Space News & Blog Articles

Ah, the majestic dung beetle. The pinnacle of evolution. In all seriousness, these little critters are incredibly sophisticated navigators who have, for millennia, used the night sky to guide them about their business. But light pollution is making their lives more difficult by limiting their ability to navigate by the stars. Other nocturnal creatures, including some birds and moths, may be facing similar challenges.

Dung beetles are known for their penchant for rolling dung into balls, then pushing their prize away from competing beetles as quickly as possible. To swiftly escape the competition, they need to be able to travel in straight lines away from a dung pile, putting as much distance as they can between them and their rivals. The stars provide these rushing beetles with a compass, acting as directional cues in the sky with which the beetles are able to orient themselves. When they reach a safe distance, the beetles then bury the dung and proceed to consume it in relative safety.

Researchers at the University of Würzburg in Germany, Lund University in Sweden, and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa set out to examine how light pollution affects the beetles’ ability to travel by starlight.

Their results, published in the journal Current Biology, show that the beetles become disoriented in different lighting conditions. For example, in the presence of bright city lights, the beetles have a tendency to travel directly towards the nearest, brightest light source. Instead of dispersing away from a dung pile, the beetles are all drawn in one direction. This makes conflict and competition more likely as individuals encounter each other more frequently.

Even more surprising, and perhaps more unsettling, is that diffuse light pollution, such as occurs on the outskirts of a city with no distinct light sources nearby, wreaked even more havoc on the beetles’ senses. Here, researchers discovered, the scarabs were far less capable of travelling in straight lines, becoming disoriented and lost.

According to the most widely accepted theories, evolutionary biologists assert that life on Earth began roughly 4 billion years ago, beginning with single-celled bacteria and gradually giving way to more complex organisms. According to this same evolutionary timetable, the first complex organisms emerged during the Neoproterozoic era (ca. 800 million years ago), which took the form of fungi, algae, cyanobacteria, and sponges.

However, due to recent findings made in the Arctic Circle, it appears that sponges may have existed in Earth’s oceans hundreds of millions of years earlier than we thought! These findings were made by Prof. Elizabeth Turner of Laurentian University, who unearthed what could be the fossilized remains of sponges that are 890 million years old. If confirmed, these samples would predate the oldest fossilized sponges by around 350 million years.

Elizabeth Turner is a Professor of Carbonate Sedimentology and Invertebrate Paleontology with the Harquail School of Earth Sciences, Laurentian University, in Sudbury, Ontario. She is also a field-based geologist with 30 years of experience in Canada’s Northwest Territories, who specializes in the dynamics of carbonate and shale basins dating to the Proterozoic and Paleozoic Eras. The study that describes her research appeared in the July 28th issue of the journal Nature.

To summarize, sponges are simple lifeforms and one of the earliest forms of multi-celled life. Genetic evidence from modern sponges indicated that the first sponges emerged during the Neoproterozoic Era (ca. 1,000 to 541 million years ago), but fossilized remains from this period have been lacking. Turner discovered these fossils while doing fieldwork in the Mackenzie Mountain range in Canada’s Northwest Territories as part of her Ph.D.

While this region, which borders the neighboring territory of Yukon, is part of the Arctic Circle today, it was located in a shallow inland sea in the middle of the supercontinent of Rodinia 890 million years ago – which was much closer to the equator. Turner found these fossilized remains while exploring limestone reef pockets and crevices that form in the presence of photosynthetic microbes known as cyanobacteria (aka. stromatolites).

On July 28th, the International Space Station (ISS) suffered a mishap after a new Russian module (named Nauka) fired its thrusters just hours after arriving. As a result, the entire station was temporarily pushed out of position, forcibly delaying the Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) mission. This would have been Boeing’s CT-100 Starliner second attempt to rendezvous with the ISS as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP).

The ISS managed to correct its orbit shortly thereafter, while the OFT-2 launch was delayed until the next available opportunity (Wednesday, Aug. 4th). Unfortunately, the mission was delayed again due to an issue with one of the valves on the spacecraft’s propulsion system. This prompted the ground crews to move the Starliner and Atlas V launch vehicle back into Vertical Integration Facility (VIF), so they can look for the source of the problem more closely.

