INFORMATION

NASA recently used its powerful High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to take a breathtaking image of a dust devil traversing Syria Planum on Mars. One unique aspect of dust devils is their shadows can be used to estimate their height, which have been estimated to reach 20 km (12 miles) kilometers into the Martian sky. Studying dust devils on Mars is a regular occurrence for the scientific community and can help scientists better understand surface processes on other planets. But with the atmospheric pressure on Mars being only a fraction of Earth’s , what processes are responsible for producing them? “We think it’s similar to the Earth,” Dr. Shane Byrne, an associate professor and assistant department head at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and a deputy principal investigator on HiRISE, tells Universe Today . “Dust devils are basically solar powered. The ground heats up so air starts to rise i...

It’s Saturn’s turn. The JWST is aiming its powerful, gold-coated, segmented beryllium mirror at our Solar System’s second-largest, and perhaps most striking, planet. So far, we’ve only got a sneak preview of the raw images without any processing or scientific commentary. But they’re a start. We’re accustomed to gorgeous images of Saturn from the Hubble Space Telescope, especially as part of its OPAL ( Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy ) observing program. Those images are not only scientifically rich, they’re also eye candy for the rest of us. But that’s not what these new Saturn images from the JWST are about. This Hubble Space Telescope image captures exquisite details of Saturn and its ring system. It’s from 2019 and is part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project. Image Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (GSFC), M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL Team These images are from a proposal that’s testing the JWST’s NIRCAM instrument and its abilit...

Concern over global light pollution is growing. Astronomers are noticing its growing effect on astronomical observations, just as predicted in prior decades. Our artificial light, much of which is not strictly necessary, is interfering with our science. But there’s more than just scientific progress at stake. Can humanity afford to block out the opportunities for wonder, awe, and contemplation that the night sky provides? We’ve all seen satellite images of Earth at night, with glittering interconnected cities lit up like strings of holiday lights. These images show us how our global civilization has grown, how we’ve made progress, and how advanced we’ve become. But in reality, what we’re seeing is also light pollution. And we’re beginning to pay a price for that pollution. In January 2023, the Globe at Night organization released a paper based on 10 years of data on the night sky. The data wasn’t from satellites—an important point that we’ll get to later—it was from citizen scient...

After almost two decades of ups and downs, Virgin Galactic sent its first customers to the edge of space aboard its VSS Unity rocket plane. Today’s 72-minute-long Galactic 01 flight, which took three Italians on a suborbital research mission, marked the start of the company’s commercial operations at Spaceport America in New Mexico. Two of the fliers, Col. Walter Villadei and Lt. Col. Angelo Landolfi, are officers in the Italian Air Force. The third Italian, Pantaleone Carlucci, is an engineer at the National Research Council of Italy. The crew brought along 13 research payloads, focusing on biomedicine, thermo-fluid dynamics and materials science. Two Virgin Galactic pilots — Mike Masucci and Nicola Pecile — were at VSS Unity’s controls, and astronaut instructor Colin Bennett took a seat alongside the Italians. Two other pilots, Kelly Latimer and Jameel Janjua, flew the twin-fuselage VMS Eve airplane that carried Unity into the sky from Spaceport America and released it from a...

Two of the most important telescopes being constructed at the moment are Vera C. Rubin and Nancy Grace Roman. Each has the capability of transforming our understanding of the universe, but as a recent paper on the arxiv shows, they will be even more transformative when they work together. Originally known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), Rubin Observatory will be a ground-based sky survey telescope. It will map the entire heavens visible from its location every few nights, giving us an unprecedented view of transient objects such as supernovae, variable stars, and stellar flares. Most survey telescopes sacrifice resolution for speed, but Rubin will use a new optical mirror design that will capture high-resolution images with nearly 50 times the apparent area of the Moon. The Roman telescope on the other hand will be a space-based observatory. Originally named the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), Roman will study dark energy and discover new exoplanets th...

In the near future, NASA and other space agencies plan to send crews beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to perform long-duration missions on the Moon and Mars. To meet this challenge, NASA is developing life support systems that will sustain crew members without the need for resupply missions from Earth. These systems must be regenerative and closed-loop in nature, meaning they will recycle consumables like food, air, and water without zero waste. Currently, crews aboard the International Space Station (ISS) rely on an Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) to meet their needs. This system recycles air aboard the station by passing it through filters that scrub excess carbon dioxide produced by the crew’s exhalations. Meanwhile, the system uses advanced dehumidifiers to capture moisture from the crew’s exhalation and perspiration and sends this to the Water Purification Assembly (WPA). Another subsystem, called Urine Processor Assembly (UPA), recovers and distills water f...

