Feed aggregator

Saturday Sept. 14 marks NASA's annual Observe the Moon Night, a worldwide event to promote lunar science and astronomy, celebrate cultural connections to the moon, and promote amateur lunar observations.

Two Polaris Dawn astronauts completed the world's first all-private spacewalk in their new SpaceX extravehicular activity suits, on Day 3 of the groundbreaking mission.

Using the Comstock Act to nationally ban abortion would defy modern public opinion and the law’s historical interpretation, experts say

The security expert who created Have I Been Pwned? shares advice for protecting sensitive data

A groundbreaking civilian spacewalk saw two astronauts partially exit a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule wearing a brand new design of spacesuit. Every previous spacewalk completed before this was performed by government-trained astronauts.

A groundbreaking civilian spacewalk saw two astronauts partially exit a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule wearing a brand new design of spacesuit. Every previous spacewalk completed before this was performed by government-trained astronauts.

If you were standing on Mars as it was hit by charged particles from the sun, you might be able to see an aurora just like on Earth

If you were standing on Mars as it was hit by charged particles from the sun, you might be able to see an aurora just like on Earth

Astronomers have gotten the first-ever detailed views of turbulent activity on a star other than our own sun.

AST SpaceMobile's first five giant commercial direct-to-cell satellites, huge spacecraft called BlueBirds, lifted off this morning (Sept. 12) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Ringed Ice Giant Neptune

Image: Digel Cloud 2S

I’ve been an avid stargazer for a fair few decades now and not once have I seen anything that makes me believe we are being visited by aliens! My own experiences aside, there’s no evidence of alien visitations but it seems much of the population believes anything that they cannot immediately identify in the sky MUST be ailens. A new paper suggests there are costs associated with increasing claims such as disctractions to government programs and background noise that hampers science communication. How on Earth should we deal with it? If debunking doesn’t work, then maybe its time for a scientific investigation. 

Do you believe in aliens? It seems that a great proportion of the population does. That’s despite all the usual issues that those of us in science communication trot out to enrich the debate with a little factual information; everything is a long way away, the universe is actually quite young and so on and so on  Yet still we have a problem that a lot of people still think we are being visited by our cosmic cousins. 

With thousands of exoplanets discovered so far, astronomers are learning how different planets can be. What if intelligent alien civilizations arise on extremely different habitable worlds? Some civilizations could develop space exploration technologies, but others would be trapped underwater, under ice, or in enormous gravity wells. How could they escape? Image Credit: DALL-E

Tony Milligan from Kings College London, the author of a new paper into this very phenomenon says that it is ‘no longer a quirk but a widespread societel problem.’ He goes on to explain that it is really quite unusual because there is zero evidence that aliens even exist let alone travel to Earth. He cites the same arguments about the sheer scale of the Universe and how we are far more likely to start to engage and learn about them from remote observation. 

Somewhat worryingly is that the paper articulates almost a quarter of Americans have seen a UFO. This is then supported by a poll that shows 68% of people believe the US Government knows more about UFOs than they are letting on! Of course, and as I have often retorted in such discussions, if you see an aeroplane in the sky but don’t know it’s an aeroplane then it is indeed an Unidentified Flying Object. Doesn’t mean it’s an alien though! 

Screenshot from the “UFO Over Santa Clarita VFX Breakdown” video.

The essence of the report is that alien visitation claims become a problem when they do one of three things; 1 – move into mainstream debate in such a way that governments have to reply and respond to them; 2 – when they generate background noise which impedes science communication and 3 – when they become entangled with indigenous origin narratives, making it hard to recover the latter.

The rise of artificial intelligence and sheer volume of content in social media makes item 2 even more difficult to separate the proveribal wheat from the chaif. The paper concludes that there it is clear the popular belief in alien visitations makes it difficult to articulate and discuss such topics. Even bursts of debunking seem to fail to cut through the noise and certainly seem to show no sign of reducing it. The Moon landing is another great exmple where people that believe the landings were faked seem to have great trouble in accepting evidence when it is presented to them. 

There will come a time in the not too distant future, asserts Tony Milligan when it will require something of a more structured scientific research program to investigate and explore the concept. The time may not be now but in the near future a program can apply scientific rigour to the debate and perhaps provide an answer. 

Source : Equivocal Encounters: Alien Visitation Claims as a Societal Problem

The post Are Claims of Alien Visitation Causing a Problem to Society? appeared first on Universe Today.

