Space News & Blog Articles

Two spacecraft made historic flybys of Venus last week, and both sent back sci-fi-type views of the mysterious, cloud-shrouded planet.

The Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo spacecraft both used Venus for gravity assists within 33 hours of each other, capturing unique imagery and data during their encounters.

Solar Orbiter, a joint mission between ESA and NASA to study the Sun, sailed past Venus on August 9 at a distance of 7995 km (4967 miles). Then BepiColombo, a collaborative venture between ESA and JAXA to Mercury, skimmed past at just 552 km (343 miles) from the planet’s surface on August 10.

The image above was taken when BepiColumbo was 1,573 km from Venus.

Here’s a video of Solar Orbiter’s view, from the SoloHI imager:

In 1905 Albert Einstein wrote four groundbreaking papers on quantum theory and relativity. It became known as Einstein’s annus mirabilis or wonderous year. One was on brownian motion, one earned him the Nobel prize in 1921, and one outlined the foundations of special relativity. But it’s Einstein’s last 1905 paper that is the most unexpected.

The paper is just two pages long, and it outlines how special relativity might explain a strange aspect of radioactive decay. As Marie Curie most famously demonstrated, some materials such as radium salts can emit particles with much more energy than is possible from simple chemistry. Einstein’s little paper speculated about the excess energy might be balanced by a loss of mass of the nuclear particles. This idea eventually led to Einstein’s most famous equation, E = mc2.

This equation is often taken to mean that matter and energy are two sides of the same coin. It actually means that the apparent mass and energy of an object depend upon the relative motion of an observer, and because of this, the two are intertwined, similar to the connection between space and time. But one consequence of this relation is that under the right circumstances objects should be able to produce energy via a loss of mass.

We now know this is exactly what happens in radioactive decay. The effect is also how stars create energy in their cores via nuclear fusion. Of course, if matter can become energy, then it should also be possible for energy to become matter. That trick’s a bit more difficult, and it took particle accelerators to pull it off. These days we do this all the time. Accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light and slam them together. The large apparent mass of the particles releases tremendous energy, and some of that energy changes back into particles. All of modern particle physics can trace its history to Einstein’s two-page paper.

Two gamma-ray photons can become matter. Credit: Mathieu Michel Lobet

Over the past few weeks, there was quite a bit of excitement in the air at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where mission controllers were prepping the Perseverance rover to acquire its first sample from the Martian surface. This mission milestone would be the culmination of years of hard work by a team of over 90 dedicated scientists and engineers.

The commands to commence operations to take its first sample (from drill site Roubion) were sent to the rover on Sol 164 (Thurs, Aug. 5th). On the morning of Friday, Aug. 6th, the team gathered to witness the sampling data come in. Everything appeared to be fine until they were notified a few hours later that the sample tube was empty! Since then, the rover’s science and engineering teams have investigating what could have become of the sample.

Perseverance‘s Sample Caching System (SCS) is a unique piece of hardware. Basically, it is the first system that allows for sample return missions without the need for boots on the ground – as was the case with the moon rocks brought back by the Apollo astronauts. It is composed of three robotic elements, which include the 2-meter (7 foot) and five-jointed robotic arm, which carries a large turret that includes a rotary percussive drill to collect core samples.

The second element is the bit carousel, which provides the drill bits and empty sample tubes to the drill and transfers sample-filled tubes into the rover chassis for assessment and processing. The third is the 0.5-meter (1.6-foot) sample handling arm (aka. the “T-Rex Arm”) that is located in the belly of the rover and is responsible for moving sample tubes between storage and documentation stations, as well as the bit carousel.

Louise Jandura, the Chief Engineer for Sampling & Caching at NASA JPL, shared the story on NASA’s Perseverance website. As she explained, the team gathered together online at 02:00 AM PDT (05:00 AM EDT) to see the first data come in from the coring operation. The data verified that the Corer had drilled to the desired depth of 7 cm (inches) while one of the rover’s navigation cameras provided an image of the borehole surrounded by the cuttings pile.

