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Japanese scientists have created the first-ever long-term dataset about Earth's entire atmosphere, stretching all the way to space.

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The world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases will withdraw from the global climate pact, disrupting efforts to tackle climate change

The world’s largest economy and second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases will withdraw from the global climate pact, disrupting efforts to tackle climate change

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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA Marshall will hold a candle-lighting ceremony and wreath placement at 9:30 a.m. CST. The ceremony will include remarks from Larry Leopard, associate director, and Bill Hill, director of Marshall’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. NASA/ Krisdon Manecke

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, invites media to attend its observance of the agency’s Day of Remembrance at 9:30 a.m. CST Thursday, Jan. 23, in the lobby of Building 4221.

Day of Remembrance honors the members of the NASA family who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery. 

The event will include brief remarks from NASA Marshall leaders, followed by a candle lighting and moment of silence for the crews of Apollo 1 and space shuttles Challenger and Columbia. Speakers will include:

• Larry Leopard, associate director, technical.
• Bill Hill, director, Office of Safety and Mission Assurance.

Media interested in attending the event must confirm by 12 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 22, with Molly Porter at: molly.a.porter@nasa.gov.

The agency will also pay tribute to its fallen astronauts with special online content, updated on NASA’s Day of Remembrance, at: 

https://www.nasa.gov/dor/

Molly Porter
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.
256-424-5158
molly.a.porter@nasa.gov

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Details Last Updated Jan 21, 2025 EditorBeth RidgewayContactMolly Portermolly.a.porter@nasa.govLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms

• Marshall Space Flight Center

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NASA’s Curiosity Rover has been exploring Mars since 2012 and, more recently has found evidence of ice-free ancient ponds and lakes on the surface. The rover found small undulations like those seen in sandy lake-beds on Earth. They would have been created by wind-driven water moving back and forth across the surface. The inescapable conclusion is that the water would have been open to the elements instead of being covered by ice. The discovery suggests the ripples formed 3.7 billion years ago. 

Mars it the fourth planet in our Solar System and the second smallest of all the major planets. It’s known for its strong red colour which is caused by iron oxide in the surface material. Classed as a terrestrial planet, Mars is similar in many ways to Earth with valleys, volcanoes and even evidence of dried up river beds. The similarities end there though with polar caps made mostly of carbon dioxide ice, an unbreathable atmosphere and a surface that is cold and dry. It’s always held a special fascination for us due largely to vague hints through the centuries of alien intelligent but more recently that it may have once been habitable. 

A full-disk view of Mars, courtesy of VMC. Credit: ESA

Once such rover that has been exploring the Martian landscape is the Curiosity Rover that was sent by NASA in 2011. It arrived at Mars in August 2012 and has been exploring the region around Gale Crater ever since. The main objective of Curiosity is to investigate the climate and geology and to assess if it could support primative life in the past. To achieve that end, it’s equipped with an array of instruments from drills to collect soil samples, cameras and instruments to analyse atmospheric samples. 

New simulations are helping inform the Curiosity rover’s ongoing sampling campaign. Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

A paper recently published in the journal Science Advances by Caltech’s John Grotzinger, Harold Brown Professor of Geology and Michael Lamb, Professor of Geology shared their findings. They found two sets of what seem to be ancient wave ripples on the surface of Mars now thought to be dried up bodes of water with the ripples preserved in rock. The ripples are tiny undulations and are often seen in beaches and lake-beds on Earth as wind-driven water flows across the shallows. The team are particularly excited that this means the water was not frozen and was once open to the elements as liquid. 

The ripples discovered by Curiosity in Gale Crater are the strongest evidence to date that there have been bodies of liquid water in the history of the red planet. Analysis of the rocks and ripples suggest they formed 3.7 billion years ago. It’s thought that the atmosphere and climate of Mars must have been far warmer than it is today and more dense. Dense enough to support liquid water in open air.

NASA’s Curiosity rover continues to search for signs that Mars’ Gale Crater conditions could support microbial life. Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

The team were able to create computer models from the ripples they found to attempt to discover the size of lake. The size of the ripples and separation helps to determine how much water was present. The ripple height of 6mm and 4 to 5 cm separation tells us that the lake was shallow, possibly even less than 2 metres deep. One of the sets of ripples known as the Prow outcrop was found in an area that was once wind blown dunes. The other set was found nearby in the sulcate-rich Amapari Marker Band of rocks. The two regions come from slightly different times telling us that the warm dense atmosphere occurred at multiple times or at least for a long period of time. 

The discovery has been a massive help to Mars paleoclimate studies that have tried to map the changing conditions on Mars. NASA’s Opportunity rover was the first mission to discover ripples on the surface but the nature of the bodies of water was uncertain. This latest discovery has given a fascinating insight into the early conditions on Mars, with perhaps, bodies of liquid dotted across the landscape. Further investigation is needed to see how commonplace the ripples are. 

