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The historic launch of the Apollo 11 mission carried three astronauts toward the moon. Two of them would set foot on the lunar surface for the first time in human history as millions of people around the world followed their steps on television.

The astronauts

The crew of Apollo 11 were all experienced astronauts. All three had flown missions into space before.

Cmdr. Neil Armstrong, 38, had previously piloted Gemini 8, the first time two vehicles docked in space. Born Aug. 5, 1930, in Ohio, Armstrong was 38 when he became the first civilian to command two American space missions.

Apollo 11 crew: Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin.

Credit: NASA

Col. Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, 39, was the first astronaut with a doctorate to fly in space. Born Jan. 20, 1930, in New Jersey, Aldrin piloted Gemini 12, taking a two-hour, twenty-minute walk in space to demonstrate that an astronaut could work efficiently outside of the vehicle. For Apollo 11, he served as the lunar module pilot.

The command module pilot, Lt. Col. Michael Collins, 38, was born in Italy on Oct. 31, 1930. The pilot of Gemini 10, Collins spent almost an hour and a half outside of the craft on a space-walk and became the first person to meet another spacecraft in orbit.

From Earth to the moon

Mission planners at NASA studied the lunar surface for two years, searching for the best place to make the historic landing. Using high-resolution photographs taken by the Lunar Orbiter satellite and close-up photographs taken by the Surveyor spacecraft, they narrowed the initial thirty sites down to three. Influencing factors included the number of craters and boulders, few high cliffs or hills, and a relatively flat surface. The amount of sunlight was also a factor in determining the best time to land on the lunar surface.

Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:32 a.m. EDT on July 16, 1969. While in flight, the crew made two televised broadcasts from the interior of the ship, and a third transmission as they drew closer to the moon, revealing the lunar surface and the intended approach path. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the lunar module, nicknamed the “Eagle” and separated from the Command Service Module — the “Columbia” — headed toward the lunar surface.

Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin poses with the American flag on the surface of the moon in July 1969.

Credit: NASA

The lunar module touched down on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility, a large basaltic region, at 4:17 p.m. EDT. Armstrong notified Houston with the historic words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” For the first two hours, Armstrong and Aldrin checked all of the systems, configured the lunar module for the stay on the moon, and ate. They decided to skip the scheduled four-hour rest to explore the surface.

A camera in the Eagle provided live coverage as Armstrong descended down a ladder at 11:56 p.m. on July 20, 1969, and uttered the words, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Aldrin followed twenty minutes later, with Armstrong recording his descent. Armstrong had the responsibility to document the landing, so most of the images taken from the Apollo 11 mission were of Aldrin. [Images: NASA’s Historic Apollo 11 Moon Landing in Pictures]

While on the surface, the astronauts set up several experiments, collected samples of lunar soil and rock to bring home, erected a United States flag, and took core samples from the crust. They spoke with U.S. President Richard Nixon, whose voice was transmitted from the White House, and placed a plaque that stated:

HERE MEN FROM THE PLANET EARTH
FIRST SET FOOT UPON THE MOON
JULY 1969, A.D.
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND

Memorial medallions with the names of the three astronauts who perished in the Apollo 1 fire and two cosmonauts who were also deceased, including the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, remained after the astronauts left, as did a one-and-a-half-inch silicon disk with goodwill messages from 73 countries, and as the names of congressional and NASA leaders.

Armstrong spent a little over two and a half hours outside of the Eagle. The astronauts traveled a total distance of about 3,300 feet (1 kilometer) as they walked around, traveling as far as 200 feet (60 meters) from the module to visit a large crater. They collected 47.51 lbs. (21.55 kilograms) of samples from the moon, and reported that mobility on the moon was easier than anticipated.

Apollo 11 astronauts, still in their quarantine van, are greeted by their wives upon arrival at Ellington Air Force Base on July 27, 1969.

Credit: NASA

At 1:54 p.m. EDT, having spent a total of 21 and a half hours on the moon, the lunar module blasted back to where Collins sat in the Columbia. The two vehicles docked, and the crew and samples transferred to the Command Service Module before the Eagle was jettisoned into space. The astronauts headed back home.

The team splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 12:50 p.m. EDT on July 24, only a few miles from the recovery ship, the U.S.S. Hornet. After donning biological isolation garments, the crew left the Columbia and climbed into a rubber boat, where they were rubbed down with iodine in an effort to stem potential contamination. They traveled by helicopter to a Mobile Quarantine Facility aboard the ship before being taken to Houston. They remained in quarantine until Aug. 10, having completed the national goal set by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, to perform a crewed lunar landing and return to Earth.

Apollo 11’s legacy

The Apollo 11 mission remains widely celebrated as it approaches its 50th anniversary in 2019. The U.S. mint is already preparing special coins for the celebration. A 2016 initiative to recreate Apollo 11’s flight plan for the public soared past its Kickstarter goal. 

The Smithsonian Institution is redoing its moon gallery at the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) in Washington, D.C., for a 2021 opening. Meanwhile, the newly restored Columbia spacecraft is on tour with stops in Houston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Seattle. It’s the first time Columbia has been outside the Smithsonian since 1971.

