The moon will pass into Earth’s shadow producing a total lunar eclipse during the “Supermoon” – a time when the full moon occurs “at or near its closest approach to Earth in a given orbit,” according to NASA. Because this full moon happens on the night of the autumnal equinox (9-27-2015), it is also known as the Harvest Moon.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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| This remastered view of the Jupiter moon Europa is based on information from NASA’s Galileo mission of the 1990s. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute |
NASA’s upcoming mission to Europa may actually touch down on the potentially life-harboring Jupiter moon.
While the main thrust of the Europa mission, which NASA aims to launch by the mid-2020s, involves characterizing the icy satellite from afar during dozens of flybys, the space agency is considering sending a small probe down to the surface as well.
“We are actively pursuing the possibility of a lander,” Robert Pappalardo, Europa project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said last week during a panel discussion at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Space 2015 conference in Pasadena. (JPL manages the Europa mission.) [Europa May Harbor Simple Life-Forms (Video)]
“NASA has asked us to investigate: What would it take? How much would it cost? Could we put a small surface package on Europa with this mission?” Pappalardo added.
NASA has also asked the European Space Agency if it would be interested in contributing a lander, ice-penetrating impactor or other piggyback probe to the roughly $2 billion Europa mission, Spaceflight Now reported in April.
The 1,900-mile-wide (3,100 kilometers) Europa is covered by an ice shell perhaps 50 miles (80 km) thick, but underneath this crust is thought to lie a huge ocean of liquid water 12 miles (20 km) deep or so.
At least five other moons in the solar system — the Jovian satellites Ganymede and Callisto, Saturn’s Enceladus and Titan and the Neptune moon Triton — are believed to harbor such subsurface seas, Kevin Hand, deputy chief scientist at JPL’s Solar System Exploration Directorate, said during the same panel discussion at Space 2015. But only the oceans of Enceladus and Europa are likely in contact with the rocky mantle, a scenario that makes all sorts of interesting chemical reactions possible, he added. (The other moons’ oceans are probably sandwiched between layers of ice.)
So Europa and Enceladus are the top two destinations on many astrobiologists’ mission wish lists. Hand gives the Jovian moon a slight edge, though.
Researchers know enough about Europa to surmise that its ocean has existed since the dawn of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago, giving putative lifeforms plenty of time to evolve, Hand explained. Modeling work about the 310-mile-wide (500 km) Enceladus is less mature, so it’s unclear how long the Saturn satellite has harbored its sea.
“When it comes to habitability, we’d like to have the knowledge that the potentially habitable environment has been there for a significant duration,” Hand said.
But enthusiasm about a possible Enceladus mission is high as well, especially because the Saturn moon’s powerful geysers offer a way to sample its ocean from afar. Indeed, NASA is considering a potential mission called Enceladus Life Finder (ELF) that would do just that.
While ELF remains a concept at this point — it’s competing with about two dozen other proposals to become the next mission in NASA’s low-cost Discovery Program — the Europa project is officially on the space agency’s books.
The as-yet-unnamed Europa mission could launch as early as 2022. After reaching Jupiter orbit, the robotic probe will perform 45 flybys of Europa over the course of 2.5 years or so.
During these flybys, the spacecraft will scrutinize Europa using nine different science instruments, including high-resolution cameras, a heat detector and ice-penetrating radar. The mission’s observations should teach scientists a great deal about the moon’s surface composition, the nature of its underground ocean and its ability to support life as we know it, NASA officials have said. (Actively hunting for signs of life is not part of the current plan.)
The flyby mission should also serve a reconnaissance function. NASA has expressed interest in sending a dedicated lander mission to the icy moon — perhaps one that even attempts to get under Europa’s ice shell — but doesn’t feel ready to do so yet.
“We actually don’t know what the surface of Europa looks like at the scale of this table, at the scale of a lander — if it’s smooth, if it’s incredibly rough, if it’s full of spikes,”Curt Niebur, Europa program scientist at NASA’s Washington headquarters, said during a June news conference that announced the mission’s science payload. “Without knowing what the surface even looks like, it’s difficult to design a lander that could survive.”
