Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond.
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Here’s the answer for this week’s Where In The Universe Challenge. And okay, okay, almost everyone proved they’ve been keeping up on current events. And UT readers are definitely getting to know HiRISE images almost on sight. So congrats if you said a HiRISE image. I’m really proud of all of you! So, just what is in this image? Ian wrote about it here last week. This is terrain near the north pole on Mars, probably not all that far away from the little Phoenix lander . The bright patch of material is ice, which might have been deposited in the previous winter. Here’s the explanation from the HiRISE site:
“After ice in the form of surface frost is deposited from the atmosphere, it experiences changes throughout the Martian year. Some of the ice has a polygonal texture which probably formed when temperature variations created stress and cracks in the ice.
The dark features scattered throughout the scene are dunes. The streaks emanating from the dunes trending in the southwest direction indicate the dominant direction of the wind in recent times.”
So great job, to all of our wonderful and knowledgeable UT readers who got it right. I’ll try to make it a little more challenging next week. For those of you who guessed wrong, just keep trying; there will be lots of chances to get some right. As my uncle used to say, even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in awhile.
How did everyone like this new format, where we pose the challenge one day and provide the answer the next?
Engineers look on in the Space Telescope Operations Control Center as commands are sent to the SIC and DH. Credit: NASA
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So far, everything is going well and as planned for the Hubble Space Telescope’s long-distance ‘brain surgery.’ During the night of Oct. 15, Space Telescope Operations Control Center engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center successfully turned on and checked out Side B of Hubble’s Science Instrument Control and Data Handling (SIC&DH) system. Engineers were then able to retrieve the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) instruments. They were being held in safe mode, and were turned on, each showing they had a working interface to the Side B of SIC&DH. The instruments were then commanded back into safe mode, and then at noon today commands will be sent from Side B to each of the instruments. Engineers will then begin calibrations of the telescope’s science instruments, which they hope to finish before midnight Thursday. So this is good news…
The primary data handling system, Side A, had been used exclusively since HST launched in 1991. It failed two weeks ago. While engineers believed the redundant Side B – which hadn’t been turned on for over 18 years – would work, nothing was certain.
Scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore should complete the check-out of all the instruments by noon on Friday, October 17. They will collecting and compare baseline exposures previously taken using Side A to new exposures, using by Side B. If everything looks good, everyone is hoping normal science observations will resume early Friday morning.
The ISS had a full house during the STS-124 mission. Credit:NASA
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A Russian official misspoke last weekend when he said the number of crew members on board the International Space Station probably wouldn’t increase next year as planned. On Saturday, Roscosmos head Anatoly Perminov said, “I doubt that the ISS crew will be increased to six people from next year because the final decision has not been taken yet. All countries participating in the ISS program have to decide it.” But today NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries said Perminov made a mistake. “There are no impediments for going forward with expanding the crew size from three to six,” Humphries told Universe Today. The issue was also discussed during a press conference with the space station crew, including the newly arrived crew of three that launched on a Soyuz rocket on Sunday: U.S. astronaut Mike Fincke, Russian cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov and U.S. space tourist Richard Garriott.
NASA and the international partners working together to construct the ISS want to increase the crew size in order to expand the capability to conduct research. But in order to boost the crew size, the station must be able to recycle condensation, cooling water and even urine to provide enough potable water for the astronauts, their experiments and the station’s U.S. oxygen generator. Additional astronaut sleep stations, a second toilet (and repairing the one already on board) and a second galley also must be delivered, installed and checked out.
Fincke said the main mission during his Expedition 18 is to get the space station, currently sized for three people, up and running and ready to go for six people. “It’s going to take a lot of work, but it’s the next step in getting the space station fully operational. We’ve got the right team for it,” he said. Fincke will take over as commander of the station on Oct. 22.
Here’s the image for this week’s “Where In The Universe” challenge. But we’re going to try something different this time. Several readers have suggested (and maybe even begged) that we don’t reveal the answer right away, but allow everyone a chance to mull over the image and provide their answer in the comment section. Then tomorrow, I’ll post the answer and you can see how you did. So here you go: Take a look at the image above and try to determine where in the universe this image was taken. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for taking this image. Post your answers in the comments (if you’re brave enough!) and check back tomorrow for the answer. Good luck!