The OFT-2 mission will be the second attempt of the Boeing CST-100 Starliner to dock with the ISS, having failed to do so during its previous attempt (in Dec. of 2019). Known as the OFT-1 mission, the Starliner successfully reached space without issue, but a clock malfunction prevented the engines from firing at the correct time. Once they did fire, they burned more fuel than anticipated, making its planned rendezvous with the ISS impossible.

That planned mission would have been the final uncrewed flight test, designed to validate the Starliner to conduct resupply and crewed missions to the ISS. SpaceX completed an uncrewed flight test (Demo-1) with their Crew Dragon spacecraft, which successfully rendezvoused with the ISS on March 2nd, 2019. This was followed by Demo-2, where astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley flew to the ISS.

The OFT-2 flight would have put Boeing one step closer to securing contracts with NASA to fly cargo and crews to the ISS. Before that can happen, NASA and Boeing need to analyze the Starliner and find out why not all of its valves were in the proper configuration needed for launch. Already, NASA and Boeing have worked through several steps to troubleshoot the incorrect valve indications.

A sure-fire summer shower, the Perseid meteors are set to put on a spectacular show this year.

It’s one of my fondest astronomical observing memories of childhood. Growing up in Northern Maine, it was a family tradition to set the lawn chairs out on warm mid-August nights, and watch with my mom and brother as the Perseid meteors slid silently through the inky black sky.

Though I now reside in light-polluted Norfolk Virginia, the family tradition continues… and you couldn’t ask for a better year than 2021 for the Perseid meteors.

Circumstances for the Perseid meteors in 2021: This year, peak is set for Thursday, August 12th at around 12:00 Universal Time (UT)/8:00 AM Eastern Time (EDT), favoring the Pacific Rim region. With an expected maximum Zenithal Hourly Rate (ZHR) = 110 meteors per hour, the 2021 Perseids occur just three days prior to the Moon reaching 1st Quarter, setting well before local midnight. Live elsewhere? Do not despair: meteor showers often fail to heed predictions, and instead may ramp up hours before or after the expected maximum; the Perseids in particular are notorious for a double, ‘twin’ peak’ spanning several hours. For Europe and eastern North America, the key time to watch is in the early dawn hours of August 12th. Clouded out? If skies are clear, I’d start watching for Perseids from the morning of August 10th onwards or even starting this coming weekend, as there are always early stragglers.

Radiating from the constellation of Perseus the Hero of Greek mythos, the Perseids are also sometimes known as the ‘Tears of Saint Lawrence’ referring to the saint who was martyred on a hot grid iron on August 10th, 258 AD. The Perseids are one of the longest running and most dependable of the annual major meteor showers, vying only with the December Geminids in recent years.

It’s a common reassurance made by adults to teens and adolescents who constantly face the threat of violence, cyberbullying, and ostracism: “It gets better.” Once you graduate, once you grow up and join the workforce, all the mistreatment and abuse will cease and people will appreciate you for who you are. All the hard work and perseverance you’ve shown over these many years will finally pay off.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and even the STEM fields are not immune. This was the conclusion reached by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) based on a recent survey of 650 astronomers and geophysicists. What they found was that in 44% of cases, respondends reported bullying and harassment in the workplace during the precedeing year, which was disproportionately high for women and minorities.

The survey was comissioned by the RAS Committee on Diversity in Astronomy and Geophysics was carried out by two key personnel – Aine O’Brien, the RAS Diversity Officer; and Dr. Sheila Kanani, the RAS Education, Outreach, and Diversity Officer. The findings were presented by O’Briend during the virtual National Astronomy Meeting, which was held on Thursday, July 22nd, 2021. Specifically, the initial findings of the survey indicated that:

As O’Brien explained in a recent RAS press release, it is clear from the results of this survey that the STEM fields also suffer from a culture of discrimination:

“This is the first time data like these have been collected in our field. It’s bleak, sadly somewhat unsurprising, but is unequivocal evidence to show we need to improve the workplace culture in academia. We have a well-reported diversity problem in STEM and this does nothing to help. Women and minorities are feeling pushed out.”

