Astronomy

A grass-green snake from Vietnam with yellow eyes, blue lips and a brick-red tail has been identified as a distinct species

Image: Eye test for lunar impact surveyor

Image: Ariane 6 first passengers

Przewalski’s horses, once extinct in the wild, are revitalizing Kazakhstan’s “Golden Steppe”

Just in time for Independence Day, the James Webb Space Telescope has imaged a red, white and blue fireworks display, courtesy of an infant star at the heart of a dense cloud of gas and dust.

Giving AI systems the ability to focus on particular brain regions can make them much better at reconstructing images of what a monkey is looking at from brain recordings

Giving AI systems the ability to focus on particular brain regions can make them much better at reconstructing images of what a monkey is looking at from brain recordings

The waxing Moon passes Regulus on its way to occulting Spica July 13th. The Kite of Boötes tilts toward the Dipper. And the largest asteroid is at opposition.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, July 4 – 14 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

A network of ground stations around the world, including two owned by ESA, will track the debut flight of Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket. They will monitor key phases of the flight and gather telemetry and video that will be used to analyse the rocket’s performance and optimise future launches.

Mercury puts on one of its best apparitions for 2024 this month.

Where have all of the planets gone? The late evening fall of dusk in early July also sees a sky seemingly vacant of familiar naked eye planets. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are now denizens of dawn, and will stay that way for most of the remainder of 2024.

But two challenging planets are now emerging low to the west at dusk: Mercury and Venus. The two interior worlds are now mounting a slow return, as the hunt is now on the recover the two after sunset.

Mercury’s July apparition in particular is an interesting one, and one of the best of six for observers worldwide. This is mainly because the planet is headed towards aphelion 0.4667 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun on July 27th, just five days after greatest elongation. At greatest elongation on July 22nd , Mercury will display an 8” diameter 45% illuminated disk, shining at a respectable magnitude +0.3.

To be sure, Mercury doesn’t look like much more than a dot in a telescope, even at high power… but part of the thrill of finding the illusive world lies in knowing what your actually seeing.

Mercury, Venus and the Moon on July 8th. Credit: Stellarium. Exploring Mercury

To be sure, Mercury has been known of since antiquity and isn’t at all that hard to see, if you know exactly where and when to look for it. A low flat horizon looking west at dusk certainly helps.

The often told tale that Nicolas Copernicus never saw Mercury is probably apocryphal. Looking at the diminutive world through the telescope reveals a cycle of Moon-like phases… and not much else. Mercury’s distinction as the innermost world in the solar system always assures that it always lingers low down in the murk of the atmosphere at dusk or dawn. This makes it too blurry to glimpse much in terms of surface detail. It wasn’t until the advent of space exploration that we knew much more about Mercury. NASA’s Mariner 10 made two brief flybys past the planet in 1974 and 1975, revealing an airless, cratered world 1.4 times the size of our Moon. Since then NASA’s Mercury MESSENGER revealed the planet in greater detail, becoming the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the world in 2011. Meanwhile, the joint ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission has thus far made three flybys past Mercury, and will enter orbit in late 2025.

One of the most amazing views of Mercury in recent memory came from the Big Bear Solar Observatory during the May 9th, 2016 transit of Mercury:

…And Venus Makes Two

Meanwhile, Venus is also joining the evening scene. Though brighter at magnitude -3.9, (almost 100 times brighter than Mercury) Venus is also lower to the horizon in July. Venus typically makes a slower comeback into the evening. This is because it’s approaching us from the farside of the Sun. Think of Venus as a runner, trying to catch the Earth on the inside track of the solar system. Venus spends the remainder of 2024 in the evening sky. The planet reaches greatest eastern elongation 47 degrees from the Sun on January 10th, 2025.

The sky scene becomes ever more dynamic as the month continues. On July 6th, Mercury actually transits (passes in from of) the Beehive Cluster (Messier 44). Use binoculars to catch +4th magnitude dwarf planet 4 Vesta nearby. Venus also meets Messier 44 on July 18th, though the event is much lower to the horizon.

Mercury crosses M44 on July 6th. Credit: Stellarium.

Mercury reaches greatest elongation 27 degrees east of the Sun at dusk on July 22nd.

The Moon joins the scene on the evenings of July 7th and July 8th as a waxing crescent. The crescent Moon always adds a three-dimensional look to the scene. This is because the nighttime side is dimly illuminated by the Earth in what’s termed Earthshine.

Mercury, Venus and the Moon on July 7th.

If you’ve never seen Mercury for yourself, this month is a good time to try and check the innermost world off of your life list.

The post Meeting Mercury at Dusk in July appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick has spent some of the last few months experimenting with long exposures in space photography. The images give a rare glimpse of life on the move in orbit.