In July 2009, the National Air and Space Museum hosted a gala for the 40th anniversary, including speeches by the three crewmembers of Apollo 11. In an afternoon session where Collins, Aldrin and Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean offered autographs, the line of people quickly stretched across the entire museum’s floor.

Armstrong, 82, died on Aug. 25, 2012, from complications following cardiovascular procedures. A public memorial service was held Sept. 13 at Washington National Cathedral, and Armstrong was buried at sea the next day. In 2015, NASM announced that Armstrong’s widow (Carol Armstrong) had found a purse full of lunar artifacts among Armstrong’s belongings, which she donated to the museum.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the Apollo 11 landing site from space in 2012 and spotted the astronauts’ tracks, some of the experiments, a discarded camera and of course, the descent stage of the Eagle lunar module. A 3-D view of the site (based on this data) was generated in 2014.

A lunar sample bag from Apollo 11 generated a legal dispute after it was sold at a Texas auction in 2015, held on behalf of the U.S. Marshals Service. Illinois buyer Nancy Carlson bought the bag for $995. The U.S. government petitioned courts to return the lunar sample bag to NASA and undo the sale, but Carlson was ruled the legal owner in 2016.

See how the mission worked in this Space.com infographic.” data-options-closecontrol=”true” data-options-fullsize=”true”/>

Credit: Karl Tate/SPACE.com

Additional reporting by Elizabeth Howell, Space.com contributor

Editor’s note: This article was updated on Dec. 18 to correct Armstrong’s quote about Tranquility Base.

Our solar system’s first-known visitor from another star, the recently discovered object called ‘Oumuamua, could be a bonanza for researchers. With only a brief window of time to observe the cigar-shaped wanderer before it zooms beyond the reach of our best telescopes, astronomers have crammed in observations with the hopes of learning more about this interstellar interloper. Not only is the fast-moving object intriguing in its own right; it may also provide insights about how planetary systems evolve.

‘Oumuamua caught the eyes of astronomers on October 19 this year. Calculations revealed the space rock was traveling at 26 kilometers per second relative to the sun, a rapid clip that along with its extremely elongated orbital trajectory suggested it came from outside the solar system. Telescopes swiftly targeted the object, with most researchers expecting to see a cometary tail trailing from an icy visitor as it approached the sun. But to their surprise, ‘Oumuamua showed none. Instead, it looked more like an asteroid. “It does not a resemble a comet—it had no tail whatsoever,” says Karen Meech, who studies comets at the University of Hawai’i at Mnoa. Meech used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories to examine the mysteriously inert space tourist.

Asteroid or comet—why does it matter? The answer ties into our understanding of how planetary systems grow over time in their natal “protoplanetary” disks around young stars. Newborn giant planets can jostle one another, using their gravity to push each other around. They also lord their size over their smaller neighboring worlds—and especially over the kilometer-scale objects called “planetesimals” left behind as debris from the planet-forming process. When a giant planet throws its weight around, more than half of these planetesimals can wind up hurled from the system. Because most of a typical protoplanetary disk is icy—in 2016 Meech used solar system observations to estimate there were as many as 10,000 icy objects for every rocky object—icy objects should dominate the ejecta.

Location also makes a difference in what gets thrown out. Most gas giants lie on the other side of the “snow line,” a demarcation in a protoplanetary disk where its composition shifts from mostly rock to mostly ice. Objects on the star side are baked dry by starlight and thus predominantly rocky whereas objects on the darker outer side are colder and tend to retain more ice. In our solar system the snow line lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and astronomers believe that distance is roughly where it started out for other sunlike stars. As outlying gas giants shift their orbits, they become more likely to interact with nearby ices than the more distant rocky material closer-in to the star, adding fuel to the idea that most of the interstellar visitors we observe should be icy—including ‘Oumuamua.

“The population of planetesimals floating in space should be dominated by comets, not by asteroids,” says Sean Raymond, an astronomer at the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Bordeaux in France who models the early solar system. In a recent paper Raymond argues the extrasolar visitor is more like a defunct comet than an asteroid, based on how the exoplanets we’ve observed so far are laid out. “It’s kind of weird that this object ‘Oumuamua doesn’t have any signs of activity.”

‘Oumuamua’s oddball spin could be related to its origins as well. According to new research posted on the preprint server arXiv.org, the visitor is tumbling willy-nilly rather than smoothly rotating on its axis. The researchers, who declined to comment due to embargo concerns, state in their paper “1I/’Oumuamua was likely set tumbling within its parent planetary system, and will remain tumbling well after it has left ours.” ‘Oumuamua’s motion, they speculate, could be due to a long-ago collision with another body or the extreme tidal torqueing it may have experienced during its ejection from its parent planetary system. Alternatively, its spin could come from the jetlike outgassing of icy material vaporizing in sunlight—the process that creates a cometary tail.

But, again, the object did not appear to sprout a tail when it closely approached our sun. If indeed ‘Oumuamua is an icy body, how did it avoid growing a cometary tail? David Jewitt, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angles, suspects any ice might be buried under a layer of material damaged by the charged particles known as cosmic rays that bombarded ‘Oumuamua while it traveled through space. “The prolonged exposure will toast the surface,” forming a protective crust, he says.