When Longfellow wrote about “ships passing in the night” back in 1863, he probably wasn’t thinking about satellites passing near Venus.  He probably also wouldn’t have considered 575,000 km separation as “passing”, but on the scale of interplanetary exploration, it might as well be.  And passing is exactly what two satellites will be doing near Venus in the next few days – performing two flybys of the planet within 33 hours of each other.

The two spacecraft in question are Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo.  Neither is focused on the Venus system itself, but is simply using the planet for a gravity assist to get to their final destinations – the sun’s poles and Mercury respectively.  It just so happens that they will be passing by our sister planet at around the same time.

This isn’t Solar Orbiter’s first merry-go-round with the planet, having used Venus as a gravity assist previously, and with potentially 6 more to go.  All of those assists are to help the probe go where no machine has gone before – high enough above and below the sun to get clear images of its poles, where it hopes to get more information about the solar cycle.  

BepiColombo, on the other hand, is on its second and final Venus flyby, though it still has plenty more assists from Mercury itself before it finally settles into a stable orbit in 2025.  It will pass by Venus much more closely than its traveling companion, with an altitude of 550 km compared to 7995 km for Solar Orbiter.  

Unfortunately, the distance between them is too great to expect a picture of one craft from the other.  In fact, Solar Orbiter won’t be taking any visible light images of Venus this time around at all, as the probe must remain facing the Sun itself.  BepiColombo won’t be able to turn its main camera toward the planet either, but two of its three “monitoring cameras” will be snapping as it goes past. In fact the spacecraft might also capture its own antenna and solar arrays in the picture.  Though the pictures are only 1024×1024 resolution, they will be sent back to Earth gradually following the BepiColombo’s flyby on August 10th.  

Shadows have been known throughout history to be excellent hiding places.  They may even be hiding unexpected things off the Earth as well.  According to a new NASA study, there might be water that moves from shadow to shadow on the moon – even in daylight.

Scientists have long accepted the fact that there is water on the moon – especially in the permanently shadowed craters at the poles, which is part of the reason they recently funded a “hopper” mission to go investigate.  But there are parts of the Moon that are sometimes exposed to the sun, and sometimes cloaked in shadow.  Previously, scientists thought it would have been difficult for water ice to exist in these environments, but it turns out they might have been wrong.

Data from SOFIA, one of NASA’s airliner-based observatories, confirmed that water does exist on the surface of the moon exposed to daylight. But models suggested that any water that might have existed there should have been burned away by the Sun.  There was one critical hint in the data, which then led to a hypothesis leveraging two other factors in the lunar environment.

That critical hint was that the amount of water measured by SOFIA decreases in the lunar “morning” and then increases in the lunar “afternoon”. If it was simply being burned away, the amount would have steadily decreased throughout the time.  It also ruled out the water being trapped in rock formations by a previous meteor impact.  But one explanation that fit the data is that the water is migrating to different parts of the moon throughout the course of a lunar day.  To figure out if that was possible, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory started to look at lunar environmental conditions.

One focal point of their study were the “jagged” shadows that lay across the lunar surface and move with the sun’s position in the sky.  These shadows are primarily formed by rocks or cliffs rather than crater walls, and usually aren’t very big. While the sun blasts these areas it dramatically increases their temperature, up to 120° C in some cases. After the sun moves on and an area is again cast into shadow, the temperature can go down to -210° C.  Heat is not transferred between these two areas effectively, even though they might be literally touching each other, as there is little to no atmosphere to provide the thermal conductance necessary to even out temperatures, like there is on Earth.

Tracking exoplanets is hard – especially when that exoplanet is so far away from its parent star that the normally used “transit” method of watching it dim the light of the star itself is ineffectual.  But it really helps if the planet is huge, and has its own infrared glow, no matter how far away from its star it might be.  At least those properties allowed a team of scientists from the University of Hawai’i to track a particular exoplanet called (and we’re not kidding) Coconuts-2b.

