Universe Today (Page 3)

The Moon Will Get its Own Time Zone White House officials have directed NASA to begin work on establishing a standard time for the Moon, according to a report from Reuters this week. Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) is intended to help ensure synchronization between the various lunar activities planned under the Artemis program. Timekeeping is essential to space travel. It ensures orbital maneuvers occur correctly, it helps communications between spacecraft remain secure, and it prevents errors in positioning and mapping. Without it, in other words, lunar exploration would get very complicated. We can blame Einstein and his theory of relativity for part of the problem.Read More →

A New Tabletop Experiment to Search for Dark Matter What is Dark Matter? We don’t know. At this stage of the game, scientists are busy trying to detect it and map out its presence and distribution throughout the Universe. Usually, that involves highly-engineered, sophisticated telescopes. But a new approach involves a device so small it can sit on a kitchen table. A collaboration between the University of Chicago and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has resulted in a tabletop device called Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection or BREAD. BREAD is built to detect dark matter, and its first results are now available in aRead More →

NASA Announces Starliner’s Next Launch Attempt: May 6 Starliner, the new crewed capsule from Boeing, has been in the works for a long time. Originally unveiled in 2010, the capsule has been under development for the last 14 years, primarily utilizing NASA grants and contracts. However, Boeing itself has taken upwards of 1 billion dollars in hits to earnings as part of the craft’s development. After all that time in the prototype stages, Starliner is finally ready for its first crewed flight – which has now officially been scheduled for May 6th. The launch will utilize a ULA Atlas V, which was also partly developedRead More →

Perseverance Finds its Dream Rock If there’s a Holy Grail on Mars, it’s probably a specific type of rock: A rock so important that it holds convincing clues to Mars’ ancient habitability. Perseverance might have just found it. If scientists could design the perfect rock for Perseverance to find, it would be one that displayed evidence of ancient water and was the type that preserves ancient organic material. The rover may have found it as it explores the Margin Unit, a geologic region on the inner edge of Jezero Crater’s rim. The Margin Unit was one of the reasons Jezero Crater was selected for Perseverance’sRead More →

Start Your Engines: NASA Picks 3 Teams to Work on Lunar Terrain Vehicle Some of the biggest names in aerospace — and the automotive industry — will play roles in putting NASA astronauts in the driver’s seat for roving around on the moon. The space agency today selected three teams to develop the capabilities for a lunar terrain vehicle, or LTV, which astronauts could use during Artemis missions to the moon starting with Artemis 5. That mission is currently scheduled for 2029, three years after the projected date for Artemis’ first crewed lunar landing. The teams’ leading companies may not yet be household names outsideRead More →

The Large Magellanic Cloud isn’t Very Metal The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is the Milky Way’s most massive satellite galaxy. Because it’s so easily observed, astronomers have studied it intently. They’re interested in how star formation in the LMC might have been different than in the Milky Way. A team of researchers zeroed in on the LMC’s most metal-deficient stars to find out how different. The LMC is about 163,000 light-years away and about 32,000 light-years across. Even though it’s that large, it’s still only 1/100th the mass of the Milky Way. It was probably a dwarf spiral galaxy before gravitational interactions with the MilkyRead More →

Could We Directly Observe Volcanoes on an Exoplanet? After a few decades of simply finding exoplanets, humanity is starting to be able to do something more – peer into their atmospheres. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has already started looking at the atmospheres of some larger exoplanets around brighter stars. But in many cases, scientists are still developing models that both explain what the planet’s atmosphere is made of and match the data. A new study from researchers at UC Riverside, NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center, American University, and the University of Maryland looks at what one particular atmospheric process might look like on anRead More →

What’s the Earliest the Moon Could Have Formed? Astronomers are pretty sure they know where the Moon came from. In the early Solar System, a Mars-sized object dubbed Theia smashed into Earth. This cataclysmic collision knocked a huge mass of material into orbit, which coalesced and cooled into the Moon. But establishing exactly when this occurred is a difficult task. At the 55th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 55) last month in The Woodlands, Texas, researchers proposed a new timeline of events that moves the giant impact earlier than previous predictions, at just 50 million years after the formation of the Solar System.Read More →

How Animal Movements Help Us Study the Planet Scientists have been underutilizing a key resource we can use to help us understand Earth: animals. Our fellow Earthlings have a much different, and usually much more direct, relationship with the Earth. They move around the planet in ways and to places we don’t. What can their movements tell us? Humanity has a fleet of satellites orbiting Earth that tell us all kinds of things about the planet. Satellites track temperature, CO2 emissions, rainfall, forest fires, drought, volcanic eruptions, etc. We know more about Earth than ever, and a lot of it is thanks to satellites. ClimateRead More →

Mapping Lava Tubes on the Moon and Mars from Space Sometimes, all you need for a new discovery is some creative math. That was the case for a new paper by Edward Williams and Laurent Montési of the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology. They released a brief paper at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last month that describes a mathematical way to estimate the size of a lava tube using only remote sensing techniques. A critical starting point was the discovery that the ridge height of a surface above a lava tube is proportional to the cube of the height of the lavaRead More →