After 100,000 orbits and almost 23 years on Mars, NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has seen a lot. The spacecraft was sent to map ice and study its geology, but along the way, it’s captured more than 1.4 million images of the planet.

A recent image captured the Solar System’s tallest mountain and volcano, Olympus Mons.

This image won’t win any photography contests, but that’s not what this is about. Scientists are experts at extracting information and images like this hold information that’s part of the overall Mars puzzle.

In this image, Odyssey is taking a horizontal look at Mars. The spacecraft usually points down at the surface and captures images in long strips, which is why the image has such an unusual shape. But this horizontal viewpoint is part of an effort to use Odyssey and its Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera to capture high-altitude images of Mars’ horizon.

“Normally, we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon, we can see in a single image how large it looms over the landscape,” said Odyssey’s project scientist, Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. “Not only is the image spectacular, it also provides us with unique science data.”

Dust storms typically begin during Martian fall, and the blue layer on the bottom is dust in Mars’ atmosphere. Above that is a purplish layer. It’s where red dust from the planet’s surface is mixed with bluish water ice. The top blue-green layer is where water ice clouds reach 50 km (31 miles) into the sky. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Odyssey captured its first horizontal horizon image in late 2023, and it took engineers three months to get the operation right. THEMIS is fixed in position and points straight down. For these images, the entire spacecraft had to tilt 90 degrees. But it also had to maintain a position where the Sun could strike its solar panels. To accomplish that, Mars Odyssey used its thrusters to orient itself so that its antennae pointed away from Earth. As a result, the spacecraft couldn’t communicate with Earth for the duration of the maneuver.

Orbiters like Odyssey, MRO, and Mars Express have imaged the Martian surface in great detail and given us a vast archive of images. But these images are different. They give scientists a different look at the Martian sky, its clouds, and its dust.

THEMIS is an infrared camera and is designed to sense temperature changes on Mars’ surface. It can differentiate between sand, rock, ice, and dust. By pointing at the sky, THEMIS can measure the presence of ice and dust in Mars’ atmosphere.

This is Odyssey’s first of the Martian atmosphere from a horizontal perspective. It was taken from about 250 miles above the Martian surface – about the same altitude at which the International Space Station orbits Earth. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Odyssey personnel first realized they could point the spacecraft at the horizon when other missions were landing on the Martian surface. When Curiosity landed in 2012, Odyssey played a key role by relaying information about the landing back to Earth. To do that, it had to orient itself differently, pointing its antenna at the rover’s landing ellipse. While positioning the antenna for that job, scientists realized that THEMIS was pointing at the horizon.

“We just decided to turn the camera on and see how it looked,” said Odyssey’s mission operations spacecraft engineer, Steve Sanders of Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin built Odyssey and helps conduct day-to-day operations alongside the mission leads at JPL. “Based on those experiments, we designed a sequence that keeps THEMIS’ field-of-view centered on the horizon as we go around the planet.”

Odyssey has been a definite success by any measure, and it’s still going strong. In fact, it’s the longest continually active mission around another planet. But that feat takes careful planning and operation.

“Physics does a lot of the hard work for us,” Sanders said. “But it’s the subtleties we have to manage again and again.” The spacecraft is solar-powered, and it’s out of direct sunlight for several minutes in each orbit, but the instruments have to be kept in a certain range to remain operational, which means juggling energy demands.

Odyssey also has a limited amount of hydrazine fuel for its thrusters. With no fuel gauge, engineers have to recalculate the amount remaining after each maneuver. One way they do this is by applying heat to the two propellant tanks to see how long they take to heat up. In March 2023, NASA said that the spacecraft has enough fuel to last at least until the end of 2025.

An artist’s impression of the Odyssey orbiter around Mars. Image Credit: NASA

“It takes careful monitoring to keep a mission going this long while maintaining a historical timeline of scientific planning and execution — and innovative engineering practices,” said Odyssey’s project manager, Joseph Hunt of JPL. “We’re looking forward to collecting more great science in the years ahead.”

Odyssey can change its orbit, so there’s no way to calculate exactly how many orbits it has left. But it’s completed over 100,000 in almost 23 years, and it’s likely to complete several hundred more before its hydrazine runs out.

The post A New View of Olympus Mons appeared first on Universe Today.

There have been many proposals for building structures on the Moon out of lunar regolith. But here’s an idea sure to resonate with creators, mechanical tinkerers, model builders and the kid inside us all.

What about using actual LEGO bricks?

Researchers ground up a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite and used the dust to 3D print LEGO-style space bricks. They actually click together like the plastic variety, with so far only one downside: they only come in one color, grey.

Want to see some of these lunar LEGOs? LEGO will showcase the space bricks at some of its stores.

Creating building materials on the Moon or Mars from the material on hand means construction materials don’t have to be transported from Earth. This would be a huge savings in launch costs because less weight would have to be boosted from Earth.