A single dose of a smallpox vaccine seems to lower the risk of catching mpox by around 60 per cent, and two doses would probably be even better

A single dose of a smallpox vaccine seems to lower the risk of catching mpox by around 60 per cent, and two doses would probably be even better

Jupiter’s moon, Io, is the most volcanic body in the Solar System. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been getting closer and closer to Io in the last couple of years, giving us our first close-up images of the moon in 25 years.

Recent JunoCam images show a new volcano that appeared sometime after the Galileo spacecraft visited the region.

The new volcano is just south of Io’s equator. Since tidal heating from Jupiter causes Io’s volcanic activity, most volcanoes are in the moon’s equatorial region, within about 30 degrees north and south of the equator. When NASA’s Galileo spacecraft imaged the region where the new volcano was spotted in 1997, the surface was featureless.

The new volcano is near an existing volcano called Kanehekili. JunoCam’s image from April 2024 revealed multiple lava flows and volcanic deposits covering an area of about 180 kilometres by 180 kilometres.

The grey inset image shows what the Galileo spacecraft saw about 25 years ago. The larger colour image is from JunoCam and clearly shows a new volcano and lava flows. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Europlanet.

“Our recent JunoCam images show many changes on Io, including this large, complicated volcanic feature that appears to have formed from nothing since 1997,” said Michael Ravine. Ravine is the Advanced Projects Manager at Malin Space Science Systems, the company that built and operates JunoCam for NASA’s Juno mission.

Of course, the volcano didn’t form from nothing. Io is in a tough spot orbitally. Tidal friction from massive Jupiter, and some from its fellow moon Europa, is dissipated as orbital and heat energy in Io. In its sibling ocean moons like Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, the heat keeps their subsurface oceans in liquid form. But Io doesn’t have an ocean, so the heat causes magma to well up and break through the surface as volcanoes. Io has over 400 active volcanoes, and the surface is covered in sulphuric compounds from these eruptions, which give it its colours.

JunoCam’s best image of the region and the new volcano was taken on February 3rd, 2024, from a distance of about 2,530 km. The scale is about 1.7 km per pixel. In this image, Io is illuminated with sunlight reflected off of Jupiter.

This image shows the Galileo and JunoCam images sisde by side. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS.

There are unanswered questions about Io, its volcanism, and its interior composition. Scientists know that tidal heating from Jupiter is the moon’s primary heat source, but they aren’t certain how the heat is distributed inside. They are also uncertain about the extent of Io’s magma ocean.

They also want to know what initiates eruptions and what drives the different types of eruptions, like plumes, lava flows, and pyroclastic flows. There are unanswered questions about Io’s volcanic history and how often the surface is reshaped. There are no impact craters on Io, which means the surface must be young.

This schematic illustrates four competing explanations for Io’s interior and how tidal heating is dissipated. Though Juno won’t tell us which one is correct, every volcanic eruption is a piece of the puzzle. Image Credit: Chuck Carter and James Tuttle Keane / Keck Institute for Space Studies.

Researchers are also keen to understand how the gases from eruptions might affect the surface and the moon’s extremely thin atmosphere. Io’s volcanic activity has likely changed over time, and how that happens and what drives it are also unknown.

Answers to these questions will not only help us understand Io, but other rocky planets as well.

Juno’s discovery of a new volcano on Io is interesting, and its observations are a valuable contribution to the body of knowledge. However, Juno won’t provide the in-depth answers scientists seek. It has several more flybys of Io in the future, with the last one in 2025. Unfortunately, it’ll be getting further from the moon, and the last one will be at a distance of 94,000 km.

This graphic shows Juno’s orbits around Jupiter. PJ (perijove) 58 was its closest approach to Io, and as time goes on, its flybys will be more and more distant. Image Credit: Scott Bolton/SWRI

These images do highlight an important part of the Juno mission, though. The JunoCam isn’t a scientific instrument, strictly speaking. It was included for the rest of us, and the images are freely available for anyone to work on and post.

By spotting the new volcano, JunoCam has proven its scientific value.

The post Juno Sees a Brand New Volcano on Io appeared first on Universe Today.

Although stars are enormous, they’re extremely far away, and appear as point sources in telescopes. Usually, you never get to see more than a pixel. Now astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to resolve details on the surface of the star R Doradus and track its activity for 30 days. The images revealed giant, hot bubbles of gas 75 times larger than the entire Sun. R Doradus is 350 times larger than our Sun, but only 180 light-years away.

