Boeing Starliner's first unmanned flight failed in December, because the aerospace giant divided its tests in small chunks instead of conducting longer tests that simulate the whole process from launch to docking. Starliner program manager John Mulholland has revealed at a teleconference that the company thought it would be "more logical to break the mission phases into chunks and do a lot of testing in those smaller chunks." Doing a single test run from launch to docking takes over 25 hours, after all.
If you'll recall, the Starliner crew capsule that was designed to ferry astronauts to the ISS failed to enter the right orbit and dock with the station during its first test flight. Turned out the spacecraft's onboard computer time was miscalibrated by 11 hours, so it wasn't able to fire the thrusters that would send on the correct path. In addition, its ground team wasn't able to establish a connection before it had already burned too much fuel. The company would've discovered the mistake if it ran a longer test.
NASA and Boeing formed a team to investigate what happened, and a report recently published by Orlando Sentinel said that the fact that the company didn't do an end-to-end test took NASA by surprise. Mulholland defended Boeing at the conference, telling reporters:
"...I really don't want anyone to have the impression that this team tried to take shortcuts. They didn't. They did an abundance of testing. And in certain areas obviously we have some gaps to fill."
Aside from not conducting a launch-to-docking simulation, Boeing also didn't test the Starliner's software against its service module. Boeing scheduled the spacecraft's software test and a "hot fire" test of the module's thrusters at the same time. That's why the service module was in a different location, and the company had to use an emulator in its place. The emulator turned out to be flawed, though, and the investigation team found a critical software defect that could've led to "loss of vehicle."
Mulholland said that going forward, Boeing will continue doing tests in smaller chunks, but it will also conduct longer end-to-end testing. According to The Washington Post, NASA is still thinking whether to allow Boeing to proceed with its first manned flight to prevent delays or to require the company to successfully complete an unmanned flight first.
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Why do so many cats have white 'socks' on their paws? Livescience.com
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiQmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmxpdmVzY2llbmNlLmNvbS93aHktY2F0cy1oYXZlLXdoaXRlLXNvY2tzLW9uLXBhd3MuaHRtbNIBRmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmxpdmVzY2llbmNlLmNvbS9hbXAvd2h5LWNhdHMtaGF2ZS13aGl0ZS1zb2Nrcy1vbi1wYXdzLmh0bWw?oc=5
A 3D reconstruction of the collision dynamics of two vortices. Credit: Ryan McKeown/Harvard SEAS
Turbulence is everywhere—it rattles our planes and makes tiny whirlpools in our bathtubs—but it is one of the least understood phenomena in classical physics.
Turbulence occurs when an ordered fluid flow breaks into small vortices, which interact with each other and break into even smaller vortices, which interact with each other and so-on, becoming the chaotic maelstrom of disorder that makes white water rafting so much fun.
But the mechanics of that descent into chaos have puzzled scientists for centuries.
When they don't understand something, physicists have a go-to solution: smash it together. Want to understand the fundamental building blocks of the universe? Smash particles together. Want to unravel the underlying mechanics of turbulence? Smash vortices together.
Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) may have identified a fundamental mechanism by which turbulence develops by smashing vortex rings head-on into each other, recording the results with ultra-high-resolution cameras, and reconstructing the collision dynamics using a 3-D visualization program. Coupled with the analysis of numerical simulations performed by collaborators at the University of Houston and ENS de Lyon, the researchers have gained unprecedented insight into how fluidic systems transform from order to disorder.
The research is described in Science Advances.
Vortex cannons fire in a 75-gallon aquarium to produce the vortices. Each vortex was dyed a different color, so researchers could observe how they interact. Credit: Harvard SEAS
"Our ability to predict the weather, understand why a Boeing 747 flies even with turbulent currents in its wake, and determine the global flows in the ocean depends on how well we model turbulence," said Shmuel Rubinstein, Associate Professor of Applied Physics at SEAS and corresponding author of the paper. "However, our understanding of turbulence still lacks a mechanistic description that explains how energy cascades to smaller and smaller scales until it is eventually dissipated. This research opens the door to just that kind of understanding."
"Trying to make sense of what is going on in an exceedingly complex system like turbulence is always a challenge," said Rodolfo Ostilla-Mónico, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston and corresponding author of the paper. "At every length-scale, vortices are straining and compressing each other to generate a chaotic picture. With this work, we can begin to isolate and watch simple pair interactions, and how these lead to rich dynamics when enough of them are present."
Physicists have been using vortex colliders to understand turbulences since the 1990s, but previous experiments haven't been able to slow down and reconstruct the mechanics of the collision, the moment it descends into chaos. To do that, the researchers synchronized a powerful scanning laser sheet with a high-speed camera—capable of snapping hundreds of thousands of images per second—to rapidly scan the entire collision in real time.
When the vortices collide, the edges form antisymmetric waves. The crests of these waves develop into finger-like filaments, which grow perpendicularly between the colliding cores. Credit: Harvard SEAS
They used vortex cannons in a 75-gallon aquarium to produce the vortices. Each vortex was dyed a different color, so researchers could observe how they interact when they violently collide. It takes less than a second for the rings to disappear into a puff of dye after the collision, but within that time, a lot of physics happens.
