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You know what it’s like. You get a new telescope and need to know where to point it! The bigger the telescope, the more potential targets and the harder the decision! To date, we have found over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets (5,288 to be exact) with thousands more candidates. With missions like Gaia identifying thousands of nearby stars like our Sun where Earth-like planets could be lurking, its time to hunt them down. A new paper takes on the goiath task of trying to filter down all the millions of candidates into about 1,000 main sequence stars or binaries worth exploring. From these, they have identified 100 most promising targets and from them, the 10 best planetary systems.

Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars outside our Solar System. The first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet occurred in 1992 and since then, thousands more have been identified. They come in a wide variety of sizes, compositions, and orbital properties, ranging from small, rocky Earth-like planets to massive gas giants many times larger than Jupiter. The exoplanets are often found in the habitable zone of their stars, where conditions might allow liquid water to exist, making them potential candidates for hosting life. They are detected using various different methods, including the transit method, where a planet passes in front of its star and causes a slight dip in brightness, and the radial velocity method, which measures the gravitational wobble a planet induces on its star. 

This artist’s impression shows a Jupiter-like exoplanet that is on its way to becoming a hot Jupiter — a large, Jupiter-like exoplanet that orbits very close to its star. Courtesy: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva

There have been a number of telescopes that have turned their gaze on exoplanets and a number of different missions on the slate to explore their properties. One such project is the LIFE mission (the Large Interferometer for Exoplanets.) It will consist of four collector spacecraft separated by hundreds of metres and is designed to search for life outside the Solar System. The high resolution images it will produce will allow for direct imaging of exoplanets and more detailed analysis of their atmosphere. Of all its mission objectives its key task objective is to search for biosignatures, looking for molecules like oxygen, methane and carbon dioxide. All of these elements might indicate the presence of life. 

Graphic depiction of A Lunar Long-Baseline Optical Imaging Interferometer: Artemis-enabled Stellar Imager (AeSI). Credit: Kenneth Carpenter

The real challenge, greater even than assessing an exoplanets suitability for hosting life is where to begin looking in the first place. A paper authored by Franziska Menti from the Institute for Particle Physics and Astrophysics in Zurich and team has tackled just that problem. The LIFE mission teams have developed exoplanet target catalogs but it contains a large number of candidates. The intention was for it to facilitate the creation of further more refined target lists based upon specific criteria. The paper from Menti articulate this process. 

The catalog contains is compatible with the Virtual Observatory standards so is easily accessible to anyone with existing tools and contains stars, exoplanets, and protoplanetary disks. Anybody that has a need for a highly customised target list for exoplanetary research (such as the LIFE mission themselves or other projects like NASA’s World’s Habitable Worlds Observatory) can extract the necessary data themselves. The whole database (which contains data on as many as 104 stellar systems within 30 parsecs of the Sun)is available online at the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory

Source : Database of Candidate Targets for the LIFE Mission

The post Just Built a Giant, Next Generation Planet Hunting Space Telescope? Here’s Where to Point It appeared first on Universe Today.

Space exploration is a dangerous business, especially when squishy living organisms, such as humans, are involved. NASA has always prided itself on how seriously it takes the safety of its astronauts, so as it gears up for the next big push in crewed space exploration, the Artemis program, it is looking for solutions to potentially catastrophic situations that might arise. One such catastrophe would be if one of the Artemis astronauts was incapacitated and couldn’t return to the lander. The only person who could potentially be able to save them would be their fellow astronaut, but carrying a fully suited human back to their base of operations would be a challenge for an astronaut similarly kitted out in their own bulky suit. So, NASA decided to address it as precisely that – a challenge – and ask for input from the general public, offering up to $20,000 for the best solution to the problem.

The challenge, “South Pole Safety: Designing the NASA Lunar Rescue System,” was announced on November 14th and accepts entries until January 23rd, 2025. It awards $45,000 to at least three winners, including $20,000 to the first-place winner. So, what does the challenge actually involve?

The work product is a design document for a system capable of moving fully suited astronauts at least two kilometers up a 20-degree slope without being attached to a rover. Oh, and it has to be able to operate in the harsh conditions of the lunar south pole. 

Fraser discusses what makes the lunar south pole so interesting.

Typically, a fully suited human wearing the new Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Suit, the new spacesuit explicitly designed for the Artemis missions, will weigh around 343 kg (755 lbs). However, lunar gravity is only about 1/6th that of Earth’s, so it will feel more like they weigh 57 kg (125 lbs). That’s still a lot to carry but much more manageable.

However, it’s probably infeasible for the other astronaut to fireman carry their unconscious comrade over that distance, especially since they are wearing their own spacesuit. So it’s up to technology to do the job. To do so, it will have to evade the pitfalls (in some cases literally) of the lunar south pole.

One hazard is the extreme temperatures—they can range from 54 C in full daylight to -203 C at night. Any materials used in the (especially electronics) would, therefore, need to be able to withstand such wild temperature swings. 

Dealing with lunar regolith for this challenge will be difficult, as Dr. Kevin Cannon discusses how annoying it can be.

Other hazards include razor-sharp lunar regolith, which is expected to cause havoc on most moving mechanical systems on the Moon. Navigating around craters and giant boulders while hopefully dodging micrometeoroid impacts adds to the complex nature of the rescue environment.

A panel of experts, including some NASA engineers, will judge this competition. Their scorecards will include categories like the overall mass of the solution, its ease of use, and how much it impacts the suit design, if any—luckily, treating the fallen astronaut while on the move back to safety is outside the scope of this challenge.

Suppose you’re interested in participating, potentially earning you or your team tens of thousands of dollars. In that case, NASA is accepting submissions through the HeroX portal (commonly used for public challenges) through January 25th. Maybe someday you’ll get to see your creation on the surface of the Moon—even if it will hopefully never be used.

Learn More:
NASA – South Pole Safety: Designing the NASA Lunar Rescue System
HeroX – South Pole Safety
UT – Lunar Astronauts Will Need Easy Walking Trails Around the Moon’s South Pole
UT – NASA, SpaceX Illustrate Key Moments of Artemis Lunar Lander Mission

Lead Image:
Logo of the South Pole Safety Challenge
Credit – NASA / HeroX

The post NASA Is Seeking Ideas for Rescuing an Astronaut from the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

The moons of Mars are garnering increased attention, not only because they could provide a view of the solar system’s past but also because they could provide invaluable staging areas for any future human settlement on Mars itself. However, missions specifically designed to visit Phobos, the bigger of the two moons, have met with varying stages of failure. So why not make an inexpensive mission to do so – one that could launch multiple copies of itself if necessary? That’s the idea behind a CubeSat-based mission to Phobos, known as Perseus, which was initially described back in 2020.

Phobos is interesting for several reasons, but so far, we’ve only gotten relatively grainy pictures of this small moon, whose total diameter is the size of a medium-sized city. Most of those pictures have come from Mars orbiters, such as MRO, who occasionally turn their instruments on the other bodies in the system. Several planned missions to visit directly, such as Phobos 1 and 2 and, more recently, Phobos Grunt, have failed in space, limiting our understanding of this potentially helpful moon to secondary scraps from larger missions.

Enter a new mission concept—Perseus (which, surprisingly, appears to not be an acronym for anything) is designed as a 27U CubeSat that inherits several commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems used in other interplanetary CubeSat missions, including its own propulsion system and remote sensing kit. Depending on the funding the mission receives, it could branch into one of two different potential interaction styles with Phobos.

MMX is another mission to collect actual samples from Phobos, though its launch has been delayed until 2026 at the earliest.

First, the mission design preferred by the mission designers, who mainly come from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University, would involve capturing Perseus in a co-orbit with Mars and Phobos. This would allow the CubeSat to pass by the moon every day, with about a 6-minute encounter time. This would allow Perseus to capture multiple images of multiple sides of Phobos, some of which have never been seen before from such a short vantage point.

The other mission concept would put Perseus on a hyperbolic trajectory past Phobos itself. In this concept, Perseus would only get a single 2-minute flyby with the moon but could get much closer, and therefore higher resolution, images of a specific area it chose to fly by. It would then be flung into the solar system, eventually running out of fuel. Saving the cost of the larger fuel load for the orbital mission concept is the main reason for designing the less scientifically exciting flyby option.

