Space News & Blog Articles

Earlier this week, a Soyuz spacecraft launched to the International Space Station with three people on board. But only one of them was a cosmonaut. The other two crew members were Russian actress Yulia Peresild and film producer Klim Shipenko. They will be on the ISS for 12 days to film scenes for an upcoming movie, called “Challenge.”

NASA says the film crew is there under a commercial agreement between Roscosmos and Moscow-based media entities, adding that “the launch will mark the expansion of commercial space opportunities to include feature filmmaking.”

Veteran cosmonaut, Anton Shkaplerov, is on his fourth flight to space. He will actually be assisting with the filming for the movie.

This brings the total on board the ISS to 10, as the three space flyers join Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency), NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei, Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov. Vande Hei is currently working towards completing the longest single spaceflight by an astronaut in U.S. history, at 355 days. He’s scheduled to return to Earth in March 2022.

While astronauts have helped film previous documentaries about the ISS and the Hubble Space Telescope, this is the first movie with real actors to actually be filmed in space. Russian journalist Vitaly Egorov told NPR that Russia’s space agency made no secret of filmmaking junket, saying that the project “promotes our space program and shows it hasn’t gathered cobwebs, that we’re still flying and can come up with interesting ideas.”

Star Trek meets star reality as William Shatner, the iconic 90-year-old actor, will fly on the next Blue Origins suborbital launch on October 12th.

The famous actor, who portrayed Captain James T. Kirk in the short-lived but much-loved original 1966 Star Trek series, will become the oldest person to fly to space, surpassing the record set by 82-year-old Wally Funk, who flew with Blue Origins in their first tourism flight last summer.

Shatner will boldly go where many people have gone before, spending about 11 minutes total in flight, with a brief excursion above the Karman Line, the internationally-recognized “boundary” of space. This will be the second launch of Blue Origins’ burgeoning space tourism business.

Shatner will be joined on the New Shepard rocket by Audrey Powers (no relation to Austin), the vice president of mission and flight operations for Blue Origins, along with Chris Boshuizen, an Australian former NASA engineer, and Glen de Vries, the founder of clinical research platform Medidata Solutions.

“I’ve heard about space for a long time now,”  Shatner said in the space company’s press release. “I’m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle.”

A supermassive black hole (SMBH) likely resides at the center of the Milky Way, and in the centers of other galaxies like it. It’s never been seen though. It was discovered by watching a cluster of stars near the galactic center, called S stars.

S stars’ motions indicated the presence of a massive object in the Milky Way’s center and the scientific community mostly agreed that it must be an SMBH. It’s named Sagittarius A*.

But some scientists wonder if it really is a black hole. And one of the S stars could answer that question and a few others about black holes.

Scientists have been monitoring and studying the S stars for over 20 years. They’ve gathered precise astrometric data for the group of stars, and the measurements of the stars’ positions and movements around the galactic center have shown that there’s a massive object there. One particular star in the group—named S2 (or S0-2)—could help astronomers determine more clearly the nature of that massive object.

A new research letter is taking a close look at S2’s behaviour and asking a potentially uncomfortable question. The study is titled “What does lie at the Milky Way centre? Insights from the S2 star orbit precession.” It’s available on the pre-print site arxiv.org. The first author is C. R. Argüelles from the Fac. de Ciencias Astron. y Geofísicas, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Paseo del Bosque.

Even the most supermassive of the supermassive black holes aren’t very large, making it extremely difficult to measure their sizes. However, astronomers have recently developed a new technique that can estimate the mass of a black hole based on the movement of hot gas around them – even when the black hole itself it smaller than a single pixel.

Supermassive black holes are surrounded by tons of superheated plasma. That plasma swirls around the back hole, forming a torus and an accretion disk that continually feeds material into the black hole. Because of the extreme gravity, that gas moves incredibly quickly and shines fiercely. It’s that light that we identify as a quasar, which can be seen from across the universe.

While the quasars are relatively easy to spot, it’s much more challenging to quantify the properties of the central black hole. Now Felix Bosco, in close collaboration with Jörg-Uwe Pott, both from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg, and former MPIA researchers Jonathan Stern (now Tel Aviv University, Israel) and Joseph Hennawi (now UC Santa Barbara; USA and Leiden University, the Netherlands), has succeeded for the first time in demonstrating the feasibility of directly determining the mass of a quasar using a technique called spectroastrometry.

