Flashes of Light on the Dark Matter

Flashes of Light on the Dark Matter:

A web that passes through infinite intergalactic spaces, a dense cosmic forest illuminated by very distant lights and a huge enigma to solve. These are the picturesque ingredients of a scientific research - carried out by an international team composed of researchers from the International School for Adavnced Studies (SISSA) and the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, the Institute of Astronomy of Cambridge and the University of Washington - that adds an important element for understanding one of the fundamental components of our Universe: the dark matter.

In order to study its properties, scientists analyzed the interaction of the "cosmic web" - a network of filaments made up of gas and dark matter present in the whole Universe - with the light coming from very distant quasars and galaxies. Photons interacting with the hydrogen of the cosmic filaments create many absorption lines defined "Lyman-alpha forest". This microscopic interaction succeeds in revealing several important properties of the dark matter at cosmological distances. The results further support the theory of Cold Dark Matter, which is composed of particles that move very slowly. Moreover, for the first time, they highlight the incompatibility with another model, i.e. the Fuzzy Dark Matter, for which dark matter particles have larger velocities. The research was carried out through simulations performed on international parallel supercomputers and has recently been published in Physical Review Letters.

Although constituting an important part of our cosmos, the dark matter is not directly observable, it does not emit electromagnetic radiation and it is visible only through gravitational effects. Besides, its nature remains a deep mystery. The theories that try to explore this aspect are various. In this research, scientists investigated two of them: the so-called Cold Dark Matter, considered a paradigm of modern cosmology, and an alternative model called Fuzzy Dark Matter (FDM), in which the dark matter is deemed composed of ultralight bosons provided with a non-negligible pressure at small scales. To carry out their investigations, scientists examined the cosmic web by analyzing the so-called Lyman-alpha forest. The Lyman-alpha forest consists of a series of absorption lines produced by the light coming from very distant and extremely luminous sources, that passes through the intergalactic space along its way toward the earth's telescopes. The atomic interaction of photons with the hydrogen present in the cosmic filaments is used to study the properties of the cosmos and of the dark matter at enormous distances.

Through simulations carried out with supercomputers, researchers reproduced the interaction of the light with the cosmic web. Thus they were able to infer some of the characteristics of the particles that compose the dark matter. More in particular, evidence showed for the first time that the mass of the particles, which allegedly compose the dark matter according to the FDM model, is not consistent with the Lyman-alpha Forest observed by the Keck telescope (Hawaii, US) and the Very Large Telescope (European Southern Observatory, Chile). Basically, the study seems not to confirm the theory of the Fuzzy Dark Matter. The data, instead, support the scenario envisaged by the model of the Cold Dark Matter.

The results obtained - scientists say - are important as they allow to build new theoretical models for describing the dark matter and new hypotheses on the characteristics of the cosmos. Moreover, these results can provide useful indications for the realization of experiments in laboratories and can guide observational efforts aimed at making progress on this fascinating scientific theme.

Credit: sissa.it

Hunting Molecules with the MWA

Hunting Molecules with the MWA:

Astronomers have used an Australian radio telescope to observe molecular signatures from stars, gas and dust in our galaxy, which could lead to the detection of complex molecules that are precursors to life. Using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), a radio telescope located in the Murchison region of Western Australia, the team successfully detected two molecules called the mercapto radical (SH) and nitric oxide (NO).

“The molecular transitions we saw are from slow variable stars—stars at the end of their lives that are becoming unstable,” said Chenoa Tremblay from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) and Curtin University.

“We use molecules to probe the Milky Way, to better understand the chemical and physical environments of stars, gas and dust,” she said.

“One of the unique aspects of this survey is that until now, no one has ever reported detections of molecules within the 70-300MHz frequency range of the MWA and this is the widest field-of-view molecular survey of the Milky Way ever published.”

Since the 1980s, frequencies greater than 80GHz have been used for this type of work due to the freedom from radio frequency interference emitted by our mobile phones, televisions and orbiting satellites. But the extreme “radio quietness” of the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, where the telescope is located, allows astronomers to study molecular signatures from stars and star-forming regions at lower frequencies.

“Before this study, the mercapto radical had only been seen twice before at infrared wavelengths, in a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum,” said Dr Maria Cunningham from the University of New South Wales.

“This shows that molecules are emitting photons detectable around 100MHz and we can detect these molecular signatures using the MWA—it’s very exciting for us,” she said.

Following on from the pilot study, a survey of the Orion region is now in progress, again using the MWA, in the frequency range of 99-270MHz. The Orion nebula is a chemical-rich environment and one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth. The aim is to detect more chemical tracers in stars, compare these regions to the observations from the Galactic Centre pilot region and to better understand the emission mechanisms of these molecules.

“This new technique paves the way for deeper surveys that can probe the Milky Way and other galaxies in search of molecular precursors to life,” said Tremblay.

“We might even discover signatures from long chain amino acids in the cold gas environments we’re observing—which is where they are likely to be most stable.”

‘A First Look for Molecules between 103 and 133MHz using the Murchison Widefi eld Array’, was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on July 21, 2017.

Credit: icrar.org

Superluminous Supernova Marks the Death of a Star at Cosmic High Noon

Superluminous Supernova Marks the Death of a Star at Cosmic High Noon:

The death of a massive star in a distant galaxy 10 billion years ago created a rare superluminous supernova that astronomers say is one of the most distant ever discovered. The brilliant explosion, more than three times as bright as the 100 billion stars of our Milky Way galaxy combined, occurred about 3.5 billion years after the big bang at a period known as "cosmic high noon," when the rate of star formation in the universe reached its peak.

Superluminous supernovae are 10 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova resulting from the collapse of a massive star. But astronomers still don't know exactly what kinds of stars give rise to their extreme luminosity or what physical processes are involved.

The supernova known as DES15E2mlf is unusual even among the small number of superluminous supernovae astronomers have detected so far. It was initially detected in November 2015 by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration using the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Follow-up observations to measure the distance and obtain detailed spectra of the supernova were conducted with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on the 8-meter Gemini South telescope.