With the orbital mission concept, Perseus could collect visible light images of the surface of Phobos down to 5m per pixel and thermal images of 25 m per one pixel, as its scientific payload would consist of visible light and thermal imagers. That is about 6 times better in visible light than the 30 m / pixel, which is the best information we have from an image from HiRISE on the Mar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Fraser makes the case for sending humans to the Martian moons first.

That level of resolution could further explore some features of Phobos, such as the “grooves” that dominate its surface. Additionally, Perseus could scout potential landing sites for future human missions to prepare for a visit to the Red Planet.

However, the real benefit of Perseus is that it is relatively cheap. While relatively large by CubeSat standards at 54 kg and a 27U configuration, many components’ flight heritage means it would be relatively cheap to assemble and test. However, the mission has not been granted any funding so far, and a brief literature search doesn’t show any additional work on the project in the last several years. But, it fits well with the trend towards smaller, less risky, and less expensive missions. Maybe someday, a similar one will get the green light, and we can finally start collecting some detailed light from one of the most important moons in the solar system.

Learn More:
Nallapu et al. – Trajectory design of perseus: A cubesat mission concept to Phobos
UT – What Could We Learn From a Mission to Phobos?
UT – How Mars’ Moon Phobos Captures Our Imaginations
UT – Did An Ancient Icy Impactor Create the Martian Moons?

Lead Image:
Engineering Model of the Perseus Spacecraft.
Credit – Nallapu et al.

The post A CubeSat Mission to Phobos Could Map Staging Bases for a Mars Landing appeared first on Universe Today.

We have studied the skies for centuries, but we have only found two objects known to come from another star system. The first interstellar object to be confirmed was 1I/2017 U1, more commonly known as ?Oumuamua. It was discovered with the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) and stood out because of its large proper motion. Because ?Oumuamua swept through the inner solar system, it was relatively easy to distinguish. The second interstellar object, 2I/Borisov, stood out because it entered the inner solar system from well above the orbital plane. But while we have only discovered two alien visitors so far, astronomers think interstellar objects are common. It’s estimated that several of them visit our solar system each year, and there may be thousands within the orbit of Neptune on any given day. They just don’t stand out, so we don’t notice them. But that could soon change.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is scheduled to come online in 2025. Unlike many large telescopes, Rubin Observatory isn’t designed to focus on specific targets in the sky. Its mirror can capture a patch of sky seven Moons wide in a single image. It will capture more than a petabyte of data every night, capturing images of solar system bodies every few days. This will allow astronomers to track even faint and slow-moving bodies with precision. The orbit of any interstellar object will stand out clearly. IF astronomers can find them. Which is where a new study comes in.

With so much data being gathered, there is no way to go through the data by hand. Some things, such as supernovae and variable stars, will be easy to distinguish, but interstellar bodies in the outer solar system will pose a particular challenge. In any given image, they will appear as a common asteroid or comet. It’s only after months or years of tracking that their unique orbits will reveal their true origins.

The fieldview of Rubin’s image compared to the Moon. Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

So the authors of this new work propose using machine learning. To demonstrate how this would work, the team created a database of simulated solar system bodies. Some of them were given regular orbits, while others were given interstellar paths. Based on this data, they trained algorithms to distinguish the two. They found that some machine learning methods worked better than others. In this case, the Random Forest approach, where one classifies decision trees statistically, and the Gradient Boosting method, which prioritizes “weak learners” to strengthen them, seem to work the best. The more commonly known Neural Network method was less effective.

Overall, the team found that machine learning can detect interstellar objects with great efficiency, and the number of false positives should be small enough that they could be effectively managed. While the approach won’t find all the interstellar bodies in our solar system, it should be able to find hundreds of them within the first year of Rubin’s operation. And that will give us plenty of data to better understand these enigmatic visitors.

Reference: Cloete, Richard, Peter Vereš, and Abraham Loeb. “Machine learning methods for automated interstellar object classification with LSST.” Astronomy & Astrophysics 691 (2024): A338.

The post Interstellar Objects Can't Hide From Vera Rubin appeared first on Universe Today.

Earth formed 4.54 billion years ago. The first period of the history of the Earth was known as the Hadean Period which lasted from 4.54 billion to 4 billion years ago. During that time, Earth was thought to be a magma filled, volcanic hellscape. It all sounds rather inhospitable at this stage but even then, liquid oceans of water are thought to have existed under an atmosphere of carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Recent research has shown that this environment may well have been rather more habitable than once thought. 

The name ‘Hadean’ comes from Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. It nicely reflects the hot, hostile climate of the early Earth. During this period, Earth was largely a molten, chaotic world with volcanic eruptions a common sight on the landscape. Overhead, there would be regular visitors from space with meteorites and comets impacting the surface as the crust is still forming. Despite these conditions, it seems that water also began to accumulate as the planet cooled, possibly having been delivered by comets or released from outgassing from giant volcanoes. By the end of the era, the crust had solidified enough to form two early continents separated by forming oceans. 

Artist concept of Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment period. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

In a paper published by a team of researchers from the University of California they confirm this conclusion that, far from being in hospitable, early Earth was actually far less tumultuous. The team, led by Christopher K Jones explore the evolution of the Earth from formation to the evolution of life. They review a number of different pathways for the origins of life during the Hadean in the context of the large-scale planetary environment at the time, including Earth’s position in the Solar System.

This view of Earth from space is a fusion of science and art, drawing on data from multiple satellite missions and the talents of NASA scientists and graphic artists. This image originally appeared in the NASA Earth Observatory story Twin Blue Marbles. Image Credits: NASA images by Reto Stöckli, based on data from NASA and NOAA.

In order to complete their work, the team look at the a number of critical aspects across different disciplines that included microbiology, atmospheric chemistry, geochemistry and planetary science. The relationships between life’s beginnings and the processes and state of the environment at the time is also assessed in their paper including the formation of the crust and evolution of the atmosphere. 

The paper also explores a number of different atmospheric processes from wet-dry and freeze-thaw cycles to hydrothermal vent systems. This is not just assessed on Earth but in the Solar System at large to see if there is any correlation or overlaps. The impact of comets too are considered and how they would impact on the atmospheric chemistry. 

According to a new study, a comet impact triggered massive wildfires and a temporary cooling 12,800 years ago. Credit: NASA/Don Davis

The team conclude that Earth, during the Hadean period, most likely had liquid water. The debate still rages on however about the existence of continents and their composition. This uncertainty has an impact on just how organic life could have got a foothold on Earth. However it did, life would have taken a hold by the end of the Hadean era and started to leave evidence in the geological records of the Archean period that followed. 

Unfortunately the paper is far from conclusive, leaving a number of questions unanswered but it does make a fabulous start to fill in the gaps at just how life began on this planet we call home.

Source : Setting the stage: Building and maintaining a habitable world and the early conditions that could favour life’s beginnings on Earth and beyond

The post The Early Earth Wasn’t Completely Terrible appeared first on Universe Today.

Globular clusters are among the oldest objects in the Universe. The early Universe was filled with dwarf galaxies and its just possible that globular clusters are the remains of these ancient relics. Analysis of the stars in the clusters reveals ages in the region of 12-13 billion years old. A new paper just published shows that the globular clusters are home to two distinct types of stars; the primordial ones with normal chemical composition and those with unusual heavy amounts of heavier elements. 

Globular clusters are dense, spherical collections of stars that orbit the outer regions of galaxies, usually in the galactic halo. They contain hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of stars bound together by gravity. They differ from open clusters, which are younger and less tightly bound and found in the main body of a galaxy. Globular clusters in contrast, are ancient with ages typically in the regions of 10 to 13 billion years old. 

M13 – Credit: R. Jay GaBany

There stellar components are mostly composed of low-mass, metal-poor stars, suggesting they formed early in the history of the universe before the heavier elements appeared. Studying globular clusters can reveal lots about stellar evolution, the formation of galaxies and even dark matter. Our own Galaxy the Milky Way is home to over 150 known globular clusters like well known M13 in the northern hemisphere or Omega Centauri in the southern hemisphere.