A crust of only half a meter could be enough to shield the ice, Jewitt adds. He calculated how heat could have moved through the object, using solar system analogues because its surface composition is unknown, and found it would not make it very far. “You’d only have to go a meter or two into the surface,” he says, “to reach the ‘interstellar temperature,’”—which is only a few degrees above absolute zero.

Not everyone thinks ‘Oumuamua could be a crusty comet. “I would not expect that volatiles would be sealed up in any particular way,” Meech notes. David Trilling, who studies asteroids at Northern Arizona University, says that although it is possible to strongly irradiate primitive material in the solar system, “it’s not obvious that you can get that irradiated goop on an interstellar object.”

Unfortunately, we are unlikely to ever know what materials comprise ‘Oumuamua because it is moving far too fast on its way out of the solar system for us to have a realistic chance of catching up to it with even our speediest spacecraft. But it left astronomers excited about the next one; they anticipate spotting about one interstellar visitor a year in the near future. If those objects all wind up being rocky, that could mean bad news for our understanding of planet formation. “If the first 10 [objects] were all rocky, then it would mean we’re really off on something important,” Raymond says. Most likely, it would mean the rocky material makes up a far larger portion of the natal disks than expected by the models. “We’d have to be way off on where planetesimals form,” he says.

In a separate paper U.C. Santa Cruz astrophysicist Greg Laughlin estimates that an abundance of rocky interstellar voyagers would require about 200 Earth-masses of debris to be ejected from every planet-hosting star, rather than the 10 Earth-masses current models call for. “It just doesn’t really work,” he says. “It’s just a little too much to ask for.”

If ‘Oumuamua is icy, Laughlin thinks it has important implications for Neptune-size worlds in the outer reaches of other planetary systems, which have been a challenge to observe. Because distant Jupiter-size worlds are only found around roughly one out of every 10 stars, he thinks the ejection of ‘Oumuamua-like objects might need a boost from an as-yet-undiscovered population of icy Neptune-like worlds in Jupiter-free systems.

For now, scientists are waiting for the more tourists from other solar systems to visit—hopefully streaming long tails behind them. “It’s not hopeless,” Jewitt says. “We just have to wait for the next 10 or so to be discovered. If none look like a comet, that would be interesting. It would tell us a little more than just seeing one object.”

This article was first published at ScientificAmerican.com. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved.

Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs. Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news.

Fravor’s account includes a video — one of several recorded as a part of the program. The video shows a small object skirting from side to side and circling in view of the camera. The Times added that observers also underwent tests after their “encounters,” to see how the experience had affected them.

“I can tell you, I think it was not from this world,” Fravor added in a separate interview with ABC News. “I’m not crazy, haven’t been drinking. It was — after 18 years of flying, I’ve seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close.”

The news comes amid news that the U.S. government has been searching for UFOs, in secret, since at least 2007. While the Department of Defense says the program was shut down in 2012 due to a lack of funding, the Times further reported that this program is still active.

The program was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and had an annual budget of $22 million between 2008 and 2011. (By contrast, the budget of NASA as a whole was roughly $18.4 billion in fiscal year 2011.)

This isn’t the first time that the government has looked into accounts of mysterious objects. In 2016, the Central Intelligence Agency released many previously classified documents that talked about unusual incidents, most of which occurred in the 1950s.

While the scientific evidence for UFOs is inconclusive, many people still want to believe. A 2012 survey said an estimated 80 million people in the U.S. believe in UFOs. Further, 1 in 10 respondents said they had seen UFOs for themselves.

In the Times interview, Fravor added that shortly after his encounter, he spoke with another pilot about what he saw. He told the pilot he had no idea what it was. “It had no plumes, wings or rotors and outran our F-18s,” he told the Times, adding, “I want to fly one.”

The tragic loss of the space shuttle Columbia killed seven astronauts. One of those, Kalpana Chawla, was the first Indian-born woman in space.

Born in Karnal, India, on July 1, 1961, Chawla was the youngest of four children. The name Kalpana means “idea” or “imagination.” Her full name is pronounced CULL-puh-na CHAV-la, though she often went by the nickname K.C.

Chawla obtained a degree in aeronautical engineering from Punjab Engineering College before immigrating to the United States and becoming a naturalized citizen in the 1980s. She earned a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado in 1988, having previously obtained her masters degree from the University of Texas. She began working at NASA’s Ames Research Center the same year, working on power-lift computational fluid dynamics.

In 1994, Chawla was selected as an astronaut candidate. After a year of training, she became a crew representative for the Astronaut Office EVA/Robotics and Computer Branches, where she worked with Robotic Situational Awareness Displays and tested software for the space shuttles.

Chawla’s first opportunity to fly in space came in November 1997, aboard the space shuttle Columbia on flight STS-87. The shuttle made 252 orbits of the Earth in just over two weeks. The shuttle carried a number of experiments and observing tools on its trip, including a Spartan satellite, which Chawla deployed from the shuttle. The satellite, which studied the outer layer of the sun, malfunctioned due to software errors, and two other astronauts from the shuttle had to perform a spacewalk to recapture it.