“This is the first time the bubbling surface of a real star can be shown in such a way,“ said Wouter Vlemmings, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and lead author of the study, in a press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). “We had never expected the data to be of such high quality that we could see so many details of the convection on the stellar surface.”

In the study, published in Nature, the astronomers detailed how they observed R Doradus, a massive red supergiant star, over four weeks between July 2 and August 2, 2023. The observations were made using the longest available ALMA baselines. The images revealed a stellar disk with prominent small-scale features that provide the structure and motions of convection on the stellar surface.

Convection is the mixing of gas within a star, where heated gas from the interior of the star created by nuclear fusion in the core rises to the surface and the cooler, denser gas on the star’s photosphere sinks. This continuous motion also distributes the heavy elements formed in the core, such as carbon and nitrogen, throughout the star, and convection is also thought to be responsible for the stellar winds that carry these elements out into the cosmos to build new stars and planets.

“Convection creates the beautiful granular structure seen on the surface of our Sun, but it is hard to see on other stars,” said Theo Khouri, a researcher at Chalmers who is a co-author of the study. “With ALMA, we have now been able to not only directly see convective granules — with a size 75 times the size of our Sun! — but also measure how fast they move for the first time.”

While convection bubbles have been previously observed in detail on the surface of other stars, including another observation of a red giant star using with the PIONIER instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer, ALMA’s higher resolution allowed astronomers to track the motion of the bubbles in a way that was not possible with other telescopes.

The researchers found that the granules of R Doradus appear to move on a one-month cycle, which is faster than scientists expected based on how convection works in the Sun.

“We don’t yet know what is the reason for the difference. It seems that convection changes as a star gets older in ways that we don’t yet understand,” said Vlemmings. In their paper, the team wrote, “This indicates a possible difference between the convection properties of low-mass and high-mass evolved stars.”

This wide-field view, created from Digitized Sky Survey 2 images, shows the region around R Doradus, the bright, orange star in the centre. The star’s surface was recently imaged in detail using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin

Red giant stars are what become of main sequence stars like our Sun once they have exhausted their hydrogen fuel, and they expand to becomes hundreds the size of times their normal diameter. Since R Doradus has a mass similar to that of our Sun, this red giant star is likely a good example of how our Sun will look like in approximately five billion years.

“It is spectacular that we can now directly image the details on the surface of stars so far away, and observe physics that until now was mostly only observable in our Sun,” said Behzad Bojnodi Arbab, a PhD student at Chalmers who was also involved in the study.

The post High Resolution Images Show Bubbling Gas on the Surface of Another Star appeared first on Universe Today.

Mars is known for its unique geological features. Olympus Mons is a massive shield volcano 2.5 times taller than Mt. Everest. Hellas Planitia is the largest visible impact crater in the Solar System. However, Mars’ most striking feature is Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the Solar System.

This fascinating geological feature begs to be explored, and a team of German researchers think that a swarm of robots is best suited to the task.

Valles Marineris (VM) is named after NASA’s Mariner 9 spacecraft, which discovered the massive canyon in 1971. It’s about 4,000 km long, 8 km deep at its deepest point, and 600 km wide in some places. These measurements dwarf the Grand Canyon in the USA.

From a distance, VM looks like a scab on Mars’s surface. It’s an interconnected network of chasms, faults, valleys, and probably caves. Unlike the Grand Canyon, VM wasn’t excavated by a flowing river. Instead, scientists think it was likely formed by rift faults, regions on the surface where plates receded from one another.

Annotated close-up of High-Resolution Stereo Camera images of Valles Marineris. The HRSC is an instrument on the ESA’s Mars Express mission. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Michael)

German scientists are developing a way to explore this unique region. It’s called the Valles Marineris Explorer (VaMEx), and the idea dates back several years. VaMEx is an initiative of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) and it’s making significant progress.

NASA’s Mars rovers have made great progress in understanding Mars and its potentially habitable past. They’re incredible machines that put humanity’s inventiveness on display. But they’re ill-suited to rough, obstacle-strewn terrain like Valles Mariners. Instead of building one robotic vehicle, VaMEx will build several types of vehicles and stationary units that will work together to explore VM and its chasms, valley walls, and caves.

VaMEx will be a swarm of interconnected vehicles that fly, move across the ground, and visit caves in VM. They’ll be linked with a ground station that acts as a command center, and a satellite will provide communications with Earth. The vehicles will collect images and data and send them to the command center and an orbiter or satellite, then to Earth.

