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Category: space

A Lab Version of Planetary Atmospheres

Researchers recreate key features of atmospheric turbulence in a meter-sized rotating cylinder.

Atmospheric turbulence encompasses a wide range of flow patterns, from 10-m-wide eddies to 1000-km-long wind streams. Geoscientists want to understand how energy and rotational motion transfer (or “cascade”) from one length scale to another, but atmospheric observations have not provided clear answers. A new model of the atmosphere consisting of fluid in a rotating, meter-wide cylinder is able to reproduce key features of observed turbulence [1]. Using video tracking, researchers mapped out the flow velocity in this system, uncovering the dominant role of a “vorticity” transfer that distributes rotational motion from large vortices into smaller ones. This form of cascade may explain the energy distribution in large-scale turbulence on Earth as well as on other planets.

Turbulence can be characterized by a kinetic energy spectrum, which indicates the amount of energy found in fluctuations at each length scale. The typical turbulence spectrum has a mathematical form called a power law, in which the energy density steadily decreases from large to small scales. Fluid dynamics models of Earth’s atmosphere have predicted that the power law should be relatively flat at large scales (with an exponent of −5÷3) and steeper at small scales (with an exponent of −3). However, these predictions aren’t supported by observations. “The basic shape of the spectrum is all wrong,” says Peter Read from the University of Oxford in the UK. Data taken by airplanes have revealed a spectrum that starts out steep at large scales (greater than 500 km) and becomes flatter at small scales.

Stealth superstorms reveal lightning on Jupiter: Beyond the superbolt

Jupiter’s lightning has long been of interest to planetary scientists, as it marks stormy spots where researchers can look to learn more about convection in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Observing lightning from a distance can be tricky, so scientists have focused on the bolts that are easiest to study: strong flashes that strike at night. As a result, some studies have concluded that lightning bolts on Jupiter are all similar to the strongest lightning on Earth, known as “superbolts.” This conclusion was recently questioned, however, when the high-sensitivity star tracker camera on NASA’s Juno spacecraft detected faint, shallow lightning.

For a study published in AGU Advances, Michael Wong and colleagues took a closer look, focusing on a period in 2021 and 2022 when lightning in Jupiter’s North Equatorial Belt was highly localized within powerful, isolated storms the researchers labeled “stealth superstorms.” This unusual meteorology allowed researchers to pinpoint the location of lightning more accurately.

Instead of looking only at visible light, the scientists used data from the Microwave Radiometer instrument and the Waves experiment—radio wave detectors carried by Juno, which has been orbiting Jupiter for the past 10 years. Radio waves are just one form of electromagnetic radiation produced by lightning, but they’re an especially informative form because scientists can study them even when clouds or other components of the atmosphere block visual cues. The approach allowed the researchers to look beyond the strong nocturnal bolts other researchers have focused on.

One-step coating keeps fabrics superhydrophobic after tens of thousands of abrasion cycles

Developing robust water-repellent textiles is critical for outdoor, protective, and industrial applications. However, achieving long-lasting water repellency under mechanical stress has been a major challenge.

Now, a research team led by Prof. Dong Zhichao from the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a new one-step fabrication strategy—termed MARS (Molecularly Assembled Robust Superhydrophobic Shell)—for producing superhydrophobic fabrics with stable mechanical performance under harsh conditions.

The findings were published in Nature Communications on March 20.

Mysterious Structure on Mars Looks Uncannily Like an Ancient Egyptian Pyramid

It would be tempting to assume there’s nothing much of note happening on Mars, but that dusty rusty planet has a lot of interesting stuff going on.

Most of it has to do with rocks. Mars has a lot of rocks. In fact, Mars has so many rocks that have undergone all sorts of weathering over the eons that, occasionally, it manages to produce something that looks a bit like an artificial or biological structure, if you squint.

It’s a bit like monkeys and typewriters. We may not get Shakespeare, but every once in a while, we might see some rocks that look enough like bugs to fool an entomologist.

LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding

Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a compelling framework for learning world models in compact latent spaces, yet existing methods remain fragile, relying on complex multi-term losses, exponential moving averages, pre-trained encoders, or auxiliary supervision to avoid representation collapse. In this work, we introduce LeWorldModel (LeWM), the first JEPA that trains stably end-to-end from raw pixels using only two loss terms: a next-embedding prediction loss and a regularizer enforcing Gaussian-distributed latent embeddings. This reduces tunable loss hyperparameters from six to one compared to the only existing end-to-end alternative. With ~15M parameters trainable on a single GPU in a few hours, LeWM plans up to 48× faster than foundation-model-based world models while remaining competitive across diverse 2D and 3D control tasks. Beyond control, we show that LeWM’s latent space encodes meaningful physical structure through probing of physical quantities. Surprise evaluation confirms that the model reliably detects physically implausible events.

TL;DR: LeWM is a JEPA-based world model that avoids representation collapse using a simple Gaussian regularizer (SIGReg), trains end-to-end from pixels with only two loss terms, and achieves competitive control performance at a fraction of the compute cost.

Life forms can planet hop on asteroid debris—and survive

Tiny life forms tucked into debris from an asteroid hit could catapult to other planets—including Earth—and survive, a new Johns Hopkins University study finds. The work demonstrates that a certain hardy bacterium easily withstands extreme pressure comparable to an ejection from Mars after an asteroid hit, as well as the inhospitable conditions it would face during the ensuing interplanetary journey.

The study, published today in PNAS Nexus, suggests that microorganisms can survive remarkably more extreme conditions than expected, and raises questions about origins of life. The work also has significant implications for planetary protection and space missions.

“Life might actually survive being ejected from one planet and moving to another,” said senior author K.T. Ramesh. “This is a really big deal that changes the way you think about the question of how life begins and how life began on Earth.”

Religion & Spirituality

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Link to Amazon in comments.

Why Space?: The Purpose of People — Kindle edition by Tumlinson, Rick N… Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Jupiter’s moons may have formed with the ingredients for life

An international team that included Southwest Research Institute has shown how complex organic molecules (COMs), considered essential chemical precursors to life, may have become part of Jupiter’s four largest moons as they formed. The results appear in companion papers published in The Planetary Science Journal and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Together, the studies shed new light on how the ingredients for life could have reached the Jovian system.

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