Category: space.com

NASA is celebrating the New Year on Mars on June 19, 2015. One Mars year is 687 days long, nearly twice the time of an Earth year, due to Mars’ longer orbit around the sun. Credit: NASA

It’s New Year’s Day on the Red Planet today and NASA is celebrating in style with an epic three-day party in Mars itself … Mars, Pennsylvania, that is.

NASA scientists and Mars experts have descended on the town of Mars to celebrate the Martian New Year today (June 18) with a press briefing at a flying saucer spaceship monument in Mars, Pennsylvania, kicks off a weekend of Mars-themed activities by NASA to inspire kids to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics – all fields that the space agency says it will need in its push to the Red Planet. [Mars Myths & Misconception: A Quiz]

Among the invited speakers is Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science. Green not only oversees many aspects of Red Planet exploration, but also was a technical consultant on the upcoming movie “The Martian,” which lands in theaters in November.

NASA will celebrate the Martian New Year with an event at this flying saucer spaceship monument in Mars, Pennsylvania on June 19, 2015, which marks the official start of a new Martian year.
Credit: Jon Dawson

Mars celebrates its New Year about once every two Earth years because the Red Planet takes twice as long to orbit the sun as our world. Astronomers count the Martian New Year from the time that the planet’s northern hemisphere spring equinox starts on Mars. This year, the Martian New Year starts June 19.

Other NASA activities at the event include a “blast-off” dinner, a talk about music of the Red Planet, and a performance by a Mars Jump Rope Team. There will also be a miniature rocket launch on Saturday (June 20), subject to weather.

In recent months, NASA has been publicly aligning many of its activities to what it says will be the ultimate goal: landing a human on Mars in a few decades. For now, NASA’s human exploration is confined to low Earth orbit, but it has an Orion spacecraft under development to bring people further into the solar system.

Space.com Exclusive T-shirt. Available to Populate Mars. Buy Now
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Mars is currently being studied by a fleet of spacecraft built by NASA and the space agencies of Europe and India. On the surface, NASA’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers continue to drive across the Martian terrain, while several orbiters monitor changes in the planet from above. The most recent addition was India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, which arrived at the Red Planet on Sept. 24, 2014, two days after NASA’s own Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission orbiter.

You can see more details about the Martian New Year celebrations at http://www.marsnewyear.com/.

Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that NASA’s Mars briefing today will not be webcast on NASA TV.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

This photo, taken by NASA astronaut Scott Kelly from the International Space Station, shows Tropical Storm Bill in the Gulf of Mexico on June 15, 2015. Credit: Scott Kelly/NASA

Tropical Storm Bill lurks menacingly near the coast of Texas in a photo taken from space yesterday (June 15).

The image was captured from the International Space Station, and shows the storm brewing in the Gulf of Mexico, just off the coast of the Lone Star State. The storm made landfall earlier today, on southern Matagorda Island, Texas, with maximum sustained winds of 60 mph (97 km/h), according to the National Hurricane Center.

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly took the new photo. Kelly, along with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, is participating in the first yearlong mission at the International Space Station to study the long-term effects of microgravity on the human body. [Earth from Above: 101 Stunning Images from Orbit]

“Concerned for all in its path including family, friends and colleagues,” Kelly wrote in an update on Twitter.

Tropical Storm Bill is expected to curve across the heart of Texas, and a tornado watch has been issued for parts of central and southeast Texas, including Houston and Austin. The latest projections show that the storm will likely move into Oklahoma on Thursday (June 18).

As of 2 p.m. EDT, a swath of land from Baffin Bay, Texas, to High Island, Texas, is under a tropical storm watch. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that Tropical Storm Bill could dump up to 12 inches (30 centimeters) of rain over some parts of eastern Texas.

More generally, Bill is expected to produce 4 to 8 inches (10 to 20 centimeters) of rain in most of eastern Texas and eastern Oklahoma, and 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 cm) in western Arkansas and southern Missouri. Along the Texas and Louisiana coasts, storm surges could reach 2 to 4 feet (0.6 to 1.2 meters) high, according to NOAA.

“The combination of a storm surge and the tide will cause normally dry areas near the coast to be flooded by rising waters,” NOAA officials wrote in an advisory, adding that recent reports state that Port Lavaca, Texas, is already experiencing water levels 3 feet (0.9 m) above normal.

“The deepest water will occur along the immediate coast near and to the right of the landfall location,” the advisory states. “Surge-related flooding depends on the relative timing of the surge and the tidal cycle, and can vary greatly over short distances.”

Parts of Texas and Oklahoma are still reeling from severe storms that soaked the state in late May. Multiple storm systems dumped nearly record-breaking rains across the two states, causing flash floods in many drought-stricken areas.

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

Meteorites from Mars found on Earth have traces of methane, adding weight to the idea that life could live off methane on the Red Planet, scientists say. But the methane detection alone is not proof that life exists on Mars now or in the past, they add. Credit: Image by Michael Helfenbein

Methane, a potential sign of primitive life, has been found in meteorites from Mars, adding weight to the idea that life could live off methane on the Red Planet, researchers say.

This discovery is not evidence that life exists, or has ever existed, on Mars, the researchers cautioned. Still, methane “is an ingredient that could potentially support microbial activity in the Red Planet,” study lead author Nigel Blamey, a geochemist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, told Space.com.

Methane is the simplest organic molecule. This colorless, odorless, flammable gas was first discovered in the Martian atmosphere by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft in 2003, and NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered a fleeting spike of methane at its landing site last year. [The Search for Life on Mars: A Photo Timeline]

Much of the methane in Earth’s atmosphere is produced by life, such as cattle digesting food. However, there are ways to produce methane without life, such as volcanic activity.

