Space News & Blog Articles

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Mars has a “dust problem.” The surface of the Red Planet is covered in particulate matter consisting of tiny bits of silica and oxidized minerals. During a Martian summer in the southern hemisphere, the planet experiences dust storms that can grow to encompass the entire planet. At other times of the year, dust devils and dusty skies are a persistent problem. This hazard has claimed robotic explorers that rely on solar panels to charge their batteries, like NASA’s Opportunity rover and the InSight lander, which ended their missions in 2018 and 2022, respectively.

Martian dust has also been a persistent challenge for the Ingenuity helicopter, the rotorcraft that has been exploring Mars alongside NASA’s Perseverance rover since February 2021. Luckily, the way it has kicked up dust has provided vital data that could prove invaluable for rotorcraft sent to explore other extraterrestrial environments in the future. Using this data, a team of researchers (with support from NASA) has completed the first real-world study of Martian dust dynamics, which will support missions to Mars and Titan (Saturn’s largest moon) in this and the next decade.

The study was led by Mark T. Lemmon, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute’s (SSI) Center for Mars Science in Boulder, Colorado. He was joined by researchers from the Stevens Institute of Technology, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), Aeolis Research, Cornell University, Arizona State University, the Centro de Astrobiologia (INTA-CSIC), and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The paper that describes their analysis recently appeared in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

A Serpent Dust Devil on Mars, captured by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Studying dust dynamics on another planet is difficult, given the distances and communications delays involved. As a result, researchers rely on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to simulate how dust behaves in extraterrestrial environments based on the local conditions. Said Jason Rabinovitch, an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology and a co-author on the study:

Kilonovae are extraordinarily rare. Astronomers think there are only about 10 of them in the Milky Way. But they’re extraordinarily powerful and produce heavy elements like uranium, thorium, and gold.

Usually, astronomers spot them after they’ve merged and emitted powerful gamma-ray bursts (GRBs.) But astronomers using the SMARTS telescope say they’ve spotted a kilonova progenitor for the first time.

A kilonova explosion occurs when two neutron stars—or a neutron star and a black hole—merge. Neutron stars are the stellar remnants of massive stars that explode as supernovae. They’re the smallest and densest astronomical objects we know of.

Astronomers spotted the progenitor kilonova stars about 11,400 light-years away. They’re named CPD-29 2176 and were first spotted with NASA’s Swift observatory. More observations with the SMARTS 1.5-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile revealed more data.

The findings are in a paper titled “A high-mass X-ray binary descended from an ultra-stripped supernova.” It’s published in the journal Nature. The lead author is Noel D. Richardson, an assistant professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

The differences between Earth and Venus are obvious to us. One is radiant with life and adorned with glittering seas, and the other is a scorching, glowering hellhole, its volcanic surface shrouded by thick clouds and visible only with radar. But the difference wasn’t always clear. In fact, we used to call Venus Earth’s sister planet.

Can astronomers tell exo-Earths and exo-Venuses apart from a great distance?

There are lots of terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of distant suns. Sometimes they’re described as “Earth-like” just for being rocky and at the right distance from the star. But with scant information on their atmospheres and climates and with almost no information on other things like plate tectonics, can they really be accurately described as Earth-like? Could they just as easily be super-heated exo-Venuses?

Polarimetry could help us determine which exoplanets are more like Earth and which are more like Venus.

Polarimetry is the measurement of polarized light that’s been affected by material that it passes through, reflects off, or is refracted or diffracted by. Polarimetry is also the interpretation of the measurements. A new paper models the polarisation of starlight that is reflected by different types of exoplanet atmospheres based on the evolution of Venus’ atmosphere since its formation. The authors wanted to know if polarimetry could distinguish between Earth-like exoplanets and Venus-like exoplanets.