SPACE/COSMOLOGY

NASA Scientists Startled When Mars Rover Finds Rock With Stripes

Sharon Adarlo

FUTURISM
Tue, September 24, 2024 


Rock the Casbah

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover has encountered something unlike anything else discovered on the Red Planet: a zebra-striped rock that sticks out like a sore thumb in the midst of the planet's dusty, notoriously red landscape.

The rover found the unusual stone, measuring about 7.8 inches in width, last week, according to NASA in a statement about the disovery, while the craft was exploring the Jezero Crater, located north of the planet's equator and which is believed to have been the site of an ancient lake and river delta.

"The science team thinks that this rock has a texture unlike any seen in Jezero Crater before, and perhaps all of Mars," reads the statement from the space agency. "Our knowledge of its chemical composition is limited, but early interpretations are that igneous and/or metamorphic processes could have created its stripes."


Researchers are now calling the rock "Freya Castle" — a nod to a craggy peak in the Grand Canyon — and are surmising that it came from somewhere at a higher elevation, according to NASA. Basically, this loose stone rolled there and gathered no moss.
Stone Alone

Freya Castle isn't the only weird rock that Perseverance has found this year at the crater. Earlier this summer, the probe chanced upon an arrow-shaped slab with tiny "leopard spots" that could hold tantalizing evidence of microbes from billions of years ago, back when scientists believe there might have been water on the surface of Mars.

Perseverance took a core sample of that rock, now called "Cheyava Falls," for further analysis. The rover has also found two other boulders, nicknamed "Atoko Point" and "Bunsen Peak," both of which may have hold more clues on Mars' early history.

These are all incredible finds for Perseverance, which landed on Mars back in 2021 and whose current mission is to find any evidence of alien microbes that could have flourished on Mars when it was wetter and warmer.

NASA is hoping that the samples the rover has collected will be sent back to Earth for further analysis as part of its troubled Mars Sample Return mission, in hopes that the data will tell us more about the Martian climate billions of years ago, and what happened to make the planet cold and desolate.

Until then, Perseverance is leaving no stone unturned.

More on Mars: Mars Appears to Be Missing a Moon, Astronomer Finds

This Might Be the Most Amazing Video of a Rocket Explosion We've Ever Seen

Frank Landymore
Mon, September 23, 2024

FUTURISM



Action Spectacular

We bet you've seen a lot of videos of exploding rockets.

But we'd also wager that you haven't seen one quite as mind-blowing as this new footage of a Chinese rocket blowing up as it touches down, because the failure is filmed so dramatically that you kinda just have to tip your hat to everyone involved — even if things didn't go quite as planned.

The star of the show is a Nebula-1 launch vehicle, a reusable, two-stage, kerosene-fueled rocket manufactured by the Chinese company Deep Blue Aerospace.

As part of a high-altitude vertical flight test on Sunday — all captured on video — the rocket took off from its launchpad in Ejin Banner Spaceport in Inner Mongolia, engaged all three of its Thunder-R engines, flew to an altitude of about three miles without issue, and came back down to make a landing, according to Ars Technica.

But that's when the footage launches into a sequence of gonzo action filmmaking that could make Michael Bay weep.

As the rocket levitates down to the pad and deploys its landing gear, we cut to a drone camera spiraling down from above. It pirouettes about its subject in epic swoops until it moves in close for the money shot: the rocket holding position a few yards above the ground, before dropping and exploding in a fireball — which is right when the slow motion kicks in. Cinema, baby.

https://twitter.com/SpaceBasedFox/status/1837856903357255849

Almost There

Deep Blue Aerospace released a detailed statement about what it's learned from the test, which Ars notes is one of the things that sets it apart from its domestic competitors: its transparency.

According to the company, it completed 10 of its 11 major objectives, achieved a landing accuracy of about 1.6 feet, and expects to perform its next vertical flight test in November.

This failure will sting, though, because it's not clear what caused the crash. It could be that the rocket's instruments incorrectly calculated its height from the ground, causing the drop to be too severe. It's also possible that the single engine left on for the landing didn't throttle properly.

In any case, it will likely be a while before the rocket can level up to perform a full-blown orbital flight test: Ars guesstimates that won't be until at least 2025.

Fully-loaded, the Nebula-1, which is about 11 feet wide and 69 feet tall, is billed to be capable of carrying around 4,400 pounds to low-Earth orbit, with plans to up that figure to over 17,000 pounds, according to SpaceNews. Compared to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket — the gold standard of kerosene-fueled rockets — which can carry 50,000 pounds to LEO, it's not a massive payload, but the rocket is also less than half the size.