Omega Centauri is the brightest globular cluster in the night sky. It holds about 10 million stars and is the most massive globular cluster in the Milky Way. It’s possible that globulars and nuclear star clusters are related in some way as a galaxy evolves. Image Credit: ESO.

In a paper recently published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, a team of researchers have advanced our understanding of these clusters by revealing more about their formation and dynamical evolution. The team led by Emanuele Dalessandro from the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) explored multiple populations of stars in the clusters. They studied the change in positions of the stars and their velocity in the first 3D kinematic analysis of 16 globular clusters. 

The team used data from ESA’s Gaia telescope the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope and Multi Instrument Kinematic Survey to measure the 3D velocity of stars within the clusters. This was a combination of proper motion (motion across the sky) and radial velocity (motion towards and away from us.) To gather the measurements, spectroscopic survey data was used.

Artist’s impression of the Gaia spacecraft detecting artificial signals from a distant star system. In this synchronization scheme, the star system’s inhabitants send the signal shortly after witnessing a supernova, which is also seen by telescopes on Earth. (Credit: Danielle Futselaar / Breakthrough Listen)

The formation and evolution of globular clusters has been one of the most hotly debated questions for the last few decades. The significance of understanding them is huge explains Dalessandro,’because they not only help us to test cosmological models of the formation of the Universe due to their age but also provide natural laboratories for studying the formation, evolution, and chemical enrichment of galaxies.’ Understanding the physical processes behind their formation was key to understanding how they evolve. This was the goal of their study which revealed for the first time that globular cluster form through multiple star formation events. 

Source : The first 3D view of the formation and evolution of globular clusters

The post Globular Clusters Evolve in Interesting Ways Over Time appeared first on Universe Today.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have created the largest astrophysical simulation of the Universe ever. They used what was until recently the world’s most powerful supercomputer to simulate the Universe at an unprecedented scale. The simulation’s size corresponds to the largest surveys conducted by powerful telescopes and observatories.

The Frontier Supercomputer is located at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It’s the second-fasted supercomputer in the world, behind only El Capitan, which pulled ahead in November, 2024. Frontier is the world’s first exascale supercomputer, though El Capitan has joined the ranks of exascale supercomputing.

The new Frontier simulation is record-breaking and is now the largest simulation of the Universe ever conducted. Its exascale computing allows it to simulate a level of detail that was unreachable prior to its implementation. Exascale is so advanced that it’s difficult to fully exploit its capabilities without new programming paradigms.

Frontier is a significant leap in astrophysical simulations. It covers a volume of the Universe that’s 10 billion light years across. It incorporates detailed physics models for dark matter, dark energy, gas dynamics, star formation, and black hole growth. It should provide new insights into some of the fundamental processes in the Universe, such as how galaxies form and how the large-scale structure of the Universe evolves.

“There are two components in the universe: dark matter—which as far as we know, only interacts gravitationally—and conventional matter, or atomic matter.” said project lead Salman Habib, division director for Computational Sciences at Argonne.

“So, if we want to know what the universe is up to, we need to simulate both of these things: gravity as well as all the other physics including hot gas, and the formation of stars, black holes and galaxies,” he said. “The astrophysical ‘kitchen sink’ so to speak. These simulations are what we call cosmological hydrodynamics simulations.”

Cosmological hydrodynamics simulations combine cosmology with hydrodynamics and allow astronomers to examine the complex interrelationships between gravity and things like gas dynamics and stellar processes that have shaped and continue to shape our Universe. They can only be conducted with supercomputers because of the level of complexity and the vast number of numerical equations and calculations involved.

The sheer amount of energy needed for Frontier to perform these simulations is staggering. It consumes about 21 MW of electricity, enough to power about 15,000 single-family homes in the US. But the payoff is equally as impressive.

“For example, if we were to simulate a large chunk of the universe surveyed by one of the big telescopes such as the Rubin Observatory in Chile, you’re talking about looking at huge chunks of time — billions of years of expansion,” Habib said. “Until recently, we couldn’t even imagine doing such a large simulation like that except in the gravity-only approximation.”

“It’s not only the sheer size of the physical domain, which is necessary to make direct comparison to modern survey observations enabled by exascale computing,” said Bronson Messer, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility director of science. “It’s also the added physical realism of including the baryons and all the other dynamic physics that makes this simulation a true tour de force for Frontier.”

The Exascale-class HPE Cray EX Supercomputer (Frontier) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Image Credit: By OLCF at ORNL – https://www.flickr.com/photos/olcf/52117623843/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119231238

Frontier simulates more than just the Universe. In June, researchers working with it achieved another milestone. They simulated a system of 466 billion atoms in a simulation of water. That was the largest system ever modeled and more than 400 times larger than its closest competition. Since water is a primary component of cells, Frontier is paving the way for an eventual simulation of a living cell.

Frontier promises to make advancements in multiple other areas as well, including nuclear fission and fusion and large-scale energy transmission systems. It’s also been used to generate a quantum molecular dynamics simulation that’s 1,000 times greater in size and speed than any of its predecessors. It also has applications in modelling diseases, developing new drugs, better batteries, better materials including concrete, and predicting and mitigating climate change.

Astrophysical/cosmological simulations like Frontier’s are powerful when they’re combined with observations. Scientists can use simulations to test theoretical models compared to observational data. Changing initial conditions and parameters in the simulations lets researchers see how different factors shape outcomes. It’s an iterative process that allows scientists to update their models by identifying discrepancies between observations and simulations.

Frontier’s huge simulation is just one example of how supercomputers and AI are taking on a larger role in astronomy and astrophysics. Modern astronomy generates massive amounts of data, and requires powerful tools to manage. Our theories of cosmology are based on larger and larger datasets that require massive computing power to simulate.

Frontier has already been superseded by El Capitan, another exascale supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). However, El Capitan is focused on managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile according to the LLNL.

The post A Superfast Supercomputer Creates the Biggest Simulation of the Universe Yet appeared first on Universe Today.

Popular media love talking about asteroid mining using big numbers. Many articles talk about a mission to Psyche, the largest metallic asteroid in the asteroid belt, as visiting a body worth $10000000000000000000, assumedly because their authors like hitting the “0” key on their keyboards a lot. But how realistic is that valuation? And what does it actually mean? A paper funded by Astroforge, an asteroid mining start-up based in Huntington Beach, and written by a professor at the Colorado School of Mine’s Space Resources Program takes a good hard look at what metals are available on asteroids and whether they’d genuinely be worth as much as the simple calculations say that would be.

The paper divides metals on asteroids into two distinct types—those that would be worth returning to Earth and those that wouldn’t. Really, the only metals judged to be worthy of returning to Earth are the platinum-group metals (PGMs), which are known for their extraordinarily high cost, relatively low supply, and high usefulness in a variety of modern-day technology. That includes catalytic converters, which is why they are commonly the target of thieves.

The other category would be metals used for in-space construction, such as iron, aluminum, and magnesium. While these might not be economically viable to send back to Earth because of their relatively low prices on our home planet, they are useful up in space for constructing large structures, such as space stations or solar power arrays. However, given the chicken-and-egg problem of not having any demand for these space-sourced metals because they are so expensive, it is hard to quantify how much they are worth. Its competition (i.e. launching the material from Earth), is priceable though, and at $10,000 / kg, plus $100 / kg for a common material such as iron.

Fraser talks about whether we would mine asteroids.

Those prices aren’t anywhere near the $500,000 / kg that a PGM such as Rhodium has ever back on Earth, but it could still make mining asteroids for iron economically viable if the material is used in space. So what do all those calculations mean for the actual value of the asteroids that we might mine?

First and most importantly, recent research suggests that asteroids made out of “pure metal,” such as Psyche is assumed to be, are likely pure fiction. While that might not be great news for any single benign asteroid worth a lot, the other part of that research is that even asteroids that were originally thought to be relatively low in metal content actually have reasonable quantities that could be economically extracted.

To prove the point, the paper looked in detail at a series of meteorite studies, which are the equivalent of left-over asteroids, and compared the “grades” of 83 different elements with ores found on or near the Earth’s surface. Since remote sensing has difficulty distinguishing between some of those elements, meteorite samples that can be subjected to advanced analysis techniques are our best bet at accurately calculating the chemical composition of asteroids, other than the few samples of in-tact asteroids that have been returned so far.