To shed light on the nature of the methane on Mars, Blamey and his colleagues analyzed rocks blasted off Mars by cosmic impacts that subsequently crash-landed on Earth as meteorites. About 220 pounds (100 kilograms) of Martian meteorites have been found on Earth.

The scientists focused on six meteorites from Mars that serve as examples of volcanic rocks there, collecting samples about one-quarter of a gram from each — a little bigger than a 1-carat diamond. All the samples were taken from the interiors of the meteorites, to avoid terrestrial contamination.

The researchers found that all six released methane and other gases when crushed, probably from small pockets inside.

“The biggest surprise was how large the methane signals were,” Blamey said.

Chemical reactions between volcanic rocks on Mars and the Martian environment could release methane. Although the dry thin air of Mars makes its surface hostile to life, the researchers suggest the Red Planet is probably more habitable under its surface. They noted that if methane is available underground on Mars, microbes could live off it, just as some bacteria do in extreme environments on Earth.

“We have not found life, but we have found methane that could potentially support microbes in the subsurface,” Blamey said.

Blamey now hopes to analyze more Martian meteorites. He and his colleagues detailed their findings online today (June 16) in the journal Nature Communications. 

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

JPL engineers Joel Steinkraus and Farah Alibay display a full-scale mechanical mock-up of a MarCO 6U cubesat. Credit: JPL

WASHINGTON — Two tiny cubesats, the first NASA plans to send to another planet, will keep watch on the agency’s InSight mission as it descends to the Martian surface in September 2016, an agency official said June 9.

The Mars Cube One satellites (or MarCO) are 6U cubesats, meaning each is built from six standard cubesat modules that measure 10 centimeters on a side and weigh just over 1 kilogram each. MarCO will be NASA’s first interplanetary cubesats, according to the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which is building the spacecraft.

“News about the status of InSight’s landing could come hours earlier with MarCO,” Joel Krajewski, MarCO program manager at JPL, wrote in a June 10 email. [NASA’s InSight Mars Lander Mission in Pictures]

MarCO is not an official part of InSight, the 12th in NASA’s Discovery line of cost-capped planetary science missions. The lander, also managed by JPL, will be built Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver using heritage parts and designs from the Mars lander Phoenix. InSight is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on March 4, 2016, and when it does, MarCO will go along for the ride.

NASA’s two small MarCO CubeSats will be flying past Mars in 2016 just as NASA’s next Mars lander, InSight, is descending through the Martian atmosphere and landing on the surface. MarCO, for Mars Cube One, will provide an experimental communications relay to inform Earth quickly about the landing.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Bundled up against the bottom of the second stage of InSight’s Atlas V rocket in open-air boxes, the MarCO satellites will separate from the launcher after InSight and fly to Mars separate from the lander. That will be possible thanks to cold gas thrusters, provided by VACCO Industries, South El Monte, California, that enable MarCO to perform the five trajectory correction maneuvers required to reach Mars at the same time as InSight. The cruise from Earth takes about six-and-a-half months.

Cubesats typically lack propulsion systems and so are little thought of as serious ride-along missions to other planets. If MarCO works, Krajewski said, it will go a long way toward proving such spacecraft are worth the mass they take up on a launch vehicle.

If MarCO can make it to Mars, stay in position to observe InSight’s descent during the lander’s seven minutes of terror, and relay the data back to Earth, it will “show that these are indeed viable technologies for interplanetary missions and feasible on a short spacecraft-development timeline.”

The MarCO mission will cost around $13 million, NASA spokesman Guy Webster wrote in a June 12 email. That includes $9 million to build the two cubesats, $2 million to get them on InSight’s launch vehicle, and $2 million for mission operations.

Should MarCO fail to make it to Mars, or if its radio equipment malfunctions, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be around to watch InSight’s landing. However, that orbiter would not immediately be able to transmit InSight landing data to Earth, as it could be busy relaying data from other landed craft.

“Confirmation of a successful landing could be aboard the [Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter] for more than an hour before it is relayed to Earth,” Krajewski said.

Concept art of InSight lander drilling beneath Mars’ surface.
Credit: NASA

MarCO came up during a June meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s planetary protection subcommittee here and has not been widely publicized outside the agency. The mission got some exposure in November at JPL’s Mars Cubesat/NanoSat Workshop in Pasadena, when Sami Asmar, a JPL scientist and MarCO’s principal investigator, briefed slides about the program.

Like all NASA missions, MarCO has to go through the bureaucratic planetary protection process put in place to ensure agency spacecraft can carry out their missions without crashing into other spacecraft or polluting extraterrestrial environments scientists want to study. MarCO’s approval process is ongoing, Krajewski told the NASA Advisory Council June 9.

JPL’s other industry partners on MarCO are:

• Blue Canyon Technologies, Boulder, Colorado, which will provide an attitude-control system;
• AstroDev, Ann Arbor, Michigan, which will provide spacecraft electronics;
• MMA Design, Boulder, Colorado, which will provide solar arrays;
• Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, part of cubesat parts and services vendor Terran Orbital Company, San Luis Obispo, California, which will provide the CubeSat dispenser system to eject the MarCO satellites from Atlas 5’s upper stage.

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.

The many “faces” of Pluto are visible in new images by NASA’s New Horizon’s probe, which is only one month away from the first-ever close encounter with the dwarf planet.

This week, NASA released what it called “the best views ever obtained of the Pluto system” taken by New Horizons, which will make its closest approach of the dwarf planet starting July 14. A video of the Pluto new images reveals the many “faces” of this petite planetary object — that is, the photos show a complete 360 degree panorama of the dwarf planet’s surface. The pictures reveal regions of light and dark, and many shades of gray in between, that hint at the presence of surface features.

