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Archaeologist, multi-instrumentalist and historian Graeme Lawson sets out to tell the story of music from 40,000 years ago until today, in his wide-ranging new book

Astronomers are pretty sure they know where the Moon came from. In the early Solar System, a Mars-sized object dubbed Theia smashed into Earth. This cataclysmic collision knocked a huge mass of material into orbit, which coalesced and cooled into the Moon. But establishing exactly when this occurred is a difficult task. At the 55th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 55) last month in The Woodlands, Texas, researchers proposed a new timeline of events that moves the giant impact earlier than previous predictions, at just 50 million years after the formation of the Solar System.

Dating the giant impact event is challenging because the existing evidence is conflicting, telling stories that don’t line up.

One line of evidence is derived from planetary orbits. The most likely cause of the impact is an instability in Jupiter’s orbit, which would have thrown objects like Theia into Earth’s path within the first 100 million years of the Solar System. If that orbital instability happened any later, the paths of the inner planets would have been disrupted, and Jupiter’s trojan asteroids, like binary pair Patroclus and Menoetius, (which NASA’s Lucy spacecraft plans to visit in 2033) would not remain where we see them today.

The best estimate based on these orbital observations places the impact between 37-62 million years after the formation of the Solar System. The Moon, researchers believe, would have cooled from a lake of magma into a solid surface within about 10 million years after impact.

Geological evidence, however, seems to be telling a different story. The earliest known moon rocks formed much later, appearing to have crystalized from magma at about 208 million years. Rocks on Earth, similarly, seem to have formed into a proper crust at about 218 million years.

A third dating scheme, done by measuring the decay of the element Hafnium into Tungsten, pushes the collision date early again, suggesting the Moon’s core formed at about 50 million years.

Any explanation for lunar formation needs to account for all of these evidence types.

A 2022 simulation of the giant impact that created the Moon. NASA / Durham University / Jacob Kegerreis.

The scenario proposed at LPSC 55 does just that. They suggest an early collision around 50 million years, followed by a 10 million-year-long period of cooling. But the Moon then went through a cycle of reheating before finally cooling again at the 200-million-year mark.

That reheating process is the key to this theory, and if it is correct, it would have been caused by tidal forces. The Moon’s orbit, according to this theory, was not yet stable around Earth, and its inclination and eccentricity increased in the years following impact, squeezing and stretching the Moon and liquifying it. These same tidal processes occur on other moons today: around Jupiter, for example, we see them creating volcanoes on Io and liquid oceans on Europa.

The cooling process was also likely slowed by violent secondary impacts, as leftover material from the initial impact slammed into the Moon over millions of years.

The team also added one new piece of evidence that strengthens the case for an early giant impact around 50 million years. Similar to the Hafnium-Tungsten decay method, the team measured the decay of earthly Rubidium sources into Strontium, giving an independent estimate supporting the early date.

This research was carried out by Steven. J. Desch of Arizona State University and A. P. Jackson of Towson University.

The post What's the Earliest the Moon Could Have Formed? appeared first on Universe Today.

Scientists have been underutilizing a key resource we can use to help us understand Earth: animals. Our fellow Earthlings have a much different, and usually much more direct, relationship with the Earth. They move around the planet in ways and to places we don’t.

What can their movements tell us?

Humanity has a fleet of satellites orbiting Earth that tell us all kinds of things about the planet. Satellites track temperature, CO2 emissions, rainfall, forest fires, drought, volcanic eruptions, etc. We know more about Earth than ever, and a lot of it is thanks to satellites.

Climate change is our biggest concern right now, and new research shows that sensors attached to animals can elevate our climate change data to a new, more granular level.

The research perspective is titled “Animal-borne sensors as a biologically informed lens on a changing climate,” published in Nature Climate Change. The lead author is Diego Ellis-Soto, a graduate student at Yale University and a NASA FINESST (Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology) fellow.

The first animal tracker was probably just a piece of coloured string. In 1803, American Naturalist John Audobon wanted to know if birds migrated and returned to the same place yearly. So he attached a piece of string around a bird’s leg before it flew south for the winter. Next spring, he spotted the bird and knew it had returned to the same place.

The tools at scientists’ disposal now are much more powerful than Audobon’s piece of string. Ellis-Soto studies animal movements and what they can tell us about rapid environmental change. He uses remote sensing, GPS tracking, and citizen science to try to forecast environmental changes at fine spatio-temporal scales.

This type of research has its roots in things like the Great Backyard Bird Count, where citizen scientists spend four days each February recording what birds they see. Participants spend only a few minutes each day recording what they see and uploading it to a website. The result is a massive collection of data unattainable by any other method.

