Tag Archives: planet

Scientists Intrigued by Water Planet Where Ocean Appears to Be Boiling – Futurism

Posted on by

Hot enough to cook an egg. Watery Depths

About 70 light years away from our solar system is a planet that may potentially be covered entirely with water. But before you start imagining oceans just like the ones here on Earth, astronomers at the University of Cambridge say the planet-wide sea could be as hot as a pot of boiling water.

The astronomers uncovered this planet after interpreting data they had picked up using the NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, subsequently publishing their findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

They trained their sights on the TOI-270 system, which consists of a red dwarf star orbited by three exoplanets. Of these three planets, they studied data from TOI-270 d, which scientists have described as a smaller version of Neptune due to its gaseous composition.

After crunching data, analysis of the atmosphere's chemical composition suggests it might instead be a "Hycean world" meaning a planet with a large ocean and hydrogen-rich atmosphere. And astonishingly, the scientists also calculated that its temperature could be as hot as 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the boiling point of water.

But the data is open to interpreation. Other scientists who have studied the same planet were quoted by The Guardian saying they think the planet has instead a rocky surface and is covered with a very dense atmosphere made up of super hot steam and hydrogen.

"The temperature in our view is too warm for water to be liquid," University of Montreal astrophysics professor Bjrn Benneke told The Guardian.

No matter the true nature of TOI-270 d, it's astonishing we're now able to pick up the chemical signatures of distant exoplanets.

Since humankind found the first detection of an exoplanet in 1992, the number of exoplanets we have found has grown to the thousands.

Maybe the real question: in that wealth of worlds, will we ever find a planet as hospitable as our own?

More on exoplanets: Astronomers Discover Potentially Habitable Planet

Originally posted here:

Scientists Intrigued by Water Planet Where Ocean Appears to Be Boiling - Futurism

A Nasa mission that collided with an asteroid didn’t just leave a dent it reshaped the space rock – theconversation.com

Posted on by

A frequent idea in sci-fi and apocalyptic films is that of an asteroid striking Earth and causing global devastation. While the probabilities of this kind of mass extinction occurring on our planet are incredibly small, they are not zero.

The results of Nasas Dart mission to the asteroid Dimorphos have now been published. They contain fascinating details about the composition of this asteroid and whether we can defend Earth against incoming space rocks.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) was a spacecraft mission that launched in November 2021. It was sent to an asteroid called Dimorphos and commanded to collide with it, head on, in September 2022.

Dimorphos posed and poses no threat to Earth in the near future. But the mission was designed to see if deflecting an asteroid away from a collision course with Earth was possible through kinetic means in other words, a direct impact of a human-made object on its surface.

Asteroid missions are never easy. The relatively small size of these objects (compared to planets and moons) means there is no appreciable gravity to enable spacecraft to land and collect a sample.

Space agencies have launched a number of spacecraft to asteroids in recent times. For example, the Japanese space agencys (Jaxa) Hayabusa-2 mission reached the asteroid Ryugu in 2018, the same year Nasas Osiris-Rex mission rendezvoused with the asteroid Bennu.

The Japanese Hayabusa missions (1 and 2) fired a small projectile at the surface as they approached it. They would then collect the debris as it flew by.

However, the Dart mission was special in that it was not sent to deliver samples of asteroid material to labs on Earth. Instead, it was to fly at high speed into the space rock and be destroyed in the process.

A high-speed collision with an asteroid needs incredible precision. Darts target of Dimorphos was actually part of a double asteroid system, known as a binary because the smaller object orbits the larger one. This binary contained both Didymus the larger of the two objects and Dimorphos, which behaves effectively as a moon.

The simulations of what has happened to Dimorphos show that while we might expect to see a very large crater on the asteroid from Darts impact, it is more likely that it has, in fact, changed the shape of the asteroid instead.

The collision was of a mass of 580kg hitting an asteroid of roughly 5 billion kg. For comparison, this is equivalent to an ant hitting two buses. But the spacecraft is also travelling around 6 kilometres per second.

The simulation results based on observations of the asteroid Dimorphos have shown that the asteroid now orbits around its larger companion, Didymus, 33 minutes slower than before. Its orbit has gone from 11 hours, 55 minutes to 11 hours, 22 minutes.

The momentum change to the core of Dimorphos is also higher than one would predict from the direct impact, which may seem impossible at first. However, the asteroid is quite weakly constructed, consisting of loose rubble held together by gravity. The impact caused a lot of material to be blown off of Dimorphos.

This material is now travelling in the opposite direction to the impact. This acts like a recoil, slowing down the asteroid.

Observations of all the highly reflective material that has been shed from Dimorphos allows scientists to estimate how much of it has been lost from the asteroid. Their result is roughly 20 million kilograms equivalent to about six of the Apollo-era Saturn V rockets fully loaded with fuel.