A Robot Hopper to Explore the Moon’s Dangerous Terrain Intuitive Machines recently had a major breakthrough, successfully becoming the first non-governmental entity to land on the Moon in February. At least the landing was partially successful – the company’s Odysseus lander ended up on its side, though its instruments and communication links remained at least partially functional. That mission, dubbed IM-1, was the first in a series of ambitious missions the company has planned. And they recently released a paper detailing features of a unique hopping robot that will hitch a ride on its next Moon mission. Known as South Pole Hopper (or S.P. Hopper),Read More →

Inside a Week to Totality: Weather Prospects, Solar Activity and More Looking at prospects for eclipse day and totality. Have you picked out your site to observe the eclipse on April 8th? Next Monday, the shadow of the Moon crosses Mexico, the contiguous United States from Texas to Maine, and the Canadian Maritimes for the last time for this generation. And while over 30 million people live in the path of totality, millions more live within an easy day drive of the path. I’m expecting that many folks will decide to make a three-day weekend of it, and eclipse travel traffic will really pick upRead More →

Want to Leave the Solar System? Here’s a Route to Take The edge of the Solar System is defined by the heliosphere and its heliopause. The heliopause marks the region where the interstellar medium stops the outgoing solar wind. But only two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, have ever travelled to the heliopause. As a result, scientists are uncertain about the heliopause’s extent and its other properties. Some scientists are keen to learn more about this region and are developing a mission concept to explore it. The heliosphere plays a critical role in the Solar System. The Sun’s heliosphere is a shield against incomingRead More →

Curiosity has Reached an Ancient Debris Channel That Could Have Been Formed by Water Like a pilgrim seeking wisdom, NASA’s MSL Curiosity has been working its way up Mt. Sharp, the dominant central feature in Gale Crater. Now, almost 12 years into its mission, the capable rover has reached an interesting feature that could tell them more about Mars and its watery history. It’s called the Gediz Vallis channel. Gediz Vallis channel appears to have been carved by ancient water. But if that’s the case, it happened billions of years ago. The channel has since filled with rock. Mt. Sharp’s upper regions are beyond Curiosity’sRead More →

Where Are All These Rogue Planets Coming From? There’s a population of planets that drifts through space untethered to any stars. They’re called rogue planets or free-floating planets (FFPs.) Some FFPs form as loners, never having enjoyed the company of a star. But most are ejected from solar systems somehow, and there are different ways that can happen. One researcher set out to try to understand the FFP population and how they came to be. FFPs are also called isolated planetary-mass objects (iPMOs) in scientific literature, but regardless of what name’s being used, they’re the same thing. These planets wander through interstellar space on theirRead More →

Extremophiles: Why study them? What can they teach us about finding life beyond Earth? Universe Today has conducted some incredible examinations regarding a plethora of scientific fields, including impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, planetary geophysics, cosmochemistry, meteorites, and radio astronomy, and how these disciplines can help scientists and the public gain greater insight into searching for life beyond Earth. Here, we will discuss the immersive field of extremophiles with Dr. Ivan Paulino-Lima, who is a Senior Research Investigator at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer for Infinite Elements Inc., including why scientists study extremophiles, the benefits and challenges, finding lifeRead More →

It Takes a Supercomputer to Properly Simulate a Neutron Star’s Surface Neutron stars, the remains of massive stars that have imploded and gone supernova at the end of their life, can still create massive flares. These incredible bursts of energy release X-rays that propagate through space. It is a complex process to simulate but astronomers have turned to a supercomputer to help. Modelling the twisting magnetic fields, the interaction with gas and dust, the surface of flaring neutron stars has been revealed in incredible 3D. Throughout a stars life, the inward force of gravity is balanced by the outward pushing thermonuclear force. Stars like ourRead More →

Against all Odds. Japan’s SLIM Lander Survived a Second Lunar Night Upside Down You might remember the SLIM lunar lander that managed to land upside-down! The probe from the Japanese Space Agency has survived its second night on the Moon and returns a new photograph. Despite the solar panels pointing away from the Sun during the day it was still able to capture the image and transmit to Earth. All that while surviving the harsh -130C lunar night.  The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) sent SLIM (the Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon) back in January but the lightweight spacecraft landed completely wrong. Despite the wonkyRead More →

Radio Astronomy: Why study it? What can it teach us about finding life beyond Earth? Universe Today has investigated the significance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, planetary geophysics, cosmochemistry, and meteorites, and how these scientific fields contribute to researchers and the public gain greater insight into our place in the universe and finding life beyond Earth. Here, will discuss the field of radio astronomy with Dr. Wael Farah, who is a research scientist at the SETI Institute, about how radio astronomy teaches us about the myriad of celestial objects that populate our universe, along with the benefits and challenges, finding life beyond Earth, andRead More →

The Search for the Perfect Coronagraph to Find Earth 2.0 Studying exoplanets is made more difficult by the light from the host star. Coronagraphs are devices that block out the star light and both JWST and Nancy Grace Roman Telescope are equipped with them. Current coronagraphs are not quite capable of seeing other Earths but work is underway to push the limits of technology and even science for a new, more advanced device. A new paper explores the quantum techniques that may one day allow us to make such observations.  Coronagraphs are devices that attach to telescopes and were originally designed to study the coronaRead More →