Disaster strikes

In 2000, Chawla was selected for her second voyage into space, serving again as a mission specialist on STS-107. The mission was delayed several times, and finally launched in 2003. Over the course of the 16-day flight, the crew completed more than 80 experiments.

This image of the STS-107 shuttle Columbia crew in orbit was recovered from wreckage inside an undeveloped film canister. The shirt colors indicate their mission shifts. From left (bottom row): Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist; Rick Husband, commander; Laurel Clark, mission specialist; and Ilan Ramon, payload specialist. From left (top row) are astronauts David Brown, mission specialist; William McCool, pilot; and Michael Anderson, payload commander. Ramon represents the Israeli Space Agency.

Credit: NASA/JSC

On the morning of Feb. 1, 2003, the space shuttle returned to Earth, intending to land at Kennedy Space Center. At launch, a briefcase-sized piece of insulation had broken off and damaged the thermal protection system of the shuttle’s wing, the shield that protects it from heat during re-entry. As the shuttle passed through the atmosphere, hot gas streaming into the wing caused it to break up. The unstable craft rolled and bucked, pitching the astronauts about. Less than a minute passed before the ship depressurized, killing the crew. The shuttle broke up over Texas and Louisiana before plunging into the ground. The accident was the second major disaster for the space shuttle program, following the 1986 explosion of the shuttle Challenger.

The entire crew of seven was killed. In addition to Chawla, the crew included:

• Commander Rick D. Husband
• Pilot William C. McCool
• Payload Commander Michael P. Anderson
• Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut
• Mission Specialists David M. Brown and Laurel B. Clark

Over the course of her two missions, Chawla logged 30 days, 14 hours, and 54 minutes in space. After her first launch, she said, “When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system.”

Chawla’s legacy

The events of Columbia have been officially investigated and reported on to understand what happened and how to prevent the tragedy from re-occurring in future spaceflights. Examples include the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003) NASA’s Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report (released in 2008).

Several documentaries have been produced about the Columbia crew. Some examples include “Astronaut Diaries: Remembering the Columbia Shuttle Crew” (2005), and one that focused on Ilan Ramon, called “Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope” (2013).

The University of Texas dedicated a Kalpana Chawla memorial at the Arlington College of Engineering in 2010. At the time of its opening, the display included a flight suit, photographs, information about Chawla’s life, and a flag that was flown over the Johnson Space Center during a memorial for the Columbia astronauts.

There have been several rumors about films in production concerning Chawla’s life, including a rumor in 2017 that had the actress Priyanka Chopra (known for Baywatch and Quantico, as well as Bollywood films) attached to it. But in a Quora discussion in 2017, Chawla’s husband — Jean-Pierre Harrison — said: “Until I issue a public statement confirming my participation in such a project, take it for granted that I have not signed any agreement nor licensed any rights necessary to produce such a movie.”

Additional reporting by Elizabeth Howell, Space.com contributor

The U.S. government has been secretly investigating unidentified flying objects — UFOs — since 2007. And despite officials’ claims that the classified UFO-hunting effort shuttered in 2012 after funding evaporated, the group is still active, The New York Times reported Saturday (Dec. 16).

Known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), the initiative was launched by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2007 and operated with an annual budget of $22 million from 2008 to 2011, the Times discovered during a recent investigation.

Pentagon officials revealed that the program existed, but added that it ceased to operate in 2012, the Times reported. However, the former leader of the program said that AATIP remained active in the years since; he continued to oversee the effort until he resigned in October — citing the department’s “excessive secrecy and internal opposition” as the cause — and he was succeeded after his departure, according to the Times. [7 Things Most Often Mistaken for UFOs]

Under the program, aerospace experts investigated and described sightings and video recordings of mysterious objects that defied easy explanation; they also conducted tests on people who reported glimpsing UFOs, to see how they might have been affected by the experience, according to the Times.

One video example — the time and date of which was withheld by government officials — showed a fast-moving, spinning and glowing aircraft, recorded midair by Navy pilots in an F/A-18 Super Hornet, the Times reported.

The nascent program was ushered into existence by Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, then the Senate majority leader. His interest in UFOs was piqued by conversations with billionaire entrepreneur Robert Bigelow, whose aerospace company was tapped to conduct much of the research for AATIP’s UFO sightings, Reid told the Times.

Reid further explained that he had also spoken about UFOs years earlier with astronaut John Glenn, the Times reported. Glenn suggested to Reid that the government should take a closer look at reports of UFO sightings by members of the military service; these reports were often not widely shared, because people who saw UFOs thought that no one would believe them.

Reid referred to the proposed budget for AATIP as “black money,” a special type of budget maintained by the Pentagon for classified programs, and one that was not debated publicly by Senate members, according to the Times.  

UFO sightings have been investigated by government agencies since the 1940s, and in January 2016, the CIA released a number of previously classified documents describing some of the most unusual UFO encounters on record, most of which took place in the 1950s.

But belief in UFOs is still widespread; according to a survey conducted in 2012, an estimated 80 million people in the U.S. think that UFOs are real, and 1 in 10 responders claimed to have personally witnessed what they describe as an extraterrestrial spacecraft.