Spectroastrometry relies on observing the area around the black hole. As the gas swirls around it, some of it will be moving in our direction and some if it will be moving away. The portion of the gas moving towards us will be blue-shifted, and the portion moving away will shift more red. Even if the central black hole and accretion disk are too small to resolve, the technique can still be applied to regions further away, and through modeling the researchers can estimate a mass.

“By separating spectral and spatial information in the collected light, as well as by statistically modeling the measured data, we can derive distances of much less than one image pixel from the centre of the accretion disk,” explained Bosco.

Not all who wander are lost – but sometimes their cell phone reception is.  That might change soon if a plan to project basic cell phone coverage to all parts of the globe comes to fruition.  Lynk has already proven it can use a typical smartphone to bound a standard SMS text message off a low-earth-orbiting satellite, and they don’t plan to stop there.

Formerly known as Ubiquitilink, Lynk was founded a few years ago by Nanoracks founder Charles Miller and his partners but came out of “stealth mode” as a start-up in 2019.  In 2020 they then used a satellite to send an SMS message from a typical smartphone, without requiring the fancy GPS locators and antennas needed by other, specially made satellite phones.

Lynk’s Logo.
Credit – Lynk Global, Inc.

The company continued its success recently by demonstrating a “two-way” link this week using a newly launched satellite, its fifth, called “Shannon.” They’ve also proved it over multiple phones in numerous areas, including the UK, America, and the Bahamas.  

Eventually, two-way communication means that the signal could eventually be used for voice calls rather than just sending messages in emergencies.  But for now, it will only take the form of text or meta-data rather than phone calls.  In the future, the company hopes to flesh out its constellation of satellites to allow faster data rates eventually.  As anyone who has lost reception can attest to, having any service at all is preferable to having none.

The Mars Perseverance rover is on the move! The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spotted the rover from above, the first view since shortly after the rover landed in February 2021. Perseverance appears as the white speck in the center of the image above, in the the “South Séítah” area of Mars’ Jezero Crater.

The HiRISE team said the rover is about 700 meters (2,300 feet) from its original landing site.

“The rover doesn’t drive in a straight line,” wrote team member Shane Byrne, “and has covered much more ground than that, and faint wheel tracks on the nearby ground are visible.”

You can see the various arrays of sand dunes in the image, and HiRISE shots like this one allow the rover team to choose the best route to get to their primary target. These images also help put the rover’s observations in context within Jezero Crater.

HiRISE also took dramatic images of the rover’s landing, nabbing a shot of Perseverance rover as it descended through the Martian atmosphere, hanging under its parachute, as well as photos of the “debris” from landing: the discarded backshell and parachute.

Carl Sagan once famously, and sarcastically, observed that, since we couldn’t see what was going on on the surface of Venus, there must be dinosaurs living there.  Once humans started landing probes on the planet’s surface, any illusion of a lush tropical world was quickly dispelled.  Venus was a hellscape of extraordinary temperatures and pressures that would make it utterly inhospitable to anything resembling Earth life.  

But more recently, astrobiologists have again turned their attention to the Morning Star.  But this time, instead of looking at the surface, they looked in the clouds.  And now, a new study from researchers at California Polytechnic, Pomona, has calculated that there is likely a layer in the atmosphere where photosynthesis can occur. Meaning there is a zone in Venus’ cloud layer where life could have evolved.

A thick layer of sulfuric acid clouds surrounds Venus.  While those clouds might sound like a horrible place to support life, they do have some advantages. They scatter or absorb most of the harmful UV radiation that hits the planet, similar to the ozone layer’s role on Earth. The clouds are so effective at eliminating UV light that only one type (UV-A) makes it through at all, and even that type is depleted by 80-90% when compared to the level on Earth’s surface.

Even so, life as we know it needs water, not sulfuric acid, to exist, and according to previous calculations, there wouldn’t be enough water to go around.  Dr. Rakesh Mogul, the new study’s lead author, showed that instead of being made entirely of sulfuric acid, some of the material in Venus’ atmosphere might be neutralized. These neutralized materials, such as ammonium bisulfate, are more conducive to the existence of water in the atmosphere than had been previously thought.

Proving that water is available is necessary for life, but it is not sufficient.  Photosynthesis, the mechanism by which much of life derives its energy, also requires light.  Usually, this light comes from the Sun.  But on Venus, there might be another abundantly available source of energy for photosynthesis – thermal heat from the planet itself.

