many More Milky Ways, and AI Investigates Alien Life

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: USPS

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—NASA: “New US Postage Stamp Commemorates NASA’s Asteroid Sample Delivery“

On Sept. 24, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) spacecraft will speed past Earth and – at precisely the right moment – jettison its sample capsule containing material from asteroid Bennu…To help celebrate this engineering and scientific achievement, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp featuring an artist’s impression of the sample capsule as it parachutes to Earth over its landing site on the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range…Although OSIRIS-REx has already had many scientific accomplishments, at its heart, the mission’s research goals circle around the sample delivery from Bennu. That influenced the Postal Service’s decision to select the capsule’s descent as the subject of the new stamp.

—LiveScience.com: “James Webb Telescope Spots Thousands of Milky Way Lookalikes That ‘Shouldn’t Exist’ Swarming Across the Early Universe“

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found more than 1,000 galaxies mysteriously resembling our own Milky Way hiding out in the early universe. Shaped like warped vinyls and sporting delicate spiral arms, the Milky Way doppelgangers were found by JWST more than 10 billion years into the universe’s past — during a period when violent galactic mergers were thought to have made an abundance of such fragile galaxies impossible. Yet the disk galaxies are 10 times more common in the early universe than astronomers previously thought, new research reveals.

—Astronomy.com: “Can AI Find Life in the Universe?“

Scientists could soon use common lab technology along with sophisticated algorithms to answer one of the biggest questions in all of astronomy — are we alone in the universe? In new research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of scientists announced a novel technique that can take a sample of a material, feed it through a machine-learning algorithm, and find out if the material did — or didn’t — come from a living organism with 90 percent accuracy.

Space Stories: New Lunar Water Estimates, Coronal Mass Ejection, and Oxygen on Mars

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Shadows on the Moon’s south pole. (NASA)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Southwest Research Institute: “New Findings Suggest Moon May Have Less Water Than Previously Thought“

A team recently calculated that most of the Moon’s permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are at most around 3.4 billion years old and can contain relatively young deposits of water ice. Water resources are considered key for sustainable exploration of the Moon and beyond, but these findings suggest that current estimates for cold-trapped ices are too high.

—Scientific American: “Massive Sun Outburst Smacks NASA Spacecraft“

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe was built to withstand the ravages of the environment near our sun—and with good reason. The car-size spacecraft has now flown through a giant solar outburst of charged particles called a coronal mass ejection (CME). If that CME had it hit Earth instead, it may have caused vast, continent-wide blackouts, scientists say. Some of those searing particles whipped through space at about three million miles per hour.

—BGR: “NASA Successfully Generated Oxygen on Mars“

NASA’s Perseverance rover has done the unthinkable. Or, at least, a small device on the rover has. According to a tweet and article shared by NASA’s Perseverance team on Twitter, a device known only as MOXIE has proven that we can generate oxygen on Mars using the planet’s CO2-concentrated atmosphere. This tech is a huge boon, and the success of this story could help pave the way for future oxygen generation on the Red Planet, something that would make long-term exploration of the planet far more feasible.

Space Stories: Strange Asteroid Behavior, Another Earth in Our Solar System, and the Study of Galaxy Clusters

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Photo of Dimorphos taken by the DATA spacecraft. (NASA)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Futurism: “Something Weird is Going On with the Asteroid NASA Smashed“

Nearly a year ago, NASA successfully smashed an asteroid for the first time, in a landmark test to see whether we could divert a killer space rock before disaster — but now, the asteroid in question is behaving strangely. As New Scientist reports, a schoolteacher and his pupils seem to have discovered that the orbit of Dimorphos, the space rock socked by the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) last September, has apparently continued slowing down, unexpectedly, in the year since the refrigerator-sized craft smashed into it.

—Kindai University: “Possible Existence of Earth-Like Planet Predicted in the Outskirts of the Solar System“

Researchers from Japan predict, based on computer simulations, the likely existence of an Earth-like planet in the distant Kuiper Belt. There are many unexplained anomalies in the orbits and distribution of trans-Neptunian objects, small celestial bodies located at the outer reaches of the solar system. Now, based on detailed computer simulations of the early outer solar system, researchers from Japan predict the possibility of an undiscovered Earth-like planet beyond Neptune orbiting the Sun. Should this prediction come true, it could revolutionize our understanding of the history of the solar system.