First, the rings stretch outward as they smash into each other and the edges form antisymmetric waves. The crests of these waves develop into finger-like filaments, which grow perpendicularly between the colliding cores.
These filaments counter-rotate with their neighbors, creating a new array of miniature vortices that interact with each other for milliseconds. Those vortices also form filaments, which in turn form vortices. The research team observed three generations of this cascading cycle, each one the same as before, only smaller—a Russian nesting doll of disorder.
"This similar behavior from the large scale to the small scale emerges very rapidly and orderly before it all breaks down into turbulence," said Ryan McKeown, a graduate student at SEAS and first author of the paper. "This cascading effect is really exciting because it could point to a universal mechanism for how these interactions work, independent of scale."
In addition to the experiments, the research team also developed numerical simulations to understand the dynamics of the breakdown and quantify how the energy spectrum of the cascade evolves. Turbulence has a very specific and well-defined energy spectrum. While this system is considerably simpler than the turbulence that rattles a plane, the researchers found that the energy spectrum at the late-stage breakdown of the vortices follows the same tell-tale scaling of fully developed turbulence.
"This is a great indication that while this is a different system—for a brief time—it is creating the same conditions of turbulence. It's a starting point," said McKeown.
More information:
Ryan McKeown et al, Turbulence generation through an iterative cascade of the elliptical instability, Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz2717
Citation:
Unraveling turbulence: New insights into how fluids transform from order to disorder (2020, February 29)
retrieved 29 February 2020
from https://phys.org/news/2020-02-unraveling-turbulence-insights-fluids-disorder.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Evidence for the largest known explosion since the Big Bang has been reported by astronomers in the US and Australia. Using four telescopes, the team spotted a huge hole that the blast punched in the plasma that envelopes a galaxy cluster.
The researchers reckon that the hole was made by a colossal burst of energy from a supermassive black hole at the centre of one of the cluster’s galaxies. They estimate that the explosion involved the release of 5×1061 erg (5×1054 J) – which is the energy that 1020 Suns would output in a year. This is five-times more energy than the previous record holder for the biggest known explosion since the Big Bang.
The event occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is 390 million light-years from Earth. Unlike the supernova explosion of a star, which occurs over a matter of months, the Ophiuchus event seems to have occurred over hundreds of millions of years.
Huge rift
Evidence for the explosion was observed using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray telescope, the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope in Western Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India. The multiple observations confirmed previous X-ray studies that suggested there was a huge rift in the cluster plasma. That X-ray evidence had been discounted because of the huge size of the structure. It was only when radio observations were made that astronomers became convinced of its existence.
“You could fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster’s [plasma],” says Simona Giacintucci, from the Naval Research Laboratory in the US, who is one of six astronomers involved in the study.
Her colleague Melanie Johnston-Hollitt, from Curtin University adds “We’ve seen outbursts in the centres of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive…and we don’t know why it’s so big”.
The discovery was made using the first phase of the Murchison telescope, which had comprised 2048 antennas. The facility is being expanded to 4096 antennas, which Johnston-Hollitt says will make the telescope “ten times more sensitive”. As a result, she believes that many more such explosions will soon be discovered.
The scientists who discovered the object on Feb. 15 estimate that, because of the instability of its path through space, the minimoon will likely leave Earth's orbit sometime in April.
Astronomers know little about this minimoon — so little, in fact, that they can't even say if it's an artificial object, such as a dead satellite. However, they say, it's most likely a small asteroid. And although the object poses no danger to Earth, it does show how changeable our neighborhood is.
The international Gemini Observatory/NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/AURA/G. Fedorets (Image credit: The international Gemini Observatory/NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/AURA/G. Fedorets)
Information from the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, which keeps observation records for all known asteroids, shows that the orbit of the minimoon doesn't match the precise orbit of any known human-made object, Kacper Wierzchos, a senior research specialist for the Catalina Sky Survey and co-discoverer of the minimoon, told Space.com. The object's orbit didn't display any perturbations resulting from solar radiation pressure coming from the sun; such wiggles are common for human-made satellites in Earth's orbit.
But Wierzchos said he doesn't want to assume the minimoon is an asteroid quite yet. "The possibility it is artificial still exists, so I am trying to be cautious with every statement," he said. "I'd hate it to be artificial after [everyone is] making a fuss [about the discovery]."
The NASA-funded Catalina program at the University of Arizona is an automated survey that scans the sky for fast-moving objects. On discovery night, Wierzchos and Catalina research specialist Theodore Pruyne happened to be at the telescope, Wierzchos said. On a good night, the survey can study around 40 near-Earth asteroids, which are typically objects astronomers already know about. But on Feb. 15, something in Catalina's observations looked a little funny and didn't match anything known by astronomers. The duo submitted the discovery to the Minor Planet Center, and other astronomers soon confirmed the find.