A group of scientists from ESA (European Space Agency) were inspired by LEGO bricks, and with the advances in 3D printing, had the idea to print space bricks and test how they would work for construction.

The only problem was that except for the Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts – which are highly guarded for scientific study only — there’s not any lunar regolith available on Earth to experiment with.

But meteorite dust is a close cousin to lunar regolith. The ESA team was able to get a meteorite that was discovered in Northwest Africa in 2000 and is about 4.5 billion years old. It is made of metal grains and chondrules, similar to Moon dust.

Inspired by LEGO, ESA scientists have used dust from a meteorite to 3D-print LEGO-style ‘space bricks’ to test out construction ideas for a future Moon base. Credit: The LEGO Group

They mixed the meteorite dust with a some other things, like a polymer called polylactide and regolith simulant and 3D printed bricks that mimic and behave just like LEGO bricks. While they aren’t smooth like regular LEGO bricks, ESA said the space bricks gave ESA’s space engineers the flexibility to build and test a variety of structures using this new material.

“It’s no secret that real-world scientists and engineers sometimes try out ideas with LEGO bricks,” said Emmet Fletcher, Head of ESA’s Branding and Partnerships Office. “ESA’s space bricks are a great way to inspire young people and show them how play and the power of the imagination have an important role in space science, too.”

“Nobody has built a structure on the Moon, so it was great to have the flexibility to try out all kinds of designs and building techniques with our space bricks,” said . ESA Science Officer Aidan Cowley. “It was both fun and useful in scientifically understanding the boundaries of these techniques.”

Below is a list of where the lunar LEGOs will be on display, and the LEGO website has additional details. Hopefully the lunar LEGOs will inspire both children and adults about space and to encourage them to build their own LEGO Moon bases.

USA

The LEGO Store, Mall of America, Bloomington, Minnesota
The LEGO Store, Disney Springs, Florida
The LEGO Store, Water Tower Place, Chicago
The LEGO Store, Disneyland Resort, California
The LEGO Store, 5th Avenue, New York

Canada

The LEGO Store, West Edmonton

UK

The LEGO Store, Leicester Square, London

Germany

The LEGO Store, München Zentrum
The LEGO Store, Cologne

Denmark

The LEGO Store, Copenhagen
LEGO House, Billund

Spain

The LEGO Store, Barcelona

France

The LEGO Store, Paris

Netherlands

The LEGO Store, Amsterdam

Australia

The LEGO Store, Sydney

The post LEGO Bricks Printed out of Space Dust appeared first on Universe Today.

SpaceX is targeting July 31 for the launch of the four-astronaut Polaris Dawn mission, which will feature the first-ever private spacewalk.

An exclusive interview with "The Acolyte's" costumer designer, Jennifer Bryan, on how the series came up with its new look.

Protostellar Outflows in Serpens

Mysterious swirling patterns seen on the moon's surface may be linked to underground magma activity, a new study suggests.

Under the scorching summer sun, pavement can reach temperatures hot enough to cause second-degree burns

NASA’s InSight Mars Lander faced some challenges during its time on the red planet’s surface. Its mole instrument struggled to penetrate the compacted Martian soil, and the mission eventually ended when its solar panels were covered in dust. But some of its instruments performed well, including SEIS, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure.

SEIS gathered Mars seismic data for more than four years, and researchers working with all of that data have determined a new meteorite impact rate for Mars.

SEIS was designed to probe Mars’ interior structure by measuring seismic waves from Marsquakes and impacts. It measured over 1300 seismic events. There’s no way to absolutely measure how many of them were from impacts, but scientists working with the data have narrowed it down.

NASA’s InSight lander placed its seismometer onto Mars on Dec. 19, 2018. SEIS was later covered with a protective shell to shield it from wind. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Their results are in new research published in Nature Astronomy titled “An estimate of the impact rate on Mars from statistics of very-high-frequency marsquakes.” The lead authors are Géraldine Zenhäusern and Natalia Wójcicka, from the Institute of Geophysics, ETH Zurich, and the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College, London, respectively.

“This is the first paper of its kind to determine how often meteorites impact the surface of Mars from seismological data.”

Domenico Giardini, Professor of Seismology and Geodynamics at ETH Zurich and co-Principal Investigator for the NASA Mars InSight Mission.

Though SEIS was an effective instrument, it couldn’t always tell what each seismic event was. Only a handful of the events it detected were powerful enough to determine their location. However, six events in close proximity to the InSight lander were confirmed as meteorite impacts because they were correlated with acoustic atmospheric signals that meteors make when they enter Mars’ atmosphere. The six events belong to a larger group called very high-frequency (VF) events.

