Space news topic and space related news

Started by Tsanten Eywa 'eveng, September 23, 2011, 03:31:21 PM

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Vawmataw

Keftxo, time to adopt a brown dwarf
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Cheers! NASA's Webb Finds Ethanol, Other Icy Ingredients for Worlds
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2024/news-2024-111

Newfound carbon-containing molecules are key ingredients for potentially habitable planets.

Stars and their planets form from swirling clouds of gas and dust enriched with chemical elements and compounds from previous generations of stars. One long-standing question in astronomy is: How ubiquitous are the elements crucial to life as we know it?

A new Webb study of two protostars, so young that they have not yet formed planets, has found a variety of molecules ranging from relatively simple ones like methane to complex compounds like acetic acid (familiar to cooks as an ingredient in vinegar). These molecules constitute key ingredients for worlds that might one day host life.

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Aiming exascale at black holes
https://www.ias.edu/news/aiming-exascale-black-holes

In 1783, John Michell, a rector in northern England, "proposed that the mass of a star could reach a point where its gravity prevented the escape of most anything, even light. The same prediction emerged from [founding IAS Faculty] Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. Finally, in 1968, physicist [and Member (1937) in the School of Math/Natural Sciences] John Wheeler gave such phenomena a name: black holes."

Despite initial skepticism that such astrophysical objects could exist, observations now estimate that there are 40 quintillion (or 40 thousand million billion) black holes in the universe. These black holes are important because the matter that falls into them "doesn't just disappear quietly," says James Stone, Professor in the School of Natural Sciences.

"Instead, matter turns into plasma, or ionized gas, as it rotates toward a black hole. The ionized particles in the plasma 'get caught in the gravitational field of a black hole, and as they are pulled in they release energy,' he says. That process is called accretion, and scientists think the energy released by accretion powers many processes on scales up to the entire galaxy hosting the black hole."

To explore this process, Stone uses general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). But the equations behind MHD are "so complicated that analytic solutions — finding solutions with pencil and paper — [are] probably impossible." Instead, by running complex simulations on high-performance computers like Polaris and Frontier, Stone and his colleagues are working to understand how radiation changes black hole accretion.

"The code created by Stone's team to investigate black hole accretion can be applied to other astrophysical phenomena. Stone mentions that he 'can use the same [...] code for MHD simulations to follow the motion of cosmic rays,' high-energy particles also produced by black holes."

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Mars Sample Return a top scientific priority, Lunine testifies
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/03/mars-sample-return-top-scientific-priority-lunine-testifies

At the western end of Mars' Jezero Crater, a river channel and pile of sediments resembling river deltas on Earth hold clues about how Mars evolved from a more Earth-like world to the barren, inhospitable surface seen today.

Since 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover has collected more than 20 samples of rocks and sediments from the crater floor, delta fan and hills above it – resources that could answer crucial questions about what happened to the red planet's climate and geology and improve understanding of our own.

But those samples could be stranded on Mars if Congress fails to provide adequate funding for the space agency to design and build the Mars Sample Return mission, Jonathan Lunine, the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and chair of the Department of Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, testified March 21 before a congressional subcommittee reviewing NASA's science programs.

"The benefit of succeeding in bringing back rock and soil from an ancient riverbed on a planet 140 million miles away is that it will tell the world that this nation has the imagination, will and courage to accomplish just about anything," Lunine said in written testimony. "And that message is priceless. To not complete Mars Sample Return – to leave the samples stranded on Mars – would be ... a national disgrace."

Lunine was one of four experts invited to testify at the U.S. House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics hearing titled, "Advancing Scientific Discovery: Assessing the Status of NASA's Science Mission Directorate." Watch a replay here.

Earlier this year, budget uncertainty led NASA to plan for the lower of two proposed funding levels for the mission and to lay off staff at its Jet Propulsion Lab in California. Current appropriations bills defer a decision on funding, which could range from $300 million to nearly $1 billion, while the agency reassesses the mission's architecture.

Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said that after an independent review board's "sobering analysis" of the mission's costs and challenges last fall, the agency would complete its internal reassessment this spring.

"It's our willingness to acknowledge these challenges and overcome them, to conduct science in ways that have barely been imagined, that makes us NASA," Fox testified.

Lunine called Mars Sample Return the most ambitious robotic program the United States has ever attempted, requiring challenging new technology and involving multiple NASA centers and the European Space Agency.

But having served as a member of an independent review board that examined the mission last year, Lunine said he's "supremely confident" that it can and will be done despite budget pressures requiring difficult choices.

"It can be done because American engineering prowess is up to the task," he told lawmakers. "It will be done because as a nation we surely will not simply walk away from a daring, highly visible and scientifically important challenge."

Successive National Academies of Sciences decadal surveys have identified the mission as the top priority in planetary science, Lunine said, to help answer the questions: Did life begin on Mars? How did Mars dry up? Exactly when did it dry up?