You know the feeling …. seeing Jupiter through your own telescope. If it gives you the chills — like it does for me — then you’ll know how the team for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter felt when they turned their spacecraft around – yes, the orbiter that’s been faithfully circling and looking down at the Moon since 2008 – and saw the giant planet Jupiter with their camera. If you zoom in on the picture, you can even see Jupiter’s Galilean moons.

Usually, LRO takes stunning, high-resolution images of the lunar surface, including being able to spot details of the Apollo landing sites. But recently, the LRO team used some high-powered calculations and precise timing to use its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) to scan the area of the sky where Jupiter was going to be, about 600 million km away. They hit the jackpot. While it’s not Hubble Space Telescope quality, the fact this image was taken from a spacecraft orbiting 100 km above the lunar surface is a true feat in engineering.

“We took a pic of Jupiter from the Moon last month,” said LRO team member Brett Denevi on Twitter. “It may not be the highest resolution ever, but its ours.”

Denevi explained on the LRO website that the exercise to take a picture of Jupiter was a labor of love. The team does these complicated maneuvers because they love exploring the planets and taking pictures.

“It is fun to take a look around our Solar System every once in a while from our perch in lunar orbit,” Denevi said.

You could say that the study of extrasolar planets is in a phase of transition of late. To date, 4,525 exoplanets have been confirmed in 3,357 systems, with another 7,761 candidates awaiting confirmation. As a result, exoplanet studies have been moving away from the discovery process and towards characterization, where follow-up observations of exoplanets are conducted to learn more about their atmospheres and environments.

In the process, exoplanet researchers hope to see if any of these planets possess the necessary ingredients for life as we know it. Recently, a pair of researchers from Northern Arizona University, with support from the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL), developed a technique for finding oceans on exoplanets. The ability to find water on other planets, a key ingredient in life on Earth, will go a long way towards finding extraterrestrial life.

The research was conducted by postdoctoral researcher Dominick J. Ryan, a postdoctoral researcher at Northern Arizona University (NAU), and Tyler D. Robinson – an Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science at NAU and the NASA Astrobiology Institute. The study that described their findings, titled “Detecting Oceans on Exoplanets with Phase-Dependent Spectral Principal Component Analysis,” recently appeared online and is being considered for publication by The Planetary Science Journal.

An artist’s illustration of the exoplanet HR8799e. The ESO’s GRAVITY instrument on its Very Large Telescope Interferometer made the first direct optical observation of this planet and its atmosphere. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

When it comes to exoplanet characterization, the most promising technique is the Transit Method (aka. Transit Photometry). This consists of monitoring stars for periodic dips in brightness, which are indications of planets passing in front of their parent stars (relative to the observer). At times, astronomers are also able to obtain spectra as light passes through the transiting planet’s atmosphere, revealing things about its chemical composition. But as Prof. Robinson told Universe Today via email, this method doesn’t allow for surface observations:

Astronomers have been using gravitational waves to detect merging black holes for years now, but may have to rely on pulsars – rapidly spinning neutron stars – to observe the mergers of supermassive black holes.

When black holes merge, they release enormous amounts of energy in the form of ripples in the fabric of spacetime. These ripples are constantly washing over the Earth, and it’s only through the use of extremely – and I mean extremely – sensitive detectors that we can spot them.

Right now, our gravitational wave detectors are only sensitive to brief, intense pulses, signalling the mergers of relatively small black holes and neutron stars. When giant black holes merge, however, the process takes so long – and produces gravitational waves of such low frequency – that we can’t spot it in the data.

??A recent study led by Dr Boris Goncharov and Prof Ryan Shannon – both researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) in Australia – are trying a different tactic: instead of observing gravitational waves directly, they’re hoping that pulsars do the hard work for us.

Pulsars are a special kind of neutron star that rapidly rotates, sending a splash of radiation across the Earth at precisely timed intervals. Their work uses the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array to monitor as many pulsars as possible. As the gravitational waves from a supermassive black hole merger wiggle through the galaxy, they will cause variations in the timing of the pulses.

Usually, when the topic of asteroid mining comes up, thoughts turn to the riches of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.  The sheer size and scale of the available resources in these asteroids are astounding and overshadow a much more accessible resource – Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) that are much closer to home. Now a team from the University of Arizona (UA) has spent some time looking at these near neighbors and realized some are very similar to one of the most famous asteroids in the belt – Psyche.