Artist impression of a black hole. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
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What is the environment around a black hole really like? Astronomers are getting a better idea by observing the light coming from the accretion disk surrounding black holes. The light is not constant — it flares, sputters and sparkles – and this flickering provides new and surprising insights into the colossal amount of energy emanating from around black holes. By mapping out how well the variations in visible light match those in X-rays on very short timescales, astronomers have shown that magnetic fields must play a crucial role in the way black holes swallow matter.
“The rapid flickering of light from a black hole is most commonly observed at X-ray wavelengths,” says Poshak Gandhi, who led the international team that reports these results. “This new study is one of only a handful to date that also explore the fast variations in visible light, and, most importantly how these fluctuations relate to those in X-rays.”
The observations tracked the flickering of the black holes simultaneously using two different instruments, one on the ground and one in space. The X-ray data were taken using NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite. The visible light was collected with the high speed camera ULTRACAM, a visiting instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), recording up to 20 images a second. ULTRACAM was developed by team members Vik Dhillon and Tom Marsh. “These are among the fastest observations of a black hole ever obtained with a large optical telescope,” says Dhillon.
To their surprise, astronomers discovered that the brightness fluctuations in the visible light were even more rapid than those seen in X-rays. In addition, the visible-light and X-ray variations were found not to be simultaneous, but to follow a repeated and remarkable pattern: just before an X-ray flare the visible light dims, and then surges to a bright flash for a tiny fraction of a second before rapidly decreasing again.
Watch a movie of the fluctuations.
None of this radiation emerges directly from the black hole, but from the intense energy flows of electrically charged matter in its vicinity. The environment of a black hole is constantly being reshaped by a competing forces such as gravity, magnetism and explosive pressure. As a result, light emitted by the hot flows of matter varies in brightness in a muddled and haphazard way. “But the pattern found in this new study possesses a stable structure that stands out amidst an otherwise chaotic variability, and so, it can yield vital clues about the dominant underlying physical processes in action,” says team member Andy Fabian.
The visible-light emission from the neighborhoods of black holes was widely thought to be a secondary effect, with a primary X-ray outburst illuminating the surrounding gas that subsequently shone in the visible range. But if this were so, any visible-light variations would lag behind the X-ray variability, and would be much slower to peak and fade away. “The rapid visible-light flickering now discovered immediately rules out this scenario for both systems studied,” asserts Gandhi. “Instead the variations in the X-ray and visible light output must have some common origin, and one very close to the black hole itself.”
Strong magnetic fields represent the best candidate for the dominant physical process. Acting as a reservoir, they can soak up the energy released close to the black hole, storing it until it can be discharged either as hot (multi-million degree) X-ray emitting plasma, or as streams of charged particles travelling at close to the speed of light. The division of energy into these two components can result in the characteristic pattern of X-ray and visible-light variability.
A solid rocket motor casing from a commercial U.S. Delta 2 launch vehicle was found inAustralia, nearly 18 years after it reentered. Picture by Michael White
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This just in from ‘The Sky is Falling’ Department: NASA’s Orbital Debris Newsletter reports that a launch vehicle rocket motor casing was found by ranchers in the Australian Outback during a cattle round-up on a three million-acre pasture property. It was first spotted by Mr. Arthur Taylor who was flying a Cessna aircraft to look for stray cattle. The casing appeared in relatively good condition (see picture above) and did not seem to be very old. Mr. Michael White forwarded numerous photos of the object to the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office, including one with a clear serial number next to the nozzle attachment point. Using the serial number, NASA Kennedy Space Center personnel were able to trace the motor casing to a a specific mission.
The casing came from a Delta 2 rocket used on June 2, 1990 to launch the Indian INSAT-1D geosynchronous spacecraft from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. This solid rocket motor served as the launch vehicle’s third stage which carried the payload from a low altitude parking orbit into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. (If you want to trace it yourself, here are the particulars: U.S. Satellite Number 20645, International Designator 1990-051C), Reentry of the stage occurred a few months later.
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The science team for the Phoenix Lander was forced to curtail many of their activities over the weekend because of a regional dust storm that temporarily lowered the lander’s solar power. But Phoenix weathered the storm well, and the team is back investigating the Red Planet’s northern plains. The 37,000 square-kilometer storm (nearly 23,000 miles) moved west to east, and weakened considerably by the time it reached the lander on Saturday, Oct. 11. The science team was expecting the worst, so this tamer storm put the spacecraft in a better than expected situation, said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, the lead scientist for Phoenix’s Robotic Arm.
The lander is now back to busily collecting samples and weather data, analyzing the soil samples, and conducting other activities before fall and winter stop Phoenix cold.