The investigation was led by UC Santa Cruz astronomers Yen-Chen Pan and Ryan Foley as part of an international team of DES collaborators. The researchers reported their findings in a paper published July 21 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The new observations may provide clues to the nature of stars and galaxies during peak star formation. Supernovae are important in the evolution of galaxies because their explosions enrich the interstellar gas from which new stars form with elements heavier than helium (which astronomers call "metals").

"It's important simply to know that very massive stars were exploding at that time," said Foley, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. "What we really want to know is the relative rate of superluminous supernovae to normal supernovae, but we can't yet make that comparison because normal supernovae are too faint to see at that distance. So we don't know if this atypical supernova is telling us something special about that time 10 billion years ago."

Previous observations of superluminous supernovae found they typically reside in low-mass or dwarf galaxies, which tend to be less enriched in metals than more massive galaxies. The host galaxy of DES15E2mlf, however, is a fairly massive, normal-looking galaxy.

"The current idea is that a low-metal environment is important in creating superluminous supernovae, and that's why they tend to occur in low mass galaxies, but DES15E2mlf is in a relatively massive galaxy compared to the typical host galaxy for superluminous supernovae," said Pan, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz and first author of the paper.

Foley explained that stars with fewer heavy elements retain a larger fraction of their mass when they die, which may cause a bigger explosion when the star exhausts its fuel supply and collapses.

"We know metallicity affects the life of a star and how it dies, so finding this superluminous supernova in a higher-mass galaxy goes counter to current thinking," Foley said. "But we are looking so far back in time, this galaxy would have had less time to create metals, so it may be that at these earlier times in the universe's history, even high-mass galaxies had low enough metal content to create these extraordinary stellar explosions. At some point, the Milky Way also had these conditions and might have also produced a lot of these explosions."

"Although many puzzles remain, the ability to observe these unusual supernovae at such great distances provides valuable information about the most massive stars and about an important period in the evolution of galaxies," said Mat Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at University of Southampton. The Dark Energy Survey has discovered a number of superluminous supernovae and continues to see more distant cosmic explosions revealing how stars exploded during the strongest period of star formation.

In addition to Pan, Foley, and Smith, the coauthors of the paper include Lluís Galbany of the University of Pittsburgh, and other members of the DES collaboration from more than 40 institutions. This research was funded the National Science Foundation, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Credit: ucsc.edu

Scientists Spy New Evidence of Water in the Moon’s Interior

Scientists Spy New Evidence of Water in the Moon’s Interior:

A new study of satellite data finds that numerous volcanic deposits distributed across the surface of the Moon contain unusually high amounts of trapped water compared with surrounding terrains. The finding of water in these ancient deposits, which are believed to consist of glass beads formed by the explosive eruption of magma coming from the deep lunar interior, bolsters the idea that the lunar mantle is surprisingly water-rich.

Scientists had assumed for years that the interior of the Moon had been largely depleted of water and other volatile compounds. That began to change in 2008, when a research team including Brown University geologist Alberto Saal detected trace amounts of water in some of the volcanic glass beads brought back to Earth from the Apollo 15 and 17 missions to the Moon. In 2011, further study of tiny crystalline formations within those beads revealed that they actually contain similar amounts of water as some basalts on Earth. That suggests that the Moon’s mantle — parts of it, at least — contain as much water as Earth’s.

“The key question is whether those Apollo samples represent the bulk conditions of the lunar interior or instead represent unusual or perhaps anomalous water-rich regions within an otherwise ‘dry’ mantle,” said Ralph Milliken, lead author of the new research and an associate professor in Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. “By looking at the orbital data, we can examine the large pyroclastic deposits on the Moon that were never sampled by the Apollo or Luna missions. The fact that nearly all of them exhibit signatures of water suggests that the Apollo samples are not anomalous, so it may be that the bulk interior of the Moon is wet.”

The research, which Milliken co-authored with Shuai Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii and a recent Brown Ph.D. graduate, is published in Nature Geoscience. The work was part of Li's Ph.D. thesis.

Detecting the water content of lunar volcanic deposits using orbital instruments is no easy task. Scientists use orbital spectrometers to measure the light that bounces off a planetary surface. By looking at which wavelengths of light are absorbed or reflected by the surface, scientists can get an idea of which minerals and other compounds are present.

The problem is that the lunar surface heats up over the course of a day, especially at the latitudes where these pyroclastic deposits are located. That means that in addition to the light reflected from the surface, the spectrometer also ends up measuring heat.

“That thermally emitted radiation happens at the same wavelengths that we need to use to look for water,” Milliken said. “So in order to say with any confidence that water is present, we first need to account for and remove the thermally emitted component.”

To do that, Li and Milliken used laboratory-based measurements of samples returned from the Apollo missions, combined with a detailed temperature profile of the areas of interest on the Moon’s surface. Using the new thermal correction, the researchers looked at data from the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, an imaging spectrometer that flew aboard India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar orbiter.

The researchers found evidence of water in nearly all of the large pyroclastic deposits that had been previously mapped across the Moon’s surface, including deposits near the Apollo 15 and 17 landing sites where the water-bearing glass bead samples were collected.

“The distribution of these water-rich deposits is the key thing,” Milliken said. “They’re spread across the surface, which tells us that the water found in the Apollo samples isn’t a one-off. Lunar pyroclastics seem to be universally water-rich, which suggests the same may be true of the mantle.”

The idea that the interior of the Moon is water-rich raises interesting questions about the Moon’s formation. Scientists think the Moon formed from debris left behind after an object about the size of Mars slammed into the Earth very early in solar system history. One of the reasons scientists had assumed the Moon’s interior should be dry is that it seems unlikely that any of the hydrogen needed to form water could have survived the heat of that impact.

“The growing evidence for water inside the Moon suggest that water did somehow survive, or that it was brought in shortly after the impact by asteroids or comets before the Moon had completely solidified,” Li said. “The exact origin of water in the lunar interior is still a big question.”

In addition to shedding light on the water story in the early solar system, the research could also have implications for future lunar exploration. The volcanic beads don’t contain a lot of water — about .05 percent by weight, the researchers say — but the deposits are large, and the water could potentially be extracted.

“Other studies have suggested the presence of water ice in shadowed regions at the lunar poles, but the pyroclastic deposits are at locations that may be easier to access,” Li said. “Anything that helps save future lunar explorers from having to bring lots of water from home is a big step forward, and our results suggest a new alternative.”