Only instruments in laboratories on Earth, instruments far more precise and powerful than those carried by the Mars rovers, can precisely analyze the collected rock and soil samples to determine their composition and age, Lunine said. In the same way, the samples Apollo astronauts returned from the moon established a definitive chronology for the earliest history of the Earth-moon system – the program's most profound scientific achievement, Lunine said. More than a half-century later, moon samples continue to be studied by increasingly capable instruments.

"The samples returned from Mars in the coming decade will be analyzed not only by scientists active today, but by scientists who are not yet born, using laboratory techniques not yet invented," Lunine said. "These precious records of early Mars will be a lasting scientific treasure and a legacy of American technological prowess."

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Study: Life's building blocks are surprisingly stable in Venus-like conditions
https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-lifes-building-blocks-surprisingly-stable-venus-conditions-0320

Results suggest the clouds of Venus could be hospitable for some forms of life.

If there is life in the solar system beyond Earth, it might be found in the clouds of Venus. In contrast to the planet's blisteringly inhospitable surface, Venus' cloud layer, which extends from 30 to 40 miles above the surface, hosts milder temperatures that could support some extreme forms of life.

If it's out there, scientists have assumed that any Venusian cloud inhabitant would look very different from life forms on Earth. That's because the clouds themselves are made from highly toxic droplets of sulfuric acid — an intensely corrosive chemical that is known to dissolve metals and destroy most biological molecules on Earth.

But a new study by MIT researchers may challenge that assumption. Appearing today in the journal Astrobiology, the study reports that, in fact, some key building blocks of life can persist in solutions of concentrated sulfuric acid.

The study's authors have found that 19 amino acids that are essential to life on Earth are stable for up to four weeks when placed in vials of sulfuric acid at concentrations similar to those in Venus' clouds. In particular, they found that the molecular "backbone" of all 19 amino acids remained intact in sulfuric acid solutions ranging in concentration from 81 to 98 percent. 

"What is absolutely surprising is that concentrated sulfuric acid is not a solvent that is universally hostile to organic chemistry," says study co-author Janusz Petkowski, a research affiliate in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

"We are finding that building blocks of life on Earth are stable in sulfuric acid, and this is very intriguing for the idea of the possibility of life on Venus," adds study author Sara Seager, MIT's Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in EAPS and a professor in the departments of Physics and of Aeronautics and Astronautics. "It doesn't mean that life there will be the same as here. In fact, we know it can't be. But this work advances the notion that Venus' clouds could support complex chemicals needed for life."

The study's co-authors include first author Maxwell Seager, an undergraduate in the Department of Chemistry at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Seager's son, and William Bains, a research affiliate at MIT and a scientist at Cardiff University.

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Signs of life detectable in single ice grain emitted from extraterrestrial moons
https://www.washington.edu/news/2024/03/22/signs-of-life-detectable-in-single-ice-grain-emitted-from-extraterrestrial-moons/

The ice-encrusted oceans of some of the moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter are leading candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life. A new lab-based study led by the University of Washington in Seattle and the Freie Universität Berlin shows that individual ice grains ejected from these planetary bodies may contain enough material for instruments headed there in the fall to detect signs of life, if such life exists.

"For the first time we have shown that even a tiny fraction of cellular material could be identified by a mass spectrometer onboard a spacecraft," said lead author Fabian Klenner, a UW postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences. "Our results give us more confidence that using upcoming instruments, we will be able to detect lifeforms similar to those on Earth, which we increasingly believe could be present on ocean-bearing moons."

The open-access study was published March 22 in Science Advances. Other authors in the international team are from The Open University in the U.K.; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; the University of Colorado, Boulder; and the University of Leipzig.

The Cassini mission that ended in 2017 discovered parallel cracks near the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Emanating from these cracks are plumes containing gas and ice grains. NASA's Europa Clipper mission, scheduled to launch in October, will carry more instruments to explore in even more detail an icy moon of Jupiter, Europa.

Vawmataw

 :o
We need to find life in our solar system
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ExLabs plans mission to rendezvous with asteroid Apophis
https://spacenews.com/exlabs-plans-mission-to-rendezvous-with-asteroid-apophis/

SAN FRANCISCO — Exploration Labs, a Southern California startup focused on space resources, is planning a 2028 mission to rendezvous with the asteroid Apophis before it reaches Earth.

During the mission, ExLabs intends to deposit three cubesats in Apophos' orbit. The flight also is designed to validate systems and software for future campaigns to capture and move near-Earth asteroids into stable orbits for resource acquisition.

"We're creating a unique partnership to enable a new style of lower-cost missions in collaboration with government and commercial partners," ExLabs CEO Matthew Schmidgall told SpaceNews.

ExLabs is developing massive modular spacecraft to host partner payloads, plus robotics to capture and transport space objects to new locations. Space Exploration and Resource Vehicle, or SERV, is ExLabs' spacecraft to host payloads with a mass as high as 30 metric tons in its fully stacked configuration. ExLabs' Arachne Platform is designed to capture and transport noncooperative objects.