Space News & Blog Articles

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).

Clouds drift over the dome-covered seismometer, known as SEIS, belonging to NASA’s InSight lander, on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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. 

Lake Vostok, roughly the size of Lake Ontario, is buried under several kilometers of ice in Antarctica yet has been found to support life. Credit: Nicolle Rager-Fuller / NSF

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.

Computer-generated image depicting ESA’s Mars Express in orbit above the surface of Mars. The MARSIS instrument on Mars Express famously showed evidence of subsurface lakes in the southern polar region of Mars in 2018. Credit: NASA/JPL/Corby Waste

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.

Artist concept of the Nauka module. Via NASA.

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.

Image of the Centaurus A galaxy, combining optical, x-ray, and infrared data. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Rolf Olsen; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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.