Credit: brown.edu

Choose Your Star: First Gaia Data Release Catalogs More than Billion Celestial Objects

Choose Your Star: First Gaia Data Release Catalogs More than Billion Celestial Objects:

European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia satellite is on a crucial mission to create the most detailed ever 3D map of our Milky Way galaxy. Last year, the agency has published first data release provided by Gaia, which contains more than one billion stars with information about their brightness and precise position on the sky.

Finding an interesting star could be now as easy as browsing offers in order to find the best car for you on websites like Cars.com. Just like this site lists a plenitude of models from Acura to Volvo, the Gaia Data Release 1 (or DR1 for short) allows astronomers to investigate a variety of peculiar objects in the sky. While car buyers and enthusiasts can choose among a diversity of models, including Toyota Gaia, the scientific community has its own Gaia, flying in space and delivering essential astronomical data.

DR1 is a real treasure trove for astronomers studying stars in our galaxy. The catalog consists of astrometry and photometry data for over one billion sources brighter than magnitude 20.7 in the white-light photometric band G of the Gaia satellite. It is the largest all-sky survey of celestial objects to date.

ESA scientists underline that DR1 shows the density of stars measured by Gaia across the entire sky, and confirms that it has already collected superb data since the beginning of its operational life in July 2014. They note that the satellite charts the sky at precision that have never been achieved before.

In particular, DR1 contains about 1.14 billion stars with precise measurements of their position on the sky and brightness. The dataset allows astronomers to estimate distance and proper motion for over two billion stars in common with the earlier Hipparcos and Tycho-2 catalogs, based on data from ESA's Hipparcos mission. Moreover, DR1 also contains nearly 3,200 variable stars, including details about their brightness variations as well as positions and brightness of more than 2,000 quasi-stellar objects (quasars).

The promising results provided by DR1 leave the researchers hungry for more. Gaia mission scientists are convinced that subsequent data releases will revolutionize our understanding of how stars are distributed and move across the Milky Way.

“1,000 days after launch and thanks to the great work of everyone involved, we are thrilled to present this first dataset and are looking forward to the next release, which will unleash Gaia’s potential to explore our galaxy as we have never seen it before,” Fred Jansen, Gaia mission manager at ESA, said on September 14, 2016, when DR1 was published.

In general, DR1 confirms that Gaia is well on track of achieving it main goal – charting the positions, distances, and motions of one billion stars. It will be a 3D map of about one percent of the Milky Way’s stellar content – all with an unprecedented accuracy. Gaia’s second data release is currently planned for April 2018.

First-ever laser communications terminal to be tested on the Moon

First-ever laser communications terminal to be tested on the Moon:

Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lander will deliver a laser communications terminal built by ATLAS to the Moon. Image Credit: Astrobotic

ATLAS Space Operations Inc., a company specializing in cloud-based satellite management and control services, has announced that it will test the first-ever laser communications terminal on the lunar surface. The company has recently signed a contract with Astrobotic Technology Inc., which could see their system fly to the Moon in late 2019.

The terminal, under development by ATLAS, is expected to establish the world’s first laser communication link from the lunar surface. This could mark a significant breakthrough in terms of laser communications for planetary missions.

It is hoped this new system could serve to revolutionize deep space communications. Photo Credit: Mark Usciak / SpaceFlight Insider

“Our main goal is to demonstrate the viability of a commercial laser communications capability from the lunar surface. This is a stepping-stone to establishing a permanent infrastructure in support of future lunar activity,” Dan Carey, Director of Marketing at ATLAS Space Operations, told SpaceFlight Insider.

The terminal, which will be sent to the Moon on board Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lander, will carry out first the crucial tests for the development of this potentially ground-breaking technology. This hardware is intended to be a baseline for ATLAS’ future interplanetary communications technology. Carey noted that the tests on lunar surface will allow us to “learn the hard lessons closer to home, on the Moon, before venturing beyond.”

By sending its payload to the Moon ATLAS also aims to provide a platform for the public to access a virtual lunar experience. With this technology and lunar capability, the company would be able to provide the rest of humanity an experience that previously has been reserved for an elite class of explorers.

“Organizations like NASA and MIT/Lincoln Labs are the ones who have developed the revolutionary technology. ATLAS is taking that technology and commercializing it for the advancement of human interest in space. Our company was founded on the ideal of making space accessible to all,” Carey said.

The laser communications terminal is expected to weigh less than 22 pounds (10 kilograms) and will consume less than 60 W for up to 1.0 Gbps of data transfer to Earth. The ground segment of this system will be comprised of Earth Observation Stations, part of the International Laser Ranging Service adapted for this mission, and other commercially-available ground terminal technology previously used for laser communications.

For ATLAS’ management, the partnership with Astrobotic is considered to be key to showcase its capabilities. Moreover, both companies share the same vision of space exploration and look forward to a long-lasting collaboration.

“Astrobotic is progressive and forward thinking. Our companies share a common goal in advancing human interest in lunar and interplanetary exploration. We aim to make the ‘heavens’ more available and affordable than ever before to all who have similar interests,” Carey concluded.



The post First-ever laser communications terminal to be tested on the Moon appeared first on SpaceFlight Insider.

Lawbreaking Particles May Point to a Previously Unknown Force in the Universe

Lawbreaking Particles May Point to a Previously Unknown Force in the Universe:

A diagram of two protons colliding inside the LHCb experiment.

Credit: CERN

For decades physicists have sought signs of misbehaving particles — evidence of subtle cracks in the "Standard Model:" of particle physics, the dominant theory describing the most fundamental building blocks of our universe. Although the Standard Model has proved strikingly accurate, scientists have long known some adjustments will be needed. Now, as a recent review paper in Nature documents, experimenters have started seeing suggestions of particles flouting the theory — but they're not quite the violations theorists were looking for.

The evidence comes from electrons and their more massive cousins, muons and tau leptons. According to the Standard Model, these three particles should behave like differently sized but otherwise identical triplets. But three experiments have produced growing evidence — including results announced in just the last few months — that the particles react differently to some as-yet mysterious influence. The findings are not yet conclusive, but if they hold up, "it would be a complete revolution," says California Institute of Technology theorist Mark Wise.