Combining all the parameters together (mass, speed, angle and amount of material lost) and simulating the impact has allowed the researchers to be fairly confident about the answer. Confident not only regarding the grain size of the material coming from Dimorphos, but also that the asteroid has limited cohesion and the surface must be constantly altered, or reshaped, by minor impacts.

But what does this tell us about protecting ourselves from an asteroid impact? Significant recent impacts on Earth have included the meteor which broke up in the sky over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, and the infamous Tunguska impact over a remote part of Siberia in 1908.

While these were not the kinds of events that are able to cause mass extinctions like the 10km object that wiped out the dinosaurs when it struck our planet 66 million years ago the potential for damage and loss of life with smaller objects such as those at Chelyabinsk and Tunguska is very high.

The Dart mission cost US$324 million (255 million), which is low for a space mission, and with its development phase completed, a similar mission to go and deflect an asteroid heading our way could be launched more cheaply.

The big variable here is how much warning we will have, because a change in orbit of 30 minutes as was observed when Dart struck Dimorphos will make little difference if the asteroid is already very close to Earth. However, if we can predict the object path from further out preferably outside the Solar System and make small changes, this could be enough to divert the path of an asteroid away from our planet.

We can expect to see more of these missions in the future, not only because of interest in the science surrounding asteroids, but because the ease of removing material from them means that private companies might want to step up their ideas of mining these space rocks for precious metals.

See more here:

A Nasa mission that collided with an asteroid didn't just leave a dent it reshaped the space rock - theconversation.com

Undiscovered ‘minimoons’ may orbit Earth. Could they help us become an interplanetary species? – Livescience.com

Posted on by

In 2006, astronomers with the NASA-backed Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona discovered a peculiar body floating amid the sea of thousands of human-made satellites orbiting our planet. After taking a closer look, they determined that the object wasn't just another piece of space junk. Rather, it was a natural satellite that had been temporarily yanked into a tagalong orbit with the Earth, similar to the moon.

This "minimoon," designated 2006 RH120, was just a few meters in diameter. But unlike the actual moon, this cosmic body was a transient Earth companion, traveling around the planet for only a year before being ejected from our planet's orbit. More than a decade later, scientists with the Catalina Sky Survey spotted another minimoon (2020 CD3) this one about the size of a small car roaming through Earth's orbit, before it was flung out of the Earth-moon system's influence in March 2020.

Because of their proximity to Earth, these minimoons have warranted close scientific scrutiny. But more recently, some experts have eyed minimoons and other near-Earth asteroids for a different reason: They have the potential to act as stepping stones in our exploration of the cosmos.

"We have yet to become an interplanetary species," Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Live Science. Minimoons could become milestones "to achieve as you're learning how humans can operate in interplanetary space, and ultimately reach Mars."

In September 2016, NASA launched the uncrewed OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on a mission to collect a sample from the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu, which has a 1-in-2,700 chance of slamming into Earth in 2182. Seven years later, OSIRIS REx returned to Earth with a tiny chunk of the 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid.

The success of the OSIRIS-ReX mission has inspired scientists planning the next phases of near-Earth exploration. One idea is to use close asteroids as stepping stones for missions to Mars, Binzel said.

Retrieving Bennu was a step in the right direction, he said, but there might be a better target when it comes to testing our technology to expand further into the cosmos. At its closest, Bennu is around 186,000 miles (300,000 km) away from Earth and only crosses the planet's orbit around the sun every few years. As a result, the mission took seven years and cost an estimated $1.16 billion.

Minimoons, on the other hand, are some of the easiest asteroids to reach from Earth, Binzel said.

"To go anywhere in space, you have to change your velocity," Binzel said. Minimoons are small bodies with very little gravity, and have a low required change in velocity, or delta-V, which means that it doesn't take much propulsion to transport a spacecraft from low Earth orbit to a rendezvous with the asteroid.

Given these properties, minimoon missions would require less fuel than journeys to many other cosmic bodies. "It only takes a puff of fuel to leave the Mini-Moon and head back towards Earth," Binzel told Live Science in an email.

Journeys to minimoons would take about 100 days to get there and back, research suggests. (Our permanent moon is about a three-days' journey away, but it took NASA's Saturn V rocket 203,400 gallons (770,000 liters) of kerosene fuel and 318,000 gallons (1.2 million liters) of liquid oxygen just to get off the ground.

While minimoon missions are promising, the flaw with this strategy goes back to their ephemeral nature, which could make it difficult to plan and execute a mission before the natural satellite is ejected from its short-term journey around Earth.

"They are in tagalong orbits with the Earth, so they're like a pet," Binzel said. "Temporary pets that you keep for a while and then they wander off."