“We’re squeezing as much information as we can out of these images, and seeing details we’ve never seen before,” said New Horizons Project Scientist Hal Weaver, in a statement from NASA. “We’ve seen evidence of light and dark spots in Hubble Space Telescope images and in previous New Horizons pictures, but these new images indicate an increasingly complex and nuanced surface. Now, we want to start to learn more about what these various surface units might be and what’s causing them. By early July we will have spectroscopic data to help pinpoint that.” [More Amazing Pluto Photos by New Horizons]

These images, taken by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), show four different “faces” of Pluto as it rotates about its axis with a period of 6.4 days. All the images have been rotated to align Pluto’s rotational axis with the vertical direction (up-down) on the figure.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

New Horizons has traveled nearly 3 billion miles in just under 10 years to reach Pluto. It is the first probe to ever make a close study of the planet, and it is already returning images of the system that are of higher quality than those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. (However, Hubble has still returned some great science about Pluto. Recently, scientists using Hubble data revealed new information about the very strange motions and colors of Pluto’s five moons).

The new images, taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), seem to show a very lumpy, nonspherical-looking Pluto, but this is the result of the technique used to create the images, called deconvolution, as well as Pluto’s large variations in surface brightness, according to the same statement. In addition, the contrast in the images has been “stretched to bring out additional details.” 

The deconvolution technique has been used by the New Horizons team to identify surface markings on Pluto, including a bright area at one pole that scientists think is a polar cap. Deconvolution has been known to create “false details,” or artifacts, in the images, so NASA said the spacecraft team will be carefully reviewing images produced with this technique.

These images, taken by the LORRI instrument, have been processed using a method called deconvolution, which sharpens the original images to enhance features on Pluto. Deconvolution can occasionally introduce “false” details, so the finest details in these pictures will need to be confirmed by images taken from closer range in the next few weeks.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

“Even though the latest images were made from more than 30 million miles away, they show an increasingly complex surface with clear evidence of discrete equatorial bright and dark regions—some that may also have variations in brightness,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons’ principal investigator. “We can also see that every face of Pluto is different and that Pluto’s northern hemisphere displays substantial dark terrains, though both Pluto’s darkest and its brightest known terrain units are just south of, or on, its equator. Why this is so is an emerging puzzle.”

As of yesterday (June 11), New Horizons was approximately 2.9 billion miles (4.7 billion kilometers) from Earth and just 24 million miles (39 million kilometers) from Pluto.

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

“Happy Constellations” by artist Fin’es Scott, one of The Museum of Flight’s 25 “Astronauts on the Town” art statues, is on display at Theo Chocolate in Seattle, Washington. Credit: The Museum of Flight

Some two dozen astronauts are landing under Seattle’s Space Needle and if you can snap a selfie with one or more of them, you could win your own ticket to fly.

The Museum of Flight on Friday (June 12) launched its “Astronauts on the Town” public art program by beginning to place 25 six-foot-tall spacesuit-clad statues around the “Jet City.”

“Prepare for an astronaut invasion!” the museum declared on its art project’s website. “You may have started to see fiberglass giants emerging from the museum’s shadows. As part of our 50th anniversary celebration, the museum is launching… ‘Astronauts on the Town.’” [The Art of Space Envisioned (Gallery)]

Similar to other art installations that have featured painted cows, sports team mascots and even space shuttles, The Museum of Flight’s “Astronauts on the Town” showcases suited statues decorated by local artists and presented in locations and businesses in the surrounding area.

“Keep your eyes peeled for the astronauts at EMP, Ray’s Boathouse, the Pacific Science Center, Salty’s and many more locations!” the museum advised.

Not all the astronauts are immediately recognizable as the spacemen they all started off as. Among the customized statues are a tuxedo-sporting astronaut (complete with top hat); a hairy “SpaceSquatch” in a lumberjack shirt; and a fishy “Basstronaut” (of no relation to the singer and once-space-tourist-hopeful Lance Bass).

“SpaceSquatch” by artists David Newman and Ruth Cielo, part of The Museum of Flight’s “Astronauts on the Town,” will go on display at Pyramid Alehouse in Seattle.
Credit: The Museum of Flight

The inspiration for the statues’ theming came from the air and space museum’s “Now everyone can be an astronaut” campaign launched in 2012. Its spacesuit-wearing mascot has appeared in short videos, advertisements and at local events in and around Seattle.

“Astronauts on the Town” builds upon the campaign, while helping to promote the museum’s upcoming celebration of its founding in 1965 – the same year that an astronaut first donned a pressurized suit to walk in space. The statues will remain on exhibit for the next three and a half months, after which they will move back to the museum for its 50th birthday party planned for Sept. 19.

In the interim, the statues will be put up for auction, with bidding to begin on Aug. 1.

For now though, the museum is inviting the public to find and photograph the astronauts and then share their shots on Instagram with the hashtag #AstronautsontheTown.

“Post a photo of yourself with your favorite astronaut and be entered for your chance to win two roundtrip tickets on Alaska Airlines,” the museum announced on Friday.

Everyone who shares their statue selfies are also eligible to get an “Astronauts on the Town” t-shirt at The Museum of Flight’s 50th anniversary celebration this fall.

For more information, see The Museum of Flight’s website at: www.astronautsonthetown.org.

Click through to collectSPACE to watch The Museum of Flight’s astronaut mascot meet the “Astronauts on the Town.”

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2015 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

A cosmic butterfly of a nebula is undergoing a stunning metamorphosis in space, according to new images from a telescope in Chile.

The celestial view, captured by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, is actually the result of dust spit out of a dying star that is then shaped by a stellar companion to form what looks like a bipolar planetary nebula with symmetrical wings. ESO scientists also created a video view of the butterfly-like nebula to showcase the new images.

