Tag: planet

In NASA simulation, people tote hardy, allergy-inducing molds to Mars

Enlarge / The inflatable lunar/Mars analog habitat, or ILMAH. (credit: Microbiome, 2017 ) For many Earthlings, our planet is teeming with airborne pollens, spores, and toxins that clog schnozes and turn windpipes wheezy. Sadly, jumping to space rocks may not help , a new NASA study suggests. In a 30-day simulation of living life on another planet, NASA researchers found that fungi followed artificial astronauts and set up their own colonies. Many of those small space explorers excel at surviving in extremely harsh conditions, such as those in the salty, acidic high-altitude soils of the Indian Himalaya or the radioactive remains at Chernobyl. And several of the fungi that piggybacked off-world in the simulation are associated with allergies and asthma indoors, the researchers report this week in the journal Microbiome . “The statement ‘wherever humans go, microbes hitchhike along with them’ is true for fungi also,” Kasthuri Venkateswaran, lead study author, told Ars. He works in the Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “At present, most of our studies have been conducted to know the dynamic changes regarding bacteria , not fungi,” he notes. “This is the first study that examined the fungal changes in a confined environment for at least 30 days of human habitation in isolation using molecular methods.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In NASA simulation, people tote hardy, allergy-inducing molds to Mars

Antarctica’s ‘Dragon Skin’ Ice Is Incredible

Dragon skin ice sounds like something you’d encounter beyond The Wall in the Game of Thrones fantasy realm. But good news nerds, you can find this magical-sounding stuff right here on Earth—though you’ve gotta be lucky, and willing to travel to some of the most hostile environments on the planet. Like the team of… Read more…

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Antarctica’s ‘Dragon Skin’ Ice Is Incredible

Antarctica’s ‘Dragon Skin’ Ice Is Incredible

Dragon skin ice sounds like something you’d encounter beyond The Wall in the Game of Thrones fantasy realm. But good news nerds, you can find this magical-sounding stuff right here on Earth—though you’ve gotta be lucky, and willing to travel to some of the most hostile environments on the planet. Like the team of… Read more…

Read More:
Antarctica’s ‘Dragon Skin’ Ice Is Incredible

Antarctica’s ‘Dragon Skin’ Ice Is Incredible

Dragon skin ice sounds like something you’d encounter beyond The Wall in the Game of Thrones fantasy realm. But good news nerds, you can find this magical-sounding stuff right here on Earth—though you’ve gotta be lucky, and willing to travel to some of the most hostile environments on the planet. Like the team of… Read more…

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Antarctica’s ‘Dragon Skin’ Ice Is Incredible

A ‘brand new’ Google Earth will arrive April 18th

Google just sent out invites for a pre-Earth Day event in New York City next week. In keeping with the obvious theme, the search giant is promising to take the lid off of a “brand new experience” for Google Earth. While Google doesn’t offer many details aside from the time, date and location — April 18th, 8:30 AM ET at New York’s Whitney Museum of Art — the Earth team did launch a virtual reality version of the planet-visualizing app onto Steam late last year. The app was only available for HTC Vive headsets at the time, but the team promised to add support for additional platforms in the near future. So we’d be surprised if next week’s event didn’t come with an update for Google Daydream , which would make it much more affordable as a VR educational tool. Google has also been developing its stand-alone virtual tours and augmented reality museum experiences for years now and could be incorporating more of those “on-the-ground” kinds of VR experiences directly into its incredibly detailed whole-Earth model.

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A ‘brand new’ Google Earth will arrive April 18th

Largest digital survey of the sky mapped billions of stars

An international team of astronomers have released two petabytes of data from the Pan-STARRS project that’s also known as the “world’s largest digital sky survey.” Two petabytes of data, according to the team, is equivalent to any of the following: a billion selfies, one hundred Wikipedias or 40 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with single-spaced text. The scientists spent four years observing three-fourths of the night sky through their 1.8 meter telescope at Haleakala Observatories on Maui, Hawaii, scanning three billion objects in the Milky Way 12 times in five different filters. Those objects included stars, galaxies, asteroids and other celestial bodies. According to Thomas Henning, director of the Planet and Star Formation Department of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy: “Based on Pan-Starrs, researchers are able to measure distances, motions and special characteristics such as the multiplicity fraction of all nearby stars, brown dwarfs, and of stellar remnants like, for example white dwarfs. This will expand the census of almost all objects in the solar neighbourhood to distances of about 300 light-years. The Pan Starrs data will also allow a much better characterization of low-mass star formation in stellar clusters. Furthermore, we gathered about 4 million stellar light curves to identify Jupiter-like planets in close orbits around cool dwarf stars in order to constrain the fraction of such extrasolar planetary systems.” While the immensity of two petabytes of data is already hard to grasp, that isn’t the extent of the team’s observations. The astronomers are rolling out their research in two steps: this one called the “Static Sky” is the average of each individual scan. See the image above? That’s the result of half a million 45-second exposures taken over four years. They’re releasing even more detailed images and data in 2017 — for now, you can check out what the team released to the public on the official Pan-STARRS website. Via: TechCrunch Source: Queen’s University Belfast , Pan-STARRS , Physorg