By conducting missions to minimoons and other near-Earth asteroids in their vicinity, NASA and other space agencies can test their technologies' effectiveness in deep space, including life support systems, engines and propulsion systems, Paul Abell, chief scientist for small body exploration at NASA, told Live Science.

"Going to Mars is a big, big step," he said. "There's a lot of things that have to happen, so why don't we look at some of these near-Earth asteroids that are in between the Earth-moon system and Mars."

Related: Just 22 people are needed to colonize Mars as long as they are the right personality type, study claims

These minimoon journeys could also help scientists who are dedicated to a different pursuit that could be just as crucial for getting to Mars: mining for water.

Water is vital not only for hydration but also for the creation of additional rocket fuel, which is typically liquid hydrogen. This will be required to get as far as Mars, which is, on average, more than 140 million miles (225 million km) from Earth.

Currently, spacecraft have to carry all of the water and fuel they will need from Earth. The massive weight added by the liquid drives the "tyranny of the rocket equation," which states that as payload mass increases, so must the amount of propellant required to break free from Earth's gravitational pull.

Essentially, if NASA increases the payload mass of a spacecraft even slightly, they have to add much more fuel to get it off the ground and into orbit and the fuel itself adds even more weight to lift, creating a vicious cycle. The key to breaking this cycle is finding a way to refuel in space, Abell said.

"When you go on vacation, when you fly or drive anywhere, you're not taking all your oxygen, all your food, everything with you for the entire round trip," Abell said. "Well, it's the same type of thing. We want to get away from having to take everything with us from Earth, all the way out and then come back, because that's super expensive."

The good news? Near-Earth asteroids may be ideal candidates for space gas stations. A growing body of research shows that many near-Earth asteroids are rich in minerals and water that's locked inside the rock. If this water can be accessed, it could be split into hydrogen and oxygen, both key elements for creating rocket fuel.

"If you can access that water and leverage it, all of a sudden you have water to drink, you have oxygen to breathe and, more importantly, you have rocket fuel," Abell said.

Currently, most of NASA's efforts are focused on harvesting water from the moon, but many commercial companies including Karman+, TransAstra and AstroForge have their sights set on asteroids for water and metal mining.

These operations haven't gotten off the ground yet, largely due to the cost and technology required to get to these floating rocks, experts say. But minimoon missions could help streamline operations by providing companies a training ground to test "feasibility of asteroid mining technologies for future commercial applications," according to a 2018 study.

However, minimoons themselves may not be the best option for fueling up spacecrafts because they are small, with surfaces dried out from "sitting in the sun, cooking for a long time," said Binzel.

Robert Jedicke, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and lead author of the 2018 study, suspects that many minimoons aren't water-bearing, because they may have either broken off from the moon or were pulled in from the edge of main asteroid belt, both of which suggest a low potential for water.However, other scientists, including Abell, think it could be possible. Binzel, for his part, is more optimistic, saying there's lots of uncertainty in the modeling. "You don't know til you look!" he suggests.

Even if minimoons lack water, they could enable companies "to test their ability to maneuver spacecraft near an asteroid," said Jedicke, who is currently working with TransAstra to develop techniques for mining water from asteroids.

Related: 'Stepping stone to Mars': Minimoons may help us become an interplanetary species, says MIT astrophysicist Richard Binzel

Minimoons' small size and rapid motion make them incredibly difficult to detect with existing ground-based telescopes. However, a new telescope could soon change that. High in the Chilean Andes, construction is almost complete on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will hold the world's largest digital camera.

Starting in 2025, the camera, known as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, will snap 700 pictures each night for 10 years to catalog the solar system at a high-precision 6-terapixel level. This thorough exploration of the universe will help scientists understand mysterious substances such as dark matter and dark energy. And with a tailored approach, it could also help astronomers detect a minimoon as often as every three months, according to a 2020 simulation.

And in 2027, another NASA instrument, dubbed the NEO Surveyor, will detect asteroids from space. The surveyor will complete a full scan of the sky every two weeks to characterize potentially hazardous asteroids and comets near Earth's orbit. While the primary focus of this infrared space telescope is to keep humanity safe from "planet-killer asteroids," it has the potential to uncover tiny minimoons in the process.

It's too soon to tell whether minimoon missions will play a key role in spacecraft technology or mining operations, experts told Live Science. But no matter what, studying these temporary Earth companions and other near-Earth asteroids could provide crucial clues to the mysteries of our solar system, Binzel said. Many scientists think near-Earth asteroids, like Bennu, probably brought the seeds of life to Earth early in our planet's history.

For tracing the chemical origins of the solar system and finding the ingredients that made life on Earth, minimoons are a great place to go, he said.

"But the reason we haven't gone to them before is there aren't very many of them," Binzel said. "We're just now discovering them. But they will come to the forefront because we have new telescopes coming online."