The Bird Count is a more passive example of animal movement studies that the authors advocate. They’re pursuing more active methods of studying animal movement and gathering data to get around some of the roadblocks scientists face when studying the climate.

“Traditional climate measurements are often constrained by geographically static, coarse, sparse and biased sampling, and only indirect links to ecological responses,” Ellis-Soto and his co-authors write in their research. “Here we discuss how animal-borne sensors can deliver spatially fine-grain, biologically fine-tuned, relevant sampling of climatic conditions in support of ecological and climatic forecasting.”

A 130-pound wolf watches biologists in Yellowstone National Park after being captured and fitted with a radio collar on 1-9-03. Tracking wolves as they move through their territory can also tell researchers about the environmental and climate conditions that motivate their movements. Image Credit: By William C. Campbell – U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30609

Even though we have a fleet of powerful satellites and a massive number of ground-based data collectors, they each have a weakness of some type. Ground stations can only sample data from a single location. Satellites have their own limitations. They can collect data in fine spatial resolution, across multiple wavelengths, or at high temporal frequency. But they don’t do it all at once. They’re also inhibited by cloud cover and, in some cases, the darkness of night. The result is data that though powerful, has gaps in it.

Animal sensors can bridge those gaps, according to Ellis-Soto. “Animals are an integral component of Earth observation,” he said.

Animal-borne sensors (ABS) aren’t new. They’ve been used for decades to track various animals, including predators like lions, ocean-going animals like orcas, migrating birds, and even insects. These trackers monitor and report an animal’s movements in places that satellites can’t monitor, and humans can’t easily access. But Ellis-Soto says we can use trackers to gather other data, like temperature.

In South Africa’s Kruger National Park, scientists used temperature and movement trackers on elephants to monitor the animals as they moved around in the park for one year. They combined it with satellite temperature data. Two maps from that effort show how the elephant sensors filled in gaps in the satellite data and created a much more complete picture.

These two maps show satellite temperature data (top) and elephant location and temperature data from ABSs. Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and elephant-borne sensor data from Thaker, M. et al. (2019).

Ellis-Soto sees the issue in terms of bias. Each satellite has a sampling bias. Sampling bias is unavoidable when designing satellites and their instruments. But animals have a sampling bias, too, and scientists can use that bias for their own purposes.

“These animals are extremely biased sensors, and this bias is called animal ecology and behaviour,” said Ellis-Soto.

The elephants in Kruger National Park are just one example. The use of ABSs is widespread.

This image shows how ABSs are used to collect different environmental data. 1 to 9 show ABSs used to estimate measurements ranging from wind speed and direction to air temperature. 10 to 16 shows ABSs used to measure sea surface temperature and salinity. 17 and 18 show ABSs used to measure near-surface temperature in terrestrial realms. Image Credit: Ellis-Soto et al. 2023

Ellis-Soto and his colleagues see many opportunities to expand this kind of monitoring and combine it with other data, including satellite data. “Technological advances in ABSs offer an ever-increasing number and quality of auxiliary on-board sensors that collect climatic variables,” they write. Technological advancements in ABSs combined with animal movement are powerful tools that can play a larger role. “Animals can access and monitor remote areas and detect rare events and hard-to-measure environmental conditions of potential importance for climate change projections.”

The authors highlight the issue of snowmelt. Around the world, snowmelt is an important indicator in understanding the coming growing season. Snowmelt provides irrigation water for millions of farmers around the world. For example, in India and Pakistan, 130 million farmers rely on meltwater to irrigate their crops.

“In many areas of the globe, snowmelt is a crucial component of the natural hydrological cycle,” they write. “A biological warning system of earlier snowmelt under climate change by ABSs may improve estimates of the contribution to mountain hydrology, a critical area of improvement for climate change projections and water runoffs for food production.”

In the Arctic, researchers used ABSs to track the movements of three types of birds: snowy owls, rough-legged buzzards, and peregrine falcons. The ABS data showed how these animals follow the snowmelt during migratory journeys. The data was more granular than satellites could provide. “Spatially fine-scaled capture of patches of snowmelt as homed in on by animals is otherwise hard to attain but highly useful for understanding the phenology and distribution of Arctic species under changing climate conditions,” the authors write.

There are many examples of ABSs being used to gather otherwise unattainable or difficult-to-obtain environmental data. But there are also many more opportunities waiting to be realized.

This figure shows how harp seals can be fitted with ABSs to record and transmit data while going about their business. ARGOS is a satellite network dedicated to wildlife monitoring. Image Credit: McMahon et al. 2021.