We here at UT are no stranger to whimsical astronomical naming, but the Cool Companions on Ultrawide Orbits (Coconuts) survey may take the cake.  This new planet that survey turned up is almost 6 times the size of Jupiter and is orbiting its star at an astonishing 6,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

That incredible distance made the original discoverers of the planet back in 2011 using WISE think it was “rogue”, meaning it wasn’t gravitationally bound to any particular star.  They were only able to see it because the planet itself is still glowing with a waste heat built up during the planet’s formation, which is visible in the infrared spectrum.

But new research shows that Coconuts-2b is in fact gravitationally bound to a star, L 34-26, just as an absurdly far distance. The system it is bound to isn’t even all that far from Earth – at 35 light years away it is one of the closer exoplanets found of the 4,000 so far. It’s also not even the planet that is the farthest from its host star – that honor goes to the planet 2MASS J21265040-8140293, which is separated at an astonishing 7400 AU from it’s parent star, TYC 9486-927-1. Those names so how much more appealing a name like “Coconuts 2b” truly is.

Names aside, the experience on either of those worlds would be so very different from the experience as we know it here on Earth. In addition to the crushing gravity, night time and day time on the planet would appear to be almost the same.  The star it is orbiting would simply appear as a bright red star in a sky that is similarly full of them.

How do you track an asteroid that hit the Earth over 60 million years ago?  By using a combination of geology and computer simulations, at least according to a team of scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).  Those methods might have let them solve a long-standing mystery of both archeology and astronomy – where did the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs come from?

The fact that an asteroid impact was the catastrophe that finally killed the dinosaurs is now widely accepted in scientific circles.  Now known as the “Chicxulub event”, it was named after the 145 km wide crater in the Yucatan peninsula that the 10 km wide asteroid caused when it impacted the planet about 66 million years ago.

Large creatures like dinosaurs having evolved at all, and their reigning over the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, shows that such large impacts were not very common in their time – so where did the impactor come from?  Turns out it was probably from the outer asteroid belt.

Two main findings led to this conclusion – the first was some geology samples collected from rocks formed around the time of the impact.  The second was a detailed model of different types of asteroids and comets and how they might interact with the different forces at play in the asteroid belt.

Sixty six million year old geology samples are not easy to come by, but the SwRI team managed to, and noticed some similarities in the makeup of the rock they contained.  It pointed to the Chicxulub impactor being a “carbonaceous chondrite” asteroid, which is a common type of asteroid, many of which pass near the Earth.  The only difference is that none of them are anywhere near close to the scale of the 10 km wide Chicxulub asteroid.

Methods of movement for robotic explorers of other worlds have been as varied as the worlds themselves. Some missions have been simple landers, some rovers, and now there’s even been a helicopter flight on Mars.  But there is an unexplored hybrid mode of movement that will soon be coming to a Moon near you – hopping.  NASA just granted an additional $41.6 million to support development of a hopping lunar lander that will explore the inside of craters that are permanently in shadow.

The mission, known as Micro-Nova, was granted as part of NASA’s $370 million “Tipping Point” contract for technologies that are developing milestone-based new technologies.  The $41.6 million was awarded to Intuitive Machines, a Texas-based company that specializes in developing autonomous systems for drones and other exploration technologies.  To be clear – the “hopping” the Micro-Nova will do is actually a control flight using thrusters rather than the more biological form of hopping that insects do on Earth. The company won’t be working alone on the project – they recruited scientists from Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.  

Those specialists will help to define what Micro-Nova will carry as part of its 1 kg payload.  Most likely it will involve cameras to peer into areas that no person has ever seen before.  The reason Micro-Nova uses its unique mobility technique is to peer into “permanently shaded regions” (PSRs) of the moon.  Rovers would be unable to descend into the craters, and helicopters wouldn’t work with the moon’s lack of atmosphere.  So a hopper is the best bet to reach these difficult environments.

They are not just difficult because they are hard to reach – they are also hard to observe and extraordinarily cold.  Even once Micro-Nova is in the crater, it will still only be able to take full color spectra images of its immediate surroundings, but it should be able to take black-and-white images of a wider swath of the whole crater.  Any information it is able to gather is better than the complete lack available right now at least.