Isaac Arthur also discusses the prospects of asteroid mining.
Credit – Isaac Arthur YouTube Channel

That data showed that PGMs, while lower in concentration than considered initially (because of an assumption in a foundational paper on the composition of asteroids), are still in much higher concentrations than the equivalent terrestrial ores. In particular, a material known as a refractory metal nugget (RMN) could have concentrations of PGMs orders of magnitude higher than anything found on Earth or other types of asteroidal material.

RMNs are primarily found in a calcium aluminum inclusion (CAI) structure, mainly on L-type asteroids. L-types are relatively uncommon asteroids with a reddish tint, but we haven’t yet visited them. They might be made up of more than 30% CAIs, though, in which case, they could contain a significant amount of extractable PGMs without additional processing.

However, RMNs themselves are very small, at the micron to sub-micron range, making them extremely hard to process in the first place. So, bulk extraction from asteroidal regolith could range up to hundreds of ppm, which is already a few orders of magnitude greater than their concentration in Earth’s regolith.

Fraser talks about mining Psyche, the largest “metallic asteroid” in the asteroid belt.

When looking at the metals for use in space, they are about as abundant as initially predicted, but they face challenges in processing them out of their oxidized states. Typically, this requires some high-energy procedure, such as molten regolith electrolysis, to break off the elemental metal, which is needed for further processing. Again, there’s the chicken and egg problem of having a power source that is large enough to perform these processes, but building it would require the material that would require the power source.

Eventually, that problem will disappear if companies like AstroForge have their way. Remember that the company funded this study, and its two co-founders and Kevin Cannon, the professor at CSM, were co-authors. The company plans to launch its next mission, a rendezvous with near-Earth asteroids, to try to tell if they’re “metallic” in January. Perhaps that mission will help contribute to our growing understanding of the composition and value of the asteroids surrounding us.

Learn More:
Cannon, Gialich, Acain – Precious and structural metals on asteroids
UT – What Are Asteroids Made Of?
UT – What Is The Difference Between Asteroids and Meteorites?
UT – Asteroids: 10 Interesting Facts About These Space Rocks

Lead Image:
Asteroid mining concept.
Credit: NASA/Denise Watt

The post How Much Are Asteroids Really Worth? appeared first on Universe Today.

Gravitational lensing is a concept where dark matter distorts space revealing its presence through its interaction with light. ESA’s Euclid mission is mapping out the gravitational lensing events to chart the large scale structure of the Universe. Euclid is also expected to discover in excess of 170,000 strong gravitational lensing features too. AI is expected to help achieve this goal but machine learning is still in its infancy so human beings are likely to have to confirm each lens candidate.

Gravitational lensing was originally predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The theory proposed that a massive object such as galaxy or even a cluster of galaxies, would warp and bend space, thus magnifying light from more distant objects. Light travels through space in a straight line but bend space, for example in a gravitational field, and light appears to bend too. The lensing effect can result in various visual phenomenon such as arcs, multiple lensed images or even a complete ring around an object which became known as an Einstein ring. 

The picture shows Abell 2218, a rich galaxy cluster composed of thousands of individual galaxies. It sits about 2.1 billion light-years from the Earth (redshift 0.17) in the northern constellation of Draco. When used by astronomers as a powerful gravitational lens to magnify distant galaxies, the cluster allows them to peer far into the Universe. However, it not only magnifies the images of hidden galaxies, but also distorts them into long, thin arcs. Several arcs in the image can be studied in detail thanks to Hubble’s sharp vision. Multiple distorted images of the same galaxies can be identified by comparing the shape of the galaxies and their colour. In addition to the giant arcs, many smaller arclets have been identified.

Observing gravitational lensing gives a great insight into the distribution of matter across the universe. One probe which is exploring and studying the phenomenon is the Euclid mission. It was launched by the European Space Agency in 2023 to study the lensing events. Studying the lenses and analysing the resultant images across billions of visible galaxies allows for a detailed map to be built revealing the distribution of both dark matter and dark energy. This will help us to understand how dark matter shapes structures in the Universe and how dark energy drives the accelerated expansion of the universe. 

Artist impression of the Euclid observatory. Credit: ESA

One aspect of the Euclid mission is the Euclid Wide Survey (EWS) which will observe 14,000 deg2 of the sky hunting for gravitational lenses. It is predicted the study will find 170,000 strong gravitational lenses (a strong gravitational lens produces a very strong distorted image while weak events are much more subtle.) The challenge is in identifying the lensing features which is challenging for human beings to process that amount of data. 

Machine learning algorithms have been used previously to detect the strong lenses including the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs.) These networks are often used in imaging analysis and comprise of several layers. An image would be used as input, it would be analysed through several different layers but must achieve a specified threshold before being passed on to the next. Eventually, if it successfully passes through all layers of analysis, a strong gravitational lens should be identified. 

A team of researchers led by R. Pearce-Casey from the Open University in the UK has identified that the machine learning technology can present a number of false positives still requiring human visual inspection of the results. Their research aims to identify a higher quality CNN model and strong starting point to improve the output of the CNN based detection process. To test their approach they took images from the Euclid Early Release Observation run of the Perseus field and applied their CNN analysis. The results were promising however when applied to real Euclid EWS data the results still required human verification. 

NGC 1270 is just one member of the Perseus Cluster, a group of thousands of galaxies that lies around 240 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus. This image, taken with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North telescope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, captures a dazzling collection of galaxies in the central region of this enormous cluster. Image Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/ Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab) Acknowledgements: PI: Jisu Kang (Seoul National University)

The team are now exploring if a second filtering stage ahead of  CNN analysis may be needed to fine tune the identification of strong lenses. They conclude that currently, there is no alternative to the good old fashioned human eyeball to confirm the existence of strong and especially weak gravitational lenses to eradicate the false positives from machine learning.

Source : Euclid – Searches for strong gravitational lenses using convolutional neural nets in Early Release Observations of the Perseus field

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Subsurface oceans of liquid water are a common feature of the moon’s of Jupiter and Saturn. Researchers are exploring whether the icy moons of Uranus and Neptune might have them as well. Their new paper suggests future missions to the outer Solar System could measure the rotation of the moons and detect any wobbles pointing to liquid oceans. Less wobble means the moons is mostly solid but large wobbles can indicate ice floating on an ocean of liquid. 

Uranus is the 7th planet in the Solar System, classed as an ice giant and measures 50,724 km across. It has 27 known moons each of which have very unique and distinct characteristics. They tend to be categorised into three different groups; large moons, small inner moons and those which are irregular outer moons. The largest moon of Uranus is Titania which is composed broadly of equal parts rock and ice. The surface has a mix of old craters and younger geological features, fault lines and even cryovolcanism. 

This zoomed-in image of Uranus, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) Feb. 6, 2023, reveals stunning views of the planet’s rings. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI IMAGE PROCESSING: Joseph DePasquale (STScI).

Icy moons are fascinating to explore largely because of the potential for finding life! Jupiter’s moon Europa is a great example. Beneath the icy crust which is 30 km thick exists an ocean thought to be 100 km deep. The ocean is kept liquid by internal heat generated from the tidal interactions with Jupiter. It’s hypothesised that subsurface oceans like these may harbour life. On Earth we have found life in the deepest crevices of our oceans, drawing energy not from sunlight but from hydrothermal vents. Such features may well exist on Europa and other icy moons making them great places to detect life. 

Europa captured by Juno

Much has been learned about the outer Solar System largely from the Voyager and Pioneer probes. Exploring the region nearly 40 years ago, the probes were equipped with fairly limited imaging systems. NASA is now planning on sending another probe to Uranus with better technology and learn more about its icy moons. 

Illustration of voyager 1

A team of researchers based at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics are gearing up for the mission by developing a technique to detect subsurface oceans using only cameras! Their approach relies upon capturing high resolution images of the moons an analysing them for any wobbles as the moon spins.

