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- Dennisch
They found dust, and lots of it.
Space In General
- Thread starter BubbleBelly542
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They found dust, and lots of it.
- 11,264
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- eran0004
Dotini
(Banned)
- 15,742
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- CR80_Shifty
Likely they will announce the discovery of water - maybe saltwater - in sufficient evidence to warrant a new mission specifically designed, intended and funded to discover evidence of life, past or present.
Likely they will say their discovery caps one era of Mars exploration and opens the door to another, more ambitious.
Likely they will say their discovery caps one era of Mars exploration and opens the door to another, more ambitious.
- 33,155
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- 20,681
- TenEightyOne
- TenEightyOne
NASA news is periodic water flows on Mars.
In eclipse news, here's my own pic, couldn't see much after this point due to fog.
In eclipse news, here's my own pic, couldn't see much after this point due to fog.
- 29,311
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- GTP_Mars
I also just found this - 2015 Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year winner...
Very cool picture, although I suspected that it isn't an actual 'photo', but a montage or superposition of several shots (which apparently it is), otherwise I'm struggling to see where the sunlight on the left side of the image is coming from!
Very cool picture, although I suspected that it isn't an actual 'photo', but a montage or superposition of several shots (which apparently it is), otherwise I'm struggling to see where the sunlight on the left side of the image is coming from!
Wiegert
Premium
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@Touring Mars Looks like a part of the distant sky that was unobscured by the moon's transit at that point.
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- eran0004
I love the part about instruments designed to search for life not being allowed to go to places where there may be life, because they may contaminate the sites
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@Danoff, this is the text that goes with the pictures.
History
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has returned the best color and the highest resolution images yet of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon – and these pictures show a surprisingly complex and violent history.
Charon in Enhanced Color NASA's New Horizons captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Charon just before closest approach on July 14, 2015. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC); the colors are processed to best highlight the variation of surface properties across Charon. Charon’s color palette is not as diverse as Pluto’s; most striking is the reddish north (top) polar region, informally named Mordor Macula. Charon is 754 miles (1,214 kilometers) across; this image resolves details as small as 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometers).
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they’re finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more.
“We thought the probability of seeing such interesting features on this satellite of a world at the far edge of our solar system was low,” said Ross Beyer, an affiliate of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team from the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, “but I couldn't be more delighted with what we see."
High-resolution images of Charon were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, shortly before closest approach on July 14, 2015, and overlaid with enhanced color from the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). Charon’s cratered uplands at the top are broken by series of canyons, and replaced on the bottom by the rolling plains of the informally named Vulcan Planum. The scene covers Charon’s width of 754 miles (1,214 kilometers) and resolves details as small as 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers).
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
High-resolution images of the Pluto-facing hemisphere of Charon, taken by New Horizons as the spacecraft sped through the Pluto system on July 14 and transmitted to Earth on Sept. 21, reveal details of a belt of fractures and canyons just north of the moon’s equator. This great canyon system stretches more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across the entire face of Charon and likely around onto Charon’s far side. Four times as long as the Grand Canyon, and twice as deep in places, these faults and canyons indicate a titanic geological upheaval in Charon’s past.
“It looks like the entire crust of Charon has been split open,” said John Spencer, deputy lead for GGI at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “With respect to its size relative to Charon, this feature is much like the vast Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars.”
This composite of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left), was taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it passed through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015. This image highlights the striking differences between Pluto and Charon. The color and brightness of both Pluto and Charon have been processed identically to allow direct comparison of their surface properties, and to highlight the similarity between Charon’s polar red terrain and Pluto’s equatorial red terrain. Pluto and Charon are shown with approximately correct relative sizes, but their true separation is not to scale. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC).
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
The team has also discovered that the plains south of the Charon’s canyon -- informally referred to as Vulcan Planum -- have fewer large craters than the regions to the north, indicating that they are noticeably younger. The smoothness of the plains, as well as their grooves and faint ridges, are clear signs of wide-scale resurfacing.