Conceptual illustration of permanently shadowed, shallow icy craters near the lunar south pole.
Credit: UCLA/NASA

If asked to pick what color asteroids in the asteroid belt would be, red is likely not one that would come to mind for most people.  But that is exactly the color of two new asteroids found by Hasegawa Sunao of JAXA and an international team of researchers.  The catch is the objects don’t appear to be from the asteroid belt at all, but are most likely Trans-Neptunian objects that were somehow transported into what is commonly thought of as the asteroid belt. How exactly they got there is still up for debate.

The two asteroids, known as 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia, were originally thought to be D-type asteroids, are rich in silicates and carbon, and make up the majority of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that orbit behind the giant planet.  There is a group of these types of asteroids called the Cybeles which make up their own separate group of asteroids a little farther out from the larger belt.

Distribution curve of locations of various asteroid groups.
Credit – Astronomical Image – NASA, Ryugu Image – JAXA, Hasegawa et al.

However, the two new asteroid’s spectral lines were “too steep”, making them much more like the “Centaurs” – a body that is larger than an asteroid but smaller than a planet that orbits between Jupiter and the Kuiper belt.  The reddish color they reflect is indicative of having organic compound on its surface, which is one of two distinct categories Centaurs can be – the other one being “blue”.  

That spectra makes 203 Pompeja and 269 Justitia unique in the asteroid belt, but they are similar to their asteroid neighbors in other ways, such as their size (110km diameter for Pompeja and 55km diameter for Justitia) and their orbit, which puts them right in the middle of the traditional asteroid belt.  But why a Trans-Neptunian Centaur would migrate into the asteroid belt remains a mystery.

The bureaucracy of government control is slowly fading away in space exploration, at least in the US.  A series of delays, cost overruns, and imposed requirements have finally started taking its toll on the Space Launch System (SLS), the next generation NASA rocket system.  Now, the space agency has finally conceded a point to the commercial launch industry.  It has elected to use Space X’s Falcon Heavy to launch one of its upcoming flagship missions – Europa Clipper.

That decision was made despite a massive push from SLS contractors to try to keep the mission on board.  In fact, Congress originally had not allowed NASA to open Europa Clipper’s contract up to other bidders.  Pressure came from the constituents of the variety of Congressional districts that the SLS is built in.  But the downsides of using the oft-delayed system became too big to ignore.

One downside was the cost – and not only of the rocket itself.  Overall the Falcon Heavy, which is reusable, unlike the SLS, is expected to save $2 billion when it launches the Clipper on its path to Jupiter.  About half of that savings will come from avoiding a costly redesign.

That redesign had to do with the vibrational load of the SLS system on launch.  Known in the jargon as “torsional load”, the current iteration of the Clipper could not withstand those forces, according to a NASA inquest.  To redesign the whole Clipper to make it compatible with the SLS’s launch forces would have cost around $1 billion alone. Adding a single use, expensive rocket to the mix adds another $1 billion to the launch costs.

Another nail in the coffin was timeline – the SLS has been repeatedly delayed and is now more than 2 years behind schedule, though it still hasn’t completed its first launch yet, which is expected in November.  Falcon Heavy on the other hand, started development after the SLS and has already proved flight worthy, having 3 successful flights to date and a number of ongoing launch contracts.  SLS is primarily designed to support Artemis, NASA’s effort to return to the moon.  It was unclear, given the commitment the SLS program had made to Artemis and its repeated delays, whether or not the system would even be ready to support the Clipper’s Launch in 2024, and its usefulness for other science missions has been called into question as well.

In 1916, Albert Einstein put the finishing touches on his Theory of General Relativity, a journey that began in 1905 with his attempts to reconcile Newton’s own theories of gravitation with the laws of electromagnetism. Once complete, Einstein’s theory provided a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of the cosmos, where massive objects alter the curvature of spacetime, affecting everything around them.