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Largest digital survey of the sky mapped billions of stars

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sent photos of Saturn’s north pole

As Cassini winds down its 20-year mission to Saturn, the spacecraft will maneuver into a series of weeklong orbits, allowing it to get a closer look at the planet’s famous rings as it flies by. Although there are still a few days before Cassini grazes Saturn’s rings, its cameras have already sent back some initial shots of some interesting features near the planet’s northern hemisphere. The images below, for example, show the same view of a hexagonal-shaped jetstream over the planet’s north pole , as seen from about 400, 000 miles above the planet and through four different spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of light ranging from violet to infrared. (The curved lines you see beyond the edge of the planet are the rings, of course.) Although the images Cassini sends back are relatively small — just 256 by 256 pixels square in their original format — NASA calculated that each pixel represents about 95 miles of space and each side of the jetstream is about as wide as Earth itself. Cassini will pass by the outer edges of the planet’s rings on December 11 and it should start sending back images of the rings themselves a few days later. After that, Cassini will continue circling Saturn until April 22, when it will get a closer look at the moon Titan and another orbital adjustment in the process. That final orbit will swing the spacecraft back between the planet and its rings 22 more times before it finally takes a dive into the atmosphere and loses signal around September 15, 2017.

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NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sent photos of Saturn’s north pole

SpaceX wants to launch 4,425 internet satellites

SpaceX has just asked the FCC for permission to launch 4, 425 satellites that can provide high-speed (1 Gbps) internet around the globe. That’s more than thrice the current number of active satellites orbiting our planet, based on the data posted by the Union of Concerned Scientists. SpaceX chief Elon Musk first talked about the project back in 2015, wherein he revealed that it would cost the company $10 billion and that it will operate out of the private space corp’s new Seattle office. One of its earliest investors is Google, which contributed $1 billion to the initiative. The satellites the company plans to launch will be much bigger than CubeSats at 850 pounds each and will be designed to last five to seven years before they decay. They’ll be orbiting our planet from 714 to 823 miles above the surface, higher than the space station that typically maintains an altitude of around 268 miles. According to the FCC filing, the project has two phases: SpaceX will initially launch 800 satellites that can provide internet services in the US and other locations. Once all 4, 425 satellites are in orbit — it could take five years to launch them all — the array will be able to provide 1 Gbps connection to users across the globe. Besides providing details about the project, the FCC filing has also revealed the kind of power Elon Musk wields over SpaceX. Apparently, Musk has a 54 percent stake in the space corporation, more than twice his 22 percent stake in Tesla. Source: FCC , Business Insider , SpaceX

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SpaceX wants to launch 4,425 internet satellites

Pluto may have a 60 mile deep liquid water ocean

We used to think of Pluto a remote frigid rock, but since the New Horizons visit, it’s vying for the title of the solar system’s most interesting (ex-) planet. An earlier study showed that its core is warm enough to support a liquid water ocean, and now we’ve learned that it might be huge — at least 100 km (62 miles) deep. The evidence, according to the team from Brown University, comes from a likely impact with massive asteroid. Pluto’s most significant feature is the Sputnik Planam , a heart-shaped crater formed by an impact with an object up to 200 km (125 miles) across. Normally, such a crater would create a “negative mass anomaly, ” or a gouged-out hole with less heft than the terrain around it. However, “that’s not what we see with Sputnik Planum, ” says Brown University geologist Brandon Johnson. Instead, the region unexpectedly has more weight than scientists expect. They know that because of Charon, Pluto’s moon. Like ours, it’s tidally locked with Pluto and always shows the same face to the planet. Interestingly, the Sputnik Planum sits right on the tidal axis, suggesting that there’s more mass in that area. “As Charon’s gravity pulls on Pluto, it would pull proportionally more on areas of higher mass, which would tilt the planet until Sputnik Planum became aligned with the tidal axis, ” the paper states. A closeup of the Sputnik Planum impact crater So why would a crater area be so heavy? The researchers theorize that when a large body impacted Pluto, it created a trampoline effect, drawing material near the core toward the surface. If that material was liquid water, “it may have welled up following the Sputnik Planum impact, evening out the crater’s mass, ” the paper says. Nitrogen ice later filled in the crater to give it extra weight, resulting in a positive mass anomaly. For the simulation to be accurate, the liquid water below the surface must be at least 100km thick with 30 percent salinity. That might seem impossible on a planet with a surface temperature of 44K (-380 F). However, scientists think that radiation heating at the core of the planet and the 300km (200 mile) thick insulating ice shell makes liquid water feasible, in theory. “It’s pretty amazing to me that you have this body so far out in the solar system that still may have liquid water, ” says Johnson. Via: Phys Org Source: Brown University

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Pluto may have a 60 mile deep liquid water ocean