“We see a real opportunity for the ecological and meteorological community to employ ABSs for a strongly expanded, representative and biologically interpretable measurement of meteorological
and climatic conditions under current and future climate,” the authors write.

Our fellow Earthlings are like an army of unwitting citizen scientists. As long as the ABSs don’t hamper or harm them, they can greatly contribute to Earth’s well-being without even knowing it.

“The thousands of animals today swimming, running and flying around the globe carrying electronic tags are agile earth observers with the potential to provide transformative data collection in support of global change research, meteorology, climate forecasting and ecology,” the authors conclude.

The post How Animal Movements Help Us Study the Planet appeared first on Universe Today.

6 min read

Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)

Since it began in 1958, NASA has been charged by law with spreading the word about its work “to the widest extent practicable.” From typewritten press releases to analog photos and film, NASA has effectively moved into social media and other online communications. NASA’s broad reach across digital platforms has been recognized by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), which gave NASA 13 nominations for the academy’s Webby Awards this year. 

At NASA, we share the secrets of the universe through every platform and media there is. These nominations—for websites, podcasts, social media, apps and virtual experiences—showcase the breadth and depth of the NASA digital team, as they inspire the next generation to reach for the stars.

Marc Etkind

NASA Associate Administrator for Communications

Public Voting Opportunities

Voting for the Webby People’s Voice Awards—chosen by the public—is open now through Thursday, April 18. Voting links for each category are listed below.

28th Annual Webby Nominees Apps

Space Images
NASA, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech
Apps & Software-General Apps | Education, Science & Reference

The Space Images app provides stunning new images of space, planets, Mars, asteroids, stars, galaxies, and cutting-edge space technology as they are released each week from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Campaigns

NASA: Message in a Bottle
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Advertising, Media & PR-PR Campaigns | Best Community Engagement

NASA’s Message in a Bottle campaign invited people around the world to sign their names to a poem written by the U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. The poem connects the two water worlds — Earth, yearning to reach out and understand what makes a world habitable, and Europa, waiting with secrets yet to be explored. The campaign was a special collaboration, uniting art and science, by NASA, the U.S. Poet Laureate, and the Library of Congress.

Podcasts

NASA’s Curious Universe
Podcasts-Shows | Science & Education

As an official NASA podcast, Curious Universe brings you mind-blowing science and space adventures you won’t find anywhere else. Explore the cosmos alongside astronauts, scientists, engineers, and other top NASA experts who are achieving remarkable feats in science, space exploration, and aeronautics. Learn something new about the wild and wonderful universe we share. All you need to get started is a little curiosity. NASA’s Curious Universe is an official NASA podcast hosted by Padi Boyd and Jacob Pinter.

NASA’s Curious Universe: Suiting Up for Space
Podcasts-Individual Episodes | Science & Education

Spacesuits are more than just garments – in the airless vacuum of space or on the freezing surface of the moon, they keep astronauts alive. In this episode of NASA’s Curious Universe podcast, we explore how NASA engineers like Amy Ross and Paromita Mitra contributed to the development of the next generation of spacesuits.

Social

Hubble’s Servicing Mission 1
Social-Social Content Series | Education & Science

Shortly after its 1990 deployment, NASA discovered a flaw in the observatory’s primary mirror that affected the clarity of the telescope’s early images. Fortunately, Hubble’s design allowed astronauts to perform repairs, replace parts, and update its technology with new instruments while in orbit. Servicing Mission 1 was the first opportunity to install corrective optics that counteracted the primary mirror’s flaw, add new instruments, and conduct planned maintenance on the telescope.

NASA Social Media
Social-Features | Best Overall Social Presence, Brand

NASA’s flagship social media accounts host dynamic conversations about what’s new with America’s space agency, and why it matters. Spanning 15 social media platforms, these accounts reach more than 200 million people around the world.

NASA’s First Asteroid Sample Return Mission
Social-Social Campaigns | Education & Science

Science fiction became reality on Sept. 24, 2023 when NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft delivered rocks older than our own planet to the Utah desert, rocks that contain clues to the early solar system and the origins of life. The accompanying social media campaign and in-person, behind-the-scenes NASA Social event gave the public an inside look into NASA’s first mission to deliver an asteroid sample to Earth.

Annular Solar Eclipse
NASA, ADNET Systems Inc.
Social-Social Campaigns | Events & Live Streams

On Oct. 14, 2023, audiences across the web joined us live as a “ring of fire” eclipse. Visible in parts of the United States, Mexico, and many countries in South and Central America, millions of people in the Western Hemisphere experienced this eclipse.