One possibility for the smooth surface is a kind of cold volcanic activity, called cryovolcanism. “The team is discussing the possibility that an internal water ocean could have frozen long ago, and the resulting volume change could have led to Charon cracking open, allowing water-based lavas to reach the surface at that time,” said Paul Schenk, a New Horizons team member from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
Images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft were used to create this flyover video of Pluto's largest moon, Charon. The “flight” starts with the informally named Mordor (dark) region near Charon’s north pole. The camera then moves south to a vast chasm, descending from 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) to just 40 miles (60 kilometers) above the surface to fly through the canyon system. From there it’s a turn to the south to view the plains and "moat mountain," informally named Kubrick Mons, a prominent peak surrounded by a topographic depression. New Horizons Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) photographs showing details at up to 400 meters per pixel were used to create the basemap for this animation. Those images, along with pictures taken from a slightly different vantage point by the spacecraft’s Ralph/ Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), were used to create a preliminary digital terrain (elevation) model. The images and model were combined and super-sampled to create this animation.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Stuart Robbins
Even higher-resolution Charon images and composition data are still to come as New Horizons transmits data, stored on its digital recorders, over the next year – and as that happens, “I predict Charon’s story will become even more amazing!” said mission Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
The New Horizons spacecraft is currently 3.1 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) from Earth, with all systems healthy and operating normally.
New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. APL designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning.
From here
History
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has returned the best color and the highest resolution images yet of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon – and these pictures show a surprisingly complex and violent history.
Charon in Enhanced Color NASA's New Horizons captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Charon just before closest approach on July 14, 2015. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC); the colors are processed to best highlight the variation of surface properties across Charon. Charon’s color palette is not as diverse as Pluto’s; most striking is the reddish north (top) polar region, informally named Mordor Macula. Charon is 754 miles (1,214 kilometers) across; this image resolves details as small as 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometers).
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
At half the diameter of Pluto, Charon is the largest satellite relative to its planet in the solar system. Many New Horizons scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they’re finding a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more.
“We thought the probability of seeing such interesting features on this satellite of a world at the far edge of our solar system was low,” said Ross Beyer, an affiliate of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team from the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, “but I couldn't be more delighted with what we see."
High-resolution images of Charon were taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, shortly before closest approach on July 14, 2015, and overlaid with enhanced color from the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). Charon’s cratered uplands at the top are broken by series of canyons, and replaced on the bottom by the rolling plains of the informally named Vulcan Planum. The scene covers Charon’s width of 754 miles (1,214 kilometers) and resolves details as small as 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers).
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
High-resolution images of the Pluto-facing hemisphere of Charon, taken by New Horizons as the spacecraft sped through the Pluto system on July 14 and transmitted to Earth on Sept. 21, reveal details of a belt of fractures and canyons just north of the moon’s equator. This great canyon system stretches more than 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) across the entire face of Charon and likely around onto Charon’s far side. Four times as long as the Grand Canyon, and twice as deep in places, these faults and canyons indicate a titanic geological upheaval in Charon’s past.
“It looks like the entire crust of Charon has been split open,” said John Spencer, deputy lead for GGI at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “With respect to its size relative to Charon, this feature is much like the vast Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars.”
This composite of enhanced color images of Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left), was taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as it passed through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015. This image highlights the striking differences between Pluto and Charon. The color and brightness of both Pluto and Charon have been processed identically to allow direct comparison of their surface properties, and to highlight the similarity between Charon’s polar red terrain and Pluto’s equatorial red terrain. Pluto and Charon are shown with approximately correct relative sizes, but their true separation is not to scale. The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the spacecraft’s Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC).
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
The team has also discovered that the plains south of the Charon’s canyon -- informally referred to as Vulcan Planum -- have fewer large craters than the regions to the north, indicating that they are noticeably younger. The smoothness of the plains, as well as their grooves and faint ridges, are clear signs of wide-scale resurfacing.
One possibility for the smooth surface is a kind of cold volcanic activity, called cryovolcanism. “The team is discussing the possibility that an internal water ocean could have frozen long ago, and the resulting volume change could have led to Charon cracking open, allowing water-based lavas to reach the surface at that time,” said Paul Schenk, a New Horizons team member from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.