Tantalizing Signs

A shake-up in the Standard Model would be huge. This theory has formed the bedrock of particle physics research since it was fleshed out in the late 20th century. It carves the universe into twelve elementary particles that make up all matter, plus 'force-carrier' particles that transmit the fundamental forces of nature. (For instance, particles exert electrical or magnetic forces by exchanging transient photons.) Despite its successes, however, the Standard Model predicts nothing that would explain gravity or the dark matter thought to invisibly inhabit space. To marry particle physics with these larger-scale observations, theorists have proposed all manner of "new physics" — matter or forces beyond the Standard Model's menagerie. But most experiments have stubbornly upheld the theory with impressive fidelity, finding no evidence of the hypothesized particles or forces. [What the Higgs Is Going on with Mass?]

Since 2012, though, signs of particle misbehavior have started emerging from a less-explored corner of the Standard Model: a pattern called "lepton universality." Here "lepton" refers to the class of particles including electrons, muons and taus. The Standard Model predicts these three species should commune with one another and other particles in exactly the same way except for differences attributable to their unique masses — a commonality of behavior that accounts for the second term in lepton universality.

The first lepton surprise showed up in results announced in 2012 from the BaBar experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif. BaBar’s particle accelerator rammed together electrons and their antimatter equivalents, known as positrons. The collisions produced many composite particles that were heavy but unstable: They acted like absurdly radioactive uranium atoms, lasting just fractions of a nanosecond before decaying into smaller and smaller particles. The final products spewed out into the accelerator's detectors, allowing scientists to reconstruct the chain of particle decays. If the Standard Model is right, two of the types of decays examined by the BaBar team should produce taus just 25 to 30 percent as often as electrons, which are lighter and thus easier to make. But that is not what the team saw. Taus were far more common than they should have been, hinting at a difference between taus and electrons beyond their masses.

BaBar's result was just the beginning. Two other experiments, the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and the Belle experiment at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan, studied the same decays and published similar results in 2015. Belle, like BaBar, collides electrons and positrons. But LHCb collides protons with other protons at much higher energies, and uses different methods to detect the products. Those differences make it harder to wave away the results as experimental mistakes, bolstering the prospect that the anomaly is real.

Furthermore, LHCb has also found signs of lepton universality violation in another type of lepton-producing decay, and several months ago it announced possible deviations in yet a fourth decay type. Just last month it reported a similar disparity between electrons and muons (rather than taus) in a related decay. All these converging lines of evidence make an increasingly compelling case that something is systematically fishy. "If [the deviations] turn out to be real," says BaBar spokesperson and University of Victoria professor Michael Roney, "it would be kind of weird if they weren't related."

A Revolution — If It's Real

If the various leptons really behave differently, the only explanation would be some previously unrecognized force. Under the Standard Model, larger particles decay into leptons (and other products) via the "weak force," the same force that causes radioactive decay. But the weak force treats all leptons equally. If more taus are coming out than the weak force should produce, then some unknown force, associated with some undiscovered attendant force-carrier particle, must be breaking down the larger particles in a way that favors taus. Finding such a force would be as fundamental as the discovery of electromagnetism, albeit with much less effect on our daily lives. "It does actually constitute, with little exaggeration, a revolution in physics," says Hassan Jawahery, a University of Maryland, College Park, physicist and a member of the LHCb collaboration.

Because the implications would be so dramatic, physicists will demand overwhelming evidence — a burden the experimenters are well aware of. Greg Ciezarek, lead author on the Nature review and a postdoctoral researcher at Nikhef National Institute for Subatomic Physics in Amsterdam, says lepton universality violations "would be in the territory of making extraordinary claims," which, as the adage goes, require extraordinary evidence. Roney sums up the skepticism: "You don't bet against the Standard Model."

The evidence to date is not insubstantial. Combining all the data, the probability that the tau/electron deviations are just statistical flukes now stands at about one in 10,000. For any everyday question, that would more than suffice. But particle physicists are a skeptical bunch; the community will not consider a discovery confirmed until there's just a one-in-3.5-million chance of a false alarm. As some "chronologically more advanced" scientists can attest, they’ve been burned before, says Zoltan Ligeti, a professor of theoretical physics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "We have seen similar fluctuations in the past that have come and gone."

The evidence is even harder to swallow given how far lepton universality is from theorists' expectations of where cracks in the Standard Model might show up. "There's sort of a story line that the theorists tell," Wise says, and "this isn't in the story line." What's worse, the proposed explanations for the leptons' behavior seem ad hoc and unsatisfying. "The kind of models that can fit the…anomalies don't really do anything else at first sight," Ligeti says. "For example, they don't get you any closer to understanding what dark matter might be."

Still, he adds, "nature tells us how nature is." Physicists are increasingly taking note of the violations' continued persistence, and proposing new theoretical explanations. Experimentalists and theorists alike are also looking to reduce existing measurements' uncertainties. Ultimately, the biggest revelations will come when LHCb and the next version of Belle produce more data. Physicists are optimistic that within about five years not only will we know whether the effect is real, we will have an explanation for it. "If there is a new [force-carrier] particle," says Svjetlana Fajfer, a theorist at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, "[it] should have a mass in reach of LHC," meaning the collider should be able to produce and identify such a particle. For some theorists, that testability is a big draw. "That makes it actually exciting, because if I do something, it can be proven right or wrong," Ligeti says. "One way or another, the case will become clear."

Explore the International Space Station with Google Street View

Explore the International Space Station with Google Street View:

Aspiring astronauts can now pretend to float on the International Space Station (ISS), thanks to Google. The company worked with astronauts on the orbiting complex to provide a Google Street View of the space station, from its science labs to its beautiful Earth-facing Cupola window.

Thomas Pesquet, a European Space Agency astronaut who helped collect the images earlier this year, said in a blog post that the experience of capturing the tour "describes the feeling of being in space" better than words or a picture can. But there were limitations to collecting the data. For one, astronauts float in space, so the imagery of the ISS couldn't be captured the same way as other Google Street View locations.

NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama worked with Google to create a "gravity-free method of collecting the imagery," Pesquet said in the blog post. These methods included using DSLR cameras and other equipment already available at the space station. An extended video provides an additional look at how the view came together. (Pesquet didn't specify the other equipment in the blog post.) [The International Space Station: Inside and Out (Infographic)]

"I collected still photos in space, that were sent down to Earth where they were stitched together to create panoramic 360 degree imagery of the ISS," Pesquet wrote.

"We did a lot of troubleshooting before collecting the final imagery that you see today in Street View," he added.

"The ISS has technical equipment on all surfaces, with lots of cables and a complicated layout with modules shooting off in all directions — left, right, up, down," Pesquet wrote. "And it's a busy place, with six crew members [at the time] carrying out research and maintenance activities 12 hours a day. There are a lot of obstacles up there, and we had limited time to capture the imagery, so we had to be confident that our approach would work."

The International Space Station's U.S. laboratory module as seen through Google Street View.

Credit: Google Street View


The tour is the first Google Street View captured in space, and it features annotations that pop up to explain additional information about each module, such as how astronauts stay physically fit or the kinds of food they eat.

You can read the entire blog post here: https://www.blog.google/products/maps/welcome-outer-space-view/ and take a virtual tour of the International Space Station here in Google Street View: https://www.google.com/streetview/#international-space-station/

The International Space Station's Cupola observation module as seen through Google Street View.

Credit: Google Street View


The ISS has been occupied continuously since November 2000. It generally houses three to six crewmembers, who split their days between science and maintenance activities. Crewmembers currently "commute" to space on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, but within the next few years, commercial spacecraft from SpaceX and Boeing will ferry astronauts from U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle's retirement in 2011.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. 

'Star Trek' Historians Says CBS 'Spared No Expense' with 'Star Trek: Discovery'

'Star Trek' Historians Says CBS 'Spared No Expense' with 'Star Trek: Discovery':

Sonequa Martin-Green plays Micheal Burnham in the new CBS show "Star Trek: Discovery."

Credit: CBS

SAN DIEGO — With the "Star Trek" franchise now well into its 51st year, and a new TV series set to debut this fall, it's clear the iconic science fiction epic is definitely living long and prospering. But according to the authors of a book series chronicling the history of Star Trek, that wasn't always the case.

Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross are the authors of the two-volume book series called "The Fifty Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years," (Thomas Dunne Books, 2016), based on hundreds of interviews with people who witnessed the five-decade saga. They spoke Friday (July 20) here at Comic-Con International in San Diego on panel hosted by TV producer and lifelong Star Trek fan Scott Mantz. [More from SDCC: The 'Star Trek: Discovery' Cast Is Full of Trek Fans]

"We're going to talk about where [Star Trek is] going but first we gotta talk about where it started," Mantz said, kicking off a discussion about a few of the many instances when the "Star Trek" universe might have fallen into oblivion, and what fans can expect from the upcoming TV series, "Star Trek: Discovery" when it debuts on Sept. 24.

While the original "Star Trek" series is now a modern classic, it's fate was uncertain for most of its run, according to the authors. And its enduring success had a lot to do with Paramount Studio's decision to syndicate it, and that was thanks to Richard Block who worked for Kaiser Broadcasting in 1969 when the show was airing.

"He just kept pushing and pushing, and finally on a napkin in a bar they made a deal to syndicate 'Star Trek' on a couple of stations," Gross said. "They put it on, and it started winning the timeslot against the news. And everyone's looking around saying 'Star Trek's beating the news?' And they started bulk airing it five nights a week and blowing everything away."

The late popularity of the series kicked off the creation of the Star Trek movies starting in the late 1970s. But there were a few "Star Trek" projects in the mid-1970s that never came to fruition, including a reboot of the TV series and a movie called "Star Trek: Planet of the Titans," with an extremely complicated and bizarre plot with a scope similar to "2001: A Space Odyssey," according to Altman.

"They had hugely great people involved … it was going to be expensive, it was going to have an A-list director," Altman said. There were even rumors that Robert Redford's had been suggested to play Kirk. But the movie was planned as a one-off, not part of a series like the movies that were ultimately made, and wouldn't have spawned the "Star Trek" we know today.

"It probably would have been the end of the franchise had that movie been made," he said. [Comic-Con 2017 in Photos: Aliens, Mutants & More Invade San Diego]

Panel moderator Scott Mantz (left) with Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross (right) at Comic-Con International in 2017.

Credit: Calla Cofield/Space.com

The Future of "Star Trek"

This fall, CBS will debut a new TV series, "Star Trek: Discovery." The show takes place before the events of the original series. [What Makes a Star Trek Fan (Slideshow)]

The first episode of the show will air on CBS, but all subsequent episodes will only be available on the network's online viewing platform, CBS All Access, which requires a subscription fee. Altman said many fans had decried the additional cost, but Altman said he thinks it's a good thing.

"'Star Trek' has had good demographics but never great ratings. And I think by CBS having [the show] on [the network's] own platform, it will ensure the longevity of the show," Altman said. "So whether 'Star Trek: Discovery' is amazing and fantastic, or just mediocre, it will be ensured a long life because it's on the platform. I also think they wouldn't spend the kind of money they are spending if it weren't for this platform … and it is quite a lot of money. They spared no expense."

"Star Trek: Discovery" will also be serialized (meaning the episodes won't stand alone — they will have an overarching story such that viewers will have to watch the entire series in order to understand what's going on). That decision has been met with some skepticism by fans, the panelists said, because only one of the five previous live-action "Star Trek" TV shows attempted to do this (the rest were done in a "stand alone" format, in which viewers could watch any episode and not require any additional information to understand the plot).

Serialized shows are extremely common in the modern television landscape, perhaps largely because people don't have to watch the shows on live TV, but can instead watch them online and don't have to worry about missing an episode. The TV series "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" did incorporate serialized plotlines and was "way, way ahead of its time" in that regard, according to Altman.

Because "Discovery" takes place before the events of the original series, the creators must deal with the difficult challenge of making the show look older than the original series, but also look good in 2017. And even though the show takes place in the past in the "Star Trek" universe, it is supposed to take place in the 23rd century (so, the future for those of us in the real world). Along with that tricky balancing act is the fact that many fans may come into the show with certain expectations about which elements from the original series should be included in the new show, right down to thinks like the design of the ship and the crew uniforms.