The images offer a rare glimpse into the intricacies of this type of nebula formation, which scientists still know little about. In this case, it looks like the transition is just getting started, ESO officials explained. [Strange Nebula Shapes: What Do You See? (Gallery)]

What looks like a celestial butterfly here is actually the work of material from the red giant star L2 Puppis being shaped by a companion star into its gossamer state. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile captured this image.
Credit: Credit: ESO/P. Kervella

The new ESO images are centered on L2 Puppis, an aging red giant star about 200 light-years from Earth. The star is surrounded by a disk of dust (viewed head-on in the photographs) that extends outward across 550 million miles, (900 million kilometers). Cones of dust form the beginnings of butterfly wings as they stretch out upward and downward, perpendicular to the disk, with curving plumes flying out through their centers. Its companion star, a younger red giant, orbits it very quickly, about once every few years.

“The origin of bipolar planetary nebulae is one of the great classic problems of modern astrophysics, especially the question of how, exactly, stars return their valuable payload of metals back into space — an important process, because it is this material that will be used to produce later generations of planetary systems,” study lead author Pierre Kervella, of Unidad Mixta Internacional Franco-Chilena de Astronomía in France said in a statement. “With the companion star orbiting L2 Puppis only every few years, we expect to see how the companion star shapes the red giant’s disk. It will be possible to follow the evolution of the dust features around the star in real time — an extremely rare and exciting prospect.”

This image of the L2 Puppis “celestial butterfly” is built from visible and infrared observations of the Very Large Telescope to show the dust surrounding the red giant star.
Credit: Credit: ESO/P. Kervella

The new view of L2 Puppis is made even clearer by the Very Large Telescope’s SPHERE instrument, which has a mode that enhances faint details that would normally be overshadowed by the bright star. The result is an image three times sharper than one from the Hubble Space Telescope which also helps build a 3D model of the structures based on how they polarize nearby light.

Hubble has imaged many of these nebulas over the years, though never this young, and scientists have long puzzled over their orientation and formation: whether the dust is pressed inward or pulled outward by a companion into its distinctive shape. One theory suggests that the gas ejected by the dying star is pushed down into a disk shape by the emissions of the other star, and as the star sheds the rest of its atmosphere it is funneled outward through that ring in long plumes.

This wide view image from the European Southern Observatory’s Digital Sky Survey shows the region around the red giant star L2 Puppis, which is about 200 light-years from Earth.
Credit: Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2

Another theory suggests that the companion star draws a lot of material away from the central star into a disk surrounding it and fast jets blast out from the center, carving out space in the surrounding dust cloud. The system’s appearance is consistent with both of those theories, and spotting it in this early form offers astronomers a unique opportunity to watch the butterfly bloom.

You can follow staff writer Sarah Lewin on Twtter at @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

This image from a pilot project, the Deep Lens Survey (DLS), offers up an example of what the sky will look like when observed by LSST. The images from LSST will have twice DLS’ depth and resolution, while also covering 50,000 times the area of this particular image, and in six different optical colors. Credit: Deep Lens Survey / UC Davis / NOAO

Adam Hadhazy, writer and editor for The Kavli Foundation, contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

During a traditional Chilean stone-laying ceremony, the first building block of a powerful new astronomical observatory, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), was placed in the ground on Cerro Pachón in Chile April 14. Although LSST will not see first light until 2022, the astronomical community is already abuzz about how this ambitious project will open up the “dark universe” of dark matter and dark energy as never before. That mysterious substance and force make up 95 percent of the universe’s mass and energy, yet scientists are largely in the dark, as it were, about what they are. 

One of the keys to LSST’s potential is its 3.2 gigapixel camera, the biggest digital camera slated for construction to date. Another key is LSST’s comprehensive sweep of the heavens. Every few days, the telescope will survey the entire Southern Hemisphere’s sky. An astounding 30 terabytes of data will be collected nightly. After just a month of scanning the sky, LSST will have observed a greater share of the cosmos than all previous astronomical surveys combined.

On April 2, 2015, two astrophysicists and a theoretical physicist spoke with The Kavli Foundation about how LSST’s deep search for dark matter and dark energy  will answer fundamental questions about our universe’s composition. 

Steven Kahn — is the director of LSST and a natural sciences professor in the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University. He is an experimental astrophysicist with broad interests in instrumentation, observation and theory. 

Sarah Bridle — is a professor of astrophysics in the Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology research group of the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. She has served as the project scientist for the United Kingdom’s proposal to join LSST and she presently is co-coordinator of the Weak Lensing Working Group of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a precursor cosmological project to LSST. 

Hitoshi Murayama — is the director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) at the University of Tokyo and a professor at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. His work as a theoretical physicist spans a wide range of topics including particle physics, dark matter and dark energy. Kavli IPMU is a partner in the Hyper Suprime-Cam project, another precursor to LSST.

The following is an edited transcript of their roundtable discussion. The participants have been provided the opportunity to amend or edit their remarks.

The Kavli Foundation: Steven, when the LSST takes its first look at the universe seven years from now, why will this be so exciting to you? 

Steven Kahn: In terms of how much light it will collect and its field of view, LSST is about ten times bigger than any other survey telescope either planned or existing. This is important because it will allow us to survey a very large part of the sky relatively quickly and to do many repeated observations of every part of the Southern Hemisphere over ten years. By doing this, the LSST will gather information on an enormous number of galaxies. We’ll detect something like 20 billion galaxies. 

Sarah Bridle: That’s a hundred times as many as we’re going to get with the current generation of telescopes, so it’s a huge increase. With the data, we’re going to be able to make a three-dimensional map of the dark matter in the universe using gravitational lensing. Then we’re going to use that to tell us about how the “clumpiness” of the universe is changing with time, which is going to tell us about dark energy.

TKF: How does gathering information on billions of galaxies help us learn more about dark energy?

