Perseverance has performed a test of its MOXIE instrument to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen for the first time on Mars.
Category: space – Page 618
Great new episode with author and astronomer Linda Schweizer who talks about her new book “Cosmic Odyssey” which covers the history and science of Caltech’s Palomar Observatory.
Astronomer and author Linda Schweizer talks about her comprehensive new history of Palomar Observatory — “Cosmic Odyssey: How Intrepid Astronomers At Palomar Observatory Changed Our View of the Universe” from MIT Press. We focus on Palomar’s early 20th century construction and history. Schweizer is an expert on every aspect of the observatory; its history, and its many astronomical discoveries.
In celebration of the 31st anniversary of the launching of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers aimed the renowned observatory at a brilliant “celebrity star,” one of the brightest stars seen in our galaxy, surrounded by a glowing halo of gas and dust. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI
The mighty blue giant AG Carinae is not your normal star. One of the brightest stars in our Milky Way galaxy, AG Carinae is sizzling hot, shining with the brilliance of 1 million suns. You would need super sunscreen if you lived in the star’s vicinity. The star is up to 70 times heftier than our Sun and burning fuel at a ferocious rate.
Its opulence means that the mammoth star is living life in the fast lane. Pouring out so much energy takes a toll on the stellar behemoth. It is prone to convulsive fits, expanding in size like a hot air balloon and shedding its outer layers of material into space. One or more giant eruptions 10000 years ago created the beautiful, expanding shell of dust and gas seen here. Stars like this one are rare: less than 50 reside in our local group of neighboring galaxies.
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter ‘went big’ with its second flight, reaching new milestones with a higher altitude, flying to the side and grabbing another black-and-white photo of its shadow on the ground below.
The US space agency said it climbed up to 16ft above the surface, hovered, tilted slightly and then moved sideways 7ft. When in position it hovered again to take a series of colour photos before landing.
Writing on Twitter, NASA JPL said: Go big or go home! The Mars Helicopter successfully completed its 2nd flight,’ adding that it ‘reached new milestones of a higher altitude, a longer hover, and lateral flying.’
We are made of stardust, the saying goes, and a pair of studies including University of Michigan research finds that may be more true than we previously thought.
The first study, led by U-M researcher Jie (Jackie) Li and published in Science Advances, finds that most of the carbon on Earth was likely delivered from the interstellar medium, the material that exists in space between stars in a galaxy. This likely happened well after the protoplanetary disk, the cloud of dust and gas that circled our young sun and contained the building blocks of the planets, formed and warmed up.
Carbon was also likely sequestered into solids within one million years of the sun’s birth — which means that carbon, the backbone of life on earth, survived an interstellar journey to our planet.
We’ve known for a while that Earth is under a constant rain of space dust, and that it’s copious. Given its microscopic size, however, it’s been very hard to obtain an accurate estimate of the quantity.
Such micrometeorites are no bigger than a fraction of a millimeter, shed like space dander from passing comets and asteroids.
After two decades of collecting the stuff in Antarctica, an international team of scientists now has a number: around 5200 tons of micrometeorites smaller than 700 micrometers (0.7 millimeters), every year.
Circa 2018
In just a few weeks, NASA is due to launch one of its most ambitious projects yet. The Parker Solar Probe is going to swoop in and ‘touch’ the Sun — coming in closer to the solar surface than any probe has ever done before.
Parker’s three closest orbits will bring it within 6.1 million kilometres (3.8 million miles) of the Sun’s surface and inside its outer atmosphere, or corona, where temperatures reach millions of degrees Kelvin.
It does have heat shielding, and it’s actually pretty wicked, but we’ll get into that later. Because first, we have to address those searing temperatures.
The Fuss Over Phosphorus
Posted in biological, chemistry, climatology, particle physics, space
Phosphorus, the element critical for life´s origin and life on Earth, may be even Venus.
Scientists studying the origin of life in the universe often focus on a few critical elements, particularly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. But two new papers highlight the importance of phosphorus for biology: an assessment of where things stand with a recent claim about possible life in the clouds of Venus, and a look at how reduced phosphorus compounds produced by lightning might have been critical for life early in our own planet’s history.
First a little biochemistry: Phosphine is a reduced phosphorus compound with one phosphorus atom and three hydrogen atoms. Phosphorus is also found in its reduced form in the phosphide mineral schreibersite, in which the phosphorus atom binds to three metal atoms (either iron or nickel). In its reduced form, phosphorus is much more reactive and useful for life than is phosphate, where the phosphorus atom binds to four oxygen atoms. Phosphorus is also the element that is most enriched in biological molecules as compared to non-biological molecules, so it’s not a bad place to start when you’re hunting for life.
In the second of the new papers, Benjamin Hess from Yale University and colleagues highlight the contribution of lightning as a source of reduced phosphorus compounds such as schreibersite. It has long been recognized that meteorites supplied much of the reduced phosphorus needed for the origin of life on Earth. But Hess thinks the contribution of lightning has been underestimated. For one thing, lightning was much more common early in our planet’s history. The authors calculate that it could have produced up to 10000 kilograms of reduced phosphorus compounds per year—which may have been enough to jump-start life, especially because we don’t know how much of the reduced phosphorus from meteorites actually survives (in that form) the impact on Earth.
History has been made!!!
It made 5 grams of the gas — equivalent to what an astronaut at Mars would need to breathe for roughly 10 minutes.
An instrument in the Perseverance rover produces oxygen from the planet’s carbon dioxide atmosphere.
Oxygen isn’t just the stuff we breathe. Rocket propellant depends on oxygen, and future explorers will depend on producing propellant on Mars to make the trip home.
The instrument, called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), is a technology demonstration that could eventually be scaled up to produce enough propellant to enable a crew of astronauts to take off from the surface of the Red Planet.
“This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), in a statement. “MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars.”
“Oxygen isn’t just the stuff we breathe,” he added. “Rocket propellant depends on oxygen, and future explorers will depend on producing propellant on Mars to make the trip home.”