Space News & Blog Articles

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! Adjust your eyeglasses to read about today’s topic: adaptive optics!

Let’s say you’re an astronomer. You’ve built yourself a gigantic new observatory to study the heavens above. You look through the eyepiece (or more accurately, the computer screen), expecting the glory of space to reveal itself to you. Instead, to your frustration, you find only a blurry, wiggly mess.

Earth’s atmosphere is pretty good when it comes to keeping living things alive, but pretty terrible when it comes to astronomy. No matter how big your telescope is, how sophisticated, and how powerful, as long as it’s on the ground it has to contend with all those miles of thick atmosphere.

The problem is the ever-shifting turbulent motions of hot and cold air as they struggle to evenly distribute heat throughout the globe. Warm and cold air have different indices of refraction, meaning that they bend the path of light differently. So light from a distant star doesn’t follow a straight line on its way through our atmosphere – it constantly shifts, zigging and zagging as the air moves.

It’s exactly the same process that makes stars twinkle. It’s pretty, but annoying.

If you’re a fan of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and the Fermi Paradox, then it’s likely you’ve heard of a concept known as the Great Filter. In brief, it states that life in the Universe may be doomed to extinction, either as a result of cataclysmic events or due to circumstances of its own making (i.e., nuclear war, climate change, etc.) In recent years, it has been the subject of a lot of talk and speculation, and not just in academic circles.

Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have also weighed in on the issue, claiming that humanity’s only chance at long-term survival is to become “interplanetary.” Addressing this very possibility, a research team led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) recently created a timeline for potential human expansion beyond Earth. According to their findings, we have the potential of going interplanetary by the end of the century and intragalactic by the end of the 24th!

The paper that describes their findings was recently published in the July 27th, 2021, issue of Galaxies. The team responsible was led by Jonathan H. Jiang, a Principal Scientist and group leader with NASA JPL’s Earth Science Section. He was joined by Kristen A. Fahy, a member of the Earth Science Section at NASA JPL, and Philip E. Rosen, a retired energy industry engineer.

The Great Filter was proposed in 1996 by Robin Hanson, an economist and research associate at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI). In an essay titled “The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?” he proposed that there must be something in the grand scheme of biological evolution that prevents life from emerging and/or reaching a state of advanced technological development.

This was Hanson’s proposed resolution for why humanity’s attempts to find intelligent life – despite its assumed statistical probability – have failed thus far (aka. Fermi’s Paradox). But as Hanson makes clear in his paper, the Great Filter Hypothesis also has immense implications for humanity. Depending on where the Filter is located – an early stage of development or a later one – humanity may have already passed it or is nearing it (neither scenario is particularly reassuring).

Our Sun is about 4.6 billion years old. We know that from models of Sun-like stars, as well as through our observations of other stars of similar mass. We know that the Sun has grown hotter over time, and we know that in about 5 billion years it will become a red giant star before ending its life as a white dwarf. But there are many things about the Sun’s history that we don’t understand. How active was it in its youth? What properties of the young Sun allowed life to form on Earth billions of years ago?

If we had a time machine, we could travel to the distant past and observe the Sun’s youth directly. But since that’s not possible, we can do the next best thing. Look for young stars that are very similar in size and composition to our Sun. The spitting image of the Sun, if you will. This has been done before with older stars. HIP 102152, for example, is a solar doppelganger that’s about 4 billion years older than our Sun. Now a team has studied a young solar doppelganger known as kappa-1 Ceti.

The star has been studied since the 1940s. It’s very similar to the Sun in mass and metallicity, but it’s only about 600 million years old. For this study, the team integrated observational data of kappa-1 Ceti with evolutionary solar models. From this, they could make predictions about how the Sun behaved at a similar age. Based on their model, the Sun likely rotated about three times faster than it does now, had a much stronger magnetic field, and emitted more solar flares and high-energy particles.

This interesting thing about the Sun at around 600 million years old is that life on Earth first appeared around this time. Understanding the Sun at this age could give us clues about how terrestrial life formed. This study holds some tantalizing possibilities. Because the Earth’s magnetic field was weaker back then, solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the young Sun would have exposed Earth to more high-energy particles than they do today. These particles could have helped complex molecules to form on Earth. If that’s the case, an active young Sun could have played a key role in forming the building blocks of life.

This is an initial study, so the connection to life is tenuous. But the team hopes to gather data from other Sun-like stars at various ages. With more observations, they will be able to fine-tune their model and create a more accurate history of the Sun.

