The core has cooled and therefore isn't molten. The reason the earths magnetic field is so strong is the molten iron core that is churning. That has long since gone away on Mars, mostly because it is much smaller. Earths spin has very little to do with the magnetic field of Earth, other than it keeps the core moving.
A series of images of the rover's right front wheel, taken by the front hazard-avoidance camera, make up this brief movie. It chronicles the challenge Opportunity faced to free itself from a ripple dubbed "Jammerbugt." The rover's wheels became partially embedded in the ripple at the end of a drive on Opportunity's 833rd Martian day, or sol (May 28, 2006). The images in this clip were taken on sols 836 through 841 (May 31 through June 5, 2006).
Just amazing it took 6 days for the wheel to spin that much. I know they were trying to protect it, but it demonstrates the challenges of driving a rover from however far away we are.
Adding more = more weight = making it less possible Something like adding one millimeter to wheel thickness would add 15 kilograms to the rover's total mass.
It doesn't help that we misunderstood the surface terrain of Mars prior to deployment. Spirit and Opportunity recorded sand traps, flat bedrock and rocks on sand landscape, all of which Curiosity can handle substantially better than its two predecessors. What we didn't expect to see along Curiosity's path was strong, cemented ventifacts. Come Gale Carter, and Curiosity is transversing terrain that it was never designed to transverse on.
Daily news 29 October 2015 Salt flats on Europa mean moon’s ocean may come to surface Forget drilling through the ice – Europa’s buried ocean might come to us. In a cracked region of Jupiter’s frozen moon (pictured below), salty ice has been spotted that doesn’t match anything seen before. Europa has been a perennial favourite in the search for alien life, thanks to its probable subsurface ocean. NASA plans to send a probe to the moon to study its surface in the 2020s, but what we are learning in the meantime is making it an even more attractive destination. Infrared observations from the Galileo spacecraft, which visited the Jupiter system in the 1990s, found that the moon is covered in water ice. Sulphur and oxygen from volcanoes on the nearby moon Io also fall onto Europa’s surface, where they combine to make magnesium sulphate – the same chemical found in Epsom salts. Now a new analysis has found another, unidentified material that only shows up in fractured terrain. This could mean the buried ocean is breaching the surface. The spectrum of the material – its chemical signature – has so far defied identification. “It looks like the spectrum of water ice except that it’s distorted,” says Patrick Fischer of the California Institute of Technology. The team hasn’t been able to reproduce it using a library of known chemicals – although they can rule out sulphates, which Europa researchers expected to see. One possibility is an unknown blend of potassium or sodium chloride, which would mean these regions are salt flats left behind when ocean water burbled up and then evaporated, giving us a look at the chemistry hidden within. “We can guess that the spectrum we’re seeing is probably evaporate deposits of salt left over from the ocean,” Fischer says. If that’s true, there are big implications for Europa’s habitability. If the ocean is seasoned with those chloride salts instead of the sulphate salts expected, its overall salinity could be three times lower than thought, making it friendlier to life. “Any information on the salt content of the oceans helps us understand what biology might be possible,” says Christopher Chyba of Princeton University. Life-friendly “Microbial life on Earth can live in high salt concentrations, but it comes at a cost,” he says. “These new observational results make Europa look slightly better from the point of view of the origin of life on Europa and, should life actually exist there, slightly less challenging for microbes to live in the ocean.” And if ocean chemistry is laid bare on the surface, we could see if any of the chemicals that fuel chemosynthetic ecosystems on Earth are present – improving the chances of finding ocean life. Long before NASA’s mission arrives, we should know more. Fischer’s team is busy writing proposals to get better spectral data from Europa that will classify the mystery material. At the same time, researchers at the nearby Jet Propulsion Lab are trying to manufacture an ice with a similar spectrum in the lab. But these faint hints underscore the need to take a close look at Europa, says Chyba. “I admire the wonderful work that the Caltech/JPL group has done,” he says. “But their paper is also a reminder of how badly we need a dedicated mission to Europa.” Journal reference: Astronomical Journal, in press Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute; NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Four Months after Pluto Flyby, NASA’s New Horizons Yields Wealth of Discovery From possible ice volcanoes to twirling moons, NASA’s New Horizons science team is discussing more than 50 exciting discoveries about Pluto at this week’s 47th Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in National Harbor, Maryland. “The New Horizons mission has taken what we thought we knew about Pluto and turned it upside down,” said Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “It's why we explore -- to satisfy our innate curiosity and answer deeper questions about how we got here and what lies beyond the next horizon." For one such discovery, New Horizons geologists combined images of Pluto’s surface to make 3-D maps that indicate two of Pluto’s most distinctive mountains could be cryovolcanoes -- ice volcanoes that may have been active in the recent geological past. “It’s hard to imagine how rapidly our view of Pluto and its moons