Video

OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return (Official 4K NASA Live Stream)
Video-General Video | Events & Live Streams

Live coverage of OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid, as it returned to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, to drop off material from asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft didn’t land, but continued on to a new mission, OSIRIS-APEX, to explore asteroid Apophis. Meanwhile, scientists hope the Bennu sample OSIRIS-REx dropped into the Utah desert will offer clues to whether asteroids colliding with Earth billions of years ago brought water and other key ingredients for life here.

Virtual Experiences

NASA’s Immersive Earth
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Metaverse & Virtual-General Virtual Experiences | Science & Education

NASA created the Earth Information Center with founding partners FEMA, EPA, NOAA, USAID, USDA and USGS. The Earth Information Center draws data from research conducted by NASA’s centers and government and industry partners. The interactive physical exhibit is located inside NASA Headquarters in Washington, where visitors are invited to see how our planet is changing in six key areas: sea level rise and coastal impacts, health and air quality, wildfires, greenhouse gases, sustainable energy, and agriculture.

Websites

NASA.gov
Websites and Mobile Sites-General Desktop & Mobile Sites | Government & Associations

The new NASA web experience serves as an ever-expanding yet consolidated homebase for information about the agency’s missions and research, climate data, Artemis updates, and more. The updated nasa.gov and science.nasa.gov websites provide a connected, topic-driven experience, with a common search engine, integrated navigation, and optimized publishing capabilities in a modernized and secure set of web tools.

NASA+ Streaming Service
Websites and Mobile Sites-General Desktop & Mobile Sites | Television, Film & Streaming

Through the ad-free, no cost, and family-friendly streaming service, users gain access to the agency’s Emmy Award-winning live coverage and views into NASA’s missions through collections of original video series, including new series debuting on the streaming service. NASA+ also streams live event coverage, where people everywhere can watch in real-time as the agency launches science experiments and astronauts to space, and ultimately, the first woman and person of color to the Moon.

Hubble’s Inside the Image
NASA, Origin Films
Video-Video Series & Channels | Science & Education

In this ongoing series, astronomers explain the history and high-level science behind some of Hubble’s most beautiful, groundbreaking, and iconic images.

About the Webby Awards

Established in 1996, The Webbys is presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS)—a 3000+ member judging body comprised of leading Internet experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities. The Webbys honors excellence in nine major media types: websites and mobile sites, video, advertising, media and public relations, apps and software, social, podcasts, games and Metaverse, virtual and artificial Intelligence (AI).

The Webby Awards presents two honors in every category—The Webby Award and The Webby People’s Voice Award. Members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) select the nominees for both awards in each category, as well as the Winners of The Webby Awards. The Webby People’s Voice is awarded by the voting public.

The eclipse is coming up, and already scientists have predicted the appearance of the solar corona on the big day.

The post What Will the Sun's Corona Look Like During Totality? appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Sometimes, all you need for a new discovery is some creative math. That was the case for a new paper by Edward Williams and Laurent Montési of the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology. They released a brief paper at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last month that describes a mathematical way to estimate the size of a lava tube using only remote sensing techniques.

A critical starting point was the discovery that the ridge height of a surface above a lava tube is proportional to the cube of the height of the lava tube’s roof. Plenty of lava tubes have been studied in detail on Earth, and those studies were used to form the basis of that equation.

However, until now, there was no relationship between the roof thickness and the details of the shape of the lava tunnel itself. Enter physical modeling – the authors used a physics modeling program (COMSOL Multiphysics) to model different roof heights based on different characteristics of tunnels.

Fraser looks at how we might explore laval tubes.

One big difference was the form of the tunnel itself – they focused on two styles. One, known as “laccolith,” was a rectangle, whereas most people would think of a half-ellipse style when considering lava tubes. The modeling program also had to consider things like the material strength of the regolith as well as the pressure inside the tunnel itself – which would usually match the outside atmospheric pressure of largely airless worlds like the Moon and Mars, assuming there is a hole that connects it to the greater atmosphere.

The equation the authors eventually found uses some fancy calculus and is beyond the scope of this article. Still, their model seems to fit the data for most modeled lava caves, including those on Earth.

They turned their model to a well-known cave structure on Earth to prove that point. Valentine’s Cave, located in the Lava Beds National Monument in California, has been studied for decades by NASA researchers as an analog to caves found on the Moon and Mars. Those studies have resulted in accurate cave heights and ridge height estimates using techniques such as LIDAR.