Images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft were used to create this flyover video of Pluto's largest moon, Charon. The “flight” starts with the informally named Mordor (dark) region near Charon’s north pole. The camera then moves south to a vast chasm, descending from 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) to just 40 miles (60 kilometers) above the surface to fly through the canyon system. From there it’s a turn to the south to view the plains and "moat mountain," informally named Kubrick Mons, a prominent peak surrounded by a topographic depression. New Horizons Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) photographs showing details at up to 400 meters per pixel were used to create the basemap for this animation. Those images, along with pictures taken from a slightly different vantage point by the spacecraft’s Ralph/ Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), were used to create a preliminary digital terrain (elevation) model. The images and model were combined and super-sampled to create this animation.
Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Stuart Robbins
Even higher-resolution Charon images and composition data are still to come as New Horizons transmits data, stored on its digital recorders, over the next year – and as that happens, “I predict Charon’s story will become even more amazing!” said mission Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
The New Horizons spacecraft is currently 3.1 billion miles (5 billion kilometers) from Earth, with all systems healthy and operating normally.
New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. APL designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning.
From here
CodeRedR51
Premium
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- thematic604
This isn't new but I've been looking for something similar for a while.
NASA Trajectory Browser
Bookmark? You bet!
NASA Trajectory Browser
Bookmark? You bet!
CodeRedR51
Premium
- 55,308
- United States
Final report from the SpaceX rocket mishap will basically say what we already know, the strut failure causing a helium bottle to explode.
http://www.space.com/30801-spacex-f...=10153107181846466&adbpl=fb&adbpr=17610706465
http://www.space.com/30801-spacex-f...=10153107181846466&adbpl=fb&adbpr=17610706465
Robin
Premium
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- United Kingdom
Lots of cool moon related stuff going up for auction including the only privately owned watch which went to the moon which is a Bulova. Omega better rethink that "only" line on the back of their Speedmasters!
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/plane...r-auctions-space-and-aviation-sale/ss-AAfh6Yu
http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/plane...r-auctions-space-and-aviation-sale/ss-AAfh6Yu
- 22,551
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http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/11/tech/china-fast-telescope/index.html
Haven't seen anything posted about this massive project yet.
Haven't seen anything posted about this massive project yet.
- 29,311
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- GTP_Mars
Yes, that's about right... what that picture doesn't show, however, is that our galaxy may be around 100,000 light years across (that's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 km, or 1 quintillion kilometers) but it's a flat disc with a bulge in the middle, and is 'only' a few thousand light years wide out where we are - but that's still a few quadrillion km before you could safely say you were 'out' of the Milky Way.
You may be thinking about stars as opposed to galaxies... any stars within ~100 light years of us would (in principle anyway) be able to detect our radio transmissions, but that's about it... check this out: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/250lys.html Within a 250 lyr radius, there's ~260,000 star systems, but as for other galaxies, you need to zoom out a little bit further than that. Within a ~100 lyr radius, there's several thousand star systems that could be tuning in to some old episodes of the Goon Show as we speak (though I seriously doubt it). It would be hilarious, however, if that was the first thing an alien civilisation encountered of the human race...
You may be thinking about stars as opposed to galaxies... any stars within ~100 light years of us would (in principle anyway) be able to detect our radio transmissions, but that's about it... check this out: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/250lys.html Within a 250 lyr radius, there's ~260,000 star systems, but as for other galaxies, you need to zoom out a little bit further than that. Within a ~100 lyr radius, there's several thousand star systems that could be tuning in to some old episodes of the Goon Show as we speak (though I seriously doubt it). It would be hilarious, however, if that was the first thing an alien civilisation encountered of the human race...
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It's not a question of signal strength - all electromagnetic waves are fundamentally limited by the speed of light, c. It is not physically possible to travel any faster than that. As a result, light (and radio waves etc.) can only travel a finite distance in any given time period, specifically 300,000,000 meters (300,000 km) per second. But, even travelling at that incredible speed, it still takes light some 100,000 years to travel from one side of our galaxy to the other.... it takes an incredible 2.5 million years to reach the nearest grand spiral galaxy, Andromeda (and yes, that's still travelling at 300,000 kilometers per second). For reference, 1 light year is the distance light travels in one Earth year, and is equivalent to around 10 trillion kilometers.