Psyche is well known for its high metal content, which interests nascent asteroid miners because of the value of materials it contains.  With 85% of its weight contained in metals, even a 50-meter (164-foot) object could have vast reserves of material that could be used to build out Earth’s space infrastructure, but without the hindrance of having to launch it from a gravity well.

The UA researchers looked at two distinct NEAs – 1986 DA and 2016 ED85, which appeared similar to Psyche.  They then calculated the total amount of material available in just one of those asteroids (1986 DA) and realized it could contain more iron, nickel, and cobalt than the current global reserves (i.e., the amount on the planet left to mine easily) of each material. Just a single asteroid could provide the world’s requirements for these materials for decades.

But the researchers didn’t stop there.  They tried to track down similar asteroids to these NEAs to see where they might have come from.  The standard theory is that they formed when the core of a failed planet (which became the asteroid belt) broke apart.  Gravitational fluxes then pulled the NEAs into their own orbits, but most objects with a similar composition stayed in the asteroid belt itself, including Psyche.

Screenshot from a website called Asterank, which ranks asteroids based on their potential value.
Credit- Asterank

Materials science has once again come through for space exploration.  Researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have developed a coating that could increase the sensitivity of LIGO by almost an order of magnitude.  That would increase the detection rate of the gravitational waves the observatory is seeking from about once a week to once a day, mainly due to the increased volume of space that the observatory’s interferometers would be able to collect signals from.

It may be shocking that something as simple as a coating could dramatically impact a scientific experiment, but this was not just a simple coating.  It was specially designed to turn the glass placed in LIGO’s interferometer into a mirror.  Having a highly reflective mirror is essential to having a highly sensitive instrument, as the mirrors reflect the laser beams used to measure the gravitational waves themselves.  However, the coatings used to make these mirrors reflective can introduce a tiny amount of noise to the instrument usually caused by the material itself absorbing some heat from the beam.  Unfortunately, at the sensitivities LIGO is looking for, that small amount of noise could have an outsized impact on results.

One of the coated pieces of glass in a test chamber with a red laser beam.
Credit – CalTech

Therefore, the development of a better coating has been central to efforts to improve LIGO’s sensitivity.  Now, Gabriele Vajente, a senior research scientist at LIGO and Caltech, thinks he has a solution. Perhaps more importantly, he has developed a tool for finding better solutions in the future.

The current best solution that Dr. Vajente and his team came up with is a combination of titanium and germanium oxide, which crucially absorbed the least amount of energy into the mirror itself.  That absorption is the root cause of the noise introduced into the system.  Less absorption, therefore, means less noise.

The new Arid meteor shower may be making itself known in early October 2021.

It’s not every day that we witness an outburst from a new meteor shower gracing the skies of the Earth. But that’s just what may be in store this week for fortunate observers deep in the southern hemisphere, with the advent of the Arid meteors.

The shower in question should radiate from the otherwise obscure southern hemisphere constellation of Ara the Altar (perhaps, they should be known as the ‘Ara-tids?’ The radiant position is Right Ascension 17h 7’, Declination -57.5 degrees south.

The source of the shower is short period Comet 15P/Finlay. On a 6.5 year orbit, Comet 15P reached perihelion on July 13th this past summer, and its debris trail intersects the Earth’s orbit in early October.

Early observations of the Arids late last month were promising. Specifically, SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center astronomer Peter Jenniskens, and T. Cooper and D. Lauretta of the Astronomical Society of South Africa and the University of Arizona respectively found an uptick of 13 meteors seen in NASA Ames’ worldwide Cameras for All-Sky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS). These cameras were based in New Zealand and Chile, and caught the meteors hailing from the constellation Ara on the clear sky nights of 28-30 September. This is from debris ejected from Comet 15/P Finlay during its perihelion passage in 1995.

Welcome back to our Fermi Paradox series, where we take a look at possible resolutions to Enrico Fermi’s famous question, “Where Is Everybody?” Today, we examine the possibility that we haven’t heard from any aliens is because no one is transmitting!

In 1950, Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with some of his colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had worked five years prior as part of the Manhattan Project. According to various accounts, the conversation turned to aliens and the recent spate of UFOs. Into this, Fermi issued a statement that would go down in the annals of history: “Where is everybody?”