Data from the Catalina Sky Survey shows the recently discovered minimoon currently orbiting Earth. (Image credit: K. Wierzchos/T. Pruyne/University of Arizona/Catalina Sky Survey)
The newly identified object, now known as 2020 CD3, was very faint when it was discovered, at only about magnitude 20. (The lower the magnitude, the brighter the object.) That faintness stretches the capabilities of Catalina and is beyond what most amateurs can see in their telescopes. (Since then, the object has faded to magnitude 23, making it visible only to the largest professional telescopes.)
In the nights after the discovery, Wierzchos and his collaborators kept following the object to try to determine its orbit. Their calculations showed that, most likely, the object was circling the sun and Earth's gravity snatched it into our planet's orbit sometime in 2017.
How did the minimoon go unnoticed for years? First, the sky is vast, and telescopes have limited time dedicated to searching for asteroids, Wierzchos said. He also cited the minimoon's faintness and highly variable orbit.
2020 CD3 has a "chaotic" orbit, he said, because it is pulled between the gravity of the moon and the gravity of Earth. Its distance to Earth varies between the equivalent of 0.2 and 4.5 Earth-moon distances (The average distance to the moon is roughly 239,000 miles, or 384,000 kilometers.) When Wierzchos last observed the minimoon, on Wednesday (Feb. 26), it was roughly 2.5 lunar distances away, he said.
Because the object's distance to Earth varies, so does its orbital period, or the time it takes the minimoon to circle Earth. Wierzchos said the object's orbital period is difficult to measure precisely, but it seems to be about a month.
Astronomers have observed 2020 CD3 only about six or seven times so far, so they don't have enough information yet to derive a "light curve," which shows the variation in an object's brightness. If they can get that data, Wierzchos said, it may help astronomers determine what kind of asteroid it is (if it is, indeed, an asteroid), how quickly it rotates and how big it is.
Assuming the object is a common type of asteroid called a carbonaceous asteroid, Wierzchos said, the minimoon is probably about the size of a car. Ideally, he hopes other telescopes will be able to observe the object before it drifts away. Telescopes he would like to see participate include Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory (which has radar optimized to get the shape and size of nearby asteroids) or large optical telescopes, such as the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Wierzchos is scouring past data from the Catalina Sky Survey to see if 2020 CD3 showed up in past imagery and went unnoticed. He hasn't found such observations yet, but he said it's possible that Catalina or other asteroid surveyors, such as the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, have that information in their archives.
Wierzchos hopes Catalina will be able to see 2020 CD3 again before it fades. But astronomers are racing against the gravitational tug-of-war between Earth and our traditional moon. Before long, they know, the minimoon will drift out of sight, bound for new adventures.
Sizes of the 17 new planet candidates, compared to Mars, Earth, and Neptune. The planet in green is KIC-7340288 b, a rare rocky planet in the Habitable Zone. Credit: Michelle Kunimoto
University of British Columbia astronomy student Michelle Kunimoto has discovered 17 new planets, including a potentially habitable, Earth-sized world, by combing through data gathered by NASA's Kepler mission.
Over its original four-year mission, the Kepler satellite looked for planets, especially those that lie in the "Habitable Zones" of their stars, where liquid water could exist on a rocky planet's surface.
The new findings, published in The Astronomical Journal, include one such particularly rare planet. Officially named KIC-7340288 b, the planet discovered by Kunimoto is just 1 ½ times the size of Earth—small enough to be considered rocky, instead of gaseous like the giant planets of the Solar System—and in the habitable zone of its star.
"This planet is about a thousand light years away, so we're not getting there anytime soon!" said Kunimoto, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of physics and astronomy. "But this is a really exciting find, since there have only been 15 small, confirmed planets in the Habitable Zone found in Kepler data so far."
The planet has a year that is 142 ½ days long, orbiting its star at 0.444 Astronomical Units (AU, the distance between Earth and our Sun) - just bigger than Mercury's orbit in our Solar System, and gets about a third of the light Earth gets from the Sun.
Of the other 16 new planets discovered, the smallest is only two-thirds the size of Earth—one of the smallest planets to be found with Kepler so far. The rest range in size up to eight times the size of Earth.
Kunimoto is no stranger to discovering planets: she previously discovered four during her undergraduate degree at UBC. Now working on her Ph.D. at UBC, she used what is known as the "transit method" to look for the planets among the roughly 200,000 stars observed by the Kepler mission.
"Every time a planet passes in front of a star, it blocks a portion of that star's light and causes a temporary decrease in the star's brightness," Kunimoto said. "By finding these dips, known as transits, you can start to piece together information about the planet, such as its size and how long it takes to orbit."
Kunimoto also collaborated with UBC alumnus Henry Ngo to obtain razor-sharp follow-up images of some of her planet-hosting stars with the Near InfraRed Imager and Spectrometer (NIRI) on the Gemini North 8-metre Telescope in Hawaii.
"I took images of the stars as if from space, using adaptive optics," she said. "I was able to tell if there was a star nearby that could have affected Kepler's measurements, such as being the cause of the dip itself."