In an interview, the now-retired Reid said that he was “not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry” to have pushed for the investigation of potential threats posed by UFOs, according to the Times.

“I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before,” Reid said.

Original article on Live Science.

The search for signs of life on Mars needs a bit of a rethink, scientists argue in a new study.

A popular strategy calls for investigating spots where waterborne sediment accumulated long ago, like the ancient lake-bed environment that NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered inside Mars’ 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater. 

Here on Earth, such ancient habitats have preserved bountiful evidence of ancient life — but that doesn’t mean the same will hold true on the Red Planet, according to the study team, which was led by Joseph Michalski, an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at The University of Hong Kong. [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]

“Mars is not Earth,” the researchers wrote in the study, a “Perspectives” piece that was published online today (Dec. 18) in the journal Nature Geoscience. 

“We must recognize that our entire perspective on how life has evolved and how evidence of life is preserved is colored by the fact that we live on a planet where photosynthesis evolved,” they said. “Even if photosynthesis did evolve on Mars, questions remain as to how successful surface life would have been, and whether evidence of that life could have been captured in the sedimentary record.”

Life first got a foothold on Earth roughly 4 billion years ago, but it really began taking off about 1.5 billion years later, after cyanobacteria evolved oxygen-generating photosynthesis. The oxygen produced by these microbes led to the formation of an atmospheric ozone layer, which protected surface life from harmful ultraviolet radiation.

This evolutionary innovation therefore opened up vast amounts of livable space, allowing organisms to colonize surface and near-surface environments on land and at sea, scientists say.

The timing here is important, according to the study team. Mars was once relatively warm and wet —much warmer and wetter than it is today, anyway. But by 4 billion years ago, Mars’ interior had cooled enough that its magnetic dynamo shut down, and the Red Planet lost its global magnetic field. (Earth still has a magnetic field, because our planet is 10 times more massive than Mars and therefore hasn’t cooled nearly as much.)

This magnetic field had served to shield Mars’ atmosphere from the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing from the sun. Its loss led to the stripping of this once-thick atmosphere and the transformation of the planet to the cold desert it is today — a process that was largely complete by about 3.7 billion years ago.

So, for surface life to really get going — and therefore have a good chance of being preserved in lake-bed deposits — photosynthesis would probably have had to evolve at least 1 billion years earlier on Mars than it did on Earth. 

Michalski and his colleagues don’t think that’s a great bet. So they advocate for prioritizing spots where subsurface life may have once teemed on Mars — environments such as ancient hydrothermal systems, which may have been life’s cradle here on Earth.

And you wouldn’t necessarily have to dig deep to find such systems; NASA’s Spirit rover stumbled onto one inside Mars’ Gusev Crater back in 2008 when its wonky wheel scraped away some surface dirt. 

Such reasoning could soon have real-world applications: In 2020, NASA plans to launch a life-hunting Mars rover that will collect and store rock samples for eventual return to Earth. 

Study co-author Jack Mustard, a geology professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, said he’d like the 2020 rover to investigate exposed “mineralized fracture zones” on the Red Planet.

“These would be places where there was fluid flow in the crust, and where you get mixing between different fluids from different sources that have potentially different concentrations of important elements, as well as dissolved hydrogen, for example,” Mustard told Space.com. (Hydrogen is a possible energy source for microbes.) “Those would be cool.”

The main goal of the new study is “to get the larger scientific community thinking along these lines as we move toward continuing to search for potential evidence” of life and its precursor molecules, he added.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

Tahitian myth, South African nicknames, and ancient Chinese and Hindu titles for lunar mansions are among the inspirations for the new names of 86 stars in the Earth’s night sky, astronomers said.

Modern star catalogs identify billions of stars through designations that are strings of letters and numbers indicating each star’s position or order. However, more-colloquial and memorable names for the brightest and best-known stars are often approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the world’s largest professional astronomical society.

Traditionally, most formally approved star names have Arabic, Greek or Latin origins. For example, Canopus, the second-brightest star in the sky, was named after the navigator of the fleet of King Menelaus in the Trojan War of Greek myth, while Betelgeuse, the ninth brightest star in the night sky, comes from the Arabic “yad al-jauzā,” meaning “hand of the giant,” the giant being Orion, the constellation to which Betelgeuse belongs. [The Brightest Stars in the Night Sky]

Now the IAU’s Working Group on Star Names has approved 86 new names for stars drawn from other cultures around the world. These include Aboriginal Australian, Chinese, Coptic, Hindu, Mayan, Polynesian and South African names. (For the full list of new star names, visit the IAU website here.) 

Though they look serene and silent from our vantage on Earth, stars are actually roiling balls of violent plasma. Test your stellar smarts with this quiz.

0 of 10 questions complete

Star Quiz: Test Your Stellar Smarts

Though they look serene and silent from our vantage on Earth, stars are actually roiling balls of violent plasma. Test your stellar smarts with this quiz.

0 of questions complete

“The Working Group on Star Names provides an avenue for these ancient cultural star names to be woven into the tapestry of modern-day star catalogs and star atlases, and to point skywatchers to new and unfamiliar stories in the sky from their fellow human beings from other parts of the world, talking to them from across the centuries,” said Eric Mamajek, chair and organizer of the working group.