This became the basis of the Fermi Paradox, which refers to the disparity between high probability estimates for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) and the apparent lack of evidence. Since Fermi’s time, there have been several proposed resolutions to his question, including the possibility that everyone is listening, but no one is broadcasting – otherwise known as the “SETI-Paradox.”

This theory comes down to the noticeable divide between what is referred to as “passive SETI” and “active SETI,” the latter of which is more commonly known today as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). These differences in approach have become the focal point of attention in recent years as the two have become more differentiated, and the latter has become more common.

Origin

Passive SETI, which is generally characterized by listening to space for signs of radio communications (or other discernible technosignatures), accounts for the vast majority of SETI measures to date. This includes what is arguably the first example of an extraterrestrial radio search, which was performed by Nikola Tesla in 1899 while conducting experiments at his Colorado Springs laboratory.

As the planets of our Solar System demonstrate, understanding the solar dynamics of a system is a crucial aspect of determining habitability. Because of its protective magnetic field, Earth has maintained a fluffy atmosphere for billions of years, ensuring a stable climate for life to evolve. In contrast, other rocky planets that orbit our Sun are either airless, have super-dense (Venus), or have very thin atmospheres (Mars) due to their interactions with the Sun.

In recent years, astronomers have been on the lookout for this same process when studying extrasolar planets. For instance, an international team of astronomers led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) recently conducted follow-up observations of two Super-Earths that orbit very closely to their respective stars. These planets, which have no thick primordial atmospheres, represent a chance to investigate the evolution of atmospheres on hot rocky planets.

The study that described their findings, which were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, was led by Dr. Teruyuki Hirano of the NAOJ and The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI) in Tokyo, Japan. He was joined by researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), the SETI Institute at NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithson Center for Astrophysics (CfA), the University of Tokyo, and many other institutes.

Artist’s impression of Super-Earths TOI-1634b and TOI-1685b. Credit: NASA Exoplanet Catalog

Dr. Hirano and his team chose two planets originally identified NASA’s Transitting Exoplanet Survey Spacecraft (TESS) – TOI-1634b and TOI-1685b. These two Super-Earth planets that orbit M-type (red dwarf) stars located about 114 and 122 light-years away (respectively) in the constellation Perseus. Using the InfraRed Doppler (IRD) spectrograph mounted on the 8.5 m (~28 ft) Subaru Telescope, the team made multiple confirmations about these two rocky exoplanets.

Remember when engineers proposed one-way trips to Mars, because round trips are just too expensive to bring people back to Earth again?

Getting people home from Mars can only happen in two ways. One is to lug all the return fuel with you, which is prohibitively difficult and expensive. The second way is to make the return fuel from Martian resources. But how?

A group of researchers from the University of Cincinnati propose using a type of reactor that was used from 2010-2017 aboard the International Space Station, which scrubbed the carbon dioxide from air the astronauts breathe and generated water to drink, with methane as a biproduct. On Mars, this reactor, called a Sabatier reactor, could take carbon dioxide from Mars’ atmosphere and create methane for fuel.

“Right now if you want to come back from Mars, you would need to bring twice as much fuel, which is very heavy,” said professor Jingjie Wu, who is leading a group of students in this research. “And in the future, you’ll need other fuels. So we can produce methanol from carbon dioxide and use them to produce other downstream materials. Then maybe one day we could live on Mars.”

There’s another benefit to this research: it could also be used to convert greenhouse gases to fuel here on Earth, which could help address climate change.

Now that we know that interstellar objects (ISOs) visit our Solar System, scientists are keen to understand them better. How could they be captured? If they’re captured, what happens to them? How many of them might be in our Solar System?

One team of researchers is trying to find answers.

We know of two ISOs for certain: ‘Oumuamua and comet 2I/Borisov. There must’ve been others, probably many of them. But we’ve only recently gained the technology to see them. We’ll likely discover many more of them soon, thanks to new facilities like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

In a new paper submitted to The Planetary Science Journal, a trio of researchers have dug into the question of ISOs in our Solar System. The title of the paper is “On the Fate of Interstellar Objects Captured by our Solar System.” The first author is Kevin Napier from the Dept. of Physics at the University of Michigan.

As things stand now, there’s no reliable way to identify individual captured objects. If astronomers could catch an ISO in the process of being captured, that would be great. But the Solar System is awfully complex, and that makes identifying ISOs difficult. “Given the complex dynamical architecture of the outer Solar System, it is not straightforward to determine whether an object is of interstellar origin,” the authors write.

