by Nancy Atkinson on April 10, 2013
A closeup of an impact crater shows distinctive bright lines and spots on the steep slope, indicating bouncing boulders have fallen down the incline. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.
What are the types of things that happen on Mars when we’re not looking? Some things we’ll never know, but scientists with the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have seen evidence of bouncing boulders. They haven’t actually captured boulders in the act of rolling and bouncing down the steep slope of an impact crater (but they have captured avalanches while they were happening!)
Instead, they see distinctive bright lines and spots on the side of a crater, and these patterns weren’t they the last time HiRISE imaged this crater 5 years ago (2.6 Mars years ago), in March 2008.
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by Nancy Atkinson on April 10, 2013
Concept of Asteroid Capture in Progress. Credit: NASA.
NASA’s FY2014 budget proposal includes a plan to robotically capture a small near-Earth asteroid and redirect it safely to a stable orbit in the Earth-moon system where astronauts can visit and explore it. A spacecraft would capture an asteroid — which hasn’t been chosen yet, but would be about 7 meters (25 feet) wide — in 2019. Then using an Orion space capsule, a crew of about four astronauts would station-keep with the space rock in 2021 to allow for EVAs for exploration.
NASA has released new images, a video and more information about the mission.
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by Nancy Atkinson on April 10, 2013
NASA has released their budget proposal for 2014 and, as rumored, it includes funding for the preliminary work to begin a mission to capture an asteroid and bring it to lunar orbit. This is part of President Obama’s $3.77 trillion spending plan for the US budget, and the Fiscal Year 2014 request for NASA totals $17.7 billion. This is $50 million less than the request for 2013, and NASA said they had to make some “tough choices” in putting the proposal together. The new proposal appears to hit the Planetary Science program especially hard (no new missions to the outer planets or moons, it appears), but does include money for Plutonium-238 production and additional funding for asteroid detection. But both those enterprises now rest solely with the Planetary Science budget.
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by Nancy Atkinson on April 10, 2013
This artist’s concept illustrates how charged water particles flow into the Saturnian atmosphere from the planet’s rings, causing a reduction in atmospheric brightness. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/University of Leicester
Astronomers have known for years there was water in Saturn’s upper atmosphere, but they weren’t sure exactly where it was coming from. New observations have found water is raining down on Saturn, and it is coming from the planet’s rings.
“Saturn is the first planet to show significant interaction between its atmosphere and ring system,” said James O’Donoghue, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leicester and author of a new paper published in the journal Nature. “The main effect of ring rain is that it acts to ‘quench’ the ionosphere of Saturn, severely reducing the electron densities in regions in which it falls.”
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by Bob King on April 10, 2013
Comet C/2011 L4 PANSTARRS on the evening of April 9, 2013 from Austria. Dust released when the sun vaporizes the comet’s ice is pushed back by the pressure of sunlight to form the tail. Click to enlarge. Credit: Michael Jaeger
It’s falling out of the news but Comet PANSTARRS still lives! You can still see it in a clear sky near you with nothing more than a pair of binoculars. And thanks to guidance from the bright zigzag of Cassiopeia, it’s easier than ever to find. Would that we had had this star group to point up comet-ward in March when PANSTARRS was brightest!
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