In addition to the new planets, Kunimoto was able to observe thousands of known Kepler planets using the transit-method, and will be reanalysing the exoplanet census as a whole.
"We'll be estimating how many planets are expected for stars with different temperatures," said Kunimoto's Ph.D. supervisor and UBC professor Jaymie Matthews. "A particularly important result will be finding a terrestrial Habitable Zone planet occurrence rate. How many Earth-like planets are there? Stay tuned."
More information:
Michelle Kunimoto et al, Searching the Entirety of Kepler Data. I. 17 New Planet Candidates Including One Habitable Zone World, The Astronomical Journal (2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab6cf8
Citation:
Astronomy student discovers 17 new planets, including Earth-sized world (2020, February 28)
retrieved 28 February 2020
from https://phys.org/news/2020-02-astronomy-student-planets-earth-sized-world.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
Researchers say the blast is the biggest since the universe began. It occurred at the center of a galaxy cluster some 390 million light years away from Earth.
Astronomers have discovered the biggest explosion seen since the begining of the universe, originating from a super-massive black hole.
The blast, they said, is the biggest explosion seen since the Big Bang — the cosmologial model to describe a rapid expansion of matter and energy that created the observable universe. The explosion reportedly released five times more energy than the previous record holder.
The blast occurred at the center of the Ophiuchus cluster of galaxies, some 390 million light years away. The cluster is a conglomeration of thousands of galaxies, hot gas and dark matter bound together by gravity.
"We've seen outbursts in the centers of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive, " said Melanie Johnston-Holitt, a professor at the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). "And we don't know why it's so big."
Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory to make the discovery, as well as a European space observatory and ground telescopes. Scientists picked up the first sign of the explosion in 2016.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Red flickers
This montage shows several galaxies from the HETDEX region. More than 200 scientists from 18 countries discovered hundreds of thousands of galaxies that no human has ever seen before. The astronomers created the new map of the northern sky with the radio telescope network LOFAR (Low Frequency Array).
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Fluorescent wings
The different colors in the radio source B3 0157+406 indicate the presence of large-scale turbulences in the source's magnetic field. Less scientific observers might see faces in the wing-shaped structures.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Spiral galaxy
This brightly colored tail belongs to spiral galaxy M106. Researchers believe the flame-looking structures are the result of activity from the galaxy's central supermassive black hole. "With LOFAR, we want to find out which influence black holes have on the galaxies in which they are located," said Marcus Brüggen, an astrophysicist at the University of Hamburg.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
The 'Whirlpool Galaxy'
No, we did not make this nickname up! M51 is known as the "Whirlpool Galaxy" among LOFAR-astronomers, and it's not hard to see why. It's between 15 and 35 million light-years away from Earth and has a supermassive black hole at its center as well.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
The all-seeing red eye
This merging galaxy cluster goes by the snappy name of CIZA J2242.8+5301. Among astronomers it's known for its northern arch, dubbed the "Sausage." Researchers hope the new LOFAR data will also give them more information on how galaxy clusters evolve.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Explosions in space
What you see here are supernova explosions in the spiral arms of galaxy IC 342. Pretty awesome, right? "This is a new window on the universe," said Cyril Tasse, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory who was involved in the LOFAR project, said about the newly discovered galaxies.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Glimmering stars
Even LOFAR astronomers will use some trickery to arrive at the most beautiful picture sometimes. For this glittering snapshot, they super-imposed LOFAR images of a galaxy on an optical photo of the night sky. We'd say the effort paid off.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
'10 million DVDs'
The galaxy cluster Abell 1314 is located at a distance of approximately 460 million light-years away from Earth. LOFAR researchers will have mountains of data to look into from Abell 1314 and the roughly 300,000 other galaxies they have now discovered. "We have to work through the equivalent of 10 million DVDs," Dominik Schwarz from Bielefeld University in Germany said.
Author: Carla Bleiker
Chandra images of the cluster revealed an unusual curved edge, but scientists ruled out a possible eruption given the amount of energy that would have been needed to create such a large cavity of gas. The curviture was later confirmed to be a cavity.
According to ICRAR, the lead author of the study, Dr Simona Giacintucci from the Naval Research Laboratory in the United States, compared the blast to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, which tore the top off the mountain.
"The difference is that you can fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas," she said.
The blast is believed to be over by now, and, according to the research team, more observations are needed in other wavelengths to better understand what occurred.
We made this discovery with Phase 1 of the MWA, when the telescope had 2048 antennas pointed towards the sky," said Johnston-Hollitt. "We're soon going to be gathering observations with 4096 antennas, which should be 10 times more sensitive. I think that's pretty exciting."
