Space news topic and space related news

[Toliman]

NASA Advances Instrument to Study the Plumes of Enceladus

NASA scientists and engineers have conceived and plan to build an ambitious submillimeter-wave or radio instrument to study the composition of geysers spewing water vapor and icy particles from the south pole of Saturn's small moon, Enceladus.

The team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, recently received support to advance technologies needed for the Submillimeter Enceladus Life Fundamentals Instrument, or SELFI. This remote-sensing instrument represents a significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art in submillimeter-wavelength devices, said SELFI Principal Investigator Gordon Chin.

SELFI is being designed to measure traces of chemicals in the plumes of water vapor and icy particles that emanate from fissures, also known as tiger stripes, on Enceladus, Saturn's sixth largest moon. By studying the plumes, scientists believe they can extrapolate the composition of the ocean that lies beneath the moon's icy crust and its potential to host extraterrestrial life.

Enceladus has intrigued scientists since NASA's recently ended Cassini mission discovered the plumes that continuously spew particles, water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases from about 100 sites on the moon's surface. Although scientists initially thought that Enceladus was frozen solid, Cassini data revealed a slight wobble in the moon's orbit that suggests the presence of a global ocean beneath the ice. Saturn's tidal forces appear to pull and squeeze Enceladus, generating enough heat to hold water liquid in the interior and crack the icy shell. This forms fissures from which jets of water spray into space.

The question scientists ultimately want to answer is whether life exists in Enceladus or on other icy worlds in the outer solar system. At the bottom of Earth's oceans, hydrothermal vents thrive with life. Does Enceladus have warm hydrothermal vents at the bottom of its ocean that might support life?

"Submillimeter wavelengths, which are in the range of very high-frequency radio, give us a way to measure the quantity of many different kinds of molecules in a cold gas. We can scan through all the plumes to see what's coming out from Enceladus," Chin said. "Water vapor and other molecules can reveal some of the ocean's chemistry and guide a spacecraft onto the best path to fly through the plumes to make other measurements directly."

More here:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/picture-this-selfi-nasa-advances-instrument-to-study-the-plumes-of-enceladus

[Toliman]

Just found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3RaclgZaYo

Quite interesting video, more about this exoplanet here:
http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2017-38

[Toliman]

Next interesting attempt to contact aliens...

'Sónar Calling' campaign broadcasts music and messages to an alien super-Earth
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/sonar-calling-campaign-broadcasts-music-messages-alien-super-earth/

well, now we can start wait for any reply ... only 25 years ... xD

[`Eylan Ayfalulukanä]

Interesting choice of frequencies. They don't correspond to any natural phenomena I am aware of that other races would likely monitor for transmissions. You would think they would use something in the 21 cm "Water hole", where their antenna would also have more gain.

[Toliman]

Yeah, choice of frequencies is interesting.



Found this:

Hubble Movie Shows Movement of Light Echo Around Exploded Star

Voices reverberating off mountains and the sound of footsteps bouncing off walls are examples of an echo. Echoes happen when sound waves ricochet off surfaces and return to the listener.

Space has its own version of an echo. It's not made with sound but with light, and occurs when light bounces off dust clouds.

The Hubble telescope has just captured one of these cosmic echoes, called a "light echo," in the nearby starburst galaxy M82, located 11.4 million light-years away. A movie assembled from more than two years' worth of Hubble images reveals an expanding shell of light from a supernova explosion sweeping through interstellar space three years after the stellar blast was discovered. The "echoing" light looks like a ripple expanding on a pond. The supernova, called SN 2014J, was discovered on Jan. 21, 2014.

A light echo occurs because light from the stellar blast travels different distances to arrive at Earth. Some light comes to Earth directly from the supernova blast. Other light is delayed because it travels indirectly. In this case, the light is bouncing off a huge dust cloud that extends 300 to 1,600 light-years around the supernova and is being reflected toward Earth.

