Space News and Discussions

weatheriscool
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Surprising details leap out in sharp new James Webb Space Telescope images of Jupiter
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-sharp-jam ... scope.html
by Robert Sanders, University of California - Berkeley

Image
The latest images of Jupiter from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are stunners.

Captured on July 27, the infrared images—artificially colored to make specific features stand out—show fine filigree along the edges of the colored bands and around the Great Red Spot and also provide an unprecedented view of the auroras over the north and south poles.

One wide-field image presents a unique lineup of the planet, its faint rings and two of Jupiter's smaller satellites—Amalthea and Adrastea—against a background of galaxies.

"We've never seen Jupiter like this. It's all quite incredible," said planetary astronomer Imke de Pater, professor emerita of the University of California, Berkeley, who led the scientific observations of the planet with Thierry Fouchet, a professor at the Paris Observatory. "We hadn't really expected it to be this good, to be honest. It's really remarkable that we can see details on Jupiter together with its rings, tiny satellites and even galaxies in one image."

De Pater, Fouchet and their team released the images today (Aug. 22) as part of the telescope's Early Release Science program.
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Scientists have traced Earth's path through the galaxy via tiny crystals found in its crust

by Chris Kirkland and Phil Sutton, The Conversation
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-scientist ... -tiny.html
"To see a world in a grain of sand," the opening sentence of the poem by William Blake, is an oft-used phrase that also captures some of what geologists do.

We observe the composition of mineral grains, smaller than the width of a human hair. Then, we extrapolate the chemical processes they suggest to ponder the construction of our planet itself.

Now, we've taken that minute attention to new heights, connecting tiny grains to Earth's place in the galactic environment.

Looking out to the universe

At an even larger scale, astrophysicists seek to understand the universe and our place in it. They use laws of physics to develop models that describe the orbits of astronomical objects.

Although we may think of the planet's surface as something shaped by processes entirely within Earth itself, our planet has undoubtedly felt the effects of its cosmic environment. This includes periodic changes in Earth's orbit, variations in the sun's output, gamma ray bursts, and of course meteorite impacts.
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DART sets sights on asteroid target
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-dart-sights-asteroid.html
by NASA
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft recently got its first look at Didymos, the double-asteroid system that includes its target, Dimorphos. On Sept. 26, DART will intentionally crash into Dimorphos, the asteroid moonlet of Didymos. While the asteroid poses no threat to Earth, this is the world's first test of the kinetic impact technique, using a spacecraft to deflect an asteroid for planetary defense.

This image of the light from asteroid Didymos and its orbiting moonlet Dimorphos is a composite of 243 images taken by the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) on July 27, 2022.

From this distance—about 20 million miles away from DART—the Didymos system is still very faint, and navigation camera experts were uncertain whether DRACO would be able to spot the asteroid yet. But once the 243 images DRACO took during this observation sequence were combined, the team was able to enhance it to reveal Didymos and pinpoint its location.

"This first set of images is being used as a test to prove our imaging techniques," said Elena Adams, the DART mission systems engineer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. "The quality of the image is similar to what we could obtain from ground-based telescopes, but it is important to show that DRACO is working properly and can see its target to make any adjustments needed before we begin using the images to guide the spacecraft into the asteroid autonomously."

Although the team has already conducted a number of navigation simulations using non-DRACO images of Didymos, DART will ultimately depend on its ability to see and process images of Didymos and Dimorphos, once it too can be seen, to guide the spacecraft toward the asteroid, especially in the final four hours before impact. At that point, DART will need to self-navigate to impact successfully with Dimorphos without any human intervention.
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Yuli Ban
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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Where Do High-energy Particles that Endanger Satellites, Astronauts and Airplanes Come From?
September 13, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) For decades, scientists have been trying to solve a vexing problem about the weather in outer space: At unpredictable times, high-energy particles bombard the earth and objects outside the earth’s atmosphere with radiation that can endanger the lives of astronauts and destroy satellites’ electronic equipment. These flare-ups can even trigger showers of radiation strong enough to reach passengers in airplanes flying over the North Pole. Despite scientists’ best efforts, a clear pattern of how and when flare-ups will occur has remained enduringly difficult to identify.

This week, in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, authors Luca Comisso and Lorenzo Sironi of Columbia’s Department of Astronomy and the Astrophysics Laboratory, have for the first time used supercomputers to simulate when and how high-energy particles are born in turbulent environments like that on the atmosphere of the sun. This new research paves the way for more accurate predictions of when dangerous bursts of these particles will occur.