When applying their new model and using the known ridge height of Valentine’s Cave, the authors find a tube height within .07 m of the actual height of the Cave. Not bad for calculating the height only from the ridge height, which is an externally visible feature.

Lava tubes are a central feature of any future crewed exploration mission.

The obvious next step is to attempt to estimate some lava tube heights on our neighboring planetary bodies. At least some remote observatories around the Moon and Mars should be capable of estimating ridge height from their orbital positions. It’s then up to the team to estimate what the inside of the tube might look like. Unfortunately, it will probably be a while before human or robotic explorers enter one of these tubes to confirm the author’s estimates. But there are plenty of proposals for that as well – and one day, undoubtedly, someone or something will indeed step foot inside one of these ancient geological formations.

Learn More:
William & Montési – DETERMINATION OF LAVA TUBE DEPTH AND SHAPE FROM TOPOGRAPHY
UT – It’s Time to Study Lunar Lava Tubes. Here’s a Mission That Could Help
UT – Future Mars Helicopters Could Explore Lava Tubes
UT – Lava Tubes on the Moon Maintain Comfortable Room Temperatures Inside

Lead Image:
Lava tube on Mars
Credit – NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

The post Mapping Lava Tubes on the Moon and Mars from Space appeared first on Universe Today.

Amino acids and other molecules important to the origin of life can be enriched within networks of rocky fractures, which would have been common on the early Earth

As much as 85 percent of U.S. emissions of sulfuryl fluoride—a rare greenhouse gas and common pesticide used to treat termites—comes from California

The 21st rock core captured by NASA’s Perseverance has a composition that would make it good at trapping and preserving signs of microbial life, if any was once present. The sample – shown being taken here – was cored from “Bunsen Peak” on March 11, the 1,088th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.NASA/JPL-Caltech

The 24th sample taken by the six-wheeled scientist offers new clues about Jezero Crater and the lake it may have once held.

Analysis by instruments aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover indicate that the latest rock core taken by the rover was awash in water for an extended period of time in the distant past, perhaps as part of an ancient Martian beach. Collected on March 11, the sample is the rover’s 24th – a tally that includes 21 sample tubes filled with rock cores, two filled with regolith (broken rock and dust), and one with Martian atmosphere.

“To put it simply, this is the kind of rock we had hoped to find when we decided to investigate Jezero Crater,” said Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance at Caltech in Pasadena, California. “Nearly all the minerals in the rock we just sampled were made in water; on Earth, water-deposited minerals are often good at trapping and preserving ancient organic material and biosignatures. The rock can even tell us about Mars climate conditions that were present when it was formed.”

The presence of these specific minerals is considered promising for preserving a rich record of an ancient habitable environment on Mars. Such collections of minerals are important for guiding scientists to the most valuable samples for eventual return to Earth with the Mars Sample Return campaign.

Edge of the Crater’s Rim

Nicknamed “Bunsen Peak” for the Yellowstone National Park landmark, the rock – about 5.6 feet wide and 3.3 feet high (1.7 meters by 1 meter) – intrigued Perseverance scientists because the outcrop stands tall amid the surrounding terrain and has an interesting texture on one of its faces. They were also interested in Bunsen Peak’s vertical rockface, which offers a nice cross-section of the rock and, because it’s not flat-lying, is less dusty and therefore easier for science instruments to investigate.

Meet the 24th Martian sample collected by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover – “Comet Geyser,” a sample taken from a region of Jezero Crater that is especially rich in carbonate, a mineral linked to habitability.

Before taking the sample, Perseverance scanned the rock using the rover’s SuperCam spectrometers and the X-ray spectrometer PIXL, short for Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry. Then the rover used the rotor on the end of its robotic arm to grind (or abrade) a portion of the surface and scanned the rock again. The results: Bunsen Peak looks to be composed of about 75% carbonate grains cemented together by almost pure silica.

“The silica and parts of the carbonate appear microcrystalline, which makes them extremely good at trapping and preserving signs of microbial life that might have once lived in this environment,” said Sandra Siljeström, a Perseverance scientist from the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) in Stockholm. “That makes this sample great for biosignature studies if returned to Earth. Additionally, the sample might be one of the older cores collected so far by Perseverance, and that is important because Mars was at its most habitable early in its history.” A potential biosignature is a substance or structure that could be evidence of past life but may also have been produced without the presence of life.

The Bunsen Peak sample is the third that Perseverance has collected while exploring the “Margin Unit,” a geologic area that hugs the inner edge of Jezero Crater’s rim.