Hitoshi Muryama: Dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe and ripping it apart. The questions we are asking are: Where is the universe going? What is its fate? Is it getting completely ripped apart at some point? Does the universe end? Or does it go forever? Does the universe slow down at some point? To understand these questions, it’s like trying to understand how quickly the population of a given country is aging. You can’t understand the trend of where the country is going just by looking at a small number of people. You have to do a census of the entire population. In a similar way, you need to really look at a vast amount of galaxies so you can understand the trend of where the universe is going. We are taking a cosmic census with LSST.

What is weak gravitational lensing? This phenomenon occurs when foreground matter and dark matter contained in galaxy clusters bend the light from background galaxies — sort of like looking through the bottom of a wine glass. Measuring the amount of the distortion of the background galaxies indirectly reveals the amount of dark matter that has clumped together in the foreground object. Measuring the rate of this dark matter clumping across different eras in the universe’s history speaks to how much dark energy is stretching the universe at given times, thus revealing the mysterious, pervasive force’s strength and properties. This diagram explains the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. Foreground clumps of dark matter in galaxy clusters gravitationally bend the Earth-bound light from background galaxies. Note that the image is not to scale.
Credit: NASA, ESA, L. Calcada

TKF: The main technique the LSST will use to learn more about dark energy will be gravitational lensing (see sidebar). Dark energy is the mysterious, invisible force that is pushing open and shaping the universe. Can you elaborate on why this is important and how will LSST help realize its full potential? 

S.B.: It’s extremely difficult to detect the dark energy that seems to be causing our universe to accelerate. Through gravitational lenses, however, it’s possible by observing how much dark matter is being pulled together by gravity. And by looking at how much this dark matter clumps up early and later on in the universe, we can see how much the universe is being stretched apart at different times. With LSST, there will be a huge increase in the number of galaxies that we can detect and observe. LSST will also let us identify how far away the galaxies are. This is important. If we want to see how fast the universe is clumping together at different times, we need to know at what time and how far away we’re looking.

S.K.: With LSST, we’re trying to measure the subtle distortion of the appearance of galaxies caused by clumps of dark matter. We do this by looking for correlations in galaxies’ shapes depending on their position with respect to one another. Of course, there’s uncertainty associated with that kind of measurement on the relatively small scales of individual galaxies, and the dominant source of that uncertainty is that galaxies have intrinsic shapes—some are spiral-shaped, some are round, and so on, and we are seeing them at different viewing angles, too. Increasing the number of galaxies with LSST makes doing this a far more statistically powerful and thus precise measurement of the effect of gravitational lensing caused by dark matter and how the clumping of dark matter has changed over the universe’s history.

LSST will also help address something called cosmic variance. This happens when we’re making comparisons of what we see against a statistical prediction of what an ensemble of possible universes might look like. We only live in one universe, so there’s an inherent error associated with how good those statistical predictions are of what our universe should look like when applied to the largest scales of great fields of galaxies. The only way to try and statistically beat that cosmic variance down is to survey as much of the sky as possible, and that’s the other area where LSST is breaking new ground.

Steven Kahn
Credit: Steven Kahn

TKF: Will the gravitational lensing observations by LSST be more accurate than anything before?

S.K.: One of the reasons I personally got motivated to work on LSST was because of the difficulty in making the sort of weak lensing measurements that Sarah described.

S.B.: Typically, telescopes distort the images of galaxies by more than the gravitational lensing effect we are trying to measure. And in order to learn about dark matter and dark energy from gravitational lensing, we’ve got to not just detect the gravitational lensing signal but measure it to about a one-percent accuracy. So we’ve got to rid of these effects from the optics in the telescope before we can do anything to learn about cosmology.

S.K.: A lot of the initial work in this field has been plagued by issues associated with the basic telescopes and cameras used. It was hard to separate out the cosmic signals that people were looking for from spurious effects that were introduced by the instrumentation. LSST is actually the first telescope that will have ever been built with the notion of doing weak lensing in mind.  We have taken great care to model in detail the whole system, from the telescope to the camera to the atmosphere that we are looking through, to understand the particular issues in the system that could compromise weak lensing measurements. That approach has been a clear driver in how we design the facility and how we calibrate it. It’s been a big motivation for me personally and for the entire LSST team.

TKF: As LSST reveals the universe’s past, will it also help us predict the future of the universe?

H.M.: Yes, it will. Because LSST will survey the sky so quickly and repeatedly, it will show how the universe is changing over time. For example, we will be able to see how a supernova changes from one time period to another. This kind of information should prove extremely useful in deciphering the nature of dark energy , for instance.

S.K.: This is one way LSST will observe changes in the universe and gather information on dark energy beyond gravitational lensing. In fact, the way the acceleration of the universe by dark energy was first discovered in 1998 was through the measurement of what are called Type Ia supernovae. These are exploding stars where we believe we understand the typical intrinsic brightness of the explosion. Therefore, the apparent brightness of a supernova — how faint the supernova appears when we see it — is a clear measure of how far away the object is. That is because objects that are farther away are dimmer than closer objects. By measuring a population of Type Ia supernovae, we can figure out their true distances from us and how those distances have increased over time. Put those two pieces of information together, and that’s a way of determining the expansion rate of the universe. 

This analysis was done for the initial discovery of the accelerating cosmic expansion with a relatively small number of supernovae — just tens. LSST will measure an enormous number of supernovae, something like 250,000 per year. Only a smaller fraction of those will be very well characterized, but that number is still in the tens of thousands per year. That will be very useful for understanding how our universe has evolved.

TKF: LSST will gather a prodigious amount of data. How will this information be made available to scientists and the public alike for parsing?

S.K.: Dealing with the enormous size of the data base LSST will produce is a challenge. Over its ten-year run, LSST will generate something like a couple hundred petabytes of data, where a petabyte is 10-to-the-15th bytes. That’s more data, by a lot, than everything that’s ever been written in any language in human history. 

