The Cassini robot explorer, written about here before, will hit the four year mark on June 30th in the relentless pursuit of its prime mission to explore Saturn and its many moons. After June 30th Cassini is operating in bonus territory, as it was not expected that the probe would last this long or work this well. They call this additional time the “extended mission”. Obviously, everyone is ecstatic as the Cassini mission has been profoundly successful in sending us back invaluable information and images of Saturn (like the one above of Saturn’s rings), as well as the moons Titan, Enceladus, Dione, Tethys, Phoebe and Iapetus. In many ways the discoveries regarding Saturn’s moons has largely overshadowed the many, many findings with regards to Saturn itself.
Following the work of Cassini has been like following your favorite band on tour. Nearly every month the mission team has reported more incredible findings or provided another series of stunning images. This page from the mission website catalogs dozens of events and accomplishments. This year alone Cassini has scheduled over a dozen different flybys to allow the use of the craft’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UIS), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS), and Radio Science Subsystem. Cassini is packed with gear, and it is not only amazing that it all is still working as planned, but that it made it there in the first place. Congratulations to the Cassini-Huygens mission team on the four year anniversary.
Over the past two years astronomers at NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office have observed over one hundred explosions on the moon’s surface. These explosions are the results of impacts by meteoroids and have measured as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT. It is no surprise that the moon suffers impacts, look at the image of the moon’s surface above. What is interesting is the observable frequency of these impacts in the last 24 months, which is quite a bit more intense than astronomers were expecting. This is an important phenomena for NASA to observe and understand as we get closer to the reality of a new effort to send astronauts to the moon and eventually set up a permanent lunar base. Essentially, there is no place on the moon that is impact free, nor is there a time that is less intense for impacts than others. The image below depicts the locations of the recorded impacts since initiation of the program:
The frequency and explosive power of these impacts pose a number of challenges to lunar astronauts, not so much from the risk of a direct hit but more from the risk of a secondary hit by one of the millions of particles that the explosions create and that shoot out from the impact area like bullets. A piece of debris 1 millimeter in diameter could penetrate an astronauts suit and damage equipment.
The first impact was recorded very shortly after the initiation of the moon impact observation program and recorded the strike of a meteoroid about the size of a baseball. Most of these impacts are the result of small meteoroids, some little bigger than a small rock or pebble, but they are traveling in excess of 30,000mph and hit the moon with incredibly violent force. A meteoroid the size of a pebble can create a crater several feet across.
This image is the result of the Mars Phoenix mission team instructing the robotic arm camera to look under the vehicle. What you are looking at is the surface of Mars, and it shows that the Martian soil has been displaced by the landing thrusters on Phoenix to expose what is most probably ice. The simple action of Phoenix landing on Mars has potentially exposed polar ice directly under the vehicle, ice that was covered by a very loose and thin layer of soil.
There is a rumor that when the mission leaders saw this image the first words uttered were “Holy cow!”
Posts lately have been all things solar system, and that is because there is so much going on right now with regards to robotic exploration of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and the their various moons. It is an exciting time to be a space exploration geek. I just came across the above image taken by the ESA’s Venus Express explorer of a vortex occurring in the southern polar region of the planet. This image was captured by Express back in 2006. I also found an excellent image montage of Express approaching Venus that shows some detail in the cloud covering that surrounds Venus.
Venus Express is essentially a reconfiguration of the ESA’s Mars Express explorer technology and left for Venus back in 2005. The goals for Venus Express are to explore the atmospheric composition and circulation on Earth’s closest neighbor, as well as how the atmosphere interacts with the planet’s surface. Venus is definitely inhospitable, with an atmosphere mostly comprised of noxious gasses and an incredibly hot surface temperature. Surprisingly, given the close proximity of Venus, we still know very, very little about the planet. Venus Express is helping to change this.
The Phoenix robotic explorer has been on Mars now for about 27 hours after an incredibly successful entry, descent and landing. It has been very busy. Incredible images are already streaming to Earth, and those of us geeked out by things of this nature are absolutely riveted. I was excited to discover how many people I know were following @MarsPhoenix on Twitter.
Many images are coming back, and most right now are of the explorer itself and the immediate vicinity as the mission managers check systems and get their bearings. The above image of one of the craft’s landing pads is one of my favorites because that image is of the pad of a man-made robotic explorer sitting on the surface of Mars millions of miles away from Earth, and it was taken in the last 24 hours. Astounding. Even more astounding is this video composite of the Martian surface, terrain and horizon taken by Phoenix today.