So far, astronomers have spotted only 15 light echoes around supernovae outside our Milky Way galaxy. Light echo detections from supernovae are rarely seen because they must be nearby for a telescope to resolve them.



Found here:
http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2017-42

[Toliman]

First publicly available science observations for James Webb Space Telescope announced

The Space Telescope Science Institute is announcing some of the first science programs NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will conduct following its launch and commissioning. These specific observations are part of a program of Director's Discretionary Early Release Science (DD-ERS), which will provide the scientific community with immediate access to Webb data. These data will help inform proposals for observations in the second year of Webb operations. The 13 ERS programs will address a broad variety of science areas, from black hole growth and the assembly of galaxies to star formation and the study of exoplanets.

More here:
http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2017-39

[Toliman]

NASA Hosts Media Teleconference to Announce Latest Kepler Discovery

NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST Thursday, Dec. 14, to announce the latest discovery made by its planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence, and demonstrates new ways of analyzing Kepler data.

Teleconference audio and visuals will stream live at:
https://www.nasa.gov/live



Found here:
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-hosts-media-teleconference-to-announce-latest-kepler-discovery

[BlueHusky2154]

It will be interesting to see what they found.

[Toliman]

It will be interesting to see what they found.

I guess that it really will be. I will watch it
Almost all recent discoveries from Kepler space telescope were quite interesting.

[BlueHusky2154]

Just wait until JWST is launched.

[Toliman]

Just wait until JWST is launched.

I wait too - there is potential for great discoveries.
I just hope that JWST will be really launched at 2019 (launching was already delayed from 2018 to 2019).

[BlueHusky2154]

Let's not have it delayed like Avatar 2. 

[`Eylan Ayfalulukanä]

JWST is far enough along that a major delay is fairly unlikely. There are also AFAIK, few constraints on launch windows for Langerine points, so it won't be, like, waiting for Mars to be in the right spot to launch to Mars.

[Toliman]

Let's not have it delayed like Avatar 2. 

HRH
It would be very long waiting...

[BlueHusky2154]

JWST is far enough along that a major delay is fairly unlikely. There are also AFAIK, few constraints on launch windows for Langerine points, so it won't be, like, waiting for Mars to be in the right spot to launch to Mars.

That's positive. I would really like to see JWST up and running.

[Vawmataw]

Let's not have it delayed like Avatar 2. 

HRH
It would be very long waiting...

If he isn't part of the team, it's good.

[BlueHusky2154]

JWST will give us some awesome views, that's for sure.

[Toliman]

JWST will give us some awesome views, that's for sure.

True!
So let's hope that launching of JWST will be successul and JWST will work well (no another event like case of HST primary mirror...)

[BlueHusky2154]

Hopefully it doesn't need glasses like Hubble did.

[Toliman]

Artificial intelligence, NASA data used to discover eighth planet circling distant star

Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light-years from Earth. The planet was discovered in data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope.

The newly-discovered Kepler-90i – a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days – was found using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence in which computers "learn." In this case, computers learned to identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets.

"Just as we expected, there are exciting discoveries lurking in our archived Kepler data, waiting for the right tool or technology to unearth them," said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in Washington. "This finding shows that our data will be a treasure trove available to innovative researchers for years to come."

The discovery came about after researchers Christopher Shallue and Andrew Vanderburg trained a computer to learn how to identify exoplanets in the light readings recorded by Kepler – the minuscule change in brightness captured when a planet passed in front of, or transited, a star. Inspired by the way neurons connect in the human brain, this artificial "neural network" sifted through Kepler data and found weak transit signals from a previously-missed eighth planet orbiting Kepler-90, in the constellation Draco.

While machine learning has previously been used in searches of the Kepler database, this research demonstrates that neural networks are a promising tool in finding some of the weakest signals of distant worlds. 

More here:
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/artificial-intelligence-nasa-data-used-to-discover-eighth-planet-circling-distant-star