The data will be made public to the scientific community largely in the form of catalogs of objects and their properties. But those catalogs can be trillions of lines long. So one of the challenges is not so much how you acquire and store the data, but how do you actually find anything in something that big? It’s the needle in the haystack problem. That’s where there need to be advances because the current techniques that we use to query catalogs, or to say “find me such and such,” they don’t scale very well to this size of data. So a lot of new computer science ideas have to be invoked to make that work. 

Hitoshi Murayama
Credit: Hitoshi Murayama

H.M.: One thing that we at Kavli IPMU are pursuing right now is a sort of precursor project to LSST called Hyper Suprime-Cam, using the Subaru Telescope. It’s smaller than LSST, but it’s trying to do many of the things that LSST is after, like looking for weak gravitational lensing and trying to understand dark energy. We already are facing the challenge of dealing with a large data set. One aspect we would like to pursue at Kavli IPMU, and of course LSST is already doing it, is to get a lot of people in computer science and statistics involved into this. I believe a new area of statistics will be created by the needs of handling these large data sets. It’s a sort of fusion, the interdisciplinary aspects of this project. It’s a large astronomy survey that will influence other areas of science. 

TKF: Are any “citizen science” projects envisioned for LSST, like Galaxy Zoo, a website where astronomy buffs classify the shapes of millions of galaxies imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey?

S.K.: Data will be made available right away. So LSST will in some sense bring the universe home to anybody with a personal computer, who can log on and look at any part of the southern hemisphere’s sky at any given time. So there’s a tremendous potential there to engage the public not only in learning about science, but actually in doing science and interacting directly with the universe. 

We have people involved in LSST that are intimately tied into Galaxy Zoo. We’re looking into how to incorporate citizens and crowdsource the science investigations of LSST. One of these investigations is strong gravitational lensing. Sarah has talked about weak gravitational lensing, which is a very subtle distortion to the appearance of the background galaxies. But it turns out if you put a galaxy right behind a concentration of dark matter found in a massive foreground galaxy cluster, then the distortions can get very significant. You can actually see multiple images of the background galaxy in a single image, bent all the way around the foreground galaxy cluster. The detection of those strong gravitational lenses and the analysis of the light patterns you see within them also yields complementary scientific information about cosmological fundamental parameters. But it requires sort of recognizing what is in fact a strong gravitational lensing event, as well as modeling the distribution of dark matter that gives rise to the strength of that particular lensing. Colleagues of Hitoshi and myself have already created a tool to help with this effort, called SpaceWarps (www.spacewarps.org). The tool lets the public look for strong gravitational lenses using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and to play around with dark matter modeling to see if they can get something that looks like the real data. 

H.M.: This has been incredibly successful. Scientists have developed computer programs to automatically look for these strongly lensed galaxies, but even an algorithm written by the best scientists can still miss some of these strong gravitationally lensed objects. Regular citizens, however, often manage to find some candidates for the strongly lensed galaxies that the computer algorithm has missed. Not only will this be great fun for people to get involved, it can even help the science as well, especially with a project as large as LSST.

TKF: In the hunt for dark energy’s signature on the cosmos, LSST is just one of many current and planned efforts. Sarah, how will LSST observations tie in with the Dark Energy Survey you’re working on, and Hitoshi, with will LSST complement the Hyper Suprime-Cam? 

S.B.: So the Dark Energy Survey is going to image one-eighth of the whole sky and have 300 million galaxy images. About two years of data have been taken so far, with about three more years to go. We’ll be doing maps of dark matter and measurements of dark energy. The preparation for LSST that we are doing via DES will be essential.

H.M.: Hyper Suprime-Cam is similar to the Dark Energy Survey. It’s a nearly billion pixel camera looking for nearly 10 million galaxies. Following up on the Hyper Suprime-Cam imaging surveys, we would like to measure what we call spectra from a couple million galaxies. 

S.K.: The measurement of spectra as an addition to imaging tells us not only about the structure of matter in the universe but also how much the matter is moving with respect to the overall, accelerating cosmic expansion due to dark energy. Spectra are an additional, very important piece of information in constraining cosmological models. 

H.M.: We will identify spectra with an instrument called the Prime Focus Spectrograph, which is scheduled to start operations in 2017 also on the Subaru telescope. We will do very deep exposures to get the spectra on some of these interesting objects, such as galaxies where lensing is taking place and supernovae, which will also allow us to do much more precise measurements on dark energy. 

Like the Hyper Suprime-Cam, LSST can only do imaging. So I’m hoping when LSST comes online in the 2020s, we will already have the Prime Focus Spectrograph operational, and we will be able to help each other. LSST’s huge amount of data will contain many interesting objects we would like to study with this Prime Focus Spectrograph.

S.K.: All these dark matter and dark energy telescope projects are very complementary to each other. It’s because of the scientific importance of these really fundamental pressing questions — what is the nature of dark matter and dark energy? — that the various different funding institutions around the world have been eager to invest in such an array of different complementary projects. I think that’s great, and it just shows how important this general problem is. 

TKF: Hitoshi, you mentioned earlier the interdisciplinary approach fostered by LSST and projects like it, and you’ve spoken before about how having different scientific disciplines and perspectives together leads to breakthrough thinking — a major goal of Kavli IPMU. Your primary expertise is in particle physics, but you work on many other areas of physics. Could you describe how observations of the very biggest scales of the dark universe with LSST will inform work on the very smallest, subatomic scales, and vice versa? 

H.M.: It’s really incredible to think about this point. The biggest thing we can observe in the universe has to have something to do with the smallest things we can think of and all the matter we see around us. 

Sarah Bridle
Credit: Sarah Bridle

S.B.: It is amazing that you can look at the largest scales and find out about the smallest things. 