When the poet Horace said “We are but dust and shadow”, he probably didn’t think that dust itself could create a shadow. But it can, and that shadow can obscure even some of the most powerful explosions in the universe.  At least that’s the finding from new research from an international team using data from the recently retired Spitzer telescope.  It turns out dust in far away galaxies can obscure supernovas.

Existing theoretical models have predicted almost twice the amount of supernovas that have been observed in the wider universe.  More precisely, they overestimated the number of supernovae observed in the farther away parts of the universe.  Scientists assumed that the missing supernovae did exist, they just weren’t capturable in the visible light spectrum.  They were right.

Spitzer is an infrared telescope, meaning it can peer through otherwise opaque material that other telescopes can’t see through.  When it turned its attention to 40 relatively close by galaxies, it found 5 new supernovae that weren’t picked up by any optical telescope.  

Five new supernovae might not sound like a lot, but it was for the relatively small amount of time Spitzer spent on the observation program and the relatively small part of the universe it was concentrating on.  Extrapolating that number out to the whole of the universe, the number of supernovae jumps up to almost perfectly in line with theoretical expectations.

So the supernovae were in fact being obscured by something, and pretty quickly it became clear that the obscuring material was “dust”.  Not the same kind of dust found in a house, nor even really the same kind of dust that is found on Earth, but interstellar dust that consists of particles about that size of a piece of grain, that when combined together has the same effect as smoke.  

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! It’s easy to measure your interest in today’s topic: the astronomical unit!

Measuring distances on Earth is pretty easy using units like kilometers or miles. Your nearest town might be a few kilometers away. A long-distance flight will cover thousands of miles.

But distances in space are a whole other beast. If we stuck to our Earth-bound conventions, it would just get ridiculous. Our Moon, the nearest (natural) object in space worth talking about, is almost four hundred thousand kilometers away. On average, Saturn is easily over a billion kilometers away.

Nobody has time to type all those zeros or keep track of all those ‘illions, especially astronomers, so they’ve come up with a handy solar-system-scale measure: the astronomical unit.

Abbreviated as “AU”, “au”, and sometimes just “A”, the astronomical unit used to be defined as the average distance between the Earth and Sun (I know, I know, it’s a very Earth-centric point of view but you can’t blame us). But as our measurement techniques we improved, we realized that the Earth-sun distance is always changing. So to make life easier the astronomical unit is now defined to be exactly 149,597,870.7 kilometers.

As a field, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence suffers from some rather significant constraints. Aside from the uncertainty involved (e.g., is there life beyond Earth we can actually communicate with?), there are the limitations imposed by technology and the very nature of space and time. For instance, scientists are forced to contend with the possibility that by the time a message is received by an intelligent species, the civilization that sent it will be long dead.

Harvard astronomers Amir Siraj and Abraham Loeb tackle this very question in a new study that recently appeared online. Taking their cue from the Copernican Principle, which states that humanity and Earth are representative of the norm (and not an outlier), they calculated that if any transmissions from Earth were heard by an extraterrestrial technological civilization (ETC), it would take about 3000 years to get a reply.

Their stud, titled “Intelligent Responses to Our Technological Signals Will Not Arrive In Fewer Than Three Millennia,” recently appeared online and is being considered for publication. Whereas Siraj is a concurrent undergraduate and graduate student of astrophysics at Harvard, Prof. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, the Director of Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC), the Chair of the Breakthrough Starshot Advisory Committee, a bestselling author, and Siraj’s academic advisor.

Loeb is also renowned for theorizing that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua, which flew past Earth in 2017, could have been extraterrestrial lightsail. This theory was originally put forth in a 2018 paper he co-wrote with postdoctoral researcher Shmuel Bialy (of the ITC). The arguments presented therein have since been expanded upon in Loeb’s most recent book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

Prof. Loeb recently partnered with Dr. Frank Laukien and other colleagues to launch the Galileo Project, a multinational non-profit dedicated to the study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs). Siraj serves as the Director of Interstellar Object Studies for this project, and he and Loeb have published extensively on subjects ranging from black holes and meteors to panspermia and interstellar objects (many of which were on the subject of ‘Oumuamua).

With all the news recently about relatively young rocket companies successfully flinging their founders and some actual astronauts into space, it might be surprising that the rocket company with the most experience of all still hasn’t gotten its flagship new rocket off the ground with people yet.  And after yet another delay, there is now no firm date for the launch of Boeing’s Starliner.

This setback is the latest in a string of them for the aerospace giant.  Some were out of their control, such as a Russian module knocking the ISS for a loop around when Starliner was supposed to launch, but many have been, including this newest delay.