One of the reasons the ISS is still alive and kicking is that it offers a unique environment for testing that is available nowhere, either on the Earth or off of it.  Plenty of science experiments want to take advantage of that uniqueness.  This week, a fresh crop of experiments was delivered to the ISS aboard a Northrop Grumman Cygnus resupply craft.  They range from 3D printers to a high school science experiment with mold, and now they each have the opportunity to make use of the ISS’s microgravity environment.

The 3D printer experiment is most likely to affect one of NASA’s big pushes – the Artemis program.  The space station that serves as a backbone of that program would benefit immensely from a 3D printer using regolith as its printing feedstock.  That is exactly what the Redwire Regolith Print (RRP) project is hoping to demonstrate.

An image of the RRP, which is scheduled to start testing regolith simulant as a 3D printing feedback on the ISS.
Credit – Redwire Space

RRP will operate in conjunction with ManD, a 3D printer already housed on the ISS, and will consist of several extruders and print beds specifically designed for use with regolith.  The project will first prove that it is even capable of using regolith as a feedstock. If successful, it will then move on to testing the strength of the printed materials using a battery of ASTM standards used to characterize 3D printing materials.

One thing that RRP won’t be printing in space in muscles, but those are the focus of a second experiment that was on board the Cygnus craft – Cardinal Muscle.  This experiment attempts to use the accelerated muscle loss experienced in microgravity as a testbed for sarcopenia – the more traditional muscle loss experienced on Earth as people age.  Cardinal Muscle’s leaders hope that using the microgravity environment might speed the development of potential drugs to alleviate this long-term condition back on Earth.

As any good project manager will tell you, goals are necessary to complete any successful project.  The more audacious the goal, the more potentially successful the project will be.  But bigger goals are harder to hit, leading to an increased chance of failure.  So when the team behind one of NASA’s most unique missions released a list of goals this week, the space exploration world took notice.  One thing is clear – Dragonfly will not lack ambition.

The list was published in The Planetary Science Journal and addresses many of the looming questions surrounding the second-largest moon in the solar system.  This won’t be the first time a spacecraft visited Titan.  Huygens made a successful landing in 2004, but its instruments were designed to monitor the atmosphere rather than surface conditions, partly because the craft’s designers were so unsure about its successful descent they hoped to get as much data as they could if it failed on impact.

That left question marks on some of the most interesting aspects of Titan – including what it was like on the surface.  There are three main focus areas for Dragonfly, which hope to address those question marks – researching the moon’s prebiotic chemistry, understanding its active methane cycle, and exploring any chemical biosignatures.

All three of those goals are underpinned by the long-standing theory that Titan might be able to support life.  Any life that formed on the moon would be drastically different from our own – most likely, it would have evolved to use methane as a solvent rather than water.  Hence the interest in the methane cycle.

Even if there isn’t life on the moon, that doesn’t mean there couldn’t eventually be.  Understanding whatever prebiotic chemistry is already taking place on Titan is useful for postulating what life might eventually evolve there and what the chemistry on Earth was like before the first lifeforms were created.

Asteroid Bennu is one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our Solar System. Luckily, the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft orbited Bennu for more than two years and gathered data that has allowed scientists to better understand the asteroid’s future orbit, trajectory and Earth-impact probability, and even rule out some future impact possibilities.

In the most precise calculations of an asteroid’s trajectory ever made, researchers determined Bennu’s total impact probability through the year 2300 is really small — about 1 in 1,750 (or 0.057%). The team’s paper says the asteroid will make a close approach to Earth in 2135, where Bennu will pose no danger at that time. But Earth’s gravity will alter the asteroid’s path, and the team identifies Sept. 24, 2182 as the most significant single date in terms of a potential impact, with an impact probability of 1 in 2,700 (or about 0.037%).

“The impact probability went up just a little bit, but it’s not a significant change,” said Davide Farnocchia, lead author of the paper, and scientist at the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, speaking at a press briefing this week. Farnocchia added that means there is a 99.94% probability that Bennu is not on an impact trajectory.

“So, there is no particular reason for concern,” he said. “We have time to keep tracking the asteroid and eventually come to a final answer.”