“Energy is becoming an issue, so we have to carefully budget our activities,” Arvidson said.
The Phoenix team tracked the dust storm last week through images provided by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s Mars Color Imager. The imager’s team estimated that after the dust storm passed through Phoenix’s landing site on Saturday, the dust would gradually decrease this week.
This dust storm is a harbinger of more wintry and volatile weather to come. As Martian late summer turns into fall, the Phoenix team anticipates more dust storms, frost in trenches, and water-ice clouds. They look forward to collecting data and documenting this “most interesting season,” Arvidson said.
The procedure to begin “brain surgery” on the Hubble Space Telescope will begin at 6:00 am EDT (10:00 GMT) on October 15. The venerable space telescope will be put into electronic hibernation; then engineering teams will work from the ground around the clock for two days to reconfigure a data handler system which failed two weeks ago. If the procedure is successful, science operations could resume as early as Friday, October 17. The Control Unit/Science Data Formatter, which relays science data to Earth, is a redundant system, with two sides. Side A has been used exclusively since the telescope’s launch over 18 years ago in 1990. Side B hasn’t been powered on since well before launch. “It is obviously a possibility that things will not come up,” said Art Whipple, manager of the Hubble Space Telescope Systems Management office at the Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “We have very good confidence this will work. In addition, we have contingency plans built in at each step of the transition where if something does not go the way we expect it to, we’ll be able to back out and go down an alternate path.”
Whipple said there is very little aging that goes on with an unpowered component in space. “It’s actually a very benign storage environment,” he said.
In addition six associated components have to be switched over to a redundant side as well. “Five of the six redundant components in this data management system that will be brought on line have also not been powered since 1990,” said Whipple. “The command procedures to accomplish this transition have been thoroughly tested.”
Engineers and mission managers have been working the past two weeks, devising a plan and testing procedures. NASA headquarters gave approval for the activation on Tuesday.
The planned Hubble Servicing Mission 4, shuttle mission STS-125, would have launched today (Oct. 14) if the data handler had not gone off line. NASA has re-set a tentative launch date for mid-February. The seven member crew, commanded by veteran Scott Altman, will perform five back-to-back spacewalks to add new cameras, (the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph), replace old batteries and gyroscopes, add docking equipment and upgrade the telescope’s guidance system. The astronauts will also attempt to fix the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Those two were never designed to be repaired in orbit. In addition, a spare data handler system will brought up, after engineers test and certify the unit. That unit has not been turned on since 1992.
It has yet to be determined if the spare data handler will be ready by mid-February, and if the astronauts can be trained ready for the additional work required for the unit switch-out.
“We think in the first week or two in November we will have a much better handle on the actual state of the hardware,” Whipple said. “The paperwork says February should be supportable, but we should have much higher confidence (in November).”
A species of life on Earth could possibly survive on Enceladus. Credit: JPL
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The discovery of solitary little critters deep beneath Earth’s surface has set the world of microbiology on its head while exciting astrobiologists about the possibility of life on other planets. A community of bacteria was found 2.8 kilometers below ground in a goldmine and it lives completely alone and completely independent of any other life forms. It also subsists without sunlight or oxygen. Planetary scientist Chris McKay, of NASA’s Ames Research Center says that the species Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator is an amazing discovery, and represents the kind or organism that could survive below the surface of Mars or Saturn’s sixth largest moon Enceladus.
Nicknamed “the bold traveler,” the species was found in fluid-filled cracks of the Mponeng goldmine in South Africa. The discovery of the species contradicts the principle that all life on earth is part of one great, interdependent system.
Scientists extracted all of the DNA present within 5,600 liters of fluid from a fracture deep within the mine. Expecting to find a mix of species within the fluid, the researchers were surprised to find that 99.9% of the DNA belonged to one bacterium, a new species. The remaining DNA was contamination from the mine and the laboratory.
A community of a single species is almost unheard of in the microbial world. But this little bacteria has been happily living on its own and seems to have all of the genetic machinery to enable it to survive independently. Since it is the only species in the ecosystem, it must extract everything it needs from an otherwise dead environment.
Analysis by Dylan Chivian of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory showed that D. audaxviator gets its energy from the radioactive decay of uranium in the surrounding rocks. It has genes to extract carbon from dissolved carbon dioxide and other genes to fix nitrogen, which comes from the surrounding rocks. Both carbon and nitrogen are essential building blocks for life as we know it.