From this information, it’s possible to work out how much ice, water and rock is inside. If the wobble is only slight then it’s likely the interior of the moon is solid whereas a much larger amplitude to the wobble could mean ice is floating around on a subsurface ocean. In reality a large wobble only means movement of under 100 metres. This is within the capability of modern technology to detect. 

The technique that has been developed by planetary scientist Doug Hemingway and team has been run through some theoretical calculations. They found that for example, if Ariel wobbles by about 100 metres then it is likely to have an ocean 160 km thick surrounded by an ice shell around 30 km thick. Smaller oceans are detectable but the work the team have undertaken will help give mission designers guidelines to maximise the outcome of the scientific goals. 

Source : Uranus’s swaying moons will help spacecraft seek out hidden oceans

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Extended periods spent in microgravity can take a serious toll on the human body, leading to muscular atrophy, bone density loss, vision problems, and changes to the cardiovascular, endocrine, and nervous systems. At the same time, however, scientists have found that microgravity may play a key role in the future of medicine. This includes bioprinting in space, where cultured cells are printed out to form organic tissues and organs without the need for grafts. Printing in microgravity also ensures that fragile cell structures do not collapse due to pressures caused by Earth’s gravity.

However, space medicine may also have applications for stem cell research, which also benefit from a microgravity environment. Stem cells have countless applications in medicine because of their ability to quickly replicate and differentiate into many different types of cells. Based on experiments carried out aboard the International Space Station (ISS), researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Florida determined that these abilities are enhanced when grown in space. These findings could have significant benefits in the study of disease prevention and treatment on Earth, as well as medical treatments delivered in space.

The research was conducted by Fay Ghani and Abba C. Zubair, two pathologists with the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Regenerative Biotherapeutics and the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology. The paper detailing their experiment and findings was recently published in NPJ Microgravity. For their experiment, the team specifically examined the behavior of several types of adult stem cells, which manage normal wear and tear on the body. These cells are often grown by scientists for the sake of disease research and developing new therapies.

Several experiments have been run on the ISS. Credit: Ghani & Zubair, NPJ Microgravity (2024)

The process is challenging, expensive, and takes a long time. But as Zubair said in a recent interview with ScienceAlert!, the process could be simplified by growing them in space-based labs:

“Studying stem cells in space has uncovered cell mechanisms that would otherwise be undetected or unknown within the presence of normal gravity. That discovery indicates a broader scientific value to this research, including potential clinical applications. The space environment offers an advantage to the growth of stem cells by providing a more natural three-dimensional state for their expansion, which closely resembles growth of cells in the human body.

Ghani and Zubair experimented with many types of adult stem cells and obtained positive results for them all. This included general improvements in cell expansion and stability of replication, which continued after the cell cultures were returned to Earth. In particular, they noted improvements with mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), a class of multipotent stromal cells that can differentiate into bone, cartilage, muscle, and fat cells – which gives rise to marrow adipose tissue, thus increasing bone density.

When grown in microgravity, these cells were shown to be better at managing immune system responses and reducing inflammation. “That’s in comparison to the two-dimensional culture environment available on Earth that is less likely to imitate human tissue,” said Zubair. “The space research conducted so far is just a starting point. A broader perspective about stem cell applications is possible as research continues to explore the use of space to advance regenerative medicine.”

One of the experiments conducted aboard the ISS. Credit: Mayo Clinic

While there is still a significant amount of research and testing to be done, these results are very promising and indicate that stem cells can be grown faster and in greater numbers in microgravity. Ghani and Zubair are confident that space-grown stem cells will help treat the most common causes of mortality here on Earth, including heart disease, stroke, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases like dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

Further Reading: ScienceAlert!, NPJ Microgravity

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Jupiter is a stunning planet to observe. Whether it be visible light or any other wavelength. In a stunning new image released by the University of California -Berkley, Jupiter is seen in ultraviolet light. The familiar Great Red Spot appears as a blue oval as do many of the familiar belt features. Around the polar regions are revealed a brown haze which is thought to be caused by a high altitude vortex mixing up the atmosphere. The jury is still out on the mechanism behind this though but it may be an interaction between Jupiter’s strong magnetic field which pierces the atmosphere near the poles. 

Jupiter is the largest planet in the Solar System, a gas giant with powerful storms. With a diameter of 143,000 km, Jupiter is 11 times wider than Earth and capable of swallowing all of the other planets in the Solar System and still have room to spare. It is composed or hydrogen and helium and lacks a solid surface. It’s atmosphere has bands of alternating colour with strong winds, hurricanes and lightning storms. The Great Red Spot is one of its most well known features, a hurricane system three times the size of Earth. It’s also home to a family of satellites including the four well known Galilean moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. 

Side-by-side images show the opposite faces of Jupiter. The largest storm, the Great Red Spot, is the most prominent feature in the left bottom third of this view. Credit: NASA, ESA, Amy Simon (NASA-GSFC).

The atmosphere of Jupiter is a complex system of thick clouds, storms and high winds. The hydrogen makes up about 90% of the atmosphere with helium the bulk of the remainder plus trace amounts of methane, water vapour and other compounds. The belts in the atmosphere appear to alternate between lighter and darker colours driven by different temperatures, chemical compositions and wind speeds that reach up to 640 km/hr. Lower down, beneath the visible layer, the atmosphere becomes denser, hotter and eventually becomes fluid. Other phenomenon have been observed from lightning storms, aurora and ice crystal clouds. 

Europa and Io move across the face of Jupiter, with the Great Red Spot behind them. Image: NASA/JPL/Cassini, Kevin M. Gill

The newly released ultraviolet image reveals strange features around the polar regions. The oval shaped features are Earth-sized and only visible in the ultraviolet wavelengths. The ovals seems to consistently appear at a slightly lower latitude than the auroral zones around the poles. In the image, the ovals seem dark in colour due to absorption of ultraviolet radiation, more so than the brighter surrounding regions. 

The Hubble Space Telescope orbits Earth at an altitude of 540 km and takes yearly images of Jupiter and the other planets. Hubble was the first telescope to capture the so called UV ovals and they have since been detected by the Cassini spacecraft. The team at UC Berkeley discovered that the ovals were more common around the south pole (appearing in 75% of images around south pole and only 12% around north pole.) 

This image of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was taken on May 19, 2009 after deployment during Servicing Mission 4. NASA

The team spoke with planetary atmospherics experts Tom Stallard (Northumbria University in UK) and Xi Zhang (from UC Santa Cruz) to try and understand the mechanism. They theorise that Jupiter’s strong magnetic field lines experience friction in the ionosphere leading to the establishment of a vortex (a rotating, spinning flow of fluid or air.) It is the vortex that drives the dark ovals. 

Source : Magnetic tornado is stirring up the haze at Jupiter’s poles

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Venus is often referred to as Earths twin but size and mass are the only similarities. A visitor to one of our nearest neighbours would experience a very different world at the surface. Unlike other planets in the Solar System, Venus seems to show very little active volcanism. The environmental conditions on the surface are harsh so a researcher has suggested a combination of an orbiter, a balloon and a lander would be able to work together to detect seismic activity under the surface.

Venus is the second planet from the Sun and is enshrouded in a thick atmosphere. From Earth, it is impossible to see any visual detail on the surface of the planet due to the planet-wide thick clouds that engulf it. The atmosphere is composed mostly of carbon dioxide with clouds of sulfuric acid which together have raised the surface temperature to a staggering ~475°C. Venus is a pretty inhospitable world given these high surface temperatures, atmospheric pressure equivalent to being a kilometre under water and sulfuric acid rain in the atmosphere. There is strong evidence of geological activity on Mars with volcanoes, volcanic plains and highland areas.

Venus

There have been a number of robotic explorers and orbiters visit Venus but some have braved the extreme surface conditions. Venera, part of the Soviet space program was the first series of landers to successfully land on the Venusian surface. They were designed to last for about half an hour in the hostile environment but generally lasted for just over an hour before the conditions caused them to fail. Despite the challenges, the landers have provided valuable information of the conditions that have helped to learn more about climate change and atmospheric chemistry. 