101955 Bennu was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Team. Since its discovery, Bennu has been extensively tracked with 580 ground-based optical astrometric observations. The asteroid made three relatively close passes of Earth in 1999, 2005, and 2011, during which the Arecibo and Goldstone radar stations collected a wealth of data about Bennu’s motion.

As we all anticipate the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) later this year (hopefully), LEGO designers are hoping for a “launch” of their own. A new LEGO design of JWST is currently gathering supporters on the LEGO Ideas website. If it gets enough support, LEGO will review it and possibly create it.

As of today (August 12, 2021), the idea has just under 1,500 supporters, with the goal of 10,000. If you want your very own JWST model, cast your vote of support!

(You’ll need to create a LEGO account to vote or comment on the site.)

LEGO itself says the design for the build-a-block JWST is “well made.” It includes many impressive details of the actual telescope, such as the foldable mirror segments and sunshade.

The real JWST will be the largest space telescope ever launched. Since it is so big, the big mirror and gigantic sunshade must be folded up to fit inside the Ariane 5 rocket, and then will be unfolded once it is in space.

When it comes to finding exoplanets, size matters, but so does weight.  The larger and heavier the planet, the more likely they will be discovered by the current crop of telescopes.  Both the techniques to find exoplanets and the telescopes using those techniques are biased toward larger, heavier planets.  So when even the current crop of telescopes manages to find one that is about half the mass of Venus, it is cause for celebration.  That is precisely the size of the planet a team from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope has found orbiting a star called L98-59.

Known as L98-59b, it is not the smallest exoplanet ever discovered.  That title appears to be held by Kepler-37b, which is roughly between the Moon and Mercury in size.  But Kepler-37b was discovered using a different technique than L98-50b, which is the lightest planet on record so far discovered using the “radial velocity” technique of exoplanet detection.

The radial velocity technique relies on a planet pulling on its star and the star pulling on its planet.  So a star “wobbles” when a world is pulling it in one direction or another.  Modern telescopes can detect that wobble for most large, massive planets, which have a more significant gravitational impact on their host star.

On the other hand, relatively light planets, such as L98-59b, don’t have as big of a pull on their host star, making them harder to detect using this method.  If their small mass is matched by small size, they might also be hard to detect using the “transit” method – another popular exoplanet detection technique that watches for dips in a star’s brightness that a planet could cause, which was used to find Kepler 37-b.

That technique was used previously by TESS to detect three planets in the L98-59 system back in 2019.  This new radial velocity research found an additional fourth planet.  L98-59b was actually one of the three planets first found by TESS, but it is difficult to determine the masses of exoplanets found via the transiting method.

Photos can’t do some places justice – nor can any level of sophisticated remote sensing.  That seems to be the case for Gale Crater.  Curiosity has been wandering around the crater for almost the last nine years.  Scientists thought Gale crater was an old lakebed, and it was specifically chosen as a landing site to allow Curiosity to collect samples from such a lakebed.  But new research from scientists at the University of Hong Kong shows that most likely, the samples Curiosity has been analyzing during its sojourn didn’t actually form in a lake.

The researchers suggest that the samples Curiosity collected were deposited as part of dust storms over millions of years, covering up any existing lake sediment that might once have existed in Gale crater.  The key to this assertion is hydrochemistry.

Postgraduate researcher Jiacheng Liu used chemistry measurements, x-ray diffraction, and pictures from the rover itself to analyze rock samples and estimate the geological processes that formed them. One big discrepancy was whether or not the samples formed in water. In geology, some elements are considered “mobile,” which means they dissolve easily in water.  Properties of that water, such as whether it is acidic or saline, impact the types of elements that are considered mobile.  

Elements can be considered “immobile” if they are not soluble in water, and tracing them would allow researchers to determine where water flowed.  Dr. Liu found that immobile elements, which usually are not washed away by water, had much higher concentrations at high levels in the rock.  That type of weathering would usually be seen in soils rather than lakebeds.

Iron’s prevalence adds another data point.  Dr. Liu showed that concentration decreased with increasing weathering, pointing to a reducing atmosphere typical of ancient Mars.  All this data points to rocks that formed under an open sky in a desert rather than on the floor of a lakebed.

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.