We are at just under four hours before Phoenix lands on the surface of Mars. I am checking periodically at the Phoenix mission control website in anticipation of this event. Martian weather is clear and the landing later today is green for go. I suspect there are a lot of very excited and anxious people at JPL right now.
The above animation is of weather on Mars around its north pole from 5/16 through 5/22. The small cigar shaped outline in the upper left quadrant is the planned landing zone.
It’s not just a big day for race fans, its a big day for science and space enthusiasts. In August of last year the Mars Phoenix Explorer left Earth to start its journey to Mars. Its mission is to arrive safely, land on the Martian North Pole, and dig into the soil there begin looking for the building blocks of life. It arrives today at around 4:45PM PDT. Arriving is the hardest part, as now the explorer has to successfully enter the Martian atmosphere (at 12,000mph) using parachutes to slow the rapid descent from 900mph to 250mph, and then fire landing rockets to prevent it from slamming into the Martian surface (see the video above). Its a complex landing, and the mission control team probably hasn’t been sleeping much these last few days, as the last five years of their work culminates today in about seven minutes of anxiety. That’s okay, though, as they have a number of ways they can distract themselves while keeping us updated on the the mission’s progress. For instance, you can follow the Phoenix mission on Twitter and get frequent updates and mission facts. The mission team also has a blog that is full of information and that will be used to post what the mission team is thinking and what Phoenix sees and discovers, as well as an information rich mission website.
So, the entire Phoenix mission is going to be captured for us via an array of online tools. This is incredibly exciting, and it serves to connect us to the exploration and science that NASA leads in a way that is not only meaningful, but also basically real time.
I came across the graphic below this morning and found it really interesting, and startlingly revealing of the fragility of freshwater on the planet. It was put together by UNESCO’s World Water Assessment Program, a program that monitors freshwater issues to properly inform decision making and ensure a comprehensive understanding of the status of our planet’s most valuable natural resource. WWAP puts out a report, the World Wide Development Report, that comprehensively reviews the state of freshwater on the planet. This relates to an earlier post here, What is Important, to Scale, that used a compelling image to represent the proportion of air and water to our planet. The graphic below supports the tenuous nature of freshwater on our planet:
Let’s summarize:
Of the total water on the planet, only 2.5% is freshwater
Of that 2.5%, almost 69% is in glaciers
About 30% is groundwater
Only 0.4% is surface and atmospheric freshwater
Of that 0.4%, 67.4% is freshwater lakes
12.2% is made up of soil moisture
9.5% is in the atmosphere
And just over 10% is in wetlands, rivers and plants and animals
It is interesting to realize how overwhelmingly abundant freshwater is in certain areas of the world, so much so as to be taken for granted, while in contrast how overwhelmingly scarce it is in others. The net is that there is just not that much freshwater on the planet.
The image above is via the Galileo explorer and depicts the volcanic moon Io previously discussed, with its neighboring moon Amalthea. Amalthea is small, and has been misshapen by the incredible volatility of existing in close proximity to Io and Jupiter. It’s a tough neighborhood. As Io is swept by Jupiter’s electromagnetic field huge amounts of material are scoured off of Io and spiraled towards Jupiter. At times Amalthea orbit takes it directly into the path of this material, and the total intensity of the power generated, and it is thought that this has created its intense reddish color and elongated shape.
I came across this composite image last evening and it stopped me in my tracks. Click on it to view larger, it’s worth it. Here is an enormous, active chain of volcanic calderas, named Tvashtar Catena, on Jupiter’s moon Io and we get to see it in amazing detail and color. This is a color intensified composite made up of images taken by Galileo back in 2000 and composited by Ricardo Nunes.
Back in 1999 the Galileo Orbiter snapped some pictures of an active fissure eruption in this caldera. The eruption let loose lava flows that were 30km long and 1.5km high. Here’s a composited image from those pictures:
Io is the most volcanic body in our solar system with its surface literally covered in lava lakes, giant calderas, and active lava flows. The color of Io is mostly due to the huge amounts of sulfur that blanket its surface from all of this activity, which has remained continuous as long as we have been able to observe this moon. We have measured volcanic eruptions on this moon that have created sulfurous plumes 500km high. Because Io orbits closely to Jupiter it is subject to intense electromagnetic radiation. As Jupiter’s magnetosphere rotates it sweeps Io and strips away nearly 1 ton per second of volcanic gases and other materials. Io actually acts as an enormous electrical generator as it moves through Jupiter’s magnetic field developing 400,000 volts across its diameter and generating 3 million amperes that flow across the magnetic field and into Jupiter’s ionosphere.