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Presentation in the clean room
The new NASA Mars rover has arrived. It will support the currently operating Curiosity rover in its work on the red planet. The new rover weighs just over 1 tonne (2,000 lbs) and is therefore 100 kg heavier than its predecessor. And, at 3 meters in size, it is also 10 centimeters longer. It can load more research equipment and sensors, and its gripper arm with cameras and tools is also stronger.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Ready for takeoff to Cape Canaveral
This is what the rover looks like when it travels. On board a C-17 Globemaster, it traveled from California to Florida in the US. From there, it will set off to Mars on July 17. The new rover is able to collect samples from Mars. It is equipped with 23 cameras and many other instruments. Among other things, it aims to find out whether oxygen can be extracted from the Martian rocks.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
The robotic giant
Curiosity is the largest and most modern of all Mars rovers currently deployed. It landed on August 6, 2012 and has since traveled more than 21 kilometers. It is much more than just a rover. Its official name is "Mars Science Laboratory," and it really is a complete lab on wheels.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
What's in it?
For example, it contains special spectrometer, which can analyze chemical compounds from a distance with the help of a laser; a complete meteorological station that can measure temperature, atmospheric pressure, radiation, humidity and wind speed; and most importantly, a chemistry lab that can run detailed analyses of organic compounds and is always on the hunt for traces of alien life.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Not just scratching the surface
Curiosity has shown that life would theoretically be possible on Mars. But it hasn't discovered any life, yet. The robot's arm is equipped with a full power drill. Here, it's taking a sample in "Yellowknife Bay" inside the Gale Crater.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Off to the lab!
The Mars dust is processed by a large number of instruments. First, it's filtered and separated into different-sized particles. Then, those get sorted and sent off to different analytical laboratory machines.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
A tiny predecessor
Curiosity's predecessors were much smaller. On July 4, 1997, the small Mars rover Sojourner left its first tire tracks behind in the dust of the red planet. It was the first time a mobile robot had been left to its own devices there, equipped with an X-ray spectrometer to conduct chemical analyses and with optical cameras.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Size comparison
Three rover generations. (The tiny one up front is Sojourner.) At 10.6 kilograms (23 pounds), it's not much bigger than a toy car. Its top speed: 1 centimeter per second. Opportunity weighs 185 kilograms — roughly the equivalent of an electric wheelchair. Curiosity is as big as a small car, at 900 kilograms. The big ones travel up to 4 or 5 centimeters per second.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Almost four months of duty
Sojourner travelled about 100 meters during its lifetime and delivered data and pictures until September 27, 1997. This is one of the last pictures of it, taken nine days before the radio connection broke down. Sojourner probably died because the battery did not survive the cold nights.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Paving the way for tomorrow's technology
Without the experience of Sojourner, newer rovers could have hardly been envisaged. In 2004, NASA landed two robots of the same model on Mars: Spirit and Opportunity. Spirit survived for six years, travelling a distance of 7.7 kilometers. The robot climbed mountains, took soil samples and withstood winter and sandstorms. Its sibling, Opportunity, lost contact on February 13, 2019.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Lots of gadgets
Opportunity passed the marathon distance of 42 kilometers back in 2015, and to this day, it has covered much more ground than Curiosity. It can take ground probes with its arm. It has three different spectrometers and even a 3D camera. It was last operating in "Perseverance Valley," an appropriate workplace for the sturdy robot, before being incapacitated by a sand storm.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
The red planet's landscapes
This panorama was taken by Curiosity's mast camera. The most modern of the rovers will stay in service as long as possible — hopefully at least another five years and much longer. The Martian landscape looks familiar somehow, not unlike some deserts here on Earth. Should we give in to our wanderlust, then — or would it be better leave Mars to the robots?
Researchers say the blast is the biggest since the universe began. It occurred at the center of a galaxy cluster some 390 million light years away from Earth.
Astronomers have discovered the biggest explosion seen since the begining of the universe, originating from a super-massive black hole.
The blast, they said, is the biggest explosion seen since the Big Bang — the cosmologial model to describe a rapid expansion of matter and energy that created the observable universe. The explosion reportedly released five times more energy than the previous record holder.
The blast occurred at the center of the Ophiuchus cluster of galaxies, some 390 million light years away. The cluster is a conglomeration of thousands of galaxies, hot gas and dark matter bound together by gravity.
"We've seen outbursts in the centers of galaxies before but this one is really, really massive, " said Melanie Johnston-Holitt, a professor at the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). "And we don't know why it's so big."
Astronomers used NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory to make the discovery, as well as a European space observatory and ground telescopes. Scientists picked up the first sign of the explosion in 2016.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Red flickers
This montage shows several galaxies from the HETDEX region. More than 200 scientists from 18 countries discovered hundreds of thousands of galaxies that no human has ever seen before. The astronomers created the new map of the northern sky with the radio telescope network LOFAR (Low Frequency Array).