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That's the idea for the moment, yes - there remain some more outlandish ideas about how and where we might detect alien civilizations, but SETI etc. are currently looking through various regions of the electromagnetic spectrum for signals that may be from an extraterrestrial civilization. However, even if such a signal were to be detected, there would remain a strong possibility that it emanated from a civilization that has long since disappeared - say, for example, a signal is detected from M33 (Andromeda galaxy) tomorrow... it would have to have been 'sent' 2.5 million years ago. Looked at the other way, the only outward signs of human existence are the radio and light transmissions we've produced, which means that any star system beyond the (relatively) nearby stars up to 100 light years away wouldn't detect any sign of human radio activity, even if they were looking right at us.
A more depressing thought is what happens when human activity comes to an end - let's say 1,000 years from now (and that's possibly optimistic!). You can then visualize all human radio/optical signals as a spherical 'pulse' expanding out through space, sweeping by stars and planets as it goes... a 2D slice through it would look like a ring 1,000 light years thick. That would give any possible detector (e.g. aliens looking for intelligent life) a window of just 1,000 years to find our signal. It's possible that many such pulses have passed us in the dim and distant past, or will do so in the far future, but either way there is a chance that we won't be around to find any, and there's a chance that our own activities will never be detected for the same reason.
The speed of all electromagnetic radiation (which includes both radio and visible light) is constant for any given medium, but it cannot travel faster than it does when traveling through a vacuum such as in outer space. It is (apparently) possible to slow light down in a vacuum (as some colleagues of mine recently showed: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/speed-light-not-so-constant-after-all ), but as for speeding up light, that's not possible.
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Okay thank you bud. It's very complicated, and obviously a long process. A whole needle in a haystack thing.
I can only admire them for really putting in the effort.
I suppose this is also why they are looking even for bacteria in our solar system. More realistic. Achievable.
The liquid on Mars has given them a boost, and perhaps they will want to get man there sooner.
I read somewhere that Saturns moon has liquids as well, or frozen liquid.
- 29,311
- Glasgow
- GTP_Mars
Actually, finding evidence of life in our solar system is a lot harder and considerably more expensive and possibly less convincing (see below) than searching for extraterrestrial communications. The latter is a pretty passive thing that can be done pretty easily, if not for the fact that there are arguably better things to do with valuable telescopes and expensive astronomers. Even the data analysis can be outsourced, such as the SETI project that relies on volunteers donating their PCs idle time to process the data.
Going to other planets/moons to look for physical evidence of extraterrestrial life forms is unbelievably expensive, and it would almost certainly not involve sending people there - OK, it might involve people manning a mothership while various probes were deployed to explore the planet/moon/asteroid in question, but I doubt it. If anything, sending people anywhere near these pristine environments would risk contamination, thus defeating the entire purpose of the trip.
There also remains the question of whether it is possible that life from Earth could have reached other places i.e. a meteor strike could send biological material into space where it could eventually end up somewhere where it might survive... however incredibly unlikely that might be. But it's not that unheard of... there are thousands of Martian meteors on Earth, and we know for certain that there is some exchange of material between Mars and here... Titan or Europa, however, is maybe pushing it a bit.
Going to other planets/moons to look for physical evidence of extraterrestrial life forms is unbelievably expensive, and it would almost certainly not involve sending people there - OK, it might involve people manning a mothership while various probes were deployed to explore the planet/moon/asteroid in question, but I doubt it. If anything, sending people anywhere near these pristine environments would risk contamination, thus defeating the entire purpose of the trip.
There also remains the question of whether it is possible that life from Earth could have reached other places i.e. a meteor strike could send biological material into space where it could eventually end up somewhere where it might survive... however incredibly unlikely that might be. But it's not that unheard of... there are thousands of Martian meteors on Earth, and we know for certain that there is some exchange of material between Mars and here... Titan or Europa, however, is maybe pushing it a bit.