This mosaic shows a rock called “Bunsen Peak” where NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover extracted its 21st rock core and abraded a circular patch to investigate the rock’s composition.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS Perseverance’s CacheCam captured this image of the rover’s latest cored sample – taken from an intriguing rock called “Bunsen Peak” – on March 11. NASA/JPL-Caltech

“We’re still exploring the margin and gathering data, but results so far may support our hypothesis that the rocks here formed along the shores of an ancient lake,” said Briony Horgan, a Perseverance scientist from Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana. “The science team is also considering other ideas for the origin of the Margin Unit, as there are other ways to form carbonate and silica. But no matter how this rock formed, it is really exciting to get a sample.”

The rover is working its way toward the westernmost portion of the Margin Unit. At the base of Jezero Crater’s rim, a location nicknamed “Bright Angel” is of interest to the science team because it may offer the first encounter with the much older rocks that make up the crater rim. Once it’s done exploring Bright Angel, Perseverance will begin an ascent of several months to the rim’s top.

More About the Mission

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.

For more about Perseverance:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

News Media Contacts

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Charles Blue
NASA Headquarters, Washington
301-286-6284 / 202-802-5345
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / charles.e.blue@nasa.gov

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Details Last Updated Apr 03, 2024 Related Terms

• Perseverance (Rover)
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Mars
• Mars 2020
• Mars Sample Return (MSR)
• The Solar System

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Rivers can flush rainwater over hundreds of miles to the sea, changing the makeup of coastal waters in ways that scientists are still discovering. In this satellite image from December 2023, a large, sediment-rich plume from the Mississippi River spreads down the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Texas following winter rains.NASA/OB.DAAC

New findings have revealed a coastal realm highly sensitive to changes in runoff and rainfall on land.

After helping stoke record heat in 2023 and drenching major swaths of the United States this winter, the current El Niño is losing steam this spring. Scientists have observed another way that the climate phenomenon can leave its mark on the planet: altering the chemistry of coastal waters.

A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California used satellite observations to track the dissolved salt content, or salinity, of the global ocean surface for a decade, from 2011 to 2022. At the sea surface, salinity patterns can tell us a lot about how freshwater falls, flows, and evaporates between the land, ocean, and atmosphere – a process known as the water cycle.

The JPL team showed that year-to-year-variations in salinity near coastlines strongly correlate with El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the collective term for El Niño and its counterpart, La Niña. ENSO affects weather around the world in contrasting ways. El Niño, linked to warmer-than-average ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, can lead to more rain and snowfall than normal in the southwestern U.S., as well as drought in Indonesia. These patterns are somewhat reversed during La Niña.

During the exceptional El Niño event of 2015, for example, the scientists traced a particularly distinct global water cycle effect: Less precipitation over land led to a decrease in river discharge on average, which in turn led to notably higher salinity levels in areas as far as 125 miles (200 kilometers) from shore.

Instruments in space can track how salinity varies by region and season. Using NASA satellite data, this map shows how monsoon rains and freshwater flowing into the Bay of Bengal keep it far less salty than the Arabian Sea to the west. (Areas of low and high salinity are shown in blue and yellow, respectively.)NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio The Amazon River delivers millions of gallons of water to the ocean every second – enough to change global average surface salinity. A plume of low salinity water is shown here in dark blue, drifting away from the river mouth on ocean currents. The blue blob to the northwest is the Orinoco River plume.NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

At other times, the opposite was found: Areas with higher-than-normal rainfall over land saw increased river discharge, reducing salinity near those coasts.

“We’re able to show coastal salinity responding to ENSO on a global scale,” said lead author Severine Fournier, an ocean physicist at JPL.

The team found that salinity is at least 30 times more variable in these dynamic zones near coasts than in the open ocean. The link between rain, rivers, and salt is especially pronounced at the mouths of large river systems such as the Mississippi and Amazon, where freshwater plumes can be mapped from space as they gush into the ocean.

Salt as Signal

With global warming, researchers have been observing changes in the water cycle, including increases in extreme precipitation events and runoff. At the intersection of land and sea, coastal waters may be where the impacts are most detectable.

“Given the sensitivity to rainfall and runoff, coastal salinity could serve as a kind of bellwether, indicating other changes unfolding in the water cycle,” Fournier said.

She noted that some of the world’s coastal waters are not well studied, despite the fact that about 40% of the human population lives within about 60 miles (100 kilometers) of a coastline. One reason is that river gauges and other on-sitemonitors can be costly to maintain and cannot provide coverage of the whole planet, especially in more remote regions.