The company pointed to valves in the engine that weren’t set to the right positions before the liftoff scheduled for August 4th.  After ruling out software as a potential cause, the company has not yet provided any information on other causes or any timeline for implementing a fix. However, it has recently said it still hopes to launch sometime in August.

If the problem did stem from software, it wouldn’t be the first time Starliner suffered from bad code.  On its original uncrewed test flight in December 2019, a software glitch caused its thrusters to misfire, leaving it without enough fuel to reach the ISS and forcing an emergency descent back to Earth.  During that descent, the spacecraft experienced a “dire flight anomaly” – a euphemism for almost coming apart.  It did manage to land safely at White Sands Missile Range, and Boeing’s engineers set to work diagnosing and fixing the problems.

Those problems prove that rocket science is, in fact, hard.  Preliminary teething problems for a completely new rocket are not all that surprising.  But Boeing is not operating in a vacuum, and its competitors, such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin, have all had notable successful human flight stories of late.  

The Perseids, a rare eruption of nova RS Ophiuchi and a challenging dawn comet round out an amazing week of skywatching.

It couldn’t have happened at a better time. While we’re all gearing up for the peak of the Perseid meteors this New Moon week on August 12th, two more astronomical events have given us a reason to step outside on warm August nights: the eruption of recurrent nova RS Ophiuchi, and the brief appearance of comet C/2021 O1 Nishimura.

RS Ophiuchi Erupts

First up, is this past weekend’s eruption of RS Ophiuchi. This variable star is a member of a rare class of stars known as recurrent novae, which erupt in a spectacular fashion. T Pyxidis and U Scorpii are members of this same rare club of variable stars. Only 10 recurrent novae have been identified in our galaxy to date: they’re that rare. What you’re seeing is a white dwarf and red giant star in a tight orbital embrace, with the white dwarf siphoning off material from the red dwarf star until in compresses and ignites briefly.

RS Ophiuchi erupted six times in the 20th century, and most recently flared up in 2006. Though it averages an eruption every 20 years or so, its irregular period has seen gaps as brief as nine years. It has topped out at +4 magnitude in the past, and the American Association of Variable Star Observers AAVSO currently lists it at +4.5 magnitude ‘with a bullet’.

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! You probably don’t know how close you are to today’s topic: parallax!

How do you measure the distance to a star? The question frustrated astronomers for centuries. The stars are obviously far away, but beyond that…it’s tough.

Thankfully, there’s a trick. And you can do it at home.

Hold your finger up to your nose. Close an eye. Note the position of your finger relative to something far away, in the background. Now switch eyes. If you did it right, your finger should appear to wiggle relative to that same background.

Now hold your finger at arm’s length. Repeat the exercise. Your finger probably still wiggled, but hopefully by only a little bit.

On July 20th, 2021, NASA’s Juno spacecraft conducted a flyby of Jupiter’s (and the Solar System’s) largest moon, Ganymede. This close pass was performed as part of the orbiter’s thirty-fourth orbit of the gas giant (Perijove 34), which saw the probe come within 50,109 km (31,136 mi) of the moon’s surface. The mission team took this opportunity to capture images of Ganymede’s using Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM).

These were combined with images acquired during two previous flybys to create a new infrared map of Ganymede’s surface, which was released in honor of the mission’s tenth anniversary (which launched from Earth on Aug. 5th, 2011). This map and the JIRAM instrument could provide new information on Ganymede’s icy shell and the composition of its interior ocean, which could shed led on whether or not it could support life.

The JIRAM instrument was designed to detect infrared light emerging from Jupiter’s interior and characterizing the atmospheric dynamics to a depth of 50 to 70 km (30 to 45 mi) beneath Jupiter’s cloud tops. However, the instrument can also be used to study Jupiter’s largest moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto – collectively known as the Galilean moons in honor of their discoverer (Galileo Galilee).

As Scott Bolton, Juno’s Principal Investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), explained in a NASA press release:

“Ganymede is larger than the planet Mercury, but just about everything we explore on this mission to Jupiter is on a monumental scale. The infrared and other data collected by Juno during the flyby contain fundamental clues for understanding the evolution of Jupiter’s 79 moons from the time of their formation to today.”

In this series we are exploring the weird and wonderful world of astronomy jargon! Hang on to your magnetic hats, because today’s topic is magnetars!

Let’s start with neutron stars. These are the remnant cores of giant stars, made almost entirely of pure neutrons. But there are also some electrons and protons swimming around, and they’ll be important in a second. Neutron stars are already incredibly weird: they have several times the mass of the sun crammed into a volume about the size of Manhattan. That’s a lot of density. You would be perfectly entitled to call neutron stars the largest atomic nuclei in the universe.