This image outlines the different components of the VaMEx Mars Symphony concept. Image Credit: Clemens Riegler / University of Wuerzburg

VaMEx is particularly aimed at caves that scientists think are likely plentiful in VM. Caves are protected from radiation, and if Mars hosted simple life in its past, there may be traces of it deep in these caves. VaMEx also includes ground repeater stations that will allow cave-exploring robots to share data and images in real time.

All of this will require finely tuned communications.

“We have given our sub-project the name ‘VaMEx3-MarsSymphony’ because the aim is to make the individual elements of the robot swarm play together harmoniously like an orchestra,” said project leader Professor Hakan Kayal. Kayal is a professor of Astronautics at the Satellite Mission Control Centre at the University of Würzburg.

The walls of Valles Mariners are an ideal place to study Mars’ layered geology, as shown in this HiRISE image of layered deposits. Scientists can learn about the planet’s geological history without the need for excavation. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/UA/HiRISE

Units called autorotation bodies are also part of the swarm. Autorotation is a term from rotary-wing (helicopter) flight. It describes a situation where power to the rotors is lost, and as the helicopter falls toward Earth, air makes the rotors spin, providing enough energy for a controlled descent. VaMEx’s autorotation bodies aren’t helicopters. They’re like maple seeds, which float gently to the ground, spinning as they descend. Once they’ve reached the surface, they’re stationary.

VaMEx is also taking an unusual approach to cameras. The stationary ground station will feature a camera that monitors the Martian sky. “All previous Mars missions have focussed on the surface of the planet, but we want to look upwards for the first time,” says Hakan Kayal. The camera can monitor cloud formation and dust in the atmosphere. It will also capture any transient phenomena like unusual cloud illumination or lightning.

NASA’s Mars rovers have occasionally imaged the Martian sky. The gif below is from the Perseverance rover, which used one of its navigation cameras to capture images. A purpose-built sky-monitoring camera would image the Martian sky like never before.

via GIPHY

It will also see incoming meteors, and data shows that one about the size of a basketball strikes Mars every day. “We could further substantiate this with data if we film the entry of meteorites with our UAP camera and correlate these events with the seismic signals,” says Hakan Kayal.

VaMEx faces many technical challenges that still need to be overcome. The mobile robots will need powerful route-finding AI to maneuver through difficult terrain, especially in caves. It takes about 40 minutes for a signal to travel from Mars and back, making remote real-time control impossible.

There are also communication challenges. A key challenge is getting VaMEx’s ground segments to communicate with a satellite. One company is working on special transceivers that operate in the Ka-band to handle all of the scientific data. The Ka-band is used in satellites because it allows higher bandwidth communications, but landers currently use the S or X-band. The issue is that the Ka-band usually requires more and bulkier equipment, including larger antennae, that may not be practical on a surface robot.

In August, scientists tested some aspects of VaMEx at the DLR site in Oberpfaffenhofen. They tested LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit), and GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) sensors for ground truth validation. This compared sensor information against known data. They also successfully tested Wi-Fi-like communication systems and radio-ranging.

“One of the highlights of our field test was the live test of multi-robot SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping),” the VaMEx website says. “In a dual-robot scenario, we tested the real-time capabilities of our SLAM algorithms.” They say the results were promising and illustrate a way forward for individual robots to cooperate.

This image shows several robots during tests at the DLR site. Image Credit: VaMEX/DLR

Not everything in the tests went well, though. The Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) encountered some challenges with so many units trying to communicate with one another. Bandwidth and synchronization were both problematic.

These results are helping the VaMEx team prepare for upcoming analog tests in 2025. These will take place at a quarry in Germany, where the robot swarm will be tested after improvements gained from August’s tests. The Wurzburg UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) Skycam will be part of these tests, with its resource-hungry video data added to the mix to test the system’s overall robustness.

This image shows an early version of the automated Wurzurg UAP Skycam from 2021. Image Credit: Hakan Kayal / Universität Würzburg

If all goes well, the next step is to harden the VaMEx equipment. Mars has much harsher conditions, with much lower temperatures, a thin atmosphere, and global dust storms that can interrupt exploration.

“In a possible follow-up project, the hardware would have to be adapted for use on Mars,” explains Hakan Kayal.

The post A Swarm of Robots to Explore Mars’ Valles Marineris appeared first on Universe Today.