Source : Signatures of Ice-Free Ancient Ponds and Lakes Found on Mars

The post Curiosity Finds Ancient Wave Ripples on Mars appeared first on Universe Today.

Bill Nelson has stepped down as NASA administrator, ending a half-century of public service. Janet Petro is now the agency's interim chief.

The US contributes around a fifth of the budget for the World Health Organization – its withdrawal from the public health body will impede efforts to control the global spread of diseases and could put the US at risk

The US contributes around a fifth of the budget for the World Health Organization – its withdrawal from the public health body will impede efforts to control the global spread of diseases and could put the US at risk

Gas is the stuff of star formation, and most galaxies have enough gas in their budget to form some stars. However, the picture is a little different for dwarf galaxies. They lack the mass required to hold onto their gas when more massive neighbouring galaxies are siphoning it off.

New research shows that even isolated dwarf galaxies with no overbearing galactic neighbours struggle to form stars. What’s going on?

The research is centred on ultra-faint dwarf (UFD) galaxies. These tiny galaxies are the faintest galaxies in the Universe and contain only a few hundred stars, up to about one thousand. UFDs also contain ample amounts of dark matter. They’re different from globular clusters because globulars contain tens of thousands up to millions of stars and have very little dark matter, maybe none at all.

Because they’re so faint, astronomers struggle to locate them. The ones that have been found are close to the Milky Way. However, that makes them difficult to study because their massive neighbour dominates them. The Milky Way’s gravity and hot corona can siphon the UFDs’ gas away, making it challenging to understand their natural evolution.

Astronomers working with the DECam and the Gemini South Telescope have successfully located three UFDs well beyond the Milky Way’s gravitational influence. Although they weren’t easy to find, astronomers have made significant discoveries about UFDs from them.

The results are in new research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s titled “Three Quenched, Faint Dwarf Galaxies in the Direction of NGC 300: New Probes of Reionization and Internal Feedback.” The lead author is David Sand, an astronomer from the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.

Sand found the three UFDs during a painstaking manual search. The UFDs are so faint that algorithmic searches couldn’t detect them.

“It was during the pandemic,” recalled Sand. “I was watching TV and scrolling through the DESI Legacy Survey viewer, focusing on areas of sky that I knew hadn’t been searched before. It took a few hours of casual searching, and then boom! They just popped out.”

The three UFDs are in the direction of the spiral galaxy NGC 300 and the Sculptor constellation. They’re called Sculptor A, Sculptor B, and Sculptor C.

Sculptor A is about 1.35 Mpc away and is likely at the edge of the Local Group, similar to Tucana B. It’s not a direct satellite of NGC 300.

Sculptor B is about 2.48 Mpc away and is likely behind NGC 300.

Sculptor C is about 2.04 Mpc away and is a satellite of NGC 300.

All three UFDs share some characteristics. They contain mostly old, metal-poor stars, are quenched and do not form any new stars, contain no neutral atomic hydrogen (H i), and emit no UV. “None of the three dwarfs are detected in H i line emission in the H i Parkes All Sky Survey, suggesting that they are not gas rich,” Sand and his co-researchers explain in their paper.

The lack of H I and UV both indicate that the galaxies are quenched and star formation has ceased. “Any younger blue stellar population either has few stars associated with it or is below our detection limit,” the authors write.

The discovery of the Sculptor galaxies, as they’re called, supports theories that say UFDs are dead galaxies that ceased star formation a long time ago in the early Universe. So, finding these faint quenched galaxies is entirely expected.

The jarring thing about their discovery is that they’re isolated. They’re not in proximity to any other larger galaxies that could’ve stripped away their gas and quenched their star formation. “The three dwarf galaxies in this work are among the faintest quenched dwarfs discovered outside the Local Group,” the authors write.

“Many of the recently discovered faint dwarf galaxies beyond the Local Group show distinct signs of recent star formation, although a growing subset also appears to be quenched, with little to no recent star formation,” the authors explain. “The mix of stellar populations of faint dwarf galaxies in the “field” is a critical ingredient for understanding the role of reionization, stellar feedback, and ram pressure from the cosmic web in driving the evolution of the smallest galaxies.”

Finding these three UFDs is significant because of their isolation. Only one of them, Sculptor C, is clearly associated with the nearby NGC 300. Sculptors A and B are isolated. Studying them is an opportunity to learn more about how star formation is affected by internal feedback mechanisms in low-mass galaxies. It’s also an opportunity to learn more about ram-pressure stripping, which is when gas is removed from a galaxy through interactions with the surrounding medium and even cosmic reionization.