It'll be disappointing that the rocket failed at the final hurdle, but at the very least, the engineers will be walking away with heaps of data — and also an absolutely blockbuster video.

More on rockets: SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Crashes While Landing


Side-by-side images from the James Webb and Hubble space telescopes show why NASA spent 25 years and $10 billion on the Webb

Morgan McFall-Johnsen
Mon, September 23, 2024 

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is by far the most powerful observatory ever launched into space.


Even Webb's very first images show why NASA spent 25 years and $10 billion.


The Hubble Space Telescope captured the same sights, but JWST revealed details that were invisible.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope floored astronomers and spectators across the globe when it released its first full-color images.

Even the scientists who worked on the telescope were taken aback when they saw those first snapshots in the summer of 2022, telling reporters that they sobbed, fell speechless, or dropped their jaws so far that they "nearly broke."

The telescope — called Webb or JWST for short — has continued to wow the world with new discoveries and mesmerizing portraits of the universe.

It has investigated distant planets that could be habitable, spotted the oldest black hole ever, and peered into the universe's ancient dark ages, giving astronomers answers in some cases and raising new mysteries in others.

Webb has even spotted a pair of galaxies that look like a question mark.NASA, ESA, CSA. Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

JWST has snagged so many feats that it's easy to forget what a scientific marvel each image is. To grasp how far Webb has taken us, we can revisit its first images.

Even those preliminary snapshots revealed countless stars, galaxies, and fine details that hadn't been seen before. They painted the births and deaths of stars in sharp, new colors and peered further into the distance than any infrared telescope ever had.

Before Webb, images like these only came from the Hubble Space Telescope, which rocketed into Earth's orbit in 1990. But the JWST pictures reveal the rewards of the 25 years and $10 billion NASA spent on the observatory — all in a new, wide-ranging spectrum of infrared light.

A side-by-side collage of the same area taken by Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope in its very first image.NASA/STScI; NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

"We're making discoveries, and we really haven't even started trying yet," Eric Smith, the chief scientist of NASA's astrophysics division, said in a 2022 briefing where the Webb team revealed its first images.

Indeed, these pictures were only warm-ups for the years of science ahead. Here's what they revealed.
JWST clearly showed two stars at the center of this nebula, where Hubble only saw one

Hubble's image of the Southern Ring Nebula, left, has just one light at its center, while JWST, right, clearly shows two stars.The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA); NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

The Southern Ring Nebula is a dying star that has imploded and is slowly expelling the layers of its atmosphere in successive waves, creating ever-expanding bubbles of colorful gas. Scientists knew there were two stars at its center, but couldn't see them in images.

The new JWST picture showed the dying star, which glows red because it's surrounded by dust, right next to its white companion star.
With other wavelengths of infrared light, JWST saw different details in the same nebula
The Southern Ring Nebula, captured by JWST in near-infrared light.NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

This image, captured in near-infrared wavelengths of light, shows the structure of the nebula. The blue bubble at the center is hot, ionized gas that the leftover core of the star has superheated. In the foamy orange outer regions made of newly formed hydrogen, rays of the starlight beam through holes in the inner bubble.
A cluster of five galaxies was much sharper through JWST's lens

The galaxy cluster Stephan's Quintet, as imaged by Hubble (left) and JWST (right).Hubble SM4 ERO Team/NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

Four of the galaxies in this image are about 300,000 light-years away, locked in a cosmic dance as each galaxy's gravity influences the others.
In the JWST image, you can see galaxies in the background that were invisible to Hubble

A few galaxies that are clearly visible in the JWST image, but not the Hubble image.Hubble SM4 ERO Team/NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

Webb is 100 times stronger than Hubble, capturing far more galaxies than its predecessor could.
The JWST image also revealed the stellar nurseries created as galaxies merge

The JWST image shows a region of gas compressed between merging galaxies.Hubble SM4 ERO Team/NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI

"We now see gas and dust, which is being heated up in the collision between those galaxies," Mark McCaughrean, the senior advisor for science and exploration at the European Space Agency — which is collaborating with NASA on the telescope — said when the images were released in 2022.

As gas and dust get compressed and heated, they collapse into new stars. That means the cloud between galaxies in the JWST image is a nursery for the birth of new stars.