“The purposes of the naming of the stars have ranged from representing mythological figures and animals, to [identifying] important stars useful for timing harvests, to navigating the immense Pacific Ocean, to providing pilots and astronauts with names for bright navigational stars during the 20th century,” Mamajek told Space.com.

For instance, the names Xamidimura and Pipirima were approved for the star systems Mu-1 and Mu-2 Scorpii in the constellation of Scorpius. Xamidimura refers to the “xami di mura,” or “eyes of the lion,” a nickname for the Mu-1 Scorpii system among the Khoikhoi people of South Africa. Pipirima refers to legendary twins from Tahitian myth: a boy and a girl who ran away from their parents and became stars in the sky. (Star atlases typically use Greek letters such as “mu” or “zeta” for stars in each constellation, with the letters assigned according to the stars’ approximate order of brightness.) [How the Constellations Got Their Names]

The new star names include 11 Chinese star names, with three of those coming from “lunar mansions,” vertical strips of the sky that astronomers used to mark the nightly progress of the moon, a bit like the zodiac. The new names also include two ancient Hindu lunar mansions: Revati and Bharani, for the stars designated Zeta Piscium and 41 Arietis, respectively.

Four new stars names that were drawn from Aboriginal Australians are some of the most ancient star names on the new list, as Aboriginal Australians are among the oldest continuous cultures in the world, going back more than 65,000 years. The name Unurgunite for Sigma Canis Majoris comes from an ancestral figure among the Boorong who fought the moon, while the names Larawag, Ginan and Wurren for the stars designated Epsilon Scorpii, Epsilon Crucis and Zeta Phoenicis, respectively, come from the Wardaman people.

“For the Wardaman people of Australia, some of the names are part of their song lines, oral mythologies of creation passed on from generation to generation,” Mamajek said. 

The brightest star with a new name is now called Alsephina, assigned to the star designated Delta Velorum. The name stems from the Arabic name “al-safinah,” meaning “the ship,” referring to the ancient Greek constellation Argo Navis, the ship of the Argonauts. Numerous stars have names with Greek origins that were translated to Arabic and then to Latin during the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. 

Among the nearest stars to the sun, the IAU’s Working Group on Star Names recognized the name Barnard’s Star, which has been in common use for a century. The name refers to a red dwarf star discovered by astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard in 1916 that lies only about 6 light-years away from the sun, just a bit farther away than the sun’s closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, which lies just 4.2 light-years from Earth. 

One reason the IAU formally catalogs names is to avoid the confusion that has arisen over the centuries as different cultures and astronomers have given their own names to stars. Until recently, some of the most famous stars in the sky had no official spelling and even multiple names, and identical names were sometimes used for completely different stars. For example, there were 30 names for the star commonly known as Fomalhaut, including Fom-al hut al-jenubi, Fomahandt, Fomahant, Fomal’gaut, Fomal’khaut, Fomalhani, Fomalhut, Formalhaut, Fumahant, Fumahaut and Fumalhaut. 

In another example, two bright stars — Epsilon Cygni in the northern constellation Cygnus and Gamma Corvi in the southern constellation Corvus — have both been known for centuries as Gienah, from the Arabic “al janah,” meaning “wing.” To reduce confusion, the name Gienah was retained as the name for the star Gamma Corvi, and Aljanah was approved for Epsilon Cygni, in keeping with its original name. 

Gamma Corvi won the name Gienah because “by a narrow margin, the name has been used slightly more often for Gamma Corvi over the past few decades compared to [the] use for Epsilon Cygni in some authoritative catalogs and astronomical works,” Mamajek said. [The Nearest Stars to Earth (Infographic)]

The IAU’s Working Group on Star Names consists of a group of IAU members from around the globe who review star names from star catalogues, sky atlases and other sources. The group votes on what names stars should get, “and sometimes names do not get approved,” Mamajek said. “There are some bright stars currently lacking IAU names approved by the Working Group on Star Names, and I can say that those are already reflecting some cases where names were not approved, despite their use in some astronomical literature in recent decades.”

The IAU announced the 86 new names on Dec. 11. More names from indigenous American, African, and Australian cultural traditions likely “will be included in the IAU catalog over the next year or so,” Mamajek said.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Orginal article on Space.com.

NEW ORLEANS — When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft arrives at its next destination in 2019, it may find more primordial objects than NASA had anticipated: Researchers have announced that the probe’s next target, an icy object known as 2014 MU69, may have at least one moon and could even host a swarm of natural satellites.

“It is very exciting,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, told Space.com. Stern and his colleagues chased 2014 MU69 on land and through the air last summer as it occulted, or passed in front of, three background stars. The results suggest that the distant object has at least one moon, said the scientists who presented the results here yesterday (Dec. 12) at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting.

“This might be the harbinger,” Stern said during a news conference at the AGU meeting. “It might hint that there is actually a swarm of satellites from MU69.” [Wow! See New Horizons’ Next Flyby Target Blot Out a Star’s Light]

“MU” moon

After New Horizons slipped by Pluto in July 2015, it continued on through the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects beyond Neptune. The team quickly obtained permission to embark on an extended mission, with MU69 as its selected target.