During cosmic reionization, also known as the Epoch of Reionization, light from the first stars and galaxies reionized the neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium. The high-energy UV photons from the stars and galaxies could’ve effectively boiled away the gas in dwarf galaxies, ending their star formation.

An alternative explanation for UFDs losing their gas is supernova explosions. If some of the first stars in UFDs exploded, they could have expelled the gas and ended star formation. Ram-pressure stripping could also have been responsible.

Astronomers still need to learn more about reionization and if it’s responsible, and the Sculptor galaxies can help them.

“We don’t know how strong or uniform this reionization effect is,” explained Sand. “It could be that reionization is patchy, not occurring everywhere all at once. We’ve found three of these galaxies, but that isn’t enough. It would be nice if we had hundreds of them. If we knew what fraction was affected by reionization, that would tell us something about the early Universe that is very difficult to probe otherwise.”

“The Epoch of Reionization potentially connects the current day structure of all galaxies with the earliest formation of structure on a cosmological scale,” said Martin Still, NSF program director for the International Gemini Observatory. “The DESI Legacy Surveys and detailed follow-up observations by Gemini allow scientists to perform forensic archeology to understand the nature of the Universe and how it evolved to its current state.”

Ultimately, astronomers need to find more of these isolated UFDs to constrain their findings.

“Many more faint and ultrafaint dwarf galaxies are predicted at the edges of the Local Group and in nearby, low-density environments, but initial efforts to find them have not always been successful,” the authors write in their conclusion. That only emphasizes the importance of this discovery.

“Several upcoming programs such as Euclid, the Roman Space Telescope, and the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time are sure to find many more examples in the years ahead, which will provide demographic properties across environments,” the authors conclude.

Sand presented these results at the recent 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Find them at the 32:00 mark of this video.

The post The Star-Forming Party Ended Early in Isolated Dwarf Galaxies appeared first on Universe Today.

An exclusive interview with "Silo's" acclaimed executive producer and showrunner, Graham Yost

On Jan. 19, 1965, Gemini 2 successfully completed the second of two uncrewed test flights of the spacecraft and its Titan II booster, clearing the way for the first crewed mission. The 18-minute suborbital mission achieved the primary goals of flight qualifying the Gemini spacecraft, especially its heat shield during a stressful reentry. Recovery forces retrieved the capsule following its splashdown, allowing engineers to evaluate how its systems fared during the flight. The success of Gemini 2 enabled the first crewed mission to fly two months later, beginning a series of 10 flights over the following 20 months. The astronauts who flew these missions demonstrated the rendezvous and docking techniques necessary to implement the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous method NASA chose for the Moon landing mission. They also proved that astronauts could work outside their spacecraft during spacewalks and that spacecraft and astronauts could function for at least eight days, the minimum time for a roundtrip lunar mission. The Gemini program proved critical to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s. 

Cutaway diagram of the Gemini spacecraft. Workers at Launch Pad 19 lift Gemini 2 to mate it with its Titan II rocket. At Pad 19, engineers verify the flight simulators inside Gemini 2.

Following the success of Gemini 1 in April 1964, NASA had hoped to fly the second mission before the end of the year and the first crewed mission by January 1965. The two stages of the Titan II rocket arrived at Cape Kennedy from the Martin Marietta factory in Baltimore on July 11, and workers erected it on Launch Pad 19 five days later. A lightning strike at the pad on Aug. 17 invalidated all previous testing and required replacement of some pad equipment. A series of three hurricanes in August and September forced workers to partially or totally unstack the vehicle before stacking it for the final time on Sept. 14. The Gemini 2 spacecraft arrived at Cape Kennedy from its builder, the McDonnell Company in St. Louis, on Sept. 21, and workers hoisted it to the top of the Titan II on Oct. 18. Technical issues delayed the spacecraft’s physical mating to the rocket until Nov. 5. These accumulated delays pushed the launch date back to Dec. 9. 

The launch abort on Dec. 9, 1964. Liftoff of Gemini 2 from Launch Pad 19 on Jan. 19, 1965. Engineers in the blockhouse monitor the progress of the Titan II during the ascent.

Fueling of the rocket began late on Dec. 8, and following three brief holds in the countdown, the Titan’s two first stage engines ignited at 11:41 a.m. EST on Dec. 9. and promptly shut down one second later. Engineers later determined that a cracked valve resulted in loss of hydraulic pressure, causing the malfunction detection system to switch to its backup mode, forcing a shutdown of the engines. Repairs meant a delay into the new year. On Jan. 19, 1965, following a mostly smooth countdown, Gemini 2 lifted off from Pad 19 at 9:04 a.m. EST. 

The Mission Control Center (MCC) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In the MCC, astronauts Eugene Cernan, left, Walter Schirra, Gordon Cooper, Donald “Deke” Slayton, and Virgil “Gus” Grissom monitor the Gemini 2 flight.