What’s more, Einstein’s field equations predicted the existence of black holes, objects so massive that even light cannot escape their surfaces. GR also predicts that black holes will bend light in their vicinity, an effect that can be used by astronomers to observe more distant objects. Relying on this technique, an international team of scientists made an unprecedented feat by observing light caused by an X-ray flare that took place behind a black hole.

The team was led by Dr. Dan Wilkins, an astrophysicist with the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University and a NASA Einstein Fellow. He was joined by researchers from Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos at The Pennsylvania State University, and the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.

Using the ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR space telescopes, Wilkins and his team observed bright X-ray flares coming from around a supermassive black hole (SMBH) located at the center of I Zwicky 1 – a spiral galaxy located 1,800 light-years from Earth. Astronomers were not expecting to see this, but because of the SMBH’s extreme gravity (which comes from 10 million Solar masses), flares from behind it were made visible to the XMM-Newton and NuSTAR.

The discovery was made in the course of a survey designed to learn more about the bright and mysterious X-ray light that surrounds a black hole’s event horizon. This “corona” (as its nicknamed) is thought to be the result of gas that falls continuously into the black hole and forms a spinning disk around it. As the ring is accelerated to near the speed of light, it is heated to millions of degrees and generated magnetic fields that get twisted into knots.

Material science is still the unsung hero of space exploration.  Rockets are flashier, and control systems more precise, but they are useless without materials that withstand the immense temperatures of forces required to get people and things off the planet.  Now a team from MT Aerospace, working on a grant from ESA, has developed a new type of material that will be immensely useful in one of the most important parts of any rocket engine – the fuel tanks.

The material itself isn’t new – known as Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (CFRP), the technology has been around for decades, and is widely used in automotive, aerospace, and civil engineering.  However, no one has been able to successfully make a rocket fuel tank out of it until now.

Several challenges had to be overcome first – it had to be made leakproof and then had to withstand the extreme cryogenic pressures that come with storing rocket fuel.  Hydrogen and oxygen, which are combined in a rocket engine, are notoriously difficult to retain.  Existing field tanks, even those primarily made out of some form of composite, had an interior metal lining to ensure the highly reactive gas didn’t escape out of the tank.

Metallic linings have a downside though – they are heavy, and require many more parts and manufacturing steps than a pure CFRP tank would. Since launch costs are one of the primary cost drivers of space exploration, and weight is tied directly to launch cost, decreasing both the weight and the number of components is appealing for rocket manufacturers.

That appeal has been well known for a long time, so ESA spent some research money on projects to develop a novel, lightweight fuel tanks.  The new technology developed by MT Aerospace was one of the outcomes of that funding.  

In May of 2018, NASA’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport (InSight) landed on the Martian surface. This mission is the first of its kind, as all previous orbiters, landers, and rovers focused on studying the surface and atmosphere of Mars. In contrast, InSight was tasked with characterizing Mars’ interior structure and measuring the core, mantle, and crust by reading its seismic activity (aka. “marsquakes”).

The purpose of this is to learn more about the geological evolution of Mars since it formed 4.5 billion years ago, which will also provide insight into the formation of Earth. According to three recently published papers, the data obtained by InSight has led to new analyses on the depth and composition of Mars’ crust, mantle and confirmed the theory that the planet’s inner core is molten.

The three studies, which were published in the July 23rd issue of Science, were led by Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun of the Bensberg Observatory at the University of Cologne; Amir Khan, a researcher with the Physics Institute at the University of Zürich; and Simon Stähler, a researcher with the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich. These papers addressed the new findings made thickness and structure of the Martian crust, the upper mantle structure, and the molten core (respectively).

As Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), expressed in a recent NASA JPL press release: “When we first started putting together the concept of the mission more than a decade ago, the information in these papers is what we hoped to get at the end. This represents the culmination of all the work and worry over the past decade.”

The data that led to all three papers came from InSight’s seismometer, known as the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS). On Mars, seismic activity is largely the result of impacts on the surface, which causes sound waves to travel through the mantle and core to the other side of the planet. The ultrasensitive SIES was designed to let scientists hear these soundwaves, which vary in terms of speed and shape based on the materials they pass through.