“This exciting new research will allow us to better predict the origin of solar energetic particles and improve forecasting models of space weather events, a key goal of NASA and other space agencies and governments around the globe,” Comisso said. Within the next couple of years, he added, NASA's Parker Solar Probe, the closest spacecraft to the sun, may be able to validate the paper’s findings by directly observing the predicted distribution of high-energy particles that are generated in the sun's outer atmosphere.

In their paper, “Ion and Electron Acceleration in Fully Kinetic Plasma Turbulence,” Comisso and Sironi demonstrate that magnetic fields in the outer atmosphere of the sun can accelerate ions and electrons up to velocities close to the speed of light. The sun and other stars’ outer atmosphere consist of particles in a plasma state, a highly turbulent state distinct from liquid, gas, and solid states. Scientists have long believed that the sun’s plasma generates high-energy particles. But particles in plasma move so erratically and unpredictably that they have until now not been able to fully demonstrate how and when this occurs.

Using supercomputers at Columbia, NASA, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Comisso and Sironi created computer simulations that show the exact movements of electrons and ions in the sun’s plasma. These simulations mimic the atmospheric conditions on the sun, and provide the most extensive data gathered to-date on how and when high-energy particles will form.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/964273
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caltrek
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A Core Principle of General Relativity Just Passed Its Strictest Test Yet
by Michele Starr
September 15, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) A core principle of Einstein's general theory of relativity has just passed its most stringent test yet.

Using a specially designed satellite, an international team of scientists measured the accelerations of pairs of free-falling objects in Earth's orbit. Results based on five months' worth of data indicated the accelerations didn't differ by more than one part in 1015, ruling out any violations to the weak equivalence principle down to that scale.

The weak equivalence principle is relatively simple to observe, stating all objects accelerate identically in the same gravitational field when no other influences act upon them, regardless of their mass or composition.

It was perhaps most famously demonstrated to dramatic effect in 1971 when astronaut Dave Scott dropped a hammer and a feather simultaneously from the same height while standing on the Moon. Without air resistance to slow the feather, the two objects dropped to the Moon's surface at the same speed.

The new experiment, called MICROSCOPE and headed by the late physicist Pierre Touboul, was somewhat more rigorous than Scott's demonstration. It involved a satellite circling over Earth in orbit from April 25, 2016 until deactivation on October 18, 2018.
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/a-core-pr ... -test-yet
Don't mourn, organize.

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United Arab Emirates to launch first lunar rover in November
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-arab-emir ... ember.html

The United Arab Emirates will launch its first lunar rover in November, the mission manager said Monday.

Hamad Al Marzooqi told The National, a state-linked newspaper, that the "Rashid" rover, named for Dubai's ruling family, would be launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida sometime between Nov. 9 and Nov. 15. The exact date will be announced next month, he said.

The rover is to be launched aboard a Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket and deposited on the moon by a Japanese ispace lander sometime in March.

"We've finished with the testing of the rover and we are happy with the results," Al Marzooqi was quoted as saying. "The rover has been integrated with the lander and it is ready for launch."

The lunar mission is part of the UAE's broader strategy to become a major player in the field of space exploration. If the moon mission succeeds, the UAE and Japan would join the ranks of only the U.S., Russia and China as nations that have put a spacecraft on the lunar surface.
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Undergrad Publishes Theory on Immune Dysfunction in Space
September 19, 2022

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(EurekAlert) ITHACA, N.Y. -- It’s been known for decades that astronauts’ immune systems become suppressed in space, leaving them vulnerable to disease, but the exact mechanisms of immune dysfunction have remained a mystery – now a Cornell undergraduate has found a potential solution.

A biological and mechanical engineering double major in the College of Engineering, Rocky An ’23 published his theory, “MRTF May be the Missing Link in a Multiscale Mechanobiology Approach toward Macrophage Dysfunction in Space,” Sept. 12 in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.

An reviewed the last 20 years of literature on the behavior of macrophages – key cells in the body’s immune response – in space and recent research about how macrophages respond to forces in normal gravity, identifying a transcription factor that could prove to be the missing piece of the puzzle.

“I just kept asking questions about how the data is presented,” An said. “There are these two really important papers, in particular, one a review of how macrophages are suppressed in microgravity, and another about the mechanobiology of macrophages. I was able to connect these two papers, and that's when the idea came to me. I was really excited, as it was kind of a eureka moment for me.”

In space, the lack of gravity changes the shape of the immune cell, and scientists have suspected that changes to the cytoskeleton, the filamented infrastructure of the cell, were involved in immune dysfunction. Recent studies in normal gravity have shown that disturbing the cytoskeleton of macrophages reduces the transport of a particular protein, a transcription factor important for immune response, to the nucleus.
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/965152
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