"There's a danger of doing fan service when you go backwards, because everyone's going to have expectations of what they think should be or what they saw in their mind. And if any show is about going forward it's 'Star Trek," Altman said. "I think that for too long Star Trek has imitated itself. I'd really love to see what the future of Star Trek looks like because we've kind of got stuck in this temporal loop where we're just exploring the same eras over and over again."

Mantz, the die-hard Trek fan, said, "I love fan service! Bring on the fan service!"

"[But] you need new fans," Gross countered.

"But at the end of the day, what's the most important thing about 'Star Trek'? It's the vision. It's the optimism," Altman said. "It's believing that we can be a better people, that we are striving to be better. The respect for science, the respect for each other, the lack of xenophobia, all the things we don't have right now in our society that need to come back."

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Cool the Planet? Geoengineering Is Easier Said Than Done

Cool the Planet? Geoengineering Is Easier Said Than Done:

Credit: Narith Thongphasuk/Shutterstock

Planet Earth is feeling the heat.

With the world facing increased warming, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, intense weather events and other global disasters, scientists are exploring ways to re-engineer the planet to counter the effects of global warming.

Earth's surface has warmed, on average over land and sea, 1.53 degreesFahrenheit (0.85 degrees Celsius) since 1880, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international organization created by the United Nations to evaluate the state of climate change science. [Changing Earth: 7 Ideas to Geoengineer Our Planet]

In the most recent issue of the journal Science, published online Thursday (July 20), two researchers provided perspective on two geoengineering methods that could reduce the so-called greenhouse effect, under which gases and clouds in Earth's atmosphere trap the sun's heat. Both schemes could contribute to a cooler climate, but they are not without risks. And as both researchers made clear, neither idea addresses the rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere that is primarily to blamefor global warming and higher levels of oceanic acid. This acidity is killing the coral reefs that shelter marine life and support the fish that humans eat.

Ulrike Lohmann and Blaž Gasparini, both researchers at the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Scienceat ETH Zurich inSwitzerland, proposed a counterintuitive plan: Seed the upper atmosphere with tiny particles of desert dust to reduce cirrus clouds. These are the wispy, nearly invisible clouds that form at high altitudes. Unlike fat, billowy clouds that reflect sunlight, these clouds trap heat energy radiating up from Earth out into space.

"If cirrus clouds behave like a blanket around the Earth, you're trying to get rid of that blanket," Lohmann, a professor of experimental atmospheric physics at ETH Zurich, told Live Science.

Thinning the clouds

Seeding the atmosphere with dust would paradoxically thin out cirrus clouds, Lohman said. Under normal circumstances, the atmosphere at altitudes of about 16,000 to 40,000 feet (4,800 to 12,200 meters) is full of tiny particles. Some are solid particles like mineral dust, and some are liquid aerosols, such assulfuric acid. The liquid aerosols freeze instantly and create ice crystals that form long-lasting cirrus clouds.

Cirrus thinning changes this dynamic, Lohman said. The idea, Lohmann said, is to inject solid particles, like desert dust, into the atmosphere at spots slightly lower than where cirrus clouds would naturally form. The quantity of dust introduced would be far less than the number of particles that exist higher up. This part is key, because fewer particles will attract more water vapor, creating larger crystals. As the ice crystals grow to larger and heavier, they would and fall as precipitation, and depending on the conditions would evaporate before reaching the ground.

"You remove the water vapor, you remove the humidity and you prevent the normal cirrus cloud formation," Lohmann said. [8 Ways Global Warming is Already Changing the World]

Ideally, the method would be applied to locations most susceptible to cirrus cloud formation, Lohmann said — geographical latitudes above 60 degrees, including the Arctic, where temperature increases from CO2 are the greatest.

The researchers' computer models have shown that if done correctly, cirrus thinning could reduce global temperatures by 0.9 degrees F (0.5 degrees C), Lohmann said. But if done incorrectly, the activity could produce cirrus clouds where none existed before, contributing to the very problem it's meant to solve, she added.

Risky business

The risk of doing more harm than good is a concern, said Ulrike Niemeier, a climate scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, and her colleague Simone Tilmes, a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Niemeier and Tilmes published a separate commentary in this week's issue of the journal Science that discusses a geoengineering method called stratospheric aerosol modification (SAM).

SAM involves injecting sulfur aerosols into the stratosphere to increase the reflectivity of Earth's atmosphere. Computer models have shown that SAM could reduce the amount of sunlight that reaches the planet's surface. The effect would resemble that of ash clouds that linger after volcanic eruptions, which have been shown to lower global temperatures, the researchers wrote.

But the science behind SAM is in its very early stages, and the technologies to deploy it are not developed, the researchers added.

"It was our intention to say that [geoengineering] is not something that we should have in the back of our minds as the main solution," Niemeier told Live Science.

Niemeier and Tilmes wrote that different computer models consistently identify side effects to SAM. For example, reducing incoming solar radiation also reduces evaporation, which in turn reduces precipitation, and that can slow the hydrological cycle, particularly in the tropics, the authors wrote. Less rainfall could increase droughts that are already devastating parts of the world.

Although computer models tend to agree that it’s best to inject the aerosols into the stratosphere above the tropics or subtropics, and that the aerosols would disperse globally, the models differ on the extent of injection required for a given level of cooling, the authors wrote.

"Most current Earth-system models do not adequately capture important interactions, such as the coupling between stratospheric aerosols, chemistry, radiation and climate. They cannot, therefore, simulate the full impact of the interventions," Niemeier and Tilmes wrote.

Complicated solutions

Even if scientists could figure out a precise method, the economics are mind-boggling. Using SAM to bring down global temperatures just 2 degrees F (1 degree C), to preindustrial levels, would require injection amounts equivalent to one volcanic eruption per year the size of the 1991 Mount Pinatubo blast in the Philippines — the largest volcanic eruption in the last 100 years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The cost of dispersing that much content artificially would cost $20 billionper year and require 6,700 aircraft flights per day over 160 years, the researchers wrote.

No single method can solve the climate change problem as a whole, either, they said.