—European Space Agency: “X-ray mission lifts off to study high-energy Universe“

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) lifted off on a H-IIA rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan at 08:42 JST / 00:42 BST / 01:42 CEST on 7 September 2023. The successful launch marks the beginning of an ambitious mission to explore the growth of galaxy clusters, the chemical make-up of the Universe, and the extremes of spacetime. XRISM is a collaboration between JAXA and NASA, with significant participation from ESA.

Space Stories: New Horizon Questions, A Dark Spot on Neptune, and Prioritizing Exoplanets

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Space.com : “NASA’s New Horizons Mission Faces an Uncertain Future (op-ed)“

With its budget being trimmed for 2024, NASA is making some weighty decisions… and one includes drastically trimming New Horizons funds by replacing the current science staff with a new team in an effort to save about $3 million—a rounding error in terms of the planetary science budget...As it stands, New Horizons will exit the Kuiper Belt around 2028 and should continue operating until 2050.

—ScienceDaily : “Mysterious Neptune Dark Spot Detected from Earth for the First Time“

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have observed a large dark spot in Neptune’s atmosphere, with an unexpected smaller bright spot adjacent to it. This is the first time a dark spot on the planet has ever been observed with a telescope on Earth. These occasional features in the blue background of Neptune’s atmosphere are a mystery to astronomers, and the new results provide further clues as to their nature and origin.

—Universe Today : “TESS has Found Thousands of Possible Exoplanets: Which Ones Should JWST Study?“

We will soon have more than 10,000 worlds where life might be able to survive. It’s an amazing idea, but with so many exoplanets we don’t have the resources to search for life on all of them. So how do we prioritize our search? That’s the focus of a recent paper on the pre-print server arxiv. In it, the team strives to identify the “best in class” candidates for exoplanets that could be further studied by the spectroscopic cameras of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Their list could not only help astronomers find evidence of life but also help us understand the range of atmospheres exoplanets have.

Space Stories: The End of Arecibo, Early Black Holes, and Habitable Red Dwarf Exoplanets

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Aerial view of the damaged Arecibo Observatory after one of the main cables holding the receiver broke in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, on December 1, 2020. (Photo by Ricardo ARDUENGO / AFP)

Here are some recent stories of interest.

—Scientific American : “Arecibo Observatory Shuts Down Its Science“

After weathering hurricanes, earthquakes, budget cuts and a pandemic-induced shutdown, the iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico closed its doors on 14 August. After its main instrument collapsed two years ago, the site was supposed to shift from carrying out astronomy and other research to being a science education centre. But concrete plans for that have yet to materialize — and funding for current operations has run out. Scientists were disappointed that research would formally halt at the site, but they had hoped to keep some instruments running, both for the students who might use the educational centre and to continue the site’s astronomy legacy. Doubts now swirl, as equipment is taken offline and dismantled, that Arecibo will ever again study the sky.

—Quanta Magazine : “JWST Spots Giant Black Holes All Over the Early Universe“

In recent months, a torrent of observations of the cosmic smudges has delighted and confounded astronomers…The most straightforward explanation for the tornado-hearted galaxies is that large black holes weighing millions of suns are whipping the gas clouds into a frenzy. That finding is both expected and perplexing. It is expected because JWST was built, in part, to find the ancient objects. They are the ancestors of billion-sun behemoth black holes that seem to appear in the cosmic record inexplicably early. By studying these precursor black holes, such as three record-setting youngsters discovered this year, scientists hope to learn where the first humongous black holes came from and perhaps identify which of two competing theories better describes their formation: Did they grow extremely rapidly, or were they simply born big?

—Phys.org : “New Study Suggests Some Exoplanets Orbiting Red Dwarfs May be Habitable After All“

A team of astrophysicists from the University of Bordeaux and Observatoire Astronomique de l’Université de Genève is suggesting that some exoplanets may not have been too hot during their formative years to harbor life today. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group suggests that due to factors not considered in the past, some exoplanets may not have grown so hot that they lost the water in their atmospheres to evaporation into space.