Now back to those electrons and protons. Neutrons themselves are electrically neutral, and don’t really do much in this story except provide the bulk of the neutron star mass. But electrons and protons are electrically charged, which is important once I tell you that some neutron stars spin insanely fast. We’re talking up to tens of thousands of rpm – that’s faster than your kitchen blender (please don’t make smoothies with a rotating neutron star).

Those electric charges whipping around at that velocity can power up some truly enormous magnetic fields. And now we come to the magnetars: the name we give to super-rotating, super-magnetized neutron stars. Magnetars have, by far, the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe. A typical magnetar’s field is over a trillion (yes, with a “t”) times more powerful than the Earth’s. And sometimes these even reach up into the quadrillion.

That’s a lot of illions.

Once again, things are gearing up at SpaceX’s South Texas Launch Facility, located just outside the village of Boca Chica, Texas. In recent weeks, the aerospace community has been abuzz about the rollout and Static Fire test of the Super Heavy Booster 3 (B3) prototype. This was the first time a booster was tested, which will be responsible for launching the Starship to space in the near future. Since then, things have only ramped up some more.

First, there was the announcement on Aug. 2nd that the fourth Super Heavy prototype (the BN4) received a full complement of 29 Raptor engines and grid fins. This was followed on Aug. 3rd with news that BN4 was being moved to the launch pad and that the SN20 Starship prototype received a full six Raptor engines. On Aug. 6th, the denouement came with the stacking of both prototypes together, which resulted in the tallest rocket in the history of spaceflight!

Together, the integrated Starship stood around 120 meters (390 feet) tall, and 145 m (475 feet) tall with the addition of the orbital launch stand – which is taller than the Pyramid of Giza (138.5 m; 454 ft). The stacking was the first time that the Starship and Super Heavy were fully integrated, a major milestone for the company that puts them one step closer to making an orbital flight test.

The integration was part of an accelerated work order that came to be nicknamed the “Warp 9” surge. This included bringing hundreds of employees in from other sites around the country to assist in operations. By Friday, Aug. 6th, The two elements were integrated just long enough to get a sense of how they would hold up on flight day; and, of course, for observers to take millions of pictures, shoot videos, and live-tweet the event!

They were then unstacked and the SN20 was returned to the High Bay while the BN4 remained on the orbital launch stand. Next, the two elements are expected to undergo a series of ground tests, which will likely include Static Fire tests for the BN4 booster. This will allow the company to complete and integrate the final elements of the Starship at the Orbital Launch Site (OLS), which is where it will launch to conduct the orbital test flight.

The only known life in the universe lives on a mid-size rocky planet that orbits a mid-size yellow star. That makes our planet a bit unusual. While small rocky planets are common in the galaxy, yellow stars are not. Small red dwarf stars are much more typical, making up about 75% of the stars in the Milky Way. This is why most of the potentially habitable exoplanets we’ve discovered orbit red dwarfs.

All things being even, you would expect then that red dwarf planets are the ones most likely to harbor life. But all things aren’t equal. Red dwarfs can be much more active than Sun-like yellow stars. They can emit enormous solar flares and strong x-rays. And since red dwarfs are much cooler than the Sun, planets must orbit very close to them to be potentially habitable. All of this paints a grim picture for life on red dwarf planets. A red dwarf would likely strip the atmospheres of close planets, and fry any life those worlds might harbor. But a new study finds that things might not be as bad as we thought.

The team used data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). While the primary goal of the TESS mission is to study exoplanets that transit their stars, the TESS survey also contains data on stellar flares. So the team looked for the stellar flares of red dwarfs. From this, they could determine the latitude of solar flares on the star. They found that the distribution of flares on red dwarfs is very different from that of our Sun.

Solar flares generally occur within the equatorial region. Because of this, the energy and particles from these flares can strike planets in the inner solar system. This most recently happened in 1859 with the Carrington Event. But Earth’s strong magnetic field does a good job protecting us. If such an event happened today it would disrupt our electronic infrastructure, but it wouldn’t threaten Earth-life as a whole. If Earth orbited the Sun much closer than Mercury, such a flare would be much more dangerous.

It’s been generally thought that red dwarfs also emit flares from their equatorial regions, but this new study found that the largest flares tend to appear close to the star’s poles. The red dwarf flares they observed all appeared above the 60-degree latitude. Their sample size was small, so they couldn’t entirely rule this out as a fluke, but if further observations support the trend that’s good news for red dwarf planets. It means that most flares will be directed out of the orbital plane, and potentially habitable worlds will be spared from an apocalypse.

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.