The surface of Venus as captured by Soviet Venera 13 lander in March of 1982. NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org

One aspect of Venus that we still don’t know much about is its interior. Seismic activity measurements are one way we can probe the interior of planets and already we have learned a lot in this way about the Moon and Mars. The high winds and extreme temperatures make measuring quakes on Venus difficult.

A team of researchers led by Raphael F. Garcia from Université de Toulouse in France have proposed a technique that might be used to detect Venusian quakes using three different sensors. One will be based on the ground to try and detect them directly although with current technology is only likely to survive for around a day. In addition to a lander, the team propose a balloon based sensor that may be able to detect infrasound waves. These low frequency waves are often detected in the atmosphere as a result of the quakes. They have been used before for example during the Soviet Vega program and could last for up to a month in the atmosphere of Venus.

Vega balloon probe on display at the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian Institution. Photo by Geoffrey A. Landis. CC by SA 4.0

Ground and balloon based detectors can only detect quakes on Venus to magnitude 4.5. An additional approach is to use a satellite based detector which could detect and measure airglow or emissions of light from molecules perturbed by infrasound waves. Satellites in orbit can of course last for years, long after ground and airborne sensors are Inoperative. 

Source : Three Ways to Track Venus quakes, from Balloons to Satellites

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There’s a new contender for your holiday fireplace video. This one comes from NASA, and features rocket engines and boosters to light up your days with Space Launch System holiday cheer.

Say goodbye to the crackling logs in fireplace videos of Christmas past. We’ll miss the anticipation of the fire burning down to embers and the next log being placed in the fireplace.

Instead, we can gaze contentedly as the Space Launch System’s four RS-25 engines and pair of boosters light up our video hearths.

Enjoy the warm glow of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as their combustion casts a calming, flickering glow. Thrill to the intense white-hot gases from the solid boosters as their aluminum powder and ammonium perchlorate oxidizer, bound together by polybutadiene acrylonitrile, is set ablaze.

NASA created this 8-hour-long looping video from the November 2022 launch of Artemis 1 to the Moon. The holiday video is a somewhat sanitized version of the real launch. The real launch was a thunderous, bellowing spectacle featuring a towering maelstrom of light and thorax-vibrating sound. Below is the real launch.

Traditionalists might scoff at this updated holiday fireplace video, and tradition is fine. But progress is also good, so why not spend some time thinking about humanity’s frontiers, and our return to the Moon, while tucking into some turkey and eggnog?

Merry Christmas, and Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends.

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Breaking oxygen out of a water molecule is a relatively simple process, at least chemically. Even so, it does require components, one of the most important of which is a catalyst. Catalysts enable reactions and are linearly scalable, so if you want more reactions quickly, you need a bigger catalyst. In space exploration, bigger means heavier, which translates into more expensive. So, when humanity is looking for a catalyst to split water into oxygen and hydrogen on Mars, creating one from local Martian materials would be worthwhile. That is precisely what a team from Hefei, China, did by using what they called an “AI Chemist.”

Unfortunately, the name “AIChemist” didn’t stick, though that joke might vary depending on the font you read it in. Whatever its name, the team’s work was some serious science. It specifically applied machine learning algorithms that have become all the rage lately to selecting an effective catalyst for an “oxygen evolution reaction” by utilizing materials native to Mars. 

To say it only chose the catalyst isn’t giving the system the full credit it’s due, though. It accomplished a series of steps, including developing a catalyst formula, pretreating the ore to create the catalyst, synthesizing it, and testing it once it was complete. The authors estimate that the automated process saved over 2,000 years of human labor by completing all of these tasks and point to the exceptional results of the testing to prove it.

Depiction of the process the AI Chemist went through to create the test catalyst.
Credit – Zhu et al.

Before we get to that, though, let’s start with the “initial conditions.” The team developed an “all-in-one” robotic AI chemist capable of performing all these tasks. It was initially based on work done by more limited AI chemists who could read synthetic chemistry literature and estimate the efficacy of different chemical compounds for different tasks. After they built the model, they needed to feed it with some data.

For that data, they selected five different common rocks from the surface of Mars. They estimated that there would be 3,764,376 possible combinations to come out of the elements present in those rocks, depending on how the combinations were manufactured. So, the first task of the AI Chemist was to select one that could act as a catalyst for splitting off oxygen. Part of that dataset was built with 30,000 other theoretical datasets and the results of 243 experiments. The result is a “polymetallic” material composed of manganese, iron, nickel, magnesium, aluminum, and calcium. 

Next, a sample of the catalyst would be manufactured for testing. The AI is equipped with a robot arm that took physical samples of meteorites that had been dissolved in hydrochloric acid and attempted to synthesize the suggested catalyst out of those materials. This process involved pretty extreme processes like centrifuging the samples at 7,500g for 5 minutes to separate out the necessary materials and drying out the resultant material. Impressively, all of this was seemingly done without human intervention.

Fraser goes into detail about how a potential mission to Mars will happen in the near future – including creating oxygen using catalysts.

After some of the material had been synthesized, the research team tested it by actually performing the reduction process it was designed to do. More importantly, they did so under Martian ambient conditions. The material performed admirably, similar to existing catalysts already used.

So, effectively, an AI just developed and tested a catalyst for use on Mars using local materials. And potentially saved over 2,000 years of intensive human labor in doing so. That is a testament to how effective AI is at finding patterns in existing data and extrapolating them using new data. It remains to be seen, though, if this catalyst will ever see the light of day on Mars, as the catalyst itself must be integrated with the rest of the system to perform the reduction reaction to split oxygen from water effectively. Given the complexity of the process used to create that catalyst, it might be easier for us to ship one directly from Earth, even if it doesn’t use Martian materials.

Learn More:
Zhu et al. – Automated synthesis of oxygen-producing catalysts from Martian meteorites by a robotic AI chemist
UT – A Single Robot Could Provide a Mission To Mars With Enough Water and Oxygen
UT – What is ISRU, and How Will it Help Human Space Exploration?
UT – A new way to Make Oxygen on Mars: Using Plasma

Lead Image:
Series of images of the robotic arm used in the experiments running the catalyst synthesis process.
Credit – Zhu et al.

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We’ve known for a while that complex chemistry occurs in space. Organic molecules have been detected in cold molecular clouds, and we have even found sugars and amino acids, the so-called “building blocks of life,” within several asteroids. The raw ingredients of terrestrial life are common in the Universe, and meteorites and comets may have even seeded Earth with those ingredients. This idea isn’t controversial. But there is a more radical idea that Earth was seeded not just with the building blocks of life but life itself. It’s known as panspermia, and a recent study has brought the idea back to popular science headlines. But the study is more subtle and interesting than some headlines suggest.

Panspermia became popular in the 1800s and 1900s when it became clear that life arose surprisingly early on Earth. On a geologic scale, cellular life appears almost as soon as Earth cooled enough to support it. Given the complexity of DNA and living cells, how could such a thing have evolved so quickly? In the panspermia model, life evolved either in space or on some distant world, and was carried to Earth within asteroids or comets. We know that some living things can survive the harsh vacuum of space, so perhaps we have some alien, extraterrestrial origin.

But there are reasons to be skeptical. For one, the transition from organic to biological chemistry may be remarkably adaptive. While life appears to have appeared suddenly on Earth, that may be precisely what you’d expect. Without an example of extraterrestrial life, we simply don’t know. And while life can survive in space for a limited time, it’s not likely to survive for the millions of years it would take for an asteroid to traverse the solar system, much less the billions of years it would take to travel between star systems. Still, one step toward proving panspermia would be to gather material from an asteroid and find out it has life, and that’s exactly what this latest study found.

The Hayabusa2 mission, launched in 2014, landed on a small asteroid named Ryugu in 2018 and returned a sample of material to Earth in 2020. The sample was kept sterile the whole time, hermetically sealed for the journey back, and only opened in a pure nitrogen clean room using sterilized equipment. The sample was as clean and uncontaminated as we could get. When the team prepared a sample and looked at it under an electron microscope, they found rods and filaments of organic matter consistent with microbial life. In other words, the team found life on an asteroid.

Except they likely didn’t.