In the Gemini Mission Control Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Flight Director Christopher C. Kraft led a team of flight controllers that monitored all aspects of the flight. At the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), now NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, a team of controllers led by Flight Director John Hodge passively monitored the flight from the newly built Mission Control Center. They would act as observers for this flight and Gemini 3, the first crewed mission, before taking over full control with Gemini IV, and control all subsequent American human spaceflights. The Titan rocket’s two stages placed Gemini 2 into a suborbital trajectory, reaching a maximum altitude of 98.9 miles, with the vehicle attaining a maximum velocity of 16,709 miles per hour. Within a minute after separating from the Titan’s second stage, Gemini 2 executed a maneuver to orient its heat shield in the direction of flight to prepare for reentry. Flight simulators installed where the astronauts normally would sit controlled the maneuvers. About seven minutes after liftoff, Gemini 2 jettisoned its equipment section, followed by firing of the retrorockets, and then separation of the retrorocket section, exposing the spacecraft’s heat shield. 

View from a camera mounted on a cockpit window during Gemini 2’s reentry. View from the cockpit window during Gemini 2’s descent on its parachute.

Gemini 2 then began its reentry, the heat shield protecting the spacecraft from the 2,000-degree heat generated by friction with the Earth’s upper atmosphere. A pilot parachute pulled away the rendezvous and recovery section. At 10,000 feet, the main parachute deployed, and Gemini 2 descended to a splashdown 2,127 miles from its launch pad, after a flight of 18 minutes 16 seconds. The splashdown took place in the Atlantic Ocean about 800 miles east of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and 25 miles from the prime recovery ship, the U.S.S. Lake Champlain (CVS-39). 

A U.S. Navy helicopter hovers over the Gemini 2 capsule following its splashdown as a diver jumps into the water. Sailors hoist Gemini 2 aboard the U.S.S. Lake Champlain.

U.S. Navy helicopters delivered divers to the splashdown area, who installed a flotation collar around the spacecraft. The Lake Champlain pulled alongside, and sailors hoisted the capsule onto the carrier, securing it on deck one hour forty minutes after liftoff. The spacecraft appeared to be in good condition and arrived back at Cape Kennedy on Jan. 22 for a thorough inspection. As an added bonus, sailors recovered the rendezvous and recovery section. Astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom, whom along with John Young NASA had selected to fly the first crewed Gemini mission, said after the splashdown, “We now see the road clear to our flight, and we’re looking forward to it.” Flight Director Kraft called it “very successful.” Gemini Program Manager Charles Matthews predicted the first crewed mission could occur within three months. Gemini 3 actually launched on March 23. 

Enjoy this NASA video of the Gemini 2 mission. 

Postscript 

The Gemini-B capsule and a Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) mockup atop a Titan-IIIC rocket in 1966. The flown Gemini-B capsule on display at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Museum in Florida. Former MOL and NASA astronaut Robert Crippen stands beside the only flown Gemini-B capsule – note the hatch in the heat shield at top.

Gemini 2 not only cleared the way for the first crewed Gemini mission and the rest of the program, it also took on a second life as a test vehicle for the U.S. Air Force’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL). The Air Force modified the spacecraft, including cutting a hatch through its heat shield, renamed it Gemini-B, and launched it on Nov. 3, 1966, atop a Titan IIIC rocket. The test flight successfully demonstrated the hatch in the heat shield design during the capsule’s reentry after a 33-minute suborbital flight. Recovery forces retrieved the Gemini-B capsule in the South Atlantic Ocean and returned it to the Air Force for postflight inspection. This marked the only repeat flight of an American spacecraft intended for human spaceflight until the advent of the space shuttle. Visitors can view Gemini 2/Gemini-B on display at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Museum.  

NASA astronaut Victor Glover tests collection methods for ISS External Microorganisms in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at Johnson Space Center.NASA

Astronauts are scheduled to venture outside the International Space Station to collect microbiological samples during crew spacewalks for the ISS External Microorganisms experiment. This investigation focuses on sampling at sites near life support system vents to examine whether the spacecraft releases microorganisms, how many, and how far they may travel.

This experiment could help researchers understand whether and how these microorganisms survive and reproduce in the harsh space environment and how they may perform at planetary destinations such as the Moon and Mars. Extremophiles, or microorganisms that can survive harsh environments, are also of interest to industries on Earth such as pharmaceuticals and agriculture.

Spacecrafts and spacesuits are thoroughly sterilized before missions; however, humans carry their own microbiomes and continuously regenerate microbial communities. It’s important to understand and address how well current designs and processes prevent or limit the spread of human contamination.  The data could help determine whether changes are needed to crewed spacecraft, including spacesuits, that are used to explore destinations where life may exist now or in the past.

Learn more about how researchers monitor microbes on the space station.

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