In preparation for the upcoming visit, the scientists arranged to observe three occultations. The first and third sets of observations were made from the ground, and the second set was taken aboard the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), the world’s largest airborne observatory.

Despite their best planning, the scientists saw no sign of MU69 during the first occultation, on June 3. “We thought we were in the right place, but it turns out we weren’t,” said New Horizons co-investigator Marc Buie, also at SwRI. On June 10, while flying over the Pacific Ocean, “we saw a little blip,” Buie said. The signal was tiny and didn’t look like the scientists expected it to, so they weren’t certain it was real until they spent time analyzing it. (It was, indeed, real.) 

“Then, on July 17, we hit the jackpot,” Buie said. Five observatories spread across Argentina provided a wealth of data that revealed the object’s unusual bilobed shape — but once again, the object wasn’t sitting where previous observations suggested it should.

Together, the measurements suggest that MU69 isn’t spinning through space alone, the researchers said. Rather, MU69’s shifted location suggests that it is offset from its center of mass, hinting at the possibility of at least one natural satellite. In other words, the small blip Buie and his team spotted aboard SOFIA may be a tiny moon.

Stressing that the results were preliminary, Buie said the signal seemed to suggest a moon that’s about 3 miles (5 kilometers) across, orbits about 124 to 186 miles (200 to 300 kilometers) from MU69 and circles the object every two to three weeks. Prior to the Jan. 1, 2019, flyby, New Horizons should be able to collect about three weeks’ worth of data, watching the satellite go around at least once, Buie told Space.com.

Stern said that if this moon makes MU69 wobble, it might be possible to measure the mass of both, which would allow scientists to determine the density of MU69 and make some general conjectures about its composition. From there, they could estimate the ratio of ice to rock in this primordial object.

“That’s very, very exciting,” Buie said.

And this moon might not be the only satellite orbiting MU69, the scientists said.

An artist’s concept of MU69, the next flyby target for NASA’s New Horizons mission. The icy object may have one or more moons.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

The odds that SOFIA happened to capture a glimpse of a solitary moon are slim, Stern said. It may be that MU69 has a system of multiple moons and that the flying observatory spotted one of many.

Moons are common in the Kuiper Belt, Buie said. In fact, some scientists suggest that every object might host at least one. Before and after its flyby of MU69, New Horizons will survey about 30 other objects and may spot moons around some of those, as well. According to Stern, the mission has enough power and fuel to operate until the mid-2030s, and perhaps even longer, should NASA decide to continue funding its exploration. And although most of New Horizons’ targets will appear as points of light, it’s possible that another new moon could be discovered.

“We’ll be looking,” said New Horizons deputy project scientist John Spencer, also of SwRI.

When MU69 is firmly in the rearview mirror, New Horizons will continue on through the Kuiper Belt and out of the solar system. Like NASA’s Voyager 1 mission, New Horizons has enough speed to escape the solar system entirely.

“There’s nothing that can slow us down,” Stern said. [Destination Pluto: NASA’s New Horizons Mission in Pictures]

Christmas in the Kuiper Belt

While people on Earth are ringing in the new year in 2019, New Horizons will be making contact with MU69. The spacecraft will go into hibernation next week and won’t wake up until August 2018, according to New Horizons mission operations manager Alice Bowman, of Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. As it closes in on MU69, the probe will hunt for other moonlets and previously unseen rings. If its course requires adjustment to avoid danger, the craft will have nine opportunities between October and the end of December 2018 to make a move. 

“We are entering the unknown here,” Spencer said. “We don’t know what the system is like. We’re prepared for the unexpected.”

On Dec. 25, 2018, the last commands will be sent, and the spacecraft will switch into encounter mode, “spend[ing] Christmas in the Kuiper Belt,” Stern joked. On Jan. 1, 2019, at 12:33 a.m. EST (0533 GMT), New Horizons will make its closest approach to 2014 MU69, passing within 2,175 miles (3,500 km) of the object’s surface and capturing images that should be even more detailed than those it took of Pluto.

“We certainly expect to see craters,” Bowman said. MU69 also could have strange grooves like those that scar the surface of the Martian moon Phobos, she said. The mission team will hunt for a variety of ices and try to solve the mystery of what makes the object take on its reddish hue, Bowman said.

By 10 a.m. EST (1500 GMT) on Jan. 1, 2019, the team should know if New Horizons made it through the MU69 system safely, Bowman said, and images will begin streaming down over the following week before the spacecraft travels behind the sun. While out of contact for several days, New Horizons will take a long series of unbroken images and then begin transmitting the data home, she said.

And that data transfer will take a long time. From MU69 — which lies nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto— a one-way signal from New Horizons will take more than 12 hours to get to Earth. Plus, the probe can send only a little at a time — it took 16 months to get back all the data from its Pluto flyby. According to Stern, getting all of the data back on the ground from New Horizons’ visit to MU69 will take all of 2019 and most of 2020.

“The news will just keep raining down from the Kuiper Belt,” Stern said.