Incredible images recently of Volcano Chaitén in Chile. This volcano is awake after 9000 years of dormancy, erupting with a fierceness this past week that has sent a plume of volcanic ash 12 miles into the atmosphere and stretching from Chile to the Atlantic ocean. The photo above is of the intense lightning that has erupted in and around the enormous plume, the result of static electricity released in incredible intensity by the density of the ash and the multitude of particles hitting each other and becoming charged. Between the earthquake in China, the cyclone in Myanmar, and the volcano in Chile it is hard to not remember how very much active our planet really is.
Last Monday Stephen Hawking gave a speech at an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of NASA. Hawking has long been a proponent of the value of humans exploring space, and again called for a determined effort by humans to colonize the moon and Mars. He put special emphasis on putting humans into space, and not relying solely on robotic explorers, which is largely driven by the survival of humans, longer term, and is an insurance policy against war, catastrophe, and disaster here on Earth. A great quote from the speech:
“Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don’t catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don’t spread the human race into space, which I’m arguing should be our long-term strategy. If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before.”
With regards to life on other planets, Hawking offered three possibilities: that life in the universe, of any type, is rare; that simple forms of life may be common, but intelligent forms of life rare; or that intelligent life typically destroys itself. He went on to say:
“Personally, I favor the second possibility – that primitive life is relatively common, but that intelligent life is very rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.”
I cannot help but be riveted by the concept of network science, actually an emerging scientific discipline that combines interacting physical, informational, biological, cognitive, and social networks… and in a way that scares me a little bit. It seems that the Department of Defense shares my fascination, but not my hesitations. The Pentagon is devoting resources (now up to $7.5 million in research grants) to what it deems a priority area of investigation and research in the effort to understand complex and variable networks. This is directly related to how the Pentagon and related constituents can then work on an understanding of the structure of the diffuse networks employed by our nation’s enemies. An underlying goal of this research is the ability to anticipate who might join such a network, which takes threat assessment to an entirely different level. So, network science would seem to be a holy grail, of sorts, for the abstract goal of developing predictive modeling. Again, very interesting and very scary, and surprising that it only garners $7.5 million currently. I suspect that will be increasing once efficacy is established. How does the military view network science:
“Initiation of a field of network science would be appropriate to provide a body of rigorous results that would improve the predictability of the engineering design of complex networks and also speed up basic research in a variety of applications areas.”
That’s from a 2005 report by the United States Army, which I have excerpted from a post at DangerRoom, Wired’s national security blog that pretty much gets my attention every day, and where I first came across this story.
Last month the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiement (HiRISE) took some incredibly detailed images of the Martian moon Phobos, as pictured above. It is incredible to me to see something so far away in such crisp detail. The simple reality that there is so much to learn and see is probably the biggest reason I continue to be fascinated by our solar system and by cosmology.
Mars has two small moons, the other being Deimos. Phobos is the bigger of the two, and is about 13 miles across. HiRISE captured a lot of amazing images of this tiny moon, but perhaps the most interesting was a focused shot on the large crater feature named Stickney and shown in the image above. It is the enormous dent on the right side of the moon. If the object that had struck Phobos had been fractionally larger it would very well have blown the moon apart and we would now only know Phobos as a dispersed ring of dust and rock orbiting Mars. Here is an image of the crater in detail:
Those lines emanating from the crater are enormous stress fractures caused by the impact and that run outward across the surface. Surviving this impact was an enormous event, but that pales when compared to the realty that the orbit of Phobos is in slow decay (at 1.8 meters per century) and will eventually bring the moon to crash into the Martian surface. Eventually being about 50 million years from now.
You’ve no doubt already heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) due to the recent resurgence in mainstream media. This is partly because it is a really big deal, connecting us to the earliest moments of the formation of the universe, and partly because some people are worried that when scientists, physicists, and researchers fire it up that it will end reality… and as a result these people are pretty active. That’s not going to happen, the world will not be consumed by tiny black holes. Rest easy.
So, what is the LHC for? It has been constructed to recreate the conditions that occurred just after the Big Bang. In recreating these early moments of the universe we may be able to understand how the first particles were conceived, and thus help us better understand how the universe actually works. The LHC will do this in a very controlled environment, and be heavily measured, recorded and monitored. It will allow us to repeat this experiment with frequency, greatly increasing our ability to study and understand. In short, this is an enormous step towards enlightenment, understanding the nature of reality, and will fill in many of the theoretical blanks that physicists and cosmologists have struggled with for a long, long time. In the name of epistemology, this is a very, very good thing.