D. audaxviator can also protect itself from environmental hazards by forming endospores – tough shells that protect its DNA and RNA from drying out, toxic chemicals and from starvation. It has a flagellum to help it navigate.
Every other species that we know of on Earth planet relies on other species for some benefit. For example, humans rely on plants to photosynthesize so that we can eat them. Also, other known ecosystems on Earth that don’t use sunlight directly, such as lifeforms found in deep sea vents, do use some form of photosynthesis. But this newly found species actually can’t handle oxygen
The water in which D. audaxviator lives has not seen the light of day in over 3 million years, and this could be an indication of how old the species is.
When we start to look for life on other planets, the discovery of this species will help broaden the horizons of our search.
The astronomy world buzzed in the Fall of 2007 when Comet Holmes – a normally humdrum, run-of-the-mill comet — unexpectedly flared and erupted. Its coma of gas and dust expanded away from the comet, extending to a volume larger than the Sun. Professional and amateur astronomers around the world turned their telescopes toward the spectacular event. Everyone wanted to know why the comet had suddenly exploded. The Hubble Space Telescope observed the comet, but provided few clues. And now, observations taken of the comet after the explosion by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope deepen the mystery, showing oddly behaving streamers in the shell of dust surrounding the nucleus of the comet. The data also offer a rare look at the material liberated from within the nucleus. “The data we got from Spitzer do not look like anything we typically see when looking at comets,” said Bill Reach of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at Caltech.
Every six years, comet 17P/Holmes speeds away from Jupiter and heads inward toward the sun, traveling the same route typically without incident. However, twice in the last 116 years, in November 1892 and October 2007, comet Holmes exploded as it approached the asteroid belt, and brightened a millionfold overnight.
In an attempt to understand these odd occurrences, astronomers pointed NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope at the comet in November 2007 and March 2008. By using Spitzer’s infrared spectrograph instrument, Reach and his colleagues were able to gain valuable insights into the composition of Holmes’ solid interior. Like a prism spreading visible-light into a rainbow, the spectrograph breaks up infrared light from the comet into its component parts, revealing the fingerprints of various chemicals. The Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: NASA
In November of 2007, Reach noticed a lot of fine silicate dust, or crystallized grains smaller than sand, like crushed gems. He noted that this particular observation revealed materials similar to those seen around other comets where grains have been treated violently, including NASA’s Deep Impact mission, which smashed a projectile into comet Tempel 1; NASA’s Stardust mission, which swept particles from comet Wild 2 into a collector at 13,000 miles per hour (21,000 kilometers per hour), and the outburst of comet Hale-Bopp in 1995.
“Comet dust is very sensitive, meaning that the grains are very easily destroyed, said Reach. “We think the fine silicates are produced in these violent events by the destruction of larger particles originating inside the comet nucleus.”
When Spitzer observed the same portion of the comet again in March 2008, the fine-grained silicate dust was gone and only larger particles were present. “The March observation tells us that there is a very small window for studying composition of comet dust after a violent event like comet Holmes’ outburst,” said Reach.
Comet Holmes not only has unusual dusty components, it also does not look like a typical comet. According to Jeremie Vaubaillon, a colleague of Reach’s at Caltech, pictures snapped from the ground shortly after the outburst revealed streamers in the shell of dust surrounding the comet. Scientists suspect they were produced after the explosion by fragments escaping the comet’s nucleus.
In November 2007, the streamers pointed away from the sun, which seemed natural because scientists believed that radiation from the sun was pushing these fragments straight back. However, when Spitzer imaged the same streamers in March 2008, they were surprised to find them still pointing in the same direction as five months before, even though the comet had moved and sunlight was arriving from a different location. “We have never seen anything like this in a comet before. The extended shape still needs to be fully understood,” said Vaubaillon.
He notes that the shell surrounding the comet also acts peculiarly. The shape of the shell did not change as expected from November 2007 to March 2008. Vaubaillon said this is because the dust grains seen in March 2008 are relatively large, approximately one millimeter in size, and thus harder to move.
“If the shell was comprised of smaller dust grains, it would have changed as the orientation of the sun changes with time,” said Vaubaillon. “This Spitzer image is very unique. No other telescope has seen comet Holmes in this much detail, five months after the explosion.”
“Like people, all comets are a little different. We’ve been studying comets for hundreds of years — 116 years in the case of comet Holmes — but still do not really understand them,” said Reach. “However, with the Spitzer observations and data from other telescopes, we are getting closer.”