are evolving as new data stream in each week. As the discoveries pour in from those data, Pluto is becoming a star of the solar system,” said mission Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “Moreover, I’d wager that for most planetary scientists, any one or two of our latest major findings on one world would be considered astounding. To have them all is simply incredible.” The two cryovolcano candidates are large features measuring tens of miles or kilometers across and several miles or kilometers high. “These are big mountains with a large hole in their summit, and on Earth that generally means one thing -- a volcano,” said Oliver White, New Horizons postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “If they are volcanic, then the summit depression would likely have formed via collapse as material is erupted from underneath. The strange hummocky texture of the mountain flanks may represent volcanic flows of some sort that have traveled down from the summit region and onto the plains beyond, but why they are hummocky, and what they are made of, we don't yet know.” While their appearance is similar to volcanoes on Earth that spew molten rock, ice volcanoes on Pluto are expected to emit a somewhat melted slurry of substances such as water ice, nitrogen, ammonia, or methane. If Pluto proves to have volcanoes, it will provide an important new clue to its geologic and atmospheric evolution. “After all, nothing like this has been seen in the deep outer solar system,” said Jeffrey Moore, New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team leader, at Ames. Pluto’s Long History of Geologic Activity Pluto’s surface varies in age -- from ancient, to intermediate, to relatively young --according to another new finding from New Horizons. To determine the age of a surface area of the planet, scientists count crater impacts. The more crater impacts, the older the region likely is. Crater counts of surface areas on Pluto indicate that it has surface regions dating to just after the formation of the planets of our solar system, about four billion years ago. But there also is a vast area that was, in geological terms, born yesterday -- meaning it may have formed within the past 10 million years. This area, informally named Sputnik Planum, appears on the left side of Pluto’s “heart” and is completely crater-free in all images received, so far. New data from crater counts reveal the presence of intermediate, or “middle-aged,” terrains on Pluto, as well. This suggests Sputnik Planum is not an anomaly -- that Pluto has been geologically active throughout much of its more than 4-billion-year history. “We’ve mapped more than a thousand craters on Pluto, which vary greatly in size and appearance,” said postdoctoral researcher Kelsi Singer, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “Among other things, I expect cratering studies like these to give us important new insights into how this part of the solar system formed.” Using New Horizons images of Pluto’s surface to make 3-D topographic maps, scientists discovered that two of Pluto’s mountains, informally named Wright Mons and Piccard Mons, could be ice volcanoes. The color depicts changes in elevation, blue indicating lower terrain and brown showing higher elevation. Green terrains are at intermediate heights. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Locations of more than 1,000 craters mapped on Pluto by NASA’s New Horizons mission indicate a wide range of surface ages, which likely means Pluto has been geologically active throughout its history. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI Building Blocks of the Solar System Crater counts are giving the New Horizons team insight into the structure of the Kuiper Belt itself. The dearth of smaller craters across Pluto and its large moon Charon indicate the Kuiper Belt, which is an unexplored outer region of our solar system, likely had fewer smaller objects than some models had predicted. This leads New Horizons scientists to doubt a longstanding model that all Kuiper Belt objects formed by accumulating much smaller objects --less than a mile wide. The absence of small craters on Pluto and Charon support other models theorizing that Kuiper Belt objects tens of miles across may have formed directly, at their current -- or close to current -- size. In fact, the evidence that many Kuiper Belt objects could have been “born large” has scientists excited that New Horizons’ next potential target -- the 30-mile-wide (40-50 kilometer wide) KBO named 2014 MU69 -- which may offer the first detailed look at just such a pristine, ancient building block of the solar system. Pluto’s Spinning, Merged Moons The New Horizons mission also is shedding new light on Pluto’s fascinating system of moons, and their unusual properties. For example, nearly every other moon in the solar system -- including Earth’s moon -- is in synchronous rotation, keeping one face toward the planet. This is not the case for Pluto’s small moons. Pluto’s small lunar satellites are spinning much faster, with Hydra -- its most distant moon -- rotating an unprecedented 89 times during a single lap around the planet. Scientists believe these spin rates may be variable because Charon exerts a strong torque that prevents each small moon from settling down into synchronous rotation. Another oddity of Pluto’s moons: scientists expected the satellites would wobble, but not to such a degree. Most inner moons in the solar system keep one face pointed toward their central planet; this animation shows that certainly isn’t the case with the small moons of Pluto, which behave like spinning tops. Pluto is shown at center with, in order from closest to farthest orbit, its moons Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/M. Showalter “Pluto’s moons behave like spinning tops,” said co-investigator Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Images of Pluto’s four smallest satellites also indicate several of them could be the results of mergers of two or more moons. Data from NASA's New Horizons mission indicates that at least two -- and possibly all four -- of Pluto’s small moons may be the result of mergers between still smaller moons. If this discovery is borne out with further analysis, it could provide important new clues to the formation of the Pluto system. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI “We suspect from this that Pluto had more moons in the past, in the aftermath of the big impact that also created Charon,” said Showalter. To view more images and graphics being presented by New Horizons scientists at the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences, visit: http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/News-Center/Press-Conferences/November-9-2015.php For more information on NASA’s New Horizons mission, including fact sheets, videos and images, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/newhorizons
For full size images follow link. http://www.space.com/31063-electric-sail-solar-wind-space-exploration.html 'Electric Sails' Could Propel Superfast Spacecraft by 2025 by Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | November 09, 2015 07:00am ET Artist's illustration of a spacecraft powered by an "electric sail," which would gain momentum from protons in the solar wind. Credit: Alexandre Szames, Antigravite, Paris, France View full size image SANTA CLARA, California — Robotic spacecraft may ride the solar wind toward interstellar space at unprecedented speeds a decade or so from now. Researchers are developing an "electric sail" (e-sail) propulsion system that would harness the solar wind, the stream of protons, electrons and other charged particles that flows outward from the sun at more than 1 million mph (1.6 million kilometers per hour). "It looks really, really promising for ultra-deep-space exploration," Les Johnson, of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said of the e-sail concept here at the 100-Year Starship Symposium on Oct. 30. [Superfast Spacecraft Propulsion Concepts (Images)] A large enough sail would provide thrust from the pressure of sunlight, with no need for fuel. See how solar sails work in this Space.com infographic. Credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist View full size image Johnson is co-principal investigator of the Heliopause Electrostatic Rapid Transit System (HERTS), an e-sail study and development project that has received two rounds of funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. (The HERTS team also includes Pekka Janhunen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute, who originated the e-sail concept in 2006.) A prospective e-sail spacecraft would have 10 to 20 wires that are each 0.6 miles to 12 miles (1 to 20 km) long and extremely thin — just 25 microns in diameter, Johnson said. (For comparison, a typical human hair is about 50 microns wide.) The probe would probably rotate to keep these wires taut, he added. "A high-voltage, positive bias on the wires, which are oriented normal to the solar wind flow, deflects the streaming protons, resulting in a reaction force on the wires — also directed radially away from the sun," the HERTS team wrote on the NIAC website. "Over periods of months, this small force can accelerate the spacecraft to enormous speeds — on the order of 100-150 km/s (~ 20 to 30 AU/year)." One AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance from Earth to the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150 million km. The most distant human-made object ever launched, NASA's Voyager 1 probe, has traveled about 134 AU since blasting off in 1977. (Voyager 1, which entered interstellar space in 2012, is powered by traditional chemical thrusters.) The e-sail idea is similar in some ways to solar-sailing technology, which has already been demonstrated in space. For example, neither one requires propellant. But solar-sailing spacecraft harness the sun's radiation pressure, not the solar wind, and they deploy actual sails of highly reflective material rather than electrically charged wires. The HERTS team's work suggests that e-sailing craft can continue accelerating far beyond the point that solar-sail probes lose steam, Johnson said. For this reason, an e-sail could get a probe out to the heliopause — the edge of the sun's sphere of influence, where the solar wind hits the interstellar medium — in 10 years, twice as fast as a solar sail could, HERTS team members have said. But it's not clear yet whether or not e-sails are feasible. An e-sailing probe would need to be equipped with a device called an electron gun to keep its wires positively charged (otherwise, electrons arriving via the solar wind would scuttle the propulsion system). The team isn't sure how much energy would be required to run an electron gun on an e-sailing craft. Two competing models of how materials charge in a plasma give very different results, Johnson said: One model suggests it's a reasonable amount and the other implies that there's no realistic way to generate that much energy onboard. The HERTS team will soon conduct plasma-chamber tests and should know within the next year or two which model better represents reality, Johnson said. If e-sails do indeed turn out to be feasible, they could be propelling spacecraft toward the solar system's outer reaches in the near future. "The proposed HERTS can provide the unique ability to explore the heliopause and the extreme outer solar system on timescales of less than a decade," HERTS team members wrote on the NIAC page. "It is significantly more effective than any other near-to-mid-term propulsion system for deep-space missions, meshes well with heliospheric science payloads, and could be implemented in the 2025-2030 timeframe."