If you were planning an ice-fishing trip to the Martian south pole and its sub-surface lakes observed by radar in 2018, don’t pack your parka or ice auger just yet. In a research letter published earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters by I.B. Smith et al., it seems that the Martian lakes may be nothing more smectite, that is, a kind of clay. Should the findings of the paper, titled A Solid Interpretation of Bright Radar Reflectors Under the Mars South Polar Ice (a solid title if you ask me), turn out to be correct, it would be a significant setback for those hoping to find life on the red planet. So why were these supposed lakes so critical for the search for life on Mars? How were they discovered in the first place? Why have our dreams of Martian ice-fishing turned to dust (or, more correctly, clay)?

In 2018, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that its Mars Express orbiter had discovered evidence of liquid water lakes below the surface of the Martian south pole. Understandably, the discovery bolstered hopes for finding extremophile organisms surviving in the icy water similar to bacteria surviving under 4 kilometers of ice in Antarctica’s Lake Vostok. 

Like Mars, Antarctica had a warm and wet past. As geological and tectonic processes migrated the great continent to the south pole, it underwent extreme glaciation. Microbes adapted to the radical climate change and eventually gave rise to the ecosystem that thrives there today. While the glaciation of Antarctica was driven by the tectonic action of continental drift, the climate change on Mars was global and likely due to the loss of the atmosphere from erosion by the solar wind. It is not unreasonable to imagine microbes adapting to this extreme climate change and clinging stubbornly to life in subsurface lakes at the Martian poles.

Mars Express utilized Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument or MARSIS. The radar was pulsed and carefully measured, revealing reflectivity data for the surface and below to a depth of 1.5 kilometers. An exceptionally bright area, roughly 20 kilometers wide, was consistent with what would be expected if a large body of liquid were present. 

The authors of the recent paper disputing the validity of the claims of Martian lakes raise some questions that cannot be answered by radar reflectivity alone. They claim that the required amounts of salt and heat needed to sustain the supposed lake are not plausible. Mars is too cold, and while there is salt present on the planet, there is no known mechanism that would concentrate it to the salinity levels necessary for liquid water to persist. They also estimate that the local geothermal flux (would Mars-thermal flux be a more appropriate term?) is one-sixth that is required to maintain liquid as well.

The planned launch of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner test flight to the International Space Station (ISS) has been pushed back to Tuesday, August 3 after a mishap involving a newly docked Russian module. Originally, Starliner’s flight was to take place today, July 30, 2021 but NASA and Boeing officials agreed to delay the flight following a “spacecraft emergency” on the space station after inadvertent thruster firings on the new Nauka module caused a loss of attitude control on the ISS.

The Nauka module’s thrusters started firing at 12:45pm ET on Thursday, July 29 “inadvertently and unexpectedly,” NASA said, moving the station 45 degrees out of attitude. After 47 minutes, recovery operations on both the ISS and the ground regained attitude. NASA said the seven-member crew on the space station was in no danger.

In a statement released by the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Vladimir Solovyov, flight director of the space station’s Russian segment, blamed the incident on a “short-term software failure”, where a direct command to turn on the lab’s engines was mistakenly implemented.

Attitude control was quickly “countered by the propulsion system” of the Russian Zvezda module, where Nauka was attached. Additionally, thrusters in a Progress cargo ship docked on the other side of Zvezda fired to help right the ship.

During the loss of attitude control, communications blipped out for a few minutes, since the ISS’s position is important for communications, as well as for getting power from solar panels. Both NASA and Roscosmos say the station is now back to its normal orientation and all systems are operating normally.

On April 10th, 2019, the world was treated to the first image of a black hole, courtesy of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Specifically, the image was of the Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) at the center of the supergiant elliptical galaxy known as M87 (aka. Virgo A). These powerful forces of nature are found at the centers of most massive galaxies, which include the Milky Way (where the SMBH known as Sagittarius A* is located).