But that lack of knowledge is less of a concern when the lander under consideration is a low-cost add-on to an existing mission, rather than a billion-dollar, stand-alone project.
That appears to be NASA’s reasoning, anyway. And we should soon know more about the prospects of a lander blasting off with the Europa flyby probe relatively soon.
“By the end of this year, we should have an idea of how that’s looking,” Pappalardo said at the Space 2015 conference.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
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| An artist’s depiction of the distribution of the gas surrounding IRAS 16547-4247. The center is thought to host multiple young, high-mass stars. Outflows of gas push outward from the center vertically and horizontally, creating an hourglass structure. Credit: Alma Observatory |
While probing the heart of a massive-star-forming region, researchers found an intricate surprise: an unusual hourglass-shaped structure carved by multiple jets of gas. The presence of the jets suggest the structure hides two bulky newborn stars at its heart.
Although similar hourglass structures have been seen around low-mass star-forming regions, this is the first time one carved by jets of methanol has been detected in a high-mass-star creation region, and could help to probe these hard-to-examine regions, scientists reported in a new study.
For the research, an international team of astronomers studied the birthplace of massive stars, called IRAS 16547-4247, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an enormous, powerful radio telescope in Chile. Because high-mass stars form in complex environments with multiple protostars — the clouds of dust and gas that ultimately form stars — that lie far from the Earth, the region has remained a mystery that only ALMA could solve.
“Even though many of the astronomers assumed that this would be a fertile high-mass-star-forming region, we couldn’t probe the kinematics [movement] of gas around high-mass at the level of resolution provided by existing telescopes,” principal investigator Aya Higuchi, of Ibaraki University in Japan, said in a statement. [Watch: Building ALMA: Earth’s Largest Radio Telescope]
Scientists can study sunlike stars fairly easily, but stars with masses above 10 times that of the sun become more challenging to understand. While sunlike stars are close and plentiful, high-mass stars are distant and far less common. The closest massive star-forming region is the Orion Nebula, about 1,500 light-years from Earth.
With its high angular resolution, ALMA can pierce the dust and gas around these distant star-forming regions and allow scientists to make detailed observations. Previous studies of IRAS 16547-4247, a luminous infrared source about 9,500 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Scorpius, revealed a pair of gas outflows thought to be emitted from a single star as well as several other radio sources, including a bright object at the center.
While probing the dust with ALMA, the team found that the region contained two high-density compact gas clouds, each 10 to 20 times as massive as the sun. The astronomers think a newly formed high-mass star lies inside each of these cocoons of gas.
ALMA showed that the previously identified outflows, which seemed to extend in the north-south direction, were actually two pairs of outflows — one set extending north-south and the other pushing east-west. ALMA also revealed new high-velocity outflows. Because a star can produce only one pair of outflows extending from its poles, the scientists concluded that the region hosts multiple stars in the process of forming.
By tracking the methanol molecule, which traces the carbon monoxide flowing out of the region, the group determined that it produces an hourglass shape as it spreads outward from the center of IRAS 16547-4247. While such sights are often found around new low-mass stars, this is the first time such a structure has been spotted in a high-mass-star-forming region.
“ALMA enabled us to see the complex formation environment of star clusters, which is even seven times farther away than the Orion Nebula with the highest imaging resolution ever achieved,” Higuchi said in the statement. “ALMA will become indispensable for the future research on the high-mass-star-forming region.”
The findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in April.
Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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| Photographer Miguel Claro snapped this photograph of a full moon over Monsaraz from Portugal’s Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve Aug. 29. Credit: Miguel Claro Night Sky Photography/ www.miguelclaro.com |
An epic moon hangs over the medieval Portuguese village of Monsaraz in a new twilight photograph.
Miguel Claro, an astrophotographer, snapped the picture at around 8 p.m. local time (3 p.m. ET) on the night of a full moon, situated about 3 miles (4.7 kilometers) from the town and castle in Portugal’s Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve. Claro’s amazing night sky photography can be found at www.miguelclaro.com.