I seem to remember these being pitched to save the earth from a giant asteroid back in the day and Billy Bob Thorton thought it was stupid.
"Enough with this science crap, we need explosions damnit! How else is Michael Bay supposed to make $100 million off this movie?"
Terrible idea. Was I talkin' to you? This is Dr. Ronald Quincy from Research. Pretty much the smartest man on the planet You might wanna listen to him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/s...151110&nl=morning-briefing&nlid=70238072&_r=0 You engineers need to apply
Can't embed video. Follow link. Cassini and Saturn moon's doc. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/s...celadus-cassini-hunts-for-life.html?ref=space
Space Albums: http://imgur.com/gallery/PbGCI The Solar System (V2) - http://imgur.com/gallery/bRiAP Milky Way in Different Spectrums - http://imgur.com/gallery/9Z3Et Pluto Approach - http://imgur.com/gallery/e2TFi Nebulae - http://imgur.com/gallery/mKd7M Galaxies Part 1- http://imgur.com/gallery/jfod2 Galaxies Part 2 - http://imgur.com/gallery/CzOlv Earth from The ISS - http://imgur.com/gallery/1K1Go Exoplanets Part 1- http://imgur.com/gallery/yxKln Largest Astrological Image - http://imgur.com/gallery/8V2yk Cassini - http://imgur.com/gallery/MJqPN Solar Dynamics Observatory - http://imgur.com/gallery/wUh7P Collected Misc Space Facts: Part 1 - http://imgur.com/gallery/BcRp9 Part 2 - http://imgur.com/gallery/PbGCI Space Facts Series: Part 1 - http://imgur.com/gallery/Pd0bg Part 2 - http://imgur.com/gallery/MDOq2 Part 3 - http://imgur.com/gallery/MDOq2 Part 4 - http://imgur.com/gallery/5bhB9 Part 5 - http://imgur.com/gallery/t3dT4 Part 6 - http://imgur.com/gallery/oriHC Part 7 - http://imgur.com/gallery/TzgY3 Part 8 - http://imgur.com/gallery/y7Gjl Space Specials: Solar System Part 1 - http://imgur.com/gallery/ZJnpD Natural World Albums: Beautiful Nature - http://imgur.com/gallery/nCnTz Sudan The Last Rhino - http://imgur.com/gallery/twt2w Lolita the Lonely Killer Whale - http://imgur.com/gallery/DGywi The Nepal Buffalo Slaughter - http://imgur.com/gallery/l4jUO Sh*ts and giggles: The Glorious Tibetan Mastiff - http://imgur.com/gallery/mhjrg Ultra High Res Images - http://imgur.com/gallery/w2OOk
Gravity from Saturn's moon Daphnis creates vertical structures in the ring material, up to 1.6 miles high, which in turn cast shadows on the ring Waves in the Keeler gap edges induced by the passage of Daphnis.
just saw that. Definitely a notch below what Musk's team is trying to do but still incredibly impressive.
I enjoyed the following article. It has a cool section on another collider (a linear collider as opposed to a circular one like the LHC) that is being built now and will be finished in 8-10 years. Figured this was the right thread for it. Albert Einstein's special mark on the universe http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/25/opini..._homepage_deskrecommended_pool&iref=obnetwork
I was trying to post the gif of this. Pretty interesting stuff. I noticed how with the separation, a lot of small pieces flew off. I'm curious to know if those become space debris or if they get pulled back to earth and burn up. It seems like they would want to limit the amount of debris floating around earth.
At least with this particular rocket it was a straight up and straight back down shot so gravity probably took care of it in a relatively short amount of time. Anything in orbit has a 17,000 mph head start at avoiding gravity.