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Fluorescent wings
The different colors in the radio source B3 0157+406 indicate the presence of large-scale turbulences in the source's magnetic field. Less scientific observers might see faces in the wing-shaped structures.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Spiral galaxy
This brightly colored tail belongs to spiral galaxy M106. Researchers believe the flame-looking structures are the result of activity from the galaxy's central supermassive black hole. "With LOFAR, we want to find out which influence black holes have on the galaxies in which they are located," said Marcus Brüggen, an astrophysicist at the University of Hamburg.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
The 'Whirlpool Galaxy'
No, we did not make this nickname up! M51 is known as the "Whirlpool Galaxy" among LOFAR-astronomers, and it's not hard to see why. It's between 15 and 35 million light-years away from Earth and has a supermassive black hole at its center as well.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
The all-seeing red eye
This merging galaxy cluster goes by the snappy name of CIZA J2242.8+5301. Among astronomers it's known for its northern arch, dubbed the "Sausage." Researchers hope the new LOFAR data will also give them more information on how galaxy clusters evolve.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Explosions in space
What you see here are supernova explosions in the spiral arms of galaxy IC 342. Pretty awesome, right? "This is a new window on the universe," said Cyril Tasse, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory who was involved in the LOFAR project, said about the newly discovered galaxies.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
Glimmering stars
Even LOFAR astronomers will use some trickery to arrive at the most beautiful picture sometimes. For this glittering snapshot, they super-imposed LOFAR images of a galaxy on an optical photo of the night sky. We'd say the effort paid off.
Out of this world: Scientists discover 300,000 new galaxies
'10 million DVDs'
The galaxy cluster Abell 1314 is located at a distance of approximately 460 million light-years away from Earth. LOFAR researchers will have mountains of data to look into from Abell 1314 and the roughly 300,000 other galaxies they have now discovered. "We have to work through the equivalent of 10 million DVDs," Dominik Schwarz from Bielefeld University in Germany said.
Author: Carla Bleiker
Chandra images of the cluster revealed an unusual curved edge, but scientists ruled out a possible eruption given the amount of energy that would have been needed to create such a large cavity of gas. The curviture was later confirmed to be a cavity.
According to ICRAR, the lead author of the study, Dr Simona Giacintucci from the Naval Research Laboratory in the United States, compared the blast to the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, which tore the top off the mountain.
"The difference is that you can fit 15 Milky Way galaxies in a row into the crater this eruption punched into the cluster's hot gas," she said.
The blast is believed to be over by now, and, according to the research team, more observations are needed in other wavelengths to better understand what occurred.
We made this discovery with Phase 1 of the MWA, when the telescope had 2048 antennas pointed towards the sky," said Johnston-Hollitt. "We're soon going to be gathering observations with 4096 antennas, which should be 10 times more sensitive. I think that's pretty exciting."
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Presentation in the clean room
The new NASA Mars rover has arrived. It will support the currently operating Curiosity rover in its work on the red planet. The new rover weighs just over 1 tonne (2,000 lbs) and is therefore 100 kg heavier than its predecessor. And, at 3 meters in size, it is also 10 centimeters longer. It can load more research equipment and sensors, and its gripper arm with cameras and tools is also stronger.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Ready for takeoff to Cape Canaveral
This is what the rover looks like when it travels. On board a C-17 Globemaster, it traveled from California to Florida in the US. From there, it will set off to Mars on July 17. The new rover is able to collect samples from Mars. It is equipped with 23 cameras and many other instruments. Among other things, it aims to find out whether oxygen can be extracted from the Martian rocks.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
The robotic giant
Curiosity is the largest and most modern of all Mars rovers currently deployed. It landed on August 6, 2012 and has since traveled more than 21 kilometers. It is much more than just a rover. Its official name is "Mars Science Laboratory," and it really is a complete lab on wheels.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
What's in it?
For example, it contains special spectrometer, which can analyze chemical compounds from a distance with the help of a laser; a complete meteorological station that can measure temperature, atmospheric pressure, radiation, humidity and wind speed; and most importantly, a chemistry lab that can run detailed analyses of organic compounds and is always on the hunt for traces of alien life.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Not just scratching the surface
Curiosity has shown that life would theoretically be possible on Mars. But it hasn't discovered any life, yet. The robot's arm is equipped with a full power drill. Here, it's taking a sample in "Yellowknife Bay" inside the Gale Crater.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Off to the lab!
The Mars dust is processed by a large number of instruments. First, it's filtered and separated into different-sized particles. Then, those get sorted and sent off to different analytical laboratory machines.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
A tiny predecessor
Curiosity's predecessors were much smaller. On July 4, 1997, the small Mars rover Sojourner left its first tire tracks behind in the dust of the red planet. It was the first time a mobile robot had been left to its own devices there, equipped with an X-ray spectrometer to conduct chemical analyses and with optical cameras.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Size comparison
Three rover generations. (The tiny one up front is Sojourner.) At 10.6 kilograms (23 pounds), it's not much bigger than a toy car. Its top speed: 1 centimeter per second. Opportunity weighs 185 kilograms — roughly the equivalent of an electric wheelchair. Curiosity is as big as a small car, at 900 kilograms. The big ones travel up to 4 or 5 centimeters per second.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Almost four months of duty
Sojourner travelled about 100 meters during its lifetime and delivered data and pictures until September 27, 1997. This is one of the last pictures of it, taken nine days before the radio connection broke down. Sojourner probably died because the battery did not survive the cold nights.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Paving the way for tomorrow's technology
Without the experience of Sojourner, newer rovers could have hardly been envisaged. In 2004, NASA landed two robots of the same model on Mars: Spirit and Opportunity. Spirit survived for six years, travelling a distance of 7.7 kilometers. The robot climbed mountains, took soil samples and withstood winter and sandstorms. Its sibling, Opportunity, lost contact on February 13, 2019.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
Lots of gadgets
Opportunity passed the marathon distance of 42 kilometers back in 2015, and to this day, it has covered much more ground than Curiosity. It can take ground probes with its arm. It has three different spectrometers and even a 3D camera. It was last operating in "Perseverance Valley," an appropriate workplace for the sturdy robot, before being incapacitated by a sand storm.