"Any geoengineering method we know of can only offset part of the global warming that we have," Lohmann said.

And no method designed to cool the planet deals with the gases in the atmosphere that are the sources of the problem and are contributing to increasing levels of acid in the oceans, the researchers said.

"It doesn't get at the heart of the problem," Lohmann said. "The ocean acidification is ongoing."

If society decides to undertake any geoengineering method, she said, this action should be accompanied by large efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Niemeier said emission reductions should be the primary focus. "We are quite critical about [geoengineering], and we want people to be aware it would be a difficult."

Original article on Live Science.

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The Moon has more water than we thought

The Moon has more water than we thought:

The Moon has more water than previously thought, and it’s deep below the lunar surface. A new study suggests that water is widespread beyond the poles, where it was already known to exist, although scientists don’t know exactly how much water is there. The discovery has consequences for future missions to the Moon.

Scientists analyzed lunar rock samples that contain tiny, water-trapping beads of glass; these beads formed when magma erupted from the Moon’s interior billions of years ago, trapping water inside them. The scientists then looked at satellite data collected by an Indian lunar orbiter to check where these water-trapping glass beads are. The results, published today in Nature Geoscience, show that there are widespread “hot...

Continue reading…

Watching the Aurora From Orbit

Watching the Aurora From Orbit: Expedition 52 Flight Engineer Jack Fischer of NASA shared photos and time-lapse video of a glowing green aurora seen from his vantage point 250 miles up, aboard the International Space Station. This aurora photo was taken on June 26, 2017.

Original enclosures:

Good News for Future Moon Bases. There’s Water Inside the Moon

Good News for Future Moon Bases. There’s Water Inside the Moon:

Since the Apollo program wrapped up in the early 1970s, people all around the world have dreamed of the day when we might return to the Moon, and stay there. And in recent years, however, that actual proposals for a lunar settlement have begun to take shape. As a result, a great deal of attention and research has been focused on whether or not the Moon has indigenous sources of water.

Thanks to missions like Chandrayaan-1 and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scientists know that there are vast amounts of surface ice on the Moon. However, according to a new study, researchers from Brown University have found evidence of widespread water within volcanic deposits on the lunar surface. These findings could indicate that there are also vast sources of water within the Moon’s interior.

For their study – titled “Remote Detection of Widespread Indigenous Water in Lunar Pyroclastic Deposits” – Brown researchers Ralph E. Milliken and Shuai Li combined satellite data with new thermal profiles to search for signs of water away from the polar regions. In so doing, they addressed a long-standing theory about the likelihood of water in the Moon’s interior, as well as the predominant theory of how the Moon formed.

Lunar Crater as imaged by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper. Credit: SRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/Brown Univ.

As noted, scientists have known for years that there are large amounts of frozen water in the Moon’s polar regions. At the same time, however, scientists have held that the Moon’s interior must have depleted of water and other volatile compounds billions of years ago. This was based on the widely-accepted hypothesis that the Moon formed after a Mars-sized object (named Theia) collided with Earth and threw up a considerable amount of debris.

Essentially, scientists believed that it was unlikely that any hydrogen – necessary to form water – could have survived the heat of this impact. However, as of a decade ago, new scientific findings began to emerge that cast doubt on this. The first was a 2008 study, where a team of researches (led by Alberto Saal of Brown University) detected trace amounts of water in samples of volcanic glass that were bought back by the Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 missions.

This was followed by a 2011 study (also from Brown University) that indicated how crystalline structures within those beads contained as much water as some basalt mineral deposits here on Earth. These findings were particularly significant, in that they suggested that parts of the Moon’s mantle could contain as much water as Earth’s. The question though was whether these findings represented the norm, or an anomaly.

As Milliken, an associate professor in Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences (DEEPS) and the co-author on the paper, summarized in a recent Brown press release:

“The key question is whether those Apollo samples represent the bulk conditions of the lunar interior or instead represent unusual or perhaps anomalous water-rich regions within an otherwise ‘dry’ mantle. By looking at the orbital data, we can examine the large pyroclastic deposits on the Moon that were never sampled by the Apollo or Luna missions. The fact that nearly all of them exhibit signatures of water suggests that the Apollo samples are not anomalous, so it may be that the bulk interior of the Moon is wet.”

A false colour composite of the distribution of water and hydroxyl molecules over the lunar surface. Credit: ISRO/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Brown Univ/USGS

To resolve this, Milliken and Li consulted orbital data to examine lunar volcanic deposits for signs of water. Basically, orbiters use spectrometers to bounce light off the surfaces of planets and astronomical bodies to see which wavelengths of light are absorbed and which are reflected. This data is therefore able to determine what compounds and minerals are present based on the absorption lines detected.

Using this technique to look for signs of water in lunar volcanic deposits (aka. pyroclastic deposits), however, was a  rather difficult task. During the day, the lunar surface heats up, especially in the latitudes where volcanic deposits are located. As Milliken explained, spectronomers will therefore pick up thermal energy in addition to chemical signatures which this can throw off the readings:

“That thermally emitted radiation happens at the same wavelengths that we need to use to look for water. So in order to say with any confidence that water is present, we first need to account for and remove the thermally emitted component.”

To correct for this, Milliken and Li constructed a detailed temperature profile of the areas of the Moon they were examining. They then examined surface data collected by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, the spectrographic imager that was part of India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission. They then compared this thermally-corrected surface data to the measurements conducted on the samples returned from the Apollo missions.

Colored areas indicate elevated water content compared with surrounding terrains. Yellows and reds indicate the richest water content. Credit: Milliken lab/Brown University

What they found was that areas of the Moon’s surface that had been previously mapped showed evidence of water in nearly all the large pyroclastic deposits. This included the deposits that were near the Apollo 15 and 17 landing sites where the lunar samples were obtained. From this, they determined that these samples were not anomalous in nature, and that water is distributed across the lunar surface.

What’s more, these findings could indicate that the Moon’s mantle is water-rich as well. Beyond being good news for future lunar missions, and the construction of a lunar settlement, these results could lead to a rethinking of how the Moon formed. This research was part of Shuai Li’s – a recent graduate of the University of Brown and the lead author on the study – Ph.D thesis. As he said of the study’s findings:

“The growing evidence for water inside the Moon suggest that water did somehow survive, or that it was brought in shortly after the impact by asteroids or comets before the Moon had completely solidified. The exact origin of water in the lunar interior is still a big question.