NASA has delayed their Artemis mission to the Moon, but that doesn’t mean a return to the Moon isn’t imminent. Space agencies around the world have their sights set on our rocky satellite. No matter who gets there, if they’re planning for a sustained presence on the Moon, they’ll require in-situ resources.

Oxygen and water are at the top of a list of resources that astronauts will need on the Moon. A team of engineers and scientists are figuring out how to cook Moon rocks and get vital oxygen and water from them. They presented their results at the Europlanet Science Congress 2021.

Professor Michèle Lavagna of Politecnico Milano led the experiments. A consortium of companies and agencies, including the ESA and the Italian Space Agency, is behind the work. Lavagna and others presented a laboratory demonstration of their work at EPSC2921.

When we talk about lunar soil, we mean lunar regolith, the layer of dust that coats the Moon. The same layer that confounded Apollo astronauts by finding its way into the lunar module, clogging mechanisms and interfering with instruments. The dust constitutes an ongoing hazard that space agencies are still trying to mitigate. But the same dust is also a critical resource.

There’s lots of oxygen in the lunar regolith because oxygen readily reacts with other elements, especially group one elements. Lunar soil is rich in oxides, especially silicon dioxide, iron oxide, magnesium oxide, etc. According to the ESA, about 50% of lunar soil is iron and silicon dioxide, and about 26% of those compounds are oxygen. The trick is getting the oxygen out.

The search for planets beyond our Solar System has grown immensely during the past few decades. To date, 4,521 extrasolar planets have been confirmed in 3,353 systems, with an additional 7,761 candidates awaiting confirmation. With so many distant worlds available for study (and improved instruments and methods), the process of exoplanet studies has been slowly transitioning away from discovery towards characterization.

For example, a team of international scientists recently showed how combining data from multiple observatories allowed them to reveal the structure and composition of an exoplanet’s upper atmosphere. The exoplanet in question is WASP-127b, a “hot Saturn” that orbits a Sun-like star located about 525 light-years away. These findings preview how astronomers will characterize exoplanet atmospheres and determine if they are conducive to life as we know it.

The research paper that describes their findings appeared in the December 2020 issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics. It was also the subject of a presentation made during the recent Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2021, a virtual conference from September 13th to 24th, 2021. During the presentation, lead author Dr. Romain Allart showed how combining data from space-based, and ground-based telescopes detected clouds in WASP-127b’s upper atmosphere and measured their altitudes with unprecedented precision.

Some of the elements making WASP-127b unique, compared with the planets of our Solar System. Credits: David Ehrenreich/Université de Genève, Romain Allart/Université de Montréal.

Like many exoplanets discovered to date, WASP-127b is a gas giant that orbits very close to its parent star and has a very short orbital period – taking less than four days to complete a single orbit. The planet is also 10 billion years old, which is over twice as long as Earth (or “our” Saturn) has been around. Because of its close orbit, WASP-127b receives 600 times more irradiation than Earth and experiences atmospheric temperatures of up to 1,100°C (2012°F).

Scientists have begun studying the samples returned from the Moon by China’s Chang’e-5 mission in December 2020, and a group of researchers presented their first findings at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) last week.

“The Chang’e-5 samples are very diverse, and includes both local and exotic materials, including some glutenates [sharp, jagged lunar particles], silicas, salts, volcanic glasses, and impact glasses, along with different minerals and different rock types,” said Yuqi Qian, a PhD student at the China University of Geosciences, during his presentation at the EPSC virtual meeting.

Chang’e-5 landed on the near side of the Moon in the Oceanus Procellarum, or Ocean of Storms, which is located on the western, central part of the Moon from our vantage point on Earth. It landed in an area not visited by the NASA Apollo or the Soviet Luna missions nearly 50 years ago. This area is also one of the youngest lunar surfaces, with an age of about 2 billion years old, and therefore these samples are different to those returned in the 1960s and 70s.

“The samples are very diverse, as we have known for a very long time that the formation of the lunar surface is a very complex process, including solar wind implantation, micrometeorite impacts, and condensation,” Qian said.

The “local” materials, which make up about 90 per cent of the returned samples, include young mare basalts, and local impact ejecta. The “exotic” materials, i.e., materials not native to the region, make up about 10 per cent of the Chang’e-5 samples and include distant impact ejecta, meteoritical materials, and volcanic glass beads.