LHC Facts:
It is made up of 2000 super conducting magnets
It will utilize the most complex cameras ever made
These cameras will be able to capture impossibly small time horizons
The LHC is the culmination of over two decades of work
Construction involved 7,000 physicists from 80 nations
It is located 175 meters underground and is 27+ kilometers in diameter
Once operational, protons will be accelerated close to the speed of light
Every second there will be 800 million proton collisions
Only a fraction of these matter, and will captured by cameras mentioned above
Particles created will exist for a thousandth, of a thousandth, of a billionth of a second
These collisions will generate heat 1 million times hotter than the core of the sun
To achieve this, the LHC team has had to build an incredibly complex machine of enormous scale. Just one of the superconducting solenoids contains more iron than the Eiffel Tower. There are many of these making up the LHC particle accelerator. The receptors and detectors are housed in giant rooms that are as big as cathedrals. The cost of this project was of such a magnitude (estimates range in the $6 billion and up range) that the United States halted its own Superconducting Super Collider back in 1993.
Excellent video of the LHC and the planned experiments (part 1 of 3):
Earlier this month the European Space Agency posted some high resolution images taken by the ESA Mars Express Orbiter of the ice covered oddity that is Promethei Planum. The images are striking and gorgeous, and depict the seasonal ice coverage of this cratered area that measures as deep as 3,500 meters in places. In the image below on the right is an impact crater, partially covered in ice, that measures roughly 100 km wide and 800 meters deep.
Catching up on my feeds just now I was saddened to see that Arthur C. Clarke, physicist, author, innovator, futurist, and ardent believer in the potential of humanity, has died. He was 90, so the man had a very decent run. Perhaps his most recognized work was 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie for which just celebrated its 40th anniversary. He leaves behind an enormous legacy of invention, creativity, art, and inspiration having written over 100 books. Enormous. Few have been so profoundly influential to so many, and managed to do it with such consistent style, usually sporting a satin Nehru jacket and tanned from the beaches of his home in Sri Lanka. For me, Arthur C. Clarke is the Yin to Philip K. Dick’s Yang. A couple great quotes from Clarke in honor of his passing…
Reflecting on his life:
“Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered. I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer.”
A terrific quote on the value of the space program, from 1970:
“The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars… A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.”
Absolutely stunning imagery of the recent fly-by of Saturn’s moon Enceladus by Cassini presented in a photo animation. You will find little mention of this in the news, and that is mostly because the news does not care. Lost opportunity for the news. We’ve investigated the robotic Cassini probe here before, and it continues to be very, very busy. On March 12th Cassini flew within 30 miles of Enceladus, approaching from above Enceladus’ north pole and thus seeing the moon as a crescent. Some facts on this beautiful moon:
Enceladus is very bright, reflecting nearly 100% of the light that strikes it
This is because we believe it is almost entirely covered in water ice
It’s surface is considered to be geologically young at less than 100 million years old
There is evidence indicating that the interior of the moon may still be liquid
It is about 500 km wide, or roughly the width of the state of Arizona
Enceladus is known as the “geyser moon” because of enormous eruptions
These are created by the release of energy caused by frictional geothermal heating
More on Enceladus and Cassini’s observations here, here, and here.
A fascinating image. On the left is all of the water on Earth, roughly 1.41 billion cubic kilometers (including oceans, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds… etc) proportionally represented by the blue marble sitting over Italy. On the right, all of the air in the atmosphere, roughly 5,140 trillion metric tonnes, proportionally represented by the pinkish marble. I would have thought both to be somewhat larger, the reality being that we only have a tenuously thin skin of both water and air.
I found this to be quite surprising, a bit startling, and a little scary.
Image and story via Dan Phiffer, who tests the mathematical veracity of these proportional representations.
From MIT’s Technology Review (an excellent online tech resource) comes this interesting list of technologies to watch for over the coming months… the “emerging technologies” of this year. You’ve no doubt heard of some of these, and others can’t be too surprising, but taken together this list should give at least a little techno-infused optimism for the balance of 2008 (I’m feeling better already):
The practical neatnik in me is perhaps the most enthused about the potentiality of my environment without the tangle of power cords everywhere. The futurist in me is getting pretty excited about the potential of graphene transistors. There is concern in Silicon Valley about the probable termination of Moore’s Law as we approach the performance envelop of silicon based chips. Having something that is so theoretically expansive in contrast, and from PENCIL LEAD, is quite comforting.
RSS Feed
