Space and astronomy news
The latest satellite in the Landsat family of Earth observation spacecraft has collected its “first light” images of our planet. Landsat 9 launched on September 27, 2021 and it continues the nearly 50-year tradition of making critical observations to help with energy and water management, forest monitoring, human and environmental health, urban planning, disaster recovery and agriculture.
Continue reading “Landsat 9’s First Images are Here”
Science fiction author Frank Herbert is renowned for the richly-detailed worlds he created. None of his work is more well-known than “Dune,” which took him six years to complete. Like his other work, Dune is full of detail, including the description of planet Dune, or as the Fremen call it, Arrakis.
Dune is an unforgiving desert world that suffers powerful dust storms and has no rainfall. Scientists who specialize in modelling climates set out to see how realistic Dune is compared to exoplanets. Their conclusion?
Frank Herbert did a great job, considering he created Dune in the 1960s.
Continue reading “Scientists Simulate the Climate of Arrakis. It Turns Out Dune is a Pretty Realistic Exoplanet”
Auroral activity on Earth varies over time. As the magnetic poles drift, auroras can appear at different latitudes around the globe. Solar activity also affects them, with powerful solar storms pushing the auroras further into mid-latitudes.
In an effort to better understand how auroras move around, how they’ll move in the future, and when powerful solar storms might pose a threat, a team of researchers have tracked auroral activity for the last 3,000 years.
Continue reading “Researchers Use Ancient Literature to Track 3,000 Years of Auroras”
Imagine a scenario where we detect an asteroid heading straight for Earth. Imagine that it will arrive in a couple of days, or worse, only a few hours. What could be done to stop it?
It might be possible to protect ourselves and the planet on such short notice. But we’d have to test and build the right infrastructure to do it.
Continue reading “What Are Your Options When you’ve Only Got Hours or Days to Prevent an Asteroid Impact?”
So far, the battle between life on Earth and asteroids has been completely one-sided. But not for long. Soon, we’ll have the capability to deter asteroids from undesirable encounters with Earth. And while conventional thinking has said that the further away the better when it comes to intercepting one, we can’t assume we’ll always have enough advance warning.
A new study says we might be able to safely destroy potentially dangerous rocky interlopers, even when they get closer to Earth than we’d like.
Continue reading “You Can Blow Up an Asteroid Just a few Months Before it Hits Earth and Prevent 99% of the Damage”
Many regions on Earth are temperate, nutrient-rich, stable environments where life seems to thrive effortlessly. But not all of Earth. Some parts, like Greenland’s ice sheet, are inhospitable.
In our nascent search for life elsewhere in the Solar System, it stands to reason that we’ll be looking at worlds that are marginal and inhospitable. Icy worlds like Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus are our most likely targets. These frozen worlds have warm oceans under layers of ice.
What can Greenland’s cryo-ecosystems tell us about searching for life on icy bodies like Europa and Enceladus?
Continue reading “Greenland’s Ice Sheet is Similar in Many Ways to the Solar System’s Icy Worlds and Can Teach Us How to Search for Life”
Earth has a new eye in orbit to monitor our changing planet.
Landsat 9 launched on September 27, 2021 continuing the Landsat family of satellite’s nearly 50-year tradition of making critical observations to help with energy and water management, forest monitoring, human and environmental health, urban planning, disaster recovery and agriculture.
Continue reading “Landsat 9 Joins a Fleet of Earth Observation Satellites”
Remember when engineers proposed one-way trips to Mars, because round trips are just too expensive to bring people back to Earth again?
Getting people home from Mars can only happen in two ways. One is to lug all the return fuel with you when you launch from Earth, which is prohibitively difficult and expensive. The second way is to make the return fuel in-situ from Martian resources. But how?
A group of researchers from the University of Cincinnati propose using a type of reactor that was used from 2010-2017 aboard the International Space Station, which scrubbed the carbon dioxide from air the astronauts breathe and generated water to drink, with methane as a biproduct. On Mars, this reactor, called a Sabatier reactor, could take carbon dioxide from Mars’ atmosphere and create methane for fuel.
Continue reading “This is the Reactor That Could Make it Possible to Return From Mars”
How bad is the drought in the western United States? A stunning depiction of the record dry spell comes in images of Lake Mead, the reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. NASA satellite images, below, from Landsat 7 and Landsat 8 show the difference in lake levels between August 2000 and August 2021.
Continue reading “Here’s Lake Mead’s Record Low Water Levels Seen From Space”
In 2014, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). As with previous reports, AR5 contained the latest findings of Climate Change experts from all relevant disciplines, as well as projections about the near future. In short, the AR5 and its predecessors were assessments of the impact anthropogenic Climate Change was having on the planet and how we could avoid worst-case scenarios.
On Aug. 9th, 2021, the IPCC released a report titled Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis. Combining the latest advances in climate science and multiple lines of evidence, this first report paints a rather bleak picture of the remainder of the 21st century. At the same time, it presents a call to action and shows how mitigation strategies and reducing greenhouse gas emissions will ensure a better future for all.
Continue reading “A new Assessment of the World’s Climate is out. The News Isn’t Good”