The moon looks particularly large in this photo, taken Aug. 29 during the night of the full moon, because it was almost at perigee: the time when the moon’s elliptical orbit takes it closest to Earth. The actual moment of perigee happened around 18 hours later. In fact, this month’s full moon (Sept. 27) could loom even larger, because the full moon and perigee are separated by just 51 minutes. [The Moon: 10 Surprising Facts]
Claro positioned himself precisely, far away from the Monsaraz Castle, so that the castle would take up around 0.5 degrees of diameter in his camera’s field of view —the same size that the moon would appear as it rose from the horizon.
Because of the careful setup, the moon’s apparent size in the photo stems not just from being closer to Earth than normal. There’s also an illusion at work.
“Having both subjects in the same field of view creates automatically a big visual impact in our minds,” Claro told Space.com in an email. Because the moon is situated so close to the castle, it looks bigger than it would if it were higher in the sky. “It seems that this moon is greater than when it is seen at the zenith, but if you try to hide it with your smallest finger on the horizon as well as at the zenith, [you see it] has exactly the same size.” Skywatchers can see the same effect in the early evening just as the moon starts to rise.
Editor’s note: If you capture an amazing view of the full moon, or any other night sky view, that you would like to share with Space.com for a possible story or gallery, send images and comments in to managing editor Tariq Malik at: spacephotos@space.com.
Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
The first TEDxESA conference will take place on 11 November, hosted at ESA’s technical heart, with the theme ‘Science Beyond Fiction’
This composite image made from five frames shows the International Space Station, with a crew of nine onboard, in silhouette as it transits the sun at roughly 5 miles per second, Sunday, Sept. 6, 2015.
Putting a round peg in a round hole is not hard to do by someone standing next to it. But yesterday ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen did this while orbiting 400 km up aboard the International Space Station, remotely operating a rover and its robotic arm on the ground.
Follow ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen operating the Interact rover from space – initial force feedback test now at 1600 CEST, with rover on move at 1800
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| One-year-mission crewmember NASA astronaut Scott Kelly corrals the supply of fresh fruit that arrived on the Kounotori 5 H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV-5) the day before, Aug. 24. Visiting cargo ships often carry a small cache of fresh food for crewmembers aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA |
That’s a negative on the fire: There will be no barbecuing on the International Space Station this Labor Day. But the orbiting lab’s American crew will get a free day to relax and exercise after the excitement of welcoming three new teammates on Friday (Sept. 4).
“The three USOS [U.S. Operating Segment] crewmembers [Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren of NASA, and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency] will have the day off, with only their exercise on the schedule and some sample collection for Kelly for his Twins Study experiments,” NASA spokesman Dan Huot told Space.com in an email. Kelly’s identical twin Mark, also an astronaut, has remained on the ground so scientists can track the duo to investigate the effects of spending a year in space.
Huot added that the four cosmonauts aboard the station have a light day scheduled as well, focusing on maintenance and talking with media, and that the two visiting crewmembers — Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency and Aidyn Aimbetov of the Kazakh Space Agency — will be working on experiments. The visitors will only be spending a week in space, so every moment of research time counts. [Watch: Blastoff! New Crew Launch Will Make It 9 on Space Station]
On Sept. 5, Cmdr. Gennady Padalka, of the Russian Space Agency, ceremonially transferred command to Kelly before Padalka’s upcoming departure on the Soyuz craft. Fellow cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Mikhail Kornienko will stay onboard.
Even before the latest bunch arrived, more astronauts on the station meant a more varied mix of science and maintenance work: While the three cosmonauts went on a long spacewalk on Aug. 10, Kelly, Lindgren and Yui shared a bite of NASA’s first space-grown produce. Now, with nine aboard, there’s even more going on.
And the quarters will be bit tight — “a little more crowded than normal, but not anything we haven’t had in the past,” Huot said. “We had nine aboard back in 2013, when the Olympic torch was brought up to the station in advance of the Sochi Winter Olympics.” It was an unlit torch, of course — fire not allowed.
Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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| This image of the geyser-spewing Saturn moon Enceladus was taken on Oct. 5, 2008 by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute |
The Star Wars toys awaken, a looming ‘supermoon’ eclipse overshadows a solar eclipse, and hoverboard technology aims for the stars in Space.com’s best stories for this week.
Total eclipse of the supermoon
Observers can watch the first total lunar eclipse of a ‘supermoon’ in over three decades on Sept. 27, when the full moon is at its closest to the Earth. There will also be a much less visible partial solar eclipse Sept. 13. [Full Story: Rare ‘Supermoon’ Total Lunar Eclipse Coming This Month]
Moon samples crumble away
Samples of the moon’s soil collected by Apollo astronauts have crumbled since their collection 40 years ago: the particles scientists study have halved in size since the soil was fresh. [Full Story: Some Apollo Moon Samples ‘Crumbling to Dust’]
That’s no spoon
A mysterious floating spoon spotted in pictures by NASA’s Curiosity rover is merely a rock, sculpted by Martian winds, say officials — an uncannily spoon-shaped rock. [Full Story: ‘Floating Spoon’ on Mars Is Just a Weird Rock, But Still Awesome]
Two searches for life
NASA plans to search for life on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa in the 2020s, and a new proposed project would investigate Saturn’s Enceladus, too. [Full Story: NASA Mulling Life-Hunting Mission to Saturn Moon Enceladus]
Space Station full house
A Soyuz spacecraft dropped off three more crewmembers to the International Space Station Friday (Sept. 4), bringing the total up to 9 for the first time since 2013. Sept. 12, two of the newcomers and the current Commander will head back down. [Full Story: Crowded House! International Crew Arrives at Space Station]
Can life leap across the stars?
If life could spread from star to star, it would leave a distinct mathematical fingerprint — much like an epidemic, bubbles of life would scatter and grow. [Full Story: Life Might Spread Across Universe Like an ‘Epidemic’ in New Math Theory]
Star Wars toys awaken
Midnight Friday (Sept. 4) a brand-new line of “Star Wars” toys was released to fans in New York’s Times Square Toys ‘R’ Us. Hip-hop-dancing Stormtroopers built up to the big reveal (and many adorable rolling BB-8s were snatched up). [Full Story: The Force is Strong With These Toys: New ‘Star Wars’ Line is Here!]
Navy communications satellite blasts off
The United States Navy launched an advanced new tactical communications satellite into orbit Wednesday (Sept. 2) on an Atlas V rocket, the fourth installment in a network covering U.S. forces worldwide. [Full Story: US Military Launches Advanced Tactical Communications Satellite Into Orbit]
Well, it’s the future: Hoverboard tractor beams
NASA will join forces with the California company Arx Pax, whose magnetic hoverboard technology could maneuver tiny cube-sats in space without touching them. [Full Story: NASA Wants to Use Hoverboard Tech to Control Tiny Satellites]
Souped-up SpaceX rocket returning soon
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will return to flight in a “couple of months,” boasting beefier engines for increased thrust. The rocket has been grounded since a failed launch in June. [Full Story: SpaceX Will Debut Upgraded Flcon 9 Rocket on Return to Flight Mission]
Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
Astrophotographer Stefan Muckenhuber sent in a photo of galaxies M81 (left) and M82, obtained in mid-2015 from Tirol, Austria. M81 (AKA Bode’s Galaxy),…Read More » a spiral galaxy, lies about 12 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Ursa Major. M82 is also known as the Cigar Galaxy. Muckenhuber writes in an email message to Space.com: “I took this picture from a quite dark spot in … Tirol. I collected 16 hours of data and it also took me about 20 hours of processing until I was satisfied with the result. The exposure of 16 hours was necessary to bring out the faint Integrated Flux Nebula (IFN) … “ appearing as the gray dust in the image. He notes the IFN, which lies closer to us than the two galaxies, is made visible by the glow of stars in our Milky Way. [Read the full story.] Less «