That’s where satellite instruments come in. Launched in 2011, the Aquarius mission made some of the first space-based global observations of sea surface salinity using extremely sensitive radiometers to detect subtle changes in the ocean’s microwave radiation emissions. Aquarius was a collaboration between NASA and Argentina’s space agency, CONAE (Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales).

Today, two higher-resolution tools – the ESA (European Space Agency) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission and NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission – allow scientists to zoom to within 25 miles (40 kilometers) of coastlines.

Using data from all three missions, the researchers found that surface salinity in coastal waters reached a maximum global average (34.50 practical salinity units, or PSU) each March and fell to a minimum global average (34.34 PSU) around September. (PSU is roughly equal to parts per thousand grams of water.) River discharge, especially from the Amazon, drives this timing.

In the open ocean, the cycle is different, with surface salinity reaching a global average minimum (34.95 PSU) from February to April and a global average maximum (34.97 PSU) from July to October. The open ocean does not show as much variability between seasons or years because it contains a significantly larger volume of water and is less sensitive to river discharge and ENSO. Instead, changes are governed by planet-scale precipitation minus total global evaporation, plus other factors like large-scale ocean circulation.

The study was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

NASA Analysis Sees Spike in 2023 Global Sea Level Due to El Niño NASA Analysis Finds Strong El Niño Could Bring Extra Floods This Winter News Media Contacts

Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov

Written by Sally Younger

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Details Last Updated Apr 03, 2024 Related Terms

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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Students from the Power Struck Girls Team 5965 – an all-girls FIRST Robotics team from the Academy of Our Lady high school in Marrero, Louisiana, and sponsored by NASA’s Stennis Space Center – make final engineering adjustments to their robot during the 2023 Rocket City Regional FIRST Robotics tournaments in Huntsville.NASA/Joel Wallace

The Rocket City Regional – Alabama’s annual For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotics Competition – is scheduled for Friday, April 5, through Saturday, April 6, at the Von Braun Center South Hall in Huntsville, Alabama, known as the Rocket City. This event is free for the public.

FIRST Robotics is a global robotics competition for students in grades 9-12. Teams are challenged to raise funds, design a team brand, hone teamwork skills, and build and program industrial-sized robots to play a difficult field game against competitors.

More than 1,000 high school students on 47 teams from 10 states and 4 countries will compete in a new robotics game called, “CRESCENDO.”

Opening ceremonies begin at 8:30 a.m. CDT followed by qualification matches on April 5 and April 6. The Friday awards ceremony will begin at 6 p.m., while the Saturday awards ceremony will begin at 2:30 p.m.

District and regional competitions – such as the Rocket City Regional – are held across the country during March and April, providing teams a chance to qualify for the 2024 FIRST Robotics Competition Championship events held in late April in Houston.

NASA and its Robotics Alliance Project provide grants for high school teams and support for FIRST Robotics competitions to address the critical national shortage of students pursuing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) careers. This FIRST Robotics Competition, The Rocket City Regional, is supported by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement.

News media interested in covering this event should respond no later than 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 4 by contacting Taylor Goodwin at 256-544-0034 or taylor.goodwin@nasa.gov.

Learn more about the Rocket City Regional event.

Find more information about Marshall’s support for education programs:

https://www.nasa.gov/marshall/marshall-stem-engagement/

Taylor Goodwin
256-544-0034
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
taylor.goodwin@nasa.gov

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Details Last Updated Apr 03, 2024 EditorBeth RidgewayLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms

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6 Min Read NASA’s Webb Probes an Extreme Starburst Galaxy The starburst galaxy M82 as observed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Bolatto (University of Maryland)

Amid a site teeming with new and young stars lies an intricate substructure.

A team of astronomers has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to survey the starburst galaxy Messier 82 (M82). Located 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, this galaxy is relatively compact in size but hosts a frenzy of star formation activity. For comparison, M82 is sprouting new stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way galaxy.

Led by Alberto Bolatto at the University of Maryland, College Park, the team directed Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument toward the starburst galaxy’s center, attaining a closer look at the physical conditions that foster the formation of new stars.

“M82 has garnered a variety of observations over the years because it can be considered as the prototypical starburst galaxy,” said Bolatto, lead author of the study. “Both NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have observed this target. With Webb’s size and resolution, we can look at this star-forming galaxy and see all of this beautiful, new detail.”