What’s more, Li indicated that lunar water that is located in volcanic deposits could be a boon for future lunar missions. “Other studies have suggested the presence of water ice in shadowed regions at the lunar poles, but the pyroclastic deposits are at locations that may be easier to access,” he said. “Anything that helps save future lunar explorers from having to bring lots of water from home is a big step forward, and our results suggest a new alternative.”

The blue areas show locations on the Moon’s south pole where water ice is likely to exist. Credit: NASA/GSFC

Between NASA, the ESA, Roscosmos, the ISRO and the China National Space Administration (CNSA), there are no shortage of plans to explore the Moon in the future, not to mention establishing a permanent base there. Knowing there’s abundant surface water (and maybe more in the interior as well) is therefore very good news.  This water could be used to create hydrazine fuel, which would significantly reduce the costs of individual missions to the Moon.

It also makes the idea of a stopover base on the Moon, where ships traveling deeper into space could refuel and resupply – a move which would shave billions off of deep-space missions. An abundant source of local water could also ensure a ready supply of drinking and irrigation water for future lunar outposts. This would also reduce costs by ensuring that not all supplies would need to be shipped from Earth.

On top of all that, the ability to conduct experiments into how plants grow in reduced gravity would yield valuable information that could be used for long-term missions to Mars and other Solar bodies. It could therefore be said, without a trace of exaggeration, that water on the Moon is the key to future space missions.

The research was funded by the NASA Lunar Advanced Science and Exploration Research (LASER) program, which seeks to enhance lunar basic science and lunar exploration science.

Further Reading: Brown University

The post Good News for Future Moon Bases. There’s Water Inside the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA releases New Horizons flyover video

NASA releases New Horizons flyover video:

This new, detailed global mosaic color map of Pluto is based on a series of three color filter images obtained by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera aboard New Horizons during the NASA spacecraft’s close flyby of Pluto in July 2015. The mosaic shows how Pluto’s large-scale color patterns extend beyond the hemisphere facing New Horizons at closest approach, which were imaged at the highest resolution. North is up; Pluto’s equator roughly bisects the band of dark red terrains running across the lower third of the map. Pluto’s giant, informally named Sputnik Planitia glacier – the left half of Pluto’s signature “heart” feature – is at the center of this map. Note: Click on the image to view in the highest resolution. Image & Caption Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Using actual New Horizons data and digital elevation models of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, mission scientists have created flyover movies that offer spectacular new perspectives of the many unusual features that were discovered and which have reshaped our views of the Pluto system – from a vantage point even closer than the spacecraft itself.

This dramatic Pluto flyover begins over the highlands to the southwest of the great expanse of nitrogen ice plain informally named Sputnik Planitia. The viewer first passes over the western margin of Sputnik, where it borders the dark, cratered terrain of Cthulhu Macula, with the blocky mountain ranges located within the plains seen on the right. The tour moves north past the rugged and fractured highlands of Voyager Terra and then turns southward over Pioneer Terra – which exhibits deep and wide pits – before concluding over the bladed terrain of Tartarus Dorsa in the far east of the encounter hemisphere.

Digital mapping and rendering were performed by Paul Schenk and John Blackwell of the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

Video courtesy of NASA

The post NASA releases New Horizons flyover video appeared first on SpaceFlight Insider.

NASA prepares its Martian explorers for solar conjunction radio silence

NASA prepares its Martian explorers for solar conjunction radio silence:

With the Sun sitting between Earth and Mars, called a solar conjunction, NASA will suspend communications with its explorers at the Red Planet for nearly two weeks. Image Credit: NASA / JPL

For more than twenty years, NASA has had explorers surveying the Red Planet. Dutifully, the stalwart robotic travelers have followed commands beamed from their Earth-bound handlers and returned gigabytes of information of their Martian observations.

However, for a few days every 26 months, communication from Earth to Mars takes a Sun-induced break. Beginning July 22, 2017, and lasting through August 1, 2017, NASA will avoid sending commands to its Mars-based craft.

Animation of a Mars Solar Conjunction. Animation Credit: NASA / JPL

The Sun giveth, the Sun taketh away

---

While the Sun provides life-supporting energy to Earth and supplies power to solar panels on spacecraft, its highly ionized corona holds a significant potential to disrupt data transmission when it sits between the two planets. Although the two planets won’t be directly obscured by the Sun, the far-reaching effects of its outer layer can still induce data loss.

“Out of caution, we won’t talk to our Mars assets during that period because we expect significant degradation in the communication link, and we don’t want to take a chance that one of our spacecraft would act on a corrupted command,” stated Chad Edwards, manager of the Mars Relay Network Office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in a release issued by the agency.

Though commands won’t be sent to Mars during the conjunction window, telemetry will still be sent to Earth. Should data loss occur, the robotic craft can be instructed to repeat its transmission once clear of solar interference.

This command black-out period extends for two days both before and after a solar conjunction event.

Able to work independently

---

Even though no commands will be sent to Mars during the conjunction, NASA’s rovers and orbiting spacecraft will still have work to do. In fact, engineers have been preparing the explorers far ahead to ensure observations run unabated.

“The vehicles will stay active, carrying out commands sent in advance,” stated JPL’s Mars Program Chief Engineer, Hoppy Price.

While the agency’s two active rovers – Curiosity and Opportunity – will be conducting pre-programmed investigations, they will remain stationary during the blackout.

Although the lack of communications may sound worrisome, all of the orbiters/rovers have already endured at least one Mars Solar Conjunction. Indeed, the Mars Odyssey orbiter will be undergoing its eighth conjunction, while Opportunity holds the surface record at just one less than its orbiting cousin.

“All of these spacecraft are now veterans of conjunction. We know what to expect,” concluded Edwards.

Curiosity will remain stationary during the blackout period, but will still conduct investigations. Image Credit: NASA / JPL / MSSS

The post NASA prepares its Martian explorers for solar conjunction radio silence appeared first on SpaceFlight Insider.