While the source process for a typical marsquake measuring magnitude 3 takes several seconds, an impact-generated quake takes much less time because of the collision’s hypervelocity. These are the VF events.

During about three years of recording time, InSight and SEIS detected 70 VF events. 59 of them had good distance estimates, and according to the researchers, a handful of them were “higher quality B VF events,” meaning their signal-to-noise ratios are strong. “Although a non-impact origin cannot be definitively excluded for each VF event, we show that the VF class as a whole is plausibly caused by meteorite impacts,” the authors explain in their paper.

This figure from the research shows envelopes of recorded VF quality B events sorted by distance, plotted from 120?seconds before to 1,100?seconds after the event. They’re aligned by their first signal (Pg) arrival. The blue lines are the second signal arrival (Sg.) The six red events are the confirmed impact events, and for those, the black lines show where the “chirp” signal arrives. The chirp signal is a signature of impact events. Image Credit: Zenhäusern, Wójcicka et al. 2024.

This led to a new estimate of Mars’s impact frequencies. The researchers say that between 280 and 360 meteoroids about the size of basketballs strike Mars each year and excavate craters greater than 8 meters (26 ft) in diameter. That’s almost one every day at the upper end. “This rate was about five times higher than the number estimated from orbital imagery alone. Aligned with orbital imagery, our findings demonstrate that seismology is an excellent tool for measuring impact rates,” Zenhäusern said in a press release.

Impact rates on different bodies in the Solar System are one way of understanding the age of their surfaces. Earth’s surface is young because the planet is so geologically active. Earth is also much easier to study in greater detail, for obvious reasons. But for bodies like the Moon and Mars, impact rates can tell us the ages of various surfaces, leading to a more thorough understanding of their history.

Orbital images and models based on preserved lunar craters have been the main tools used by planetary scientists to infer impact rates. The data from the Moon was used to extrapolate Mars’ impact rate. But there are problems with that method. Mars has more powerful gravity and is closer to the source of most meteors, the asteroid belt.

That means more meteoroids strike Mars than the Moon, and that had to be calculated somehow. Conversely, Mars has widespread dust storms that can obscure craters in orbital images, while the lunar surface is largely static. Mars also has different types of surface regions. In some regions, craters stand out; in others, they don’t. Trying to accurately account for that many differences when extrapolating impact rates from the Moon to Mars is challenging.

This work shows that seismometers can be a more reliable way to understand impact rates.

“We estimated crater diameters from the magnitude of all the VF-marsquakes and their distances, then used it to calculate how many craters formed around the InSight lander over the course of a year. We then extrapolated this data to estimate the number of impacts that happen annually on the whole surface of Mars,” Wójcicka explained.

This figure from the research shows crater size and seismic moment for the six confirmed impacts near the InSight lander. Circles show single craters, and triangles show the effective diameter of crater clusters. The vertical error bars reflect the uncertainty in seismic moment magnitude derived using standard error propagation techniques. The horizontal error bars are given by the resolution of HiRISE images used to determine the crater sizes. Image Credit: Zenhäusern, Wójcicka et al. 2024.

“While new craters can best be seen on flat and dusty terrain where they really stand out, this type of terrain covers less than half of the surface of Mars. The sensitive InSight seismometer, however, could hear every single impact within the landers’ range,” said Zenhäusern.

These results extend beyond Mars. Understanding Mars also helps us understand the wider Solar System. “The current meteoroid impact rate on Mars is vital for determining accurate absolute ages of surfaces throughout the Solar System,” the authors write in their paper. Without accurate surface ages, we don’t have an accurate understanding of the Solar System’s history.

Now we know that an 8-metre (26-feet) crater is excavated somewhere on Mars’ surface almost daily, and a 30-metre (98-feet) crater is a monthly occurrence. But it’s about more than just crater size. These hypervelocity impacts create blast zones that dwarf the crater itself. The blast zones can easily be 100 times larger than the crater. So, a better understanding of impact rates can make robotic missions and future human missions safer.

“The higher overall number of impacts and the higher relative number of small ones found in our study show that meteoritic impacts might be a substantial hazard for future explorations of Mars and other planets without a thick atmosphere,” the authors write in their conclusion.

This study is a win for InSight and SEIS and for the researchers who pieced this together.

“This is the first paper of its kind to determine how often meteorites impact the surface of Mars from seismological data – which was a level one mission goal of the Mars InSight Mission,” says Domenico Giardini, Professor of Seismology and Geodynamics at ETH Zurich and co-Principal Investigator for the NASA Mars InSight Mission. “Such data factors into the planning for future missions to Mars.”

The post Basketball-Sized Meteorites Strike the Surface of Mars Every Day appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA picked SpaceX's Falcon 9 to be the rocket ride for its COSI gamma-ray space telescope, which is targeted to lift off in August 2027.