NASA's Mars 2020 rover: Scheduled to deploy in 1 year
The red planet's landscapes
This panorama was taken by Curiosity's mast camera. The most modern of the rovers will stay in service as long as possible — hopefully at least another five years and much longer. The Martian landscape looks familiar somehow, not unlike some deserts here on Earth. Should we give in to our wanderlust, then — or would it be better leave Mars to the robots?
China’s Chang’E-4 mission has given us the first detailed view of the subsurface geology on the far side of the Moon. Using ground penetrating radar on the mission’s rover, scientists observed layers of dust and boulders formed by debris from past impacts on the lunar surface. The radar was able to probe about four-times deeper than previous studies on the near side of the Moon.
Much of the surface of the Moon is covered in a lunar regolith – a loose layer of pulverized rock and dust created by billions of years of meteorite impacts. While the regolith in parts of the near side of the Moon has been studied in detail by several missions, it had not been clear whether the surface geology is similar in underexplored regions of the Moon. The far side of the Moon, most of which is not visible from Earth, is of particular interest because this hemisphere has a thicker crust and consequently less volcanism. Until Chang’E-4, only relatively low-resolution satellite-based radar measurements have been made of far-side regolith.
In early 2019, the Chang’E-4 lander of the Chinese National Space Administration made history by being the first spacecraft to survive a landing on the far side of the Moon. Its landing site lies in the east of the Von Kármán impact crater, which is in the South Pole–Aitken Basin.
Two lunar days
The mission’s rover Yutu-2 was deployed after the landing and it scanned the lunar subsurface with its on-board radar. In a new study, a team of researchers from China and Italy present the results of Yutu-2’s first two lunar days (about 58 Earth days) probing the geology of the lunar far side.
The team found that the Chang’E-4 landing side sits atop a layer of loose deposits reaching up 12 m in thickness. Beneath this, the radar found a second layer of progressively coarsening material with embedded boulders that endures to a depth of around 24 m. This is underlaid by alternating layers of both fine and coarse materials down to a depth of at least 40 m.
“The most plausible interpretation [of the subsurface geology] is that the sequence is made of a layer of regolith overlying a sequence of ejecta deposits from various craters, which progressively accumulated after the emplacement of the mare basalts on the floor of the Von Kármán crater,” the Chang’E-4 scientists write in Science Advances.
“Very high resolution”
“We can see for the first time at very high resolution an ejecta deposit on the moon — how it’s made, the main characteristics, the thickness of the regolith,” team member Elena Pettinelli of the Roma Tre University tells Physics World.
The far-side regolith differs in some ways from the regolith studied on the other side of the Moon. Apollo-era work had suggested that regolith is typically only a few metres thick and sat atop lava flow surfaces. In 2013, a similar radar system used by the Chang’E-3 mission to the near side was only able to probe down to a depth of 10 m. These limits on probing depths on the near side suggest that the regolith on the far side is more porous and contains less ilmenite, which is a radar-absorbing mineral commonly found in the Moon’s volcanic basalts.
Geophysicist Wenzhe Fa of Peking University — who was not involved in the study — notes that the “exciting” Chang’E-4 radar data shine a light on the geological evolution of the far-side landing site. The regolith structure, he adds, “is the combined result of volcanic eruptions and multiple impact catering events. All of these show that the geological history of the Moon’s far side (especially the South Pole–Aitken Basin) is complex”.
“The tentative identification of buried regolith layers developed on top of ancient crater ejecta deposits is especially interesting,” adds planetary scientist Ian Crawford, of Birkbeck College London, who was not involved in the study. While accessing buried material is a task for future missions, he says these layers “may preserve ancient solar wind and galactic cosmic ray particles which could potentially provide information on the past evolution of the Sun and the solar system’s galactic environment”.
With their initial study complete, the Chang’E-4 researchers will be applying the lessons they learnt in optimizing the processing of the Yutu-2 data to revisit those collected by the earlier Chang’E-3 mission on the near side of the Moon. They will also continue to study the ongoing readings from the far side. Pettinelli is hopeful that the rover may pass over an area of thinner regolith, where it might be possible to see more layers and even the underlying lava deposits.
File image - Earth is surrounded by a host of asteroids, some of which may temporarily become "minimoons."
(Credit: P. Carril/NASA)
Tumbling through Earth's increasingly crowded orbit are about 5,000 satellites, half a million pieces of human-made debris and only one confirmed natural object: the moon. Now, astronomers working out of the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory think they may have discovered a second natural satellite — or at least a temporary one.