The size distribution is consistent with terrestrial life. Credit: Genge, et al

One thing to keep in mind is that microbial life is incredibly robust. It exists everywhere and spreads rapidly. You can find the stuff in the cores of nuclear power plants, in hot thermal vents, and in the cleanest clean room. And even if you sterilize something, microbial life will find a way. When the team found life on their sample, the first thing they did was to look for evidence of contamination, and there was plenty of evidence to be found. To begin with, the size distribution of the organic rods and filaments found in the sample is consistent with those commonly deposited by terrestrial life. Their data also found evidence of a growth and decline period of about five days, which is also consistent with Earth life. If the Ryugu samples had truly evolved beyond Earth, they would be genetically separated from us by millions or billions of years. Their size and growth rate wouldn’t match those of our common microbes. So the best explanation is that the sample became contaminated despite our best efforts.

While the study doesn’t support the panspermia model, it does tell us two important things. The first is that our sterilization procedures are likely inadequate. We may have already spread life to the Moon and Mars inadvertently. The second is that asteroids have organic materials that could sustain terrestrial life. That’s good news if we want to establish ourselves elsewhere in the solar system. Earth life may not have begun in space, but it could very well end up there.

Reference: Genge, Matthew J., et al. “Rapid colonization of a space?returned Ryugu sample by terrestrial microorganisms.” Meteoritics & Planetary Science (2024).

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Our local star the Sun has been the source of many studies from ground based telescopes to space based observatories. The ESA Solar Orbiter has been approaching the Sun, capturing images along the way in unprecedented detail. It arrived at its halfway point in March last year and captured a series of 25 images. They have now been stitched together to reveal an astonishingly high resolution image. You can even zoom in to see individual granules in the solar photosphere. 

In comparison to Earth, the Sun is massive but in when it comes to other stars, it’s pretty average. It provides energy to sustain life through the process of nuclear fusion deep in its core.  The hydrogen atoms are fused into helium generating so much energy that heat and light bathes our planet. Like all other stars, the Sun is a great big ball of electrically charged gas with a visible surface temperature of about 5,500°C. It measures a staggering 1.39 million km across and lies at an average distance of 150 million km from us. It accounts for 99% of the mass of the Solar System and it is this which is responsible for its immense gravitational pull which has kept planets, asteroids and comets in orbit for the last 4.6 billion years!

The Sun on November 1, 2023 with the eQuinox 2 telescope by Unistellar and Smart Solar Filter. Credit: Nancy Atkinson.

Without a doubt it is the most prominent astronomical object to grace our skies and so it is no surprise it has been the target of many, many studies. ESA’s Solar Orbiter is one of those space based observatories that has started to unveil some of the mysteries of our nearest star. It was launched in February 2020 and was designed to capture images of the Sun’s poles along with measuring its magnetic fields and the solar wind. The orbit followed by Solar Orbiter is very specific following an elliptical orbit that takes it to within 42 million km of the Sun. 

Solar Orbiter

On board Solar Orbiter are instruments to probe the dynamics of the Sun. The most exciting of these are those designed to observe the Sun directly and includes the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) and the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) which when combined can with other on board instruments can create some fabulously high resolution images. With Solar Orbiter already half way to the Sun ESA have released a stunning new image of our nearest star derived from data from both EUI and PHI.

At the time the images were taken, Solar Orbiter was 74 million km away from the Sun (Mercury is approximately 50 million km away) and was too close to be able to capture one image of the whole Sun. Instead, 25 images were taken over a few hours and then stitched together to create the mosaic that has just been released. The finished result can be seen here and has a resolution of around 175 km per pixel. Previous observations have gone deeper for example the Gregor Solar Telescope on Tenerife has achieved a resolution of just 50 km per pixel but this was only ever of a small section of the Sun.

Large mosaics were never possible due to the turbulence in the atmosphere making it impossible to stitch sufficient images together.  The image is stunning. If you zoom in you can see the pattern of granulation all over the Sun’s photosphere and even a few sunspots in super high resolution. 

Source : The Solar Fire Up Close

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On November 18th, 2022, shortly before midnight, the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) in Arizona and other observatories worldwide detected a small object (now designated 2022 WJ1) heading toward Earth. For the next three hours, the CSS and the Southern Ontario Meteor Network (SOMN) at the University of Western Ontario monitored the object before it entered Earth’s atmosphere above Southern Ontario. At 03:26 a.m. EST (12:26 a.m. PST) on November 19th, the object appeared as a bright fireball that scattered meteorite fragments across the Niagara region.

This event triggered an international collaboration to hunt down the fragments for analysis, but none have been found yet. In a recent study led by Western University and Lowell Observatory, an international team of scientists described a new approach for studying near-Earth asteroids (NEA) based largely on 2022 WJ1. The study is significant in that the team determined the NEA’s composition—the smallest asteroid characterized to date—and established a new and integrated methodology for studying other NEAs that may impact Earth someday.

The study was led by Dr. Theodore Kareta, a Postdoctoral Researcher from the Lowell Observatory. He was joined by researchers from the University of Western Ontario, the ESA’s Planetary Defense Office (PDO), the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at Curtin University (Australia), the University of Zagreb (Croatia), the Astronomical Society Istra Pula, the Višnjan Science and Education Center, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The study that describes their technique, “Telescope-to-Fireball Characterization of Earth Impactor 2022 WJ1,” was published on November 22nd in The Planetary Science Journal.

The detection of 2022 WJ1 (WJ1) before it entered the atmosphere was a fortuitous event since it gave astronomers just enough time for scientists to telescopically observe it and gather precise information on its position and motion – which were used to refine its orbit. These factors also allowed astronomers to determine that the asteroid would enter Earth’s atmosphere above the Great Lakes region. The impact location was also fortuitous since it landed in the middle of Western’s network of meteor-observing cameras.

The three hours it took for WJ1 to enter the atmosphere also allowed several members of the Western Meteor Physics Group and Western’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration (IESE) to watch the object streak through the sky. This was the first time in history that observers were alerted of a natural fireball ahead of time and knew exactly where it would be visible. Paul Wiegert, a professor of physics and astronomy at Western and a study co-author, witnessed the fireball at 3:30 a.m.

“I watched from Brescia Hill on the Western campus,” he said in a recent Western News press release. “Though cold and windy, the hill had a clear view to the east, where I expected to see only a distant flash. Then, the fireball suddenly appeared, passing almost overhead. It was easily visible between broken clouds and noticeably orange-red.” The Lowell Discovery Telescope‘s (LDT) capacity for rapid and stable tracking made it the ideal instrument for observing WJ1, allowing it to keep up with the small and fast-moving NEA.

Teddy Kareta, a postdoctoral associate at Lowell Observatory, observed the asteroid with his team for about one hour before it was lost in the shadow of Earth. As he indicated:

“At the time that we lost the asteroid – when it got too dim to be seen in our images – we had the telescope moving at five degrees per second to try to keep up with it. That’s fast enough that most other telescopes would have had to give up considerably earlier. It’s tremendously fortuitous that this asteroid happened to fly over Arizona’s dark skies at night before burning up over Western’s excellent camera network. It’s hard to imagine better circumstances to do this kind of research.”

By comparing the Arizona-based observations to footage of the meteor acquired by the SOMN, the team determined the size and composition of 2022 WJ1 (WJ1). The size was determined thanks to observations made by the LDT, which detected a silica-rich surface that gave the object a relatively high albedo (reflectivity). By measuring this reflected light, the team calculated the diameter at 40 to 60 cm (16 to 27 inches), making it the smallest asteroid on record.

The combined telescopic and fireball camera data suggest that WJ1 is rich in silica, placing it in the S-chondrite category. They are among the oldest bodies in the Solar System and the most common type of meteorite to hit Earth. “This is only the sixth asteroid discovered before impact,” said Denis Vida, an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at Western. “Our new approach, discovering an asteroid through space observation and then subsequently observing it with cameras from the ground, allowed us to confirm that our estimates match well to estimates derived using a completely different approach.”

“This is only the second time that an asteroid has been meaningfully characterized with telescopes prior to it impacting the Earth,” said Kareta. “It’s a testament to our good luck and preparation, but it’s also due to the community that cares about keeping the Earth safe from these impactors learning to work together better. This first-ever comparison between telescopic and fireball camera data is extremely exciting and means we’ll be able to characterize the next asteroid to impact the Earth in even better detail.”