Read the rest here:

Undiscovered 'minimoons' may orbit Earth. Could they help us become an interplanetary species? - Livescience.com

Astronauts may accidentally threaten Mars missions with their gut bacteria, scientists warn – Space.com

Posted on by

As space agencies plan for future crewed missions to Mars, with NASA hoping to have humans step foot on the Red Planet as soon as the 2030s, scientists warn that astronauts themselves could be carrying a threat to these missions.

This threat may very well live within their bodies.

New research using simulated Mars conditions such as the planet's lack of water, harsh ultraviolet radiation and exposure to toxic salts suggests four strains of bacteria that can be carried in the human gut may not only survive in Martian soil, or "regolith," but, under the right conditions, thrive.

Worryingly, these bacteria including Burkholderia cepacia,Klebsiella pneumoniae,Pseudomonas aeruginosa andSerratia marcescens have the potential to cause disease in humans. For instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that even though B. cepacia can cause wildly varying symptoms, exposure to the bacteria can result in serious respiratory infections and is already resistant to common antibiotics.

"We looked at four different bacterial species, which are associated with humans and had not really been investigated in a Mars-like environment," research team member and German Aerospace Center scientist, Tommaso Zaccaria, told Space.com. "We were able to see that these species of bacteria were able to survive, to an extent, in certain Mars conditions under desiccation [loss of moisture], UV radiation and in Mars' atmosphere."

Related: Life on Mars could have thrived near active volcanoes and an ancient mile-deep lake

The bacteria's survival surprised the team. Particularly, the researchers weren't expecting how the bacteria took to toxic Martian regolith, which was simulated here on Earth to represent global conditions on the Red Planet rather than a specific area of the planet.

"We thought that the regolith would actually have more of a toxic effect on the bacteria and that it would limit the growth in such a way," Zaccaria said. "We didn't think it would completely kill them all, but we thought it would be more limiting. Instead, it seemed regolith was supplementing the bacteria's growth."

The team also found that not only can the bacteria survive for several days, with P. aeruginosa lasting for a period of up to 21 days, but in certain conditions, they could prosper in Martian soil. These conditions included access to liquid water and protection from UV light exactly the conditions human habitats on Mars will have to establish for astronaut survival.

Zaccaria added that this means missions to Mars will have to take medical precautions, such as carrying extra antibiotics, to protect humans on the Red Planet from bacterial threats brought from home.

Despite the survival of the bacteria in Mars-like conditions, the dependence on very specific conditions to survive means it is unlikely that the organisms will colonize the Red Planet after being carried from Earth. "Growth would be very limited," Zaccaria assured.

That doesn't mean there isn't cause for concern, however.

"We still think it's quite important to protect Mars, and we want to highlight the fact that there should be some mission planning to take into account also these kinds of bacteria," Zaccaria said. "We don't want to contaminate Mars with human-related bacteria."

Currently, NASA rovers Curiosity and Perseverance are exploring ancient, dried lake beds on Mars to search for signs that simple life, like bacteria, could have once existed on the presently arid world.

This new research suggests, however, that if humans were to explore regions like this in person, they may carry unwanted bacteria with them and potentially cause contamination. This bacteria could also change under the conditions of Mars, making it hard to identify as having come from Earth. And this could result in some confusion that prevents us from determining whether signs of life discovered on Mars originated on the Red Planet or hitched a ride from our own home.

"If there would be some interesting astrobiological interest on a specific location of Mars, perhaps only easily sterilized robotic missions less contained with human bacteria should be allowed to go there," Zaccaria said. "This could involve classifying certain areas of Mars as regions like national parks that we have here on Earth."

Zaccaria added that, because the human immune system functions differently in the microgravity of space, he can't currently predict the precise effect the four studied bacteria would have on human health on Mars. This is an investigation that he and his colleagues at the German Aerospace Center will undertake in the future.

Additionally, the researchers will investigate how other bacteria deal with Mars-like conditions.

"Perhaps some bacteria would be more tolerant to the conditions on Mars, and they will resist for longer periods of time, or maybe they're less resistant," Zaccaria concluded. "It will be interesting to evaluate other types of bacteria which are human-associated, which do not necessarily cause disease, but can be transported by the human microbiome either on the skin or inside the human body, to Mars."

The team's research was published in January in the journal Astrobiology.

Link:

Astronauts may accidentally threaten Mars missions with their gut bacteria, scientists warn - Space.com

China releases footage of Earth taken from space station – CGTN

Posted on by

00:56

China Manned Space Agencyreleased footage of the Earth taken from the ChinaSpace Station on January 4. The footage shows the scenery of the planet, including the Caspian Sea and China's Xizang Autonomous Region. The space station features a basic three-module configuration consisting of the core module, Tianhe, and two lab modules, Wentian and Mengtian.

Read more here:

China releases footage of Earth taken from space station - CGTN