Meet 2020 CD3, Earth's newest possible "minimoon."
A minimoon, also known as a temporarily captured object, is a space rock that gets caught in Earth's orbit for several months or years before shooting off into the distant solar system again (or burning up in our planet's atmosphere).
While astronomers suspect there is at least one minimoon circling Earth at any given time, these tiny satellites are rarely discovered, likely because of their relatively small size. Until now, only one confirmed minimoon has ever been detected: a 3--foot-wide (0.9 meters) asteroid called 2006 RH120, which orbited Earth for 18 months in 2006 and 2007.
Now, there may be a second. Kacper Wierzchos, a senior research specialist for the NASA and University of Arizona-funded Catalina Sky Survey, announced the discovery of a new temporarily captured object via Twitter yesterday (Feb. 25). The object appears to measure between 6.2 and 11.5 feet (1.9 to 3.5 m) in diameter and has a surface brightness typical of carbon-rich asteroids, Wierzchos wrote.
According to an orbital model by amateur astrophysicist and San Francisco high school physics teacher Tony Dunn, the potential minimoon has likely been trapped by Earth's gravity for about three years now and could make its exit in April 2020, resuming its regularly scheduled journey around the sun.
In a perfect universe, our departing minimoon would fly off and become trapped by the moon's gravity, creating an even rarer class of object: a moonmoon. Sadly, moonmoons remain only theoretical, and our possible new minimoon comes with some caveats of its own. While the object's existence has since been confirmed by several other observatories, further analysis is required to say for certain that the object is an extraterrestrial rock and not a large shard of space junk. Hopefully, we'll have an answer before April.
The subsurface stratigraphy seen by Yutu-2 radar on the far side of the moon. Credit: CLEP/CRAS/NAOC
A little over a year after landing, China’s spacecraft Chang’E-4 is continuing to unveil secrets from the far side of the Moon. The latest study, published on February 26, 2020, in Science Advances, reveals what lurks below the surface.
Chang’E-4 (CE-4) landed on the eastern floor of the Van Kármán crater, near the Moon’s south pole, on January 3, 2019. The spacecraft immediately deployed its Yutu-2 rover, which uses Lunar Penetrating Radar (LPR) to investigate the underground it roams.
“We found that the signal penetration at the CE-4 site is much greater than that measured by the previous spacecraft, Chang’E-3, at its near-side landing site,” said paper author LI Chunlai, a research professor and deputy director-general of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC). “The subsurface at the CE-4 landing site is much more transparent to radio waves, and this qualitative observation suggests a totally different geological context for the two landing sites.”
LI and his team used the LPR to send radio signals deep into the surface of the moon, reaching a depth of 40 meters by the high-frequency channel of 500 MHz — more than three times the depth previously reached by CE-3. This data allowed the researchers to develop an approximate image of the subsurface stratigraphy.
“Despite the good quality of the radar image along the rover route at the distance of about 106 meters, the complexity of the spatial distribution and shape of the radar features make identification of the geological structures and events that generated such features quite difficult,” said SU Yan, a corresponding author who is also affiliated with NAOC.
The researchers combined the radar image with tomographic data and quantitative analysis of the subsurface. They concluded that the subsurface is essentially made by highly porous granular materials embedding boulders of different sizes. The content is likely the result of a turbulent early galaxy, when meteors and other space debris frequently struck the Moon. The impact site would eject material to other areas, creating a cratered surface atop a subsurface with varying layers.
The results of the radar data collected by the LPR during the first 2 days of lunar operation provide the first electromagnetic image of the far side subsurface structure and the first ‘ground truth’ of the stratigraphic architecture of an ejecta deposit.
“The results illustrate, in an unprecedented way, the spatial distribution of the different products that contribute to from the ejecta sequence and their geometrical characteristics,” LI said, referring to the material ejected at each impact. “This work shows the extensive use of the LPR could greatly improve our understanding of the history of lunar impact and volcanism and could shed new light on the comprehension of the geological evolution of the Moon’s far side.”
Reference: “The Moon’s farside shallow subsurface structure unveiled by Chang’E-4 Lunar Penetrating Radar” by Chunlai Li, Yan Su, Elena Pettinelli, Shuguo Xing, Chunyu Ding, Jianjun Liu, Xin Ren, Sebastian E. Lauro, Francesco Soldovieri, Xingguo Zeng, Xingye Gao, Wangli Chen, Shun Dai, Dawei Liu, Guangliang Zhang, Wei Zuo, Weibin Wen, Zhoubin Zhang, Xiaoxia Zhang and Hongbo Zhang, 26 February 2020, Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aay6898
This work was a collaboration with the Key Laboratory of Lunar and Deep Space Exploration at NAOC, the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Mathematics and Physics Department of Roma Tre University in Italy, the School of Atmospheric Sciences at the Sun Yat-sen University, and the Insituto per il Rilevamento Elettromagnetico dell’Ambiente IREA-CNR in Italy.