While no fragments have been found in the Niagara region, and no further official searches are planned, there are still people in the area who are searching and know what to look for. While much of the fragments were predicted to fall into Lake Ontario, some are hopeful that a fragment or two could turn up in the near future.

Further Reading: Western News

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In 1936 astronomers watched as FU Orionis, a dim star in the Orion constellation, brightened dramatically. The star’s brightness increased by a factor of 100 in a matter of months. When it peaked, it was 100 times more luminous than our Sun.

Astronomers had never observed a young star brightening like this.

Since then, we’ve learned that FU Orionis is a binary star. It’s surrounded by a circumstellar disk and the brightness episodes are triggered when the star accretes mass from the disk. There are other young stars similar to FU Orionis, and it’s now the namesake for an entire class of variable young stars that brighten in the same manner. FU Ori stars are a sub-class of T-Tauri stars, young, pre-main sequence stars that are still growing.

Astronomers have modelled FU Ori’s accretion and brightness episodes with some success. But the nature of the disk-star interface has remained a mystery. Attempts to image the boundary between the two haven’t been successful. Until now.

Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe FU Ori with the telescope’s COS (Cosmic Origins Spectrograph) and STIS (Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) instruments. Their results are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The research is “A Far-ultraviolet-detected Accretion Shock at the Star–Disk Boundary of FU Ori” and the lead author is Adolfo Carvalho. Carvalho is an Astronomy PhD candidate at Caltech.

FU Ori stars are T-Tauri stars that represent the most actively accreting young stellar objects (YSOs). The outward magnetic pressure from T-Tauri stars prevents the disk from touching the star. Astronomers think that classical T-Tauri stars accrete material along their magnetic field lines and deposit on the poles in a process called magnetospheric accretion.

This schematic shows how magnetospheric accretion works on T-Tauri stars. Image Credit: Adapted from Hartmann et al. (2016).

However, FU Ori stars are different. They’ve undergone disk instability either because the disk is so much larger than the star, because of the presence of a binary, or from infalling material. The instability leads to rapid changes in the accretion rate. The increased rate of accretion upsets the balance between the star’s magnetic field and the inner edge of the accretion disk. The spectra of FU Ori stars is dominated by absorption features from the inner disk. Excess emissions from those stars is understood as matter shocking onto the star’s photosphere. However, for FU Ori stars, astronomers are uncertain about the detailed structure of the accretion boundary layer.

The researchers focused on the inner edge of FU Ori’s accretion disk in an attempt to confirm the accretion disk model and understand the boundary layer more completely.

“We were hoping to validate the hottest part of the accretion disk model, to determine its maximum temperature, by measuring closer to the inner edge of the accretion disk than ever before,” said Lynne Hillenbrand of Caltech in Pasadena, California, a co-author of the paper. “I think there was some hope that we would see something extra, like the interface between the star and its disk, but we were certainly not expecting it. The fact we saw so much extra — it was much brighter in the ultraviolet than we predicted — that was the big surprise.”

In FU Ori stars, the accretion disk is closer than in T-Tauri stars. This, combined with the enhanced infall rate, makes them much brighter than T-Tauris. In fact, during an outburst, the disk actually outshines the star. The disk is orbiting faster than the star rotates, and this means there should be a region where the disk impacts the star. The impact slows the material down and heats it up.

This artist’s image helps illustrate FU Ori’s accretion and flaring. Left panel: Material from the dusty and gas-rich disk (orange) plus hot gas (blue) mildly flows onto the star, creating a hot spot. Middle panel: The outburst begins – the inner disk is heated, more material flows to the star, and the disk creeps inward. Right panel: The outburst is in full throttle, with the inner disk contacting the star. Image Credit: Caltech/T. Pyle (IPAC)

The new Hubble UV observations show that the region is there and that it’s much hotter than thought.

“The Hubble data indicates a much hotter impact region than models have previously predicted,” said lead author Carvalho. “In FU Ori, the temperature is 16,000 kelvins [nearly three times our Sun’s surface temperature]. That sizzling temperature is almost twice the amount prior models have calculated. It challenges and encourages us to think of how such a jump in temperature can be explained.”

That means that the scientific model of FU Ori stars, called the viscous disk accretion model, needs to be updated. The team’s revised model says that as material from the accretion disk approaches the star and reaches its surface, it produces a hot shock that emits ultraviolet light. The temperature of the shock suggests that the material is moving at 40 km/s at the boundary, which is in line with simulations of the accretion process.

“The measured temperature and the size of the FUV emission region are consistent with expectations for a shock at the disk–star boundary,” the authors explain in their research. “The shock arises from the collision of the highly supersonic disk surface accretion flow with the stellar photosphere.”

One question scientists have concerns exoplanet formation around young stars. Researchers think that planets start to form when stars are very young. Is this hot flaring a detriment to planet formation? Does it affect their evolution? The extreme UV accretion flaring that FU Ori stars undergo could affect the chemistry of planets.

“Our revised model based on the Hubble data is not strictly bad news for planet evolution, it’s sort of a mixed bag,” explained Carvalho. “If the planet is far out in the disk as it’s forming, outbursts from an FU Ori object should influence what kind of chemicals the planet will ultimately inherit. But if a forming planet is very close to the star, then it’s a slightly different story. Within a couple outbursts, any planets that are forming very close to the star can rapidly move inward and eventually merge with it. You could lose, or at least completely fry, rocky planets forming close to such a star.”

The post The Hubble and FU Orionis: a New Look at an Old Mystery appeared first on Universe Today.

Inflatable space modules are not a new concept, NASA have been exploring the possibility since the 1960’s. The Chinese Space Agency is now getting in on the act and is testing its new inflatable module which is part of its Shijian-19 satellite launch. To get it into orbit the capsule was compressed and folded and then inflated once in orbit. Following completion of the tests, it re-entered the atmosphere, landing in the Gobi Desert on 10th October. The goal is for this to be used to extend its space station in the same way NASA have been exploring expansion of ISS. 

The idea of inflatable space capsules offers a lightweight solution which simplifies the launch process. Their development began back in the 1960’s but real progress was seen with projects like TransHub that looked at new advanced materials. Even though TransHub was cancelled it was a precursor to ventures like the Bigelow Aerospace module known as BEAM. It was tested in 2016 on the ISS and proved the concept could work making them an invaluable part of the future of space exploration. 

This computer rendering shows the Bigelow Expanded Activity Module in its fully expanded configuration. Image: NASA

The Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) has now started experimentation with inflatable modules. They have been a major player on the global space stage since it was founded in 1993. Among their successes have been the Chang’e lunar missions and the Tianwen-1 Mars explorers. Since 2021, the Tiangong space station has been in orbit high above the Earth and there are now plans for crewed lunar missions. 

A recovery team member checks the Chang’e-6 probe’s sample return capsule after its landing in Inner Mongolia. (Credit: CGTN / CNSA)

On 27th September, the CNSA launched their Shijian-19 retrievable satellite from Jiuquan in China. A test inflatable module was developed and manufactured by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) as a landmark step in getting an inflatable module in orbit. They confirmed that the inflatable flexible sealed module completed a successful orbital test. The module is a sealed structure made from composite materials much like the Bigelow Aerospace BEAM module. 

Launch is completed by compressing and folding the module and then inflating upon reaching orbit. The technique makes construction relatively cheap and the launch process far more efficient. Following on from the successful test, CAST promise that larger-scale modules are the next step marking an important step forward in sealed module technology. To arrive at this stage in the development of inflatable technology, CAST completed ground based tests that confirmed they were air tight, could deal with extreme pressures and vibrations and would be capable of with standing impact from space debris. 

A rendering of the Chinese Tiangong space station. Credit: CMSA

The CNSA have confirmed they plan to expand their Tiangong space station and are now exploring the possibility of using inflatable modules as part of their plans. The next likely module to be added is likely to be a multifunctional capsule that will allow other modules to be added. The success of the inflatable module opens up a number of possibilities and opportunities for the Chinese agency, not just for Tiangong but for other space exploration habitats. 

Source : China’s inflatable space capsule passes in-orbit test

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