Using a technique known as Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), this image signaled the birth of a new era for astronomers, where they can finally conduct detailed studies of these powerful forces of nature. Thanks to research performed by the EHT Collaboration team during a six-hour observation period in 2017, astronomers are now being treated to images of the core region of Centaurus A and the radio jet emanating from it.

The study that describes their findings, which recently appeared in Nature Astronomy, was performed by the EHT Collaboration, which involves more than 300 researchers from Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. They were joined by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI), the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science, the Flatiron Institute, and multiple universities and research institutes.

For decades, astronomers have known that SMBHs reside at the heart of most massive galaxies surrounded by massive rings of dust and gas. These rings are caused by the SMBHs tremendous gravitational pull, which accelerates the dust and gas to relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light) and triggers the release of massive amounts of electromagnetic energy (including radio waves).

This process is what leads to galactic nuclei becoming “active” – aka. an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) or quasar – where the core region vastly outshines the galactic disc many times over. Whereas matter on the edge of the black hole is accreted onto its face, some of the surrounding matter escapes into space moments before it is captured in the form of relativistic jets – one of the most energetic features in the known Universe.

In our exploration of Mars, we’ve seen some strange, naturally occurring shapes. Polygons – a shape with at least three straight sides and angles, typically with five or more – have been seen in several different Martian landscapes, and scientists say these shapes are of great interest because they often indicate the presence of shallow ice, or that water formerly was present in these areas.

For example, the Phoenix lander saw polygon shapes on the ground in the Mars arctic region, and these shapes were produced by seasonal expansion and contraction of ground ice. The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found large polygon-shaped ridges, and networks of giant polygonal troughs created by ancient lakes that have evaporated.

But HiRISE (the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) has also seen these odd shapes within dry, dusty sand dunes.  In our lead image, these polygon-shaped sand dunes have an almost honeycomb-like appearance.

“Polygons form by the intersecting ridges of sand dunes,” the HiRISE team explained on their website. “If this deposit were to become indurated and eroded, we might not be able to tell that they originated as wind-blown dunes, and interpret the polygons as evidence for a dried-up lake, for example.”

But could there be a connection between these strange-shaped dunes and water? These types of dunes often accumulate in the bottoms on craters, which is also a good setting for an ancient or temporary lake. The image below is from HiRISE, showing Victoria Crater on Mars (where the Opportunity rover explored), showing a crisscrossing, polygon-shaped dune field.

Dark matter remains one of the greatest mysteries in science.  Despite decades of astronomical evidence for its existence, no one has yet been able to find any sign of it closer to home.  There have been dozens of efforts to do so, and one of the most prominent just hit a milestone – the release and analysis of 8 years of data.  The IceCube Neutrino Observatory will soon be releasing results from those 8 years, but for now let’s dive in to what exactly they are looking for.

Theories abound about what dark matter actually is, and several of them focus on the idea of Dark Matter as a type of particle.  The most prominent of those is the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP).  The physics behind WIMP are one of the primary drivers of the IceCube Experiment.

A neutrino detector might seem like an odd way to look for WIMPs, but the physics behind it is well understood.  When traveling through large clumps of “standard model” matter (i.e. what we think of as “normal” particles), WIMPS could lose energy and eventually become gravitationally bound to the body they are traveling through.  This would be the case with planets, or with the Sun.  So the center of the Earth could harbor a large, unseen mass of weakly interacting particles.

It would be impossible to directly detect any such grouping of WIMPS.  However, scientists could see tell-tale signs by measuring a proxy particle – neutrinos.  Neutrinos, which themselves are notorious for being difficult to detect, result from some theories where WIMPs self-destruct by interacting with a standard particle.  Since they are so difficult to pin down, the neutrinos that would result from this process in any mass of WIMPs in the center of the Earth would almost certainly be able to make it through the mass of the Earth and out into space. 

But along the way, they might get picked up by a neutrino detector, like IceCube. Based at the geographic South Pole, IceCube consists of 86 strings of digital optical modules containing 5160 individual optical sensors that will detect a type of light created by Cherenkov radiation when any neutrino interacts with another particle.  By triangulating the brightness and longevity of the light pulse, scientists can then backtrack the speed and direction that the neutrino was traveling.