Image: M82 observed by the Hubble and Webb Telescopes On the left is the starburst galaxy M82 as observed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2006. The small box at the galaxy’s core corresponds to the area captured so far by the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The red filaments as seen by Webb are the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon emission, which traces the shape of the galactic wind. In the Hubble image, light at .814 microns is colored red, .658 microns is red-orange, .555 microns is green, and .435 microns is blue (filters F814W, F658N, F555W, and F435W, respectively). In the Webb image, light at 3.35 microns is colored red, 2.50 microns is green, and 1.64 microns is blue (filters F335M, F250M, and F164N, respectively). NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Bolatto (University of Maryland) A Vibrant Community of Stars

Star formation continues to maintain a sense of mystery because it is shrouded by curtains of dust and gas, creating an obstacle in observing this process. Fortunately, Webb’s ability to peer in the infrared is an asset in navigating these murky conditions. Additionally, these NIRCam images of the very center of the starburst were obtained using an instrument mode that prevented the very bright source from overwhelming the detector.

While dark brown tendrils of heavy dust are threaded throughout M82’s glowing white core even in this infrared view, Webb’s NIRCam has revealed a level of detail that has historically been obscured. Looking closer toward the center, small specks depicted in green denote concentrated areas of iron, most of which are supernova remnants. Small patches that appear red signify regions where molecular hydrogen is being lit up by a nearby young star’s radiation.

“This image shows the power of Webb,” said Rebecca Levy, second author of the study at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Every single white dot in this image is either a star or a star cluster. We can start to distinguish all of these tiny point sources, which enables us to acquire an accurate count of all the star clusters in this galaxy.”

Finding Structure in Lively Conditions

Looking at M82 in slightly longer infrared wavelengths, clumpy tendrils represented in red can be seen extending above and below the galaxy’s plane. These gaseous streamers are a galactic wind rushing out from the core of the starburst.

One area of focus for this research team was understanding how this galactic wind, which is caused by the rapid rate of star formation and subsequent supernovae, is being launched and influencing its surrounding environment. By resolving a central section of M82, scientists could examine where the wind originates, and gain insight on how hot and cold components interact within the wind.

Webb’s NIRCam instrument was well-suited to trace the structure of the galactic wind via emission from sooty chemical molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs can be considered as very small dust grains that survive in cooler temperatures but are destroyed in hot conditions.

Much to the team’s surprise, Webb’s view of the PAH emission highlights the galactic wind’s fine structure – an aspect previously unknown. Depicted as red filaments, the emission extends away from the central region where the heart of star formation is located. Another unanticipated find was the similar structure between the PAH emission and that of hot, ionized gas.

“It was unexpected to see the PAH emission resemble ionized gas,” said Bolatto. “PAHs are not supposed to live very long when exposed to such a strong radiation field, so perhaps they are being replenished all the time. It challenges our theories and shows us that further investigation is required.”

Video: Tour of the M82 Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center  Lighting a Path Forward

Webb’s observations of M82 in near-infrared light spur further questions about star formation, some of which the team hopes to answer with additional data gathered with Webb, including that of another starburst galaxy. Two other papers from this team characterizing the stellar clusters and correlations among wind components of M82 are almost finalized.

In the near future, the team will have spectroscopic observations of M82 from Webb ready for their analysis, as well as complementary large-scale images of the galaxy and wind. Spectral data will help astronomers determine accurate ages for the star clusters and provide a sense of timing for how long each phase of star formation lasts in a starburst galaxy environment. On a broader scale, inspecting the activity in galaxies like M82 can deepen astronomers’ understanding of the early universe.

“Webb’s observation of M82, a target closer to us, is a reminder that the telescope excels at studying galaxies at all distances,” said Bolatto. “In addition to looking at young, high-redshift galaxies, we can look at targets closer to home to gather insight into the processes that are happening here – events that also occurred in the early universe.”

These findings have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

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These findings have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Media Contacts

Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Rob Gutro – rob.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.

Related Information

More about starburst galaxy M82

Galaxies Overview

Star Formation

More Webb News – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/latestnews/

More Webb Images – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/multimedia/images/

Webb Mission Page – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/

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Details Last Updated Apr 03, 2024 EditorStephen SabiaContactLaura Betzlaura.e.betz@nasa.gov Related Terms

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Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, announced she had cancer last month. Many cancer patients undergo surgery, chemotherapy and other treatments in combination

Globular star cluster

The summer of 2023 was Earth’s hottest since global records began in 1880, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

El verano boreal de 2023 fue el más caluroso para la Tierra desde que se establecieron registros mundiales de temperaturas en 1880, según un análisis realizado por científicos del Instituto Goddard de Estudios Espaciales (GISS, por sus siglas en inglés) de la NASA en Nueva York.