H.M.: For more than a hundred years, particle physicists have been trying to understand what everything around us is made of. We made huge progress by building a theory called the standard model of particle physics in the 20th century, which is really a milestone of science. Discovering the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in 2012 really nailed that the standard model is the right theory about the origin of everything around us. But it turns out that what we see around us is actually making up only five percent of the universe. So there is this feeling among particle physicists of “what have we been doing for a hundred years?” We only have five percent of the universe! We still need to understand the remaining 95 percent of the universe, which is dark matter and dark energy. It’s a huge problem and we have no idea what they are really. 

A way I explain what dark matter is: It’s the mother from whom we got separated at birth. What I mean by this is without dark matter, there’s no structure to the universe — no galaxies, no stars—and we wouldn’t be here. Dark matter, like a mother, is the reason we exist, but we haven’t met her and have never managed to thank her. So that’s the reason why we would like to know who she is, how she came to exist and how she shaped us. That’s the connection between the science of looking for the fundamental constituents of the universe, which is namely what particle physicists are after, and this largest scale of observation done with LSST. 

TKF: Given LSST’s vast vista on the Universe, it is frankly expected that the project will turn up the unexpected. Any ideas or speculations on what tracking such a huge portion of the universe might newly reveal? 

S.K.: That’s sort of like asking, “what are the unknown unknowns?” [laughter]

TKF: Yes — good luck figuring those out!

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S.K.: Let me just say, one of the great things about astrophysics is that we have explicit theoretical predictions we’re trying to test out by taking measurements of the universe. That approach is more akin to many other areas of experimental physics, like searching for the Higgs boson with the Large Hadron Collider, as Hitoshi mentioned earlier. But there’s also this wonderful history in astronomy that every time we build a bigger and better facility, we always find all kinds of new things we never envisioned. 

If you go back — unfortunately I’m old enough to remember these days — to the period before the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s interesting to see what people had thought were going to be the most exciting things to do with Hubble. Many of those things were done and they were definitely exciting. But I think what many people felt was the most exciting was the stuff we didn’t even think to ask about, like the discovery of dark energy Hubble helped make. So I think a lot of us have expectations of similar kinds of discoveries for facilities like LSST. We will make the measurement we’re intending to make, but there will be a whole bunch of other exciting stuff that we never even dreamed of that’ll come for free on top.

S.B.: I’m a cosmologist and I’m very excited for what LSST is going to do for cosmology, but I’m even more excited that it’s going to be taking very, very short 15-second exposures of the sky. LSST is going to be able to discover all these changing, fleeting objects like supernovae that Hitoshi talked about, but it’s a whole new phase of discovery. It’s inevitable we’re going to discover a whole load of new stuff that we’ve never even thought of.

H.M.: I’m sure there will be surprises!

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A Boeing CST-100 crew capsule approaches the International Space Station carrying a new crew for NASA in this artist’s illustration. NASA has awarded Being its first order for a commercial crew flight in 2017. Credit: Boeing

NASA has awarded Boeing with the first order for a commercial crew change flight to the International Space Station once the company’s new CST-100 space taxi is ready for manned flights in 2017.

Both Boeing and SpaceX are building private spaceships to ferry astronauts on round trips to the space station for NASA. While SpaceX has not received an order yet, NASA said the company will likely receive one later this year. Who flies first will be determined at a later date.

“Final development and certification are top priority for NASA and our commercial providers, but having an eye on the future is equally important to the commercial crew and station programs,” said Kathy Lueders, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, in a statement. “Our strategy will result in safe, reliable and cost-effective crew missions.” [Boeing’s CST-100 Space Capsule in Pictures] 

The milestone follows on from Boeing successfully finishing the fourth stage in its Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract with NASA. Boeing showed the agency that its spacecraft design was ready for assembly, integration and testing.

“We’re on track to fly in 2017, and this critical milestone moves us another step closer in fully maturing the CST-100 design,” said John Mulholland, Boeing’s vice president of commercial programs, in a statement.

For its part, SpaceX successfully launched an unpiloted pad abort test earlier this month.

NASA makes its orders for CCtCap two or three years before the mission takes place, to give time for the companies to build the spacecraft. That said, Boeing (and SpaceX, when its mission is awarded) will need to fully finish its certification before being allowed to fly the astronauts.

Once the crew launches are running, a standard mission will see four crew members on board that are either from NASA or sponsored by NASA. The mission profile calls for the spacecraft to carry 220 pounds of pressurized cargo and to remain docked to the station for up to 210 days.

NASA added that the 2017 flight date depends on Congress awarding the agency’s full budget request for the 2016 fiscal year, and the ones following.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

The Earth’s precession is captured in stunning detail in this image by a veteran astrophotographer.

In an email to Space.com, night sky photographer Miguel Claro said he developed a new photo technique  showing a Vega “polar” star trail. The image was taken from inside the Mourão Castle, in the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, the First Starlight Tourism Destination in the world, in Alentejo, Portugal.

Earth’s axis changes over time due to a phenomenon called “precession,” which pulls the direction of the axis in a circle that takes 26,000 years to trace out in the sky. What this means is the direction of north changes in the sky over time. A consequence of the precession is a changing pole star. Typically, Polaris is used to mark a position but Claro says he was fascinated with the possibility of using a different star. But because of Earth’s precession, the star Vega will likely serve as a new North Star in the year 14,000, even though it never comes closer than 5 degrees to the celestial pole, Claro wrote. [The Brightest Stars in the Night Sky]

 But what would that look like to future astrophotographers?

In a post on his website, Claro explains how he used two star-tracker mountings to help create the views of both Polaris and Vega serving as the North Star in the image above. He also posted a video of the skywatching feat on Vimeo.

Claro used a Canon EOS 6D – Canon EF 8-15 f/ 4L Fisheye USM at 8mm (All Sky) at exposure 30 seconds and ISO 2500 to create the images.