We’ve become familiar with LIGO/VIRGO’s detections of colliding black holes and neutron stars that create gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time. However, the mergers between supermassive black holes – billions of times the mass of the Sun — generate gravitational waves too long to register with these instruments. But now, after decades of careful observations, astronomers around the world using a different type of gravitational wave detection method have finally gathered enough data to measure what is essentially a gravitational wave background hum of the Universe, mostly from supermassive black holes spiraling toward collision.   Scientists say the newly detected gravitational waves are by far the most powerful ever measured, and they persist for years to decades. They carry roughly a million times as much energy as the one-off bursts of gravitational waves from black hole and neutron star mergers detected by LIGO and Virgo. “It’s like a choir, with all t...

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA-JPL) are busy keeping the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter functioning in Jezero Crater on Mars while these robotic explorers continue the search for ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. But some of those same engineers have also been busy working with LEGO designers on new one-tenth-scale LEGO Technic buildable models of these very same robotic explorers with the goal of inspiring the next generation of NASA scientists and engineers. The collaborative effort demonstrates NASA’s ongoing commitment on working with the private sector to share ideas and technical expertise through JPL’s Technology Affiliates Program and Caltech’s Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships. For this new STEM-themed LEGO kit, LEGO designers sought to learn about the engineering aspects of both Perseverance and Ingenuity to design and build the most accurate LEGO models. “Our Mars missions began decades ago with an ide...

Remember how a new car smells? It’s a chemical signature of all the materials used to make the car’s interior. What if you could use chemical signatures to learn about newborn planets? That’s what a team of scientists did for a recent discovery. They used archival observation data of a protoplanetary disk, made using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Essentially, they looked for chemical signatures of planet formation around a young star called HD 169142. It has a huge, dusty, gas-rich cloud of material surrounding it that appears to have several planets forming inside. One of those planets is a massive Jupiter-like world called HD 169142 b. That alone makes it a compelling object for study, but astronomers wanted to know more about it and its birthplace. So, they focused ALMA on it and found some amazing chemical signatures related to the gas giant. Looking for Planets and Finding Chemical Signatures “When we looked at HD 169142 and its disk at submillimeter...

Since the 1990s, thanks to observations by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have contemplated the mystery of cosmic expansion. While scientists have known about this since the late-1920s and early-30s, images acquired by Hubble ‘s Ultra Deep Fields campaign revealed that the expansion has been accelerating for the past six billion years! This led scientists to reconsider Einstein’s theory that there is an unknown force in the Universe that “holds back gravity,” which he named the Cosmological Constant . To astronomers and cosmologists today, this force is known as “ Dark Energy .” However, not everyone is sold on the idea of Dark Energy, and some believe that cosmic expansion could mean there is a flaw in our understanding of gravity. In the near future, scientists will benefit from next-generation space telescopes to provide fresh insight into this mysterious force. These include the ESA’s Euclid mission , scheduled for launch this July, and NASA’s Nancy Gra...

Our understanding of galaxies is rooted in the fact that we can see so many of them. Some, such as the Andromeda and Pinwheel galaxies are fairly close, and others are more distant, but all of them give a unique view. Because of this, we can see how the various types of galaxies appear from different points of view, from face-on to edge-on and all angles in between. But there is one galaxy that’s a bit harder to map out, and that’s our own. Because we are in the galactic plane of the Milky Way, it can be difficult to create an accurate bird’s-eye view of our home galaxy. That’s where a recent study in Nature Astronomy comes in. For this study, the team wanted to answer the question of what our galaxy would look like when seen from other galaxies. Particularly, what would our chemical spectrum look like? Starting with data from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) survey, the team pulled in other data sources to map out things like stellar age and metal...

A professor from Northumbria University in the North East region of England has been granted telescope time with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) later this year to study Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, also known as its ionosphere . Being granted such access to JWST is extremely competitive which makes getting access to use its powerful instruments to study the cosmos a very high honor. Dr. Tom Stallard , who is a professor in the Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering department at Northumbria University, is the only scientist who will be granted access to JWST in 2023 for observing planets within our solar system, which will commence on September 7. He hopes to use the most powerful telescope ever built to learn how Jupiter’s ionosphere is affected by both the space environment above and Jupiter’s lower atmosphere beneath it. Artist rendition of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope observing the heavens. (Credit: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez) “Although...

The search for life is an incredibly evocative driver of cosmic exploration. It captures our imagination to think that there might be living things out there somewhere else. That’s one reason why we point our eyes—and telescopes—to the stars. For almost a year, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has shown astronomers the grandeur and beauty of the infrared universe. But, this infrared-sensitive observatory is also digging into the chemical underpinnings of life in the Universe. Recently researchers announced they used it to detect a carbon compound crucial to the formation of life. JWST found it in the Orion Nebula, in a young star system with a protoplanetary disk. Romancing the Molecule What the telescope spotted provides spectral evidence of a molecule called the “methyl cation” (notated as CH 3 + ). While it doesn’t trigger life directly, it aids the formation of complex carbon-based molecules that are the basis of life. Scientists predicted back in the 1970s that this molecule...