Follow Nola Taylor Redd on Twitter @NolaTRedd or Google+. Follow us at @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

NEW ORLEANS — The giant impact from an Earth-size rock that knocked Uranus sideways may have also helped create the tilted planet’s moons, a new study finds.

The poles along which Earth spins are mostly pointed the same way as the poles of the sun and nearly all the other planets of the solar system. However, Uranus is an oddball in that its axis of spin is tilted by a whopping 98 degrees (relative to the plane of the solar system), meaning it essentially spins on its side. No other planet in the solar system is tilted as much — Jupiter is tilted by about 3 degrees, for example, and Earth by about 23 degrees.

Now, researchers in Japan suggest a giant cosmic impact may not only have knocked Uranus on its side, but also created most of the planet’s moons. [Photos of Uranus, a Tilted Planet]

Uranus possesses 27 known moons. Eighteen of these moons orbit around the planet’s equator, and these “regular” moons make up 98 percent of the total mass of Uranus’ moons, said study lead author Yuya Ishizawa at Kyoto University in Japan. The other nine moons are “irregular” in that their orbits are skewed away from Uranus’ equator, and prior work suggested these moons were captured after Uranus formed.

In computer simulations, the researchers found that an Earth-size rock striking a newborn Uranus could have helped give the planet its current tilt. At the same time, the simulations found that the rubble from the impact could go on to collapse and form moons with orbits and masses similar to those of Uranus’ actual moons.

“Material from the two bodies is ejected in a debris disk, and finally satellites are formed from the debris disk,” Ishizawa told Space.com. “It is possible to explain the axial tilt and the formation of the regular satellites of Uranus simultaneously.” [The 5 Weirdest Facts About Uranus]

Ishizawa noted that the researchers’ initial simulations did predict the formation of a number of moons that would orbit Uranus at distances closer than planet’s actual moons do today. He suggested that further research should investigate how the orbit of such moons might decay over time and potentially end up destroying these moons, explaining their current absence around Uranus.

Ishizawa and his colleagues detailed their findings Dec. 13 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans.

Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

A memorial marker will be erected at Arlington National Cemetery honoring NASA’s Apollo 1 astronauts who were killed in a fire on the launch pad 50 years ago.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday (Dec. 12) signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018, which in addition to calling for appropriations for the military activities of the Department of Defense, included a provision to construct a memorial to the crew of Apollo 1.

The act directs the Secretary of the Army to authorize “the construction, at an appropriate place in Arlington National Cemetery [in] Virginia, of a memorial marker honoring the three members of the crew of the Apollo 1 who died during a launch rehearsal test on January 27, 1967.” [50th Anniversary of Apollo 1 Fire: What NASA Learned from the Tragic Accident]

The act calls for the NASA Administrator, the Commission of Fine Arts and the Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery to consult with the Secretary of the Army on the marker.

The Apollo 1 memorial was first proposed in Congress in September 2016 by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), the ranking member of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Johnson originally introduced the idea for the monument in a dedicated bill but after it failed to reach a vote, she resubmitted the “Apollo 1 Memorial Act” as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.

“I’m deeply grateful that the House of Representatives has accepted my amendment … to honor astronauts Virgil I. ‘Gus’ Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee, who perished 50 years ago while preparing for the Apollo 1 mission,” Johnson said in a statement. “It is both right and long overdue that we honor the memory of these heroes by means of a memorial.”

Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee are seen participating in a 1966 spacecraft design review in California. The three men died in a launch pad fire on Jan. 27, 1967.

Credit: NASA

Grissom, White and Chaffee were conducting a pre-launch “plugs out” test when a fire ignited inside their Apollo 204 command module. The fire engulfed the capsule, fueled by a pure-oxygen atmosphere, leading to the men’s death.

Although other NASA astronauts had died in earlier aircraft and automobile accidents, the Apollo 1 fire marked the first time that the U.S. space program suffered a fatal tragedy as part of its active spaceflight efforts.

Grissom and Chaffee were interred at Arlington Cemetery. White was buried at the Military Academy at West Point in New York.

The act does not direct where in the cemetery the Apollo 1 marker will stand, other than it is not to be constructed “in a location that is otherwise suitable as an interment site.”

The Apollo 1 memorial will join similar markers erected for NASA’s two subsequent tragedies during the space shuttle program.

In the wake of the Jan. 28, 1986 Challenger accident, the unidentified remains of the seven astronauts were interred near the grave for the mission’s commander. According to the Arlington National Cemetery website, “it was decided by family members and NASA to construct the monument over the cremated remains.”

Family members of the STS-51L astronauts and about 400 people attended the monument’s dedication on March 21, 1987, including then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.

A similar monument was erected to honor the seven STS-107 crew members lost aboard the space shuttle Columbia on Feb. 1, 2003. Authorized and funded by the Columbia Orbiter Memorial Act, the monument was dedicated a year later on Feb. 2, 2004.

Johnson originally proposed a budget of $500,000 for the Apollo 1 memorial and then reduced that to $50,000 when it was offered as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. As agreed to by the House and Senate, the legislation as enacted omitted any federal funding and instead directed the marker to be privately financed.

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