To see more amazing night sky photos submitted by Space.com readers, visit our astrophotography archive.

Editor’s note: If you have an amazing night sky photo you’d like to share for a possible story or image gallery, please contact managing editor Tariq Malik at spacephotos@space.com.

Follow Space.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We’re also on Facebook & Google+. Origina l article on Space.com.

Volunteers at Peterson Air Force Base take calls from children wanting to know where Santa is. Credit: U.S. Navy

North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is a military organization that is shared between the United States and Canada. The group is tasked with looking for threats or activity in aerospace, which can include anything from looking for aircraft, spacecraft or missiles. As of 2006, a renewal of the agreement added maritime activities.

The commander for NORAD is based at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado and is expected to update both the U.S. president and the Canadian prime minister if required. NORAD’s work is also split between three regions: Alaska (at Elmendorf Air Force Base), Canada (Winnipeg, Manitoba) and continental (Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida).

In addition to its military work, NORAD is also known for tracking Santa every Christmas Eve. 

Early history

Around the same time that the United States and Russia were jockeying for positions in space, military concerns were changing the nature of defense back on Earth. When the Cold War began in the 1940s, Americans were concerned about the potential of long-range Soviet bombers, who may be able to cross an ocean without anyone in the United States knowing about it, according to NORAD.

The United States created an Air Defense Command in 1948, and in 1954 decided to add the Navy and Army to it as well. Dubbed Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD), the organization implemented an advance warning system including radar, and came up with the plans to deploy troops should an invasion occur.

Canada and the United States share a long border, so over time officials believed it made sense to share resources. This led to the creation of NORAD in 1958. Meanwhile, as the USSR improved its missile capabilities in the 1960s, NORAD took over an Air Force warning system to track the missiles worldwide by satellite.

“Throughout the 1970s, the ballistic missile threat caused policy makers to reassess the effectiveness of the air defense system,” NORAD wrote. 

“This meant the potential demise of the arguments for enhanced traditional air defense, and moved NORAD to focus on such challenges as improved warning of missile and space attack, defense against the ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile], and greater protection and survival of command, control and communication networks and centers.”

Moving to modern days

Some structural changes came to NORAD in the late 1970s, such as changing the A to represent “Aerospace” rather than “Air” in its acronym. This was intended to represent its mandate to track satellites and space launches around the world.

Other structural changes included updating the early-warning system, and altering the command structure for ballistic missile warning and space surveillance.

NORAD also participated in campaigns such as tracking drug traffickers in the 1980s, after the Cold War finished. While its mandate to look for airborne threats continued, its work altered after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in New York City. It now does regular air patrols under the name Operation Noble Eagle.

The organization has also had a few false alarms over the years. For example: on Nov. 9, 1979, according to History.com, NORAD officials received word that the Soviets were about to send missiles toward North America. 

After sending orders to interceptor aircraft and moving to protect the U.S. president, NORAD realized its mistake: a technician had accidentally loaded a training program for a Soviet attack. There were three unrelated computer problems for NORAD in the following year.

Tracking Santa

For the past six decades, NORAD has also taken on a special non-military role – it tracks down the whereabouts of the jolly old man in red.

It began Dec. 24, 1955, when the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) Operations Center in Colorado Springs, Colo., received a call from a young girl tracking down Santa Claus’ whereabouts. Several other calls followed, the result of a misprint in a local newspaper advertisement.

Colonel Harry Shoup, who was on duty, decided to take on the job and asked his colleagues to find where Santa was. CONAD continued the tradition every Christmas. When NORAD was created in 1958, the organization inherited the duty.

To this day, on Christmas Eve, NORAD provides updates on social media, on a website and through the telephone so children know Santa’s whereabouts.

Additional resources

A new view of Ceres, captured by NASA’s Dawn probe on May 23, 2015, shows fine details of the dwarf planet’s surface coming into focus. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

A new photo from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft shows the battered surface of the dwarf planet Ceres in unprecedented detail.

Dawn captured the image on May 23, when the probe was just 3,200 miles (5,100 kilometers) from Ceres. The photo’s resolution is about 1,600 feet (480 meters) per pixel, scientists said.

“The view shows numerous secondary craters, formed by the re-impact of debris strewn from larger impact sites. Smaller surface details like this are becoming visible with increasing clarity as Dawn spirals lower in its campaign to map Ceres,” NASA officials wrote in an image description today (May 28).

“The region shown here is located between 13 degrees and 51 degrees north latitude and 182 degrees and 228 degrees east longitude,” they added. “The image has been projected onto a globe of Ceres, which accounts for the small notch of black at upper right.”

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft captured this image of the dwarf planet Ceres’ heavily cratered surface on May 23, 2015, from a distance of 3,200 miles (5,100 kilometers).
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

The $473 million Dawn mission launched in September 2007 to study Vesta and Ceres, the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Vesta and Ceres are planetary building blocks left over from the solar system’s early days, so Dawn’s observations should help researchers better understand how rocky worlds like Earth and Mars formed and grew, NASA officials have said.

Dawn orbited the 330-mile-wide (530 km) Vesta from July 2011 through September 2012 and reached Ceres, which is 590 miles (950 km) across, this March. In the process, Dawn became the first spacecraft to orbit two objects beyond the Earth-moon system, as well as the first to circle a dwarf planet.

Dawn is studying Ceres from a series of progressively closer-in orbits. The craft’s first science orbit lay about 8,400 miles (13,500 km) from the dwarf planet’s surface; Dawn is currently spiraling down to a 2,700-mile-high (4,400 km) orbit, which it should reach on June 3.

By the time Dawn wraps up its mission in June 2016, it will be eyeing Ceres’ intriguing surface from just 230 miles (375 km) away.

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