"We're actually seeing the process of creation of new stars in this region," McCaughrean said.
This is Hubble's image of a star nursery in the Carina Nebula

The star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula, captured by Hubble.NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
And this is JWST's image of the same region

The star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula, captured in infrared by JWST.NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

"When I see an image like this, I can't help but think about scale," Amber Straughn, a NASA astrophysicist on the JWST team, said in 2022. "Every dot of light we see here is an individual star, not unlike our sun, and many of these likely also have planets. And it just reminds me that our sun and our planet, and ultimately us, were formed out of the same kind of stuff that we see here."
The JWST image revealed hundreds of stars that weren't visible before

A portion of the Carina Nebula, imaged by Hubble (left) and JWST (right).NASA/ESA/The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)/CSA

"This is going to be revolutionary," Jane Rigby, a NASA scientist overseeing JWST operations, said in the briefing. "These are incredible capabilities that we've never had before."

Indeed, Webb has been revolutionary in the two years since. There are still more discoveries to come.

This story was originally published on July 12, 2022, and most recently updated on September 23, 2024.

Scientists May Have Found A Whole New Region of Our Solar System

Darren Orf
Tue, September 24, 2024 

Is There a Second Kuiper Belt?bymuratdeniz - Getty Images

New Horizons—the famous NASA spacecraft that flew by Pluto in 2015—is now making new discoveries beyond the Kuiper Belt.

With help from the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, scientists have discovered what could be a second belt of icy bodies beyond the known Kuiper Belt.

This possible discovery only highlights how much more there is to learn about our Solar System beyond the reaches of Neptune.

With the James Webb Space Telescope in orbit at Lagrange point 2, roughly 1 million miles from Earth, humanity’s view of the universe now extends some 13.5 billion years into the past. And while astronomers and cosmologists are eager to study the early days of everything, there’s still a lot we don’t know about our own stellar neighborhood.

We know that the Earth orbits the Sun (thanks for that one, Copernicus), and that our star hosts eight full-fledged planets (sorry about that one, Pluto). But astronomers still only have a fuzzy picture of what lies beyond the reaches of Neptune. In 1951, Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper hypothesized that a belt of objects must lie beyond the most distant planet, and that prediction proved true in 1992 with the discovery of the Kuiper Belt. Now, mounting evidence suggests that a second Kuiper Belt might even lie beyond this first one. A study detailing this discovery, which will be published in the Planetary Science Journal, was recently published on the pre-print server arXiv.

“Our Solar System’s Kuiper Belt long appeared to be very small in comparison with many other planetary systems,” Wes Fraser, the lead author of the study from the National Research Council of Canada, said in a press statement, “but our results suggest that idea might just have arisen due to an observational bias. So maybe, if this result is confirmed, our Kuiper Belt isn’t all that small and unusual after all compared to those around other stars.”

These results come from a joint effort of the New Horizons probe—which famously flew by Pluto back in 2015—and the 8-meter Subaru telescope Mauna Kea, which sits atop the mountain from which it gets its name and has been searching for potential Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) for New Horizons to visit. For years, Subaru’s search for objects was complicated by being located in front of the dense background of the galaxy’s center. But now that it’s located in a sparse region of the sky, the telescope’s Hyper Suprime-Cam has spotted 239 KBOs in just four years. Of those, about a dozen are particularly interesting.

"The most exciting part of the HSC was the discovery of 11 objects at distances beyond the known Kuiper Belt,” Fumi Yoshida, a co-author of the study from the Chiba Institute of Technology, said in a press statement. “If this is confirmed, it would be a major discovery.”

Their unique nature has to do with their relative distance from both the Sun and the “first” Kuiper Belt, which lies roughly 35 to 55 astronomical units (AU) out from the center of our Solar System (one AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun). However, according to Space.com, these newly discovered objects lie between 70 and 90 AU from the Sun.

So, why aren’t these farflung KBOs considered part of the (much larger than expected) original Kuiper Belt? Well, there appears to be a gap of objects located between 55 AU and 70 AU from the Sun (New Horizons is currently located at around 60 AU from the Sun). That means these 11 objects appear to be forming a defined second ring around the Solar System.

The researchers say they’ll continue to track these objects while searching for more like them, and considering that these are clustered in a small part of the sky, there are likely many more out there. Upcoming surveys—especially the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory—will search for unknown KBOs that lie beyond our (current) understanding.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about our Solar System, but much like our broadening view of the universe, some new facts are certainly coming into focus.