New Horizons Returns First, Best Images of Pluto The Mountainous Shoreline of Sputnik Planum: In this highest-resolution image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, great blocks of Pluto's water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains. "The mountains bordering Sputnik Planum are absolutely stunning at this resolution," said New Horizons science team member John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute. "The new details revealed here, particularly the crumpled ridges in the rubbly material surrounding several of the mountains, reinforce our earlier impression that the mountains are huge ice blocks that have been jostled and tumbled and somehow transported to their present locations." Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby - and the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades. Each week the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft transmits data stored on its digital recorders from its flight through the Pluto system on July 14. These latest pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons' closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel - revealing features less than half the size of a city block on Pluto's diverse surface. In these new images, New Horizons captured a wide variety of cratered, mountainous and glacial terrains. "These close-up images, showing the diversity of terrain on Pluto, demonstrate the power of our robotic planetary explorers to return intriguing data to scientists back here on planet Earth," said John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "New Horizons thrilled us during the July flyby with the first close images of Pluto, and as the spacecraft transmits the treasure trove of images in its onboard memory back to us, we continue to be amazed by what we see." These latest images form a strip 50 miles (80 kilometers) wide on a world 3 billion miles away. The pictures trend from Pluto's jagged horizon about 500 miles (800 kilometers) northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi mountains, over the shoreline of Sputnik, and across its icy plains. (To view the strip in the highest resolution possible, click here and zoom in.) "These new images give us a breathtaking, super-high resolution window into Pluto's geology," said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. "Nothing of this quality was available for Venus or Mars until decades after their first flybys; yet at Pluto we're there already - down among the craters, mountains and ice fields - less than five months after flyby! The science we can do with these images is simply unbelievable."
NASA releases new composite image of Titan, showing Earth-like surface of Saturn's largest moon *"The colours in the image are false and represent the wavelengths of light collected by Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer."
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-10/nasa-releases-detailed-image-of-titan/7015678 NASA has released a composite image of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, constructed from photos taken by the Cassini spacecraft, that shows the moon's surface instead of its hazy atmosphere. NASA's website explains the image shows terrain mostly on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Titan, including the dark, dune-filled regions of Fensal to the north and Aztlan to the south, which together form the shape of a sideways letter H. Titan is tidal locked, meaning the same side always faces towards Saturn, just as the Moon is tidal locked to Earth. Cassini flew as close as 10,000 kilometres to the "rich and complex" world of Titan during the November 13 flyby, which was considerably higher than typical flybys at 1,200 kilometres but allowed the spacecraft to capture moderate-resolution views over wide areas, with a resolution of a few kilometres per pixel.
There are. TiME is an idea. It's something like half a million, which is cheap. It would float on one of Titan's largest, and calmest lakes for 6 to 7 months of duration. Outside of that, there's a balloon/blimp proposal. Rovers like Curiosity would be hard to justify as it gets very cold there and the haze is very thick. It would be near impossible with current rover standards. The balloon and lake lander are apart of the joint proposal mission, TSSM. The balloon would circumnavigate while the lake lander would use the wind and current for propulsion. There will be an accompanying orbiter as well. Both the balloon and the lander would be powered by the, at this time, cancelled/hypothetical power supply called ASRG (advanced stirling radioisotope generator). It's a form of power supply created by radioactive waste decay that converts to heat.
I think the most exciting lander idea I've seen is one to explore the lava tubes on Mars. If there is anything worth looking for on Mars, it's going to be under the surface. Outside of course anything that goes to Europa or any of the iceball oceans.
NASA gets $19.285B in the FY16 budget, nearly $750M above request, includes $1.2438B for Commercial Crew, the exact amount requested. This is the first time Commercial Crew has ever been funded at the level requested.
Astronomers Discover a Potentially Habitable Planet Just 14 Light Years Away For reference, Pluto is 6 light hours or so away. 6 light hours away + current technology = 10 year voyage to Pluto. Out of curiosity of how long it would take to reach Wolf 1061, let's start with the heliocentric speeds of all of the past spacecrafts that have left our solar system: Voyager 1 16.615 km/s Voyager 2 14.861 km/s New Horizons 12.532 km/s Pioneer 10 11.304 km/s Pioneer 11 10.454 km/s If we implemented Voyager 1's capabilities to our spacecraft destined for the newly discovered "habitable" planet, it would take about 18,000 years to cross 1 light year in relation to the Sun's movement. Looking at Wolf 1061, the receding speed from its sun is 21.0 km/s, which is radially faster than that of Voyager 1's respective speed. Eliminating the fact that objects in space are constantly receding, in order to manage the 14 light year trip it would take about 250,000 years. Realistically, Voyager 1's speed is not able to currently match that of Wolf 1061's receding speed. This means that unless the planet is currently on the farthest side of its orbit around its sun and will reach a point that is nearer to us, or if nothing changes its orbital pathway, Voyager 1 will never be able to reach the planet.
Comparatively speaking, the previously most recent "